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I don't care about the size of the iPhone since I don't want any anyway.

But my question is:

Do the galaxy S III really have 2 GB RAM? Here in Sweden to? I thought it was only 1?

Is it quad-core Exynos 4 here with 1 GB and something else in the US? You got a different CPU but more RAM maybe?

http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9300_galaxy_s_iii-4238.php

Says 1 GB RAM.

I would had already bought it if it had 2 :/

Which one got which? Which one are the Swedish phones?

People from the 3rd world, who are still stuck on 2G-2.5G networks and want a nice device that does smart without the resource hungry part that comes with it.

For example, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Mini[1] because that was what I could afford. I bought it so I could use it as an occasional camera, surf the college Wifi if need be, use it as an ebook reader on the go, have a handy dictionary, and use it as a GPS tracker (these are my most often used apps on it; and I don't even use the WiFi and GPS so much, mostly a bookworm, so FBreader it is)

Point being, my needs are simple, yet need a smart phone for it (feature phone don't do it all). Yet despite having only a few apps, I am constantly running out of battery and worse, memory! Not the SD Card, the inbuilt memory, somehow google keeps using it up. And it's slow. Android is awesome on GB/GHZ plus hardware, but doesn't do modest hardware well.

Now say Firefox comes with OS that provides an upgrade from feature phones so that I can use the occasional Smart app, but over all runs resources like a feature phone, I think it will have a market. Oh sure it won't run HD videos or play high end games, but that's not what people like me are looking for either.

Which is why Jolla is starting with China for it's Meego phones, and Mozilla is looking at Brazil for Firefox OS. It's stupid to start with modest specs in the US, where the demand is for high-end, but it is equally stupid to push stuff that runs on high end on modest spec (and price!) phones that are in demand in other markets.

[1]: http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_mini_s5570-3725.php

Did the original iPhone have 225 hours standby?

No, it had 250.

And the fact that you still get 8 hours browsing, even over LTE, is really impressive. It might be slightly shorter than browsing time on an original iPhone but how much browsing could you have got done on Edge? You could probably read 10x the content on the iPhone 5, so how is it not far ahead?

It comes back to the problem of looking at a raw number on a list, without thinking what that number MEANS to a user on the device.

Great example of cognitive dissonance. The point of the article is that taking into account technology changes, this iphone isn't any better than the original. And you just argued "but but but... new technology!"

Have you looked at the list of Samsung Galaxy phones? They are probably the worst offender of this that I know of. Also up there on the list are the LG Optimus products. And people wonder why iPhone is so popular. It's because people actually know what product they are buying. They sell exactly 1 phone at a time, with about 3 different storage space options, but that's about it. You know very easily which iPhone you are buying. If you purchase a Samsung Galaxy, You could either get a low-end touchscreen phone, a phone which resembles a blackberry with a full qwerty keyboard, a high-end iPhone equivalent, a gigantic 5.2 inch Galaxy Note, or even a 10 inch tablet.

Have you looked at the list of Samsung Galaxy phones? They are probably the worst offender of this that I know of. Also up there on the list are the LG Optimus products. And people wonder why iPhone is so popular. It's because people actually know what product they are buying. They sell exactly 1 phone at a time, with about 3 different storage space options, but that's about it. You know very easily which iPhone you are buying. If you purchase a Samsung Galaxy, You could either get a low-end touchscreen phone, a phone which resembles a blackberry with a full qwerty keyboard, a high-end iPhone equivalent, a gigantic 5.2 inch Galaxy Note, or even a 10 inch tablet.

http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_lumia_920_with_pureview_and_820_wp8_devices_leak-news-4729.php

Whatever. If it doesn't come close to my current tablet, there's no reason to upgrade. Actually, unless you're seriously short on money, there's no way to justify any ~7 inch tablet other than this.

You have a lousy memory. There were plenty of PDA like smartphones without QWERTY keyboards running Windows Mobile and other OSes including the MIO A701 and a multitude of HTC devices. They were thicker... it is called miniaturization and Moore's law and none of it is owed to Apple. You owe more to Samsung, the world's #2 semiconductor manufacturer, than Apple which doesn't manufacture a single bolt. The finger touch interactions started getting more widely used around the time capacitive screens were available in the market. Which again predated the iPhone.

STFU. The p800 has a panel covering the buttons:
http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_p800-326.php

what kind of fucking newbie dimwits is slashdot full of now? p800 had an unique and cool aspect that you could leave the button flip attached if you wanted. afaik most people used it with the button flip removed(completely detached, that is)

Don't think I've ever seen a desktop computer with 1 GHz CPU and 128 megs of RAM. By the time 1 GHz CPUs came on the scene, most people had probably about 1 GB of RAM, possibly 512 MB. The last computer I had with 128 MB of RAM was a PII-266. Actually it originally had 64 MB of RAM and I upgraded to 256, but that was the last computer I had in that range. 128 MB doesn't get you very far these days. I had a Nokia phone with 128 MB of RAM and it would often crash the browser with out of memory errors if I loaded up the wrong page. Loading a Slashdot article would do it just about every time. It's probably enough memory to do most phone operations, except browse the web, which is a major shortcoming in these days. Also, very disappointed this phone doesn't have GPS. That phone I linked to had amazing GPS reception. Way better than I've had on any "smart" phone.

"Featurephones as Smartphones"

I don't get it. It seems these days smarta**es want "smartphone" to mean only something with ios, android, wp, etc. on it. It's not the OS that makes a smartphone "smart". Granted, it doesn't have a GPS receiver, but otherwise it's not a bad phone [1] for the price, and I wouldn't blame Nokia for marketing it with the goal of selling it - you know, that's the point.

[1] http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_asha_305-review-792.php

2002 - p800

2003 - p900

2004 - p910

2002 - p800

2003 - p900

2004 - p910

2002 - p800

2003 - p900

2004 - p910

The first line does not dismiss what you said afterwards. The web browser core is open source, not developed by Apple, everyone could use it and lots of people did. Android uses it. WebOS uses it. Samsung did not use a better browser because there were hardware limitations in that particular cellphone. The Samsung F700 had no WiFi support and was 2G so having a bandwidth consuming web browser was not a good fit for the product even it they spent the resources to integrate one in their product. This is why earlier cellphones with low resolution screens and 2G only had WAP browsers. Samsung had PocketPC mobile phones with WiFi support which had better browsers. My point is that the products were already converging in that direction and contrary to what you think Apple being absent would not stop such products from appearing in the market. Once you have a capacitive touchscreen, like the K850 LG Prada, it makes sense to drop the sliding portion of the cellphone since you no longer have a pressing need for a physical keyboard. If you have a high bandwidth connection a richer web browser becomes viable. Apple did not solve the problem of touchscreen cellphones being expensive. If it wasn't for the cellphone operators hiding the purchase price from the consumer with their pricing plans you would see that if anything Apple only made them more expensive.

What if the iPhone really is that innovative in the smartphone arena that only Apple can provide smartphones? Then they have a monopoly, and the DoJ tends to get upset with monopolies that appear to be unreasonably restraining consumer choice raising prices, or both.

Just ask Microsoft. They, arguably, have never recovered from the antitrust suit. Does Apple want to go down that path?

Apple didn't invent the smartphone, and I doubt they claim to. There were plenty of smartphones before the iphone - Nokia had e.g. N95 (and other N-series) and their Communicator, Blackberry had many phones, Sony Ericsson had their P900 series, HTC had Windows mobile phones. They behaved in different ways, and had many interesting styles. So obviously, there are many other ways than iPhone and iPhone OS to look and behave.

Samsung just put an awful lot of work into looking and behaving the same. Where the legal limit for copying goes I don't know, but Samsung wasn't exactly trying a brand new design they had been working on and polishing for the last five years... it seems as if they even copied marketing materials. And even today, there are many different ways. E.g. the Nokia Lumia 900 - it is a full screen touch mobile, but has its own design and user interface. I certainly wouldn't buy one - Microsoft has already said that they are obsolete - but they have put (different) thoughts into design and behaviour.

How will that work when you've got an entire apps ecosystem based on the assumption that the phone has a large touchscreen? Only way I can think of is you make the phone with both a large touchscreen and a keyboard and you have the thing somehow open up, but then you usually wind up with something about the size and weight of a housebrick.

Look at the Torch 9810. 3.2" screen, slide keyboard, 14.6mm thick. A small screen is less of a problem if you don't have a keyboard taking up half of it.

it's just 3 686 400 for a 1280x720x4 bytes image. so if you have ten fullscreen frames of gfx loaded it'll still just take 36 megs. with the amounts of ram in 256mbyte+ it doesn't really matter that much. true, just upping displays from 16bit to 32bit back in the day did matter, but on pc's (and surprisingly enough on phones just few years ago) the ram amounts available were in 16-32 megs ranges when that switch happened, once the ram 10 times that much it doesn't matter as much.

not that it matters, a lot of the memory is wasted elsewhere in os design too.
http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_e90-1857.php

e90 had 128mbytes of memory and after boot it had around 80mbytes of free, 800 x 352 screen which is around the same resolution as many 512mbyte androids in size.

you'll be amazed if you look at windows phones memory consumption for fairly simple apps(there's a soft limit at around 90mb per app so the app can still run on 256mb devices). and if you look at how many ui elements are in a typical app in wp vs. symbian and you'll be more baffled at where the fuck is the ram going. true, higher resolution graphics need more ram but nowhere to the tune the apps os's are using it. I'm still waiting to read a decent explanation why ICS needs more ram than GB, since it would seem to me they would have had more time removing debug prints from the source and so forth, actually reducing actual memory requirements(or is it because it keeps snapshot images of the views for taskswitcher that's the main culprit in the recommended amount or some such?).

The Sony Ericsson P800 was released in 2002 - a full 5 years before the iPhone. Full screen touchscreen Windows 5.5 phone.
http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_p800-pictures-326.php.

I loved that phone.

Samsung, in the other hand, changed the design of their phones radically after the iPhone (which received a lot of attention) came out

Yeah, it took them whole month after iPhone to get a similar design out.

It was completely unobvious for a touchscreen-centric device. Also, this is not a smartphone, and slide-out keyboard makes it _completely_ different. They couldn't ever think about stripping off that keyboard, right?

By the way, this design was registered in Korea before first iPhone pictures.

You can't claim the existence of prior art without an actual implementation, nor can you patent something that is currently not feasible to implement.

We're speaking about _design_ patents. You can claim the existence of prior art for a design patent as long as there was actual implementation of such design.

Samsung, in the other hand, changed the design of their phones radically after the iPhone (which received a lot of attention) came out

Yeah, it took them whole month after iPhone to get a similar design out.

It was completely unobvious for a touchscreen-centric device. Also, this is not a smartphone, and slide-out keyboard makes it _completely_ different. They couldn't ever think about stripping off that keyboard, right?

By the way, this design was registered in Korea before first iPhone pictures.

You can't claim the existence of prior art without an actual implementation, nor can you patent something that is currently not feasible to implement.

We're speaking about _design_ patents. You can claim the existence of prior art for a design patent as long as there was actual implementation of such design.

Samsung, in the other hand, changed the design of their phones radically after the iPhone (which received a lot of attention) came out

Yeah, it took them whole month after iPhone to get a similar design out.

It was completely unobvious for a touchscreen-centric device. Also, this is not a smartphone, and slide-out keyboard makes it _completely_ different. They couldn't ever think about stripping off that keyboard, right?

By the way, this design was registered in Korea before first iPhone pictures.

You can't claim the existence of prior art without an actual implementation, nor can you patent something that is currently not feasible to implement.

We're speaking about _design_ patents. You can claim the existence of prior art for a design patent as long as there was actual implementation of such design.

• - MIO A701
• - HTC P3600 (with a front facing camera for videoconferencing)
• - LG Prada (which also has a resistive screen)

Heck I had a Sony K750 phone (with a camera flash) and it is also a black square rectangle candy bar with a color LCD screen with a chrome bezel around the phone. It did not have a large touchscreen because those were too expensive at the time. The fact is cellphones were converging towards that form factor regardless if Apple made the iPhone or not. Samsung is having problems trying to make their cellphones as different as possible from the iPhone because it is pretty hard to come with a different shape which makes sense from a usability perspective. Once you have the large touchscreen you cannot change the shape too much otherwise it won't fit a pocket anymore. Which is also why you hardly saw non-rectangular calculators either. As one guy from HP once said the constraint was that it had to fit into a shirt pocket.

If you compare it with other designs which also used large LCD screens like PDAs you can easily see that such designs keep popping up. The Handspring Visor is one example but there are others.

• - MIO A701
• - HTC P3600 (with a front facing camera for videoconferencing)
• - LG Prada (which also has a resistive screen)

Heck I had a Sony K750 phone (with a camera flash) and it is also a black square rectangle candy bar with a color LCD screen with a chrome bezel around the phone. It did not have a large touchscreen because those were too expensive at the time. The fact is cellphones were converging towards that form factor regardless if Apple made the iPhone or not. Samsung is having problems trying to make their cellphones as different as possible from the iPhone because it is pretty hard to come with a different shape which makes sense from a usability perspective. Once you have the large touchscreen you cannot change the shape too much otherwise it won't fit a pocket anymore. Which is also why you hardly saw non-rectangular calculators either. As one guy from HP once said the constraint was that it had to fit into a shirt pocket.

If you compare it with other designs which also used large LCD screens like PDAs you can easily see that such designs keep popping up. The Handspring Visor is one example but there are others.

• - MIO A701
• - HTC P3600 (with a front facing camera for videoconferencing)
• - LG Prada (which also has a resistive screen)

Heck I had a Sony K750 phone (with a camera flash) and it is also a black square rectangle candy bar with a color LCD screen with a chrome bezel around the phone. It did not have a large touchscreen because those were too expensive at the time. The fact is cellphones were converging towards that form factor regardless if Apple made the iPhone or not. Samsung is having problems trying to make their cellphones as different as possible from the iPhone because it is pretty hard to come with a different shape which makes sense from a usability perspective. Once you have the large touchscreen you cannot change the shape too much otherwise it won't fit a pocket anymore. Which is also why you hardly saw non-rectangular calculators either. As one guy from HP once said the constraint was that it had to fit into a shirt pocket.

If you compare it with other designs which also used large LCD screens like PDAs you can easily see that such designs keep popping up. The Handspring Visor is one example but there are others.

• - MIO A701
• - HTC P3600 (with a front facing camera for videoconferencing)
• - LG Prada (which also has a resistive screen)

Heck I had a Sony K750 phone (with a camera flash) and it is also a black square rectangle candy bar with a color LCD screen with a chrome bezel around the phone. It did not have a large touchscreen because those were too expensive at the time. The fact is cellphones were converging towards that form factor regardless if Apple made the iPhone or not. Samsung is having problems trying to make their cellphones as different as possible from the iPhone because it is pretty hard to come with a different shape which makes sense from a usability perspective. Once you have the large touchscreen you cannot change the shape too much otherwise it won't fit a pocket anymore. Which is also why you hardly saw non-rectangular calculators either. As one guy from HP once said the constraint was that it had to fit into a shirt pocket.

If you compare it with other designs which also used large LCD screens like PDAs you can easily see that such designs keep popping up. The Handspring Visor is one example but there are others.

3. The fact that the iPhone design was lifted from another product design seen by Apple's team isn't a surprise, it's how all companies work.

They didn't see it. Apple *read* (in an interview) about a prototype Sony was working on and then did a mock-up based on the description. Sort of a "What would Sony do?" or "How would Sony do it?"

Cant find an accurate date on these SONY phones (range 2006 to 2010), but the iPhone 4 looks extremely close to these.
http://www.cellphonebeat.com/sony-ericssons-cybershot-concept-phone.html
http://moblog.net/view/273678/new-sony-ericsson-concept-phone
And multiple phones in these pages (plus/minus a few pages)
http://www.concept-phones.com/tag/sony-ericsson-concept-phone/page/6/

It does not matter whether SONY actually released the particular product in the market or not. The bottom line is Apple's claim that they have come up with an "entirely original" idea that never existed before does not hold water. If anyone is going to design a new touch screen only phone / tablet, there is not much one can do. They cant Patent a rounded rectangle and assert it to prevent competition in the market and escape the microscopic examination of others.

Apple keeps parading the image of before / after iPhone cellphones, where it claims that all cellphones before iPhone were flip / qwerty and candybar and touchscreens did not exist at all (which is a lie). There were many PDA phones before the first ever iPhone in 2007. Even without the iPhone touchscreen phones would have come in the market.
http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_p910-846.php (one cant argue that size of this phone would have never shrunk with time and with advances in technology)

At work I need to block/filter SMS when I'm not on-call, and I need a hotspot/tether function. The options are down to:

• Symbian: SMS blockers available, no hotspot, OS has not much of a future. I'm sticking with my crumbling Nokia 6120 classic since it's quite small.
• Jailbroken iOS: expensive, not too fond of the apps.
• WP7: Has hotspot; SMS/call blocking only on a certain Samsung model.
• Android: pretty much any phone running 2.3+.

So, what Android phones can run ICS (I like updated software)? It needs ~1GB RAM to run, but suppose I can do with 768 MB. GSMarena tells me I'm pretty much in big-screen land.

How fondly I remember them from the Ericsson R380 back in 2000. I guess it wasn't patented then because not only was it so freaking obvious, it had been done before with various other PDAs. Still, there's a reality distortion field to combat now, so let's see the epic battle betwixt that and prior art begin!

Even when the cheap ones are functionally identical to the high end ones.

Seriously... that phone right there, and the fact that Apple has never sued over it, makes it quite obvious that this has nothing to do with them trying to protect their intellectual property. It is functionally identical to the Galaxy SII that they threw a shitfit over and it came out a month before the SII... the front face and UI have the same basic design: the only real differences are that it's slightly thicker, it has a slightly slower processor, and the screen is a lower resolution and slightly smaller. The software at launch time was nearly identical (and *was* identical on the points Apple sued over).

If this was *really* about their software patents, they would have sued over that one, too, but since you can get an Ace for $100 new without a contract ($225 at launch time), they didn't sue.

btw -- if you don't do any gaming on your phone, that phone is quite adequate. The UI is zippy enough, has the same hardware-accelerated bling from a higher end phone, and you can buy it without a contract and not break the bank. I have one, and I am happy with it. There's no ICS update for it, but Gingerbread supports all the features I want out of a phone. :)

It has nothing to do with "older" devices and how well they run ICS, but budget devices even from this year. Your Nexus One and Nexus S (circa Jan 2010 and Dec 2010) still run circles around budget Android phones like a Galaxy Pocket (circa Feb 2012).

A 2 year old used Nexus One is still selling for more then budget Android phones sold outside the subsidized market of North America. Just because your Porsche 911 is 10 years old doesn't put it in the same racing category as a 2012 Kia Rio.

Eh.. What do you think Orange SanDiego runs? http://www.gsmarena.com/orange_san_diego-4588.php

The phone you are linking to is not the S III. Here. If you confuse that with an iPhone you need to get your eyes and/or brain checked.

It was a Huawei U8300. Pre-paid phone, locked to a network (not that I care), but came with a 1GB microSD card and even $10 credit, fwiw. Pretty good deal for $29. Got it at a deals shop in AU.

You can also get phones like this pretty cheaply, similar specs.

> hell YES!!! Just because I have a "smart" phone, which I only do non-call
> things where wifi is present, yet they insist on a fucking data package.

I have 2 (count-em; TWO) cellphones.

1) An el-cheapo pre-paid voice plan on an old Nokia 6015i. http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=514

2) An HTC Desire HD http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_desire_hd-3468.php I bought 2nd-hand. I use it as an FM radio, camera, ebook reader, and wifi-based web browser. I haven't bothered getting a SIM card and connecting to a carrier.

The Nokia 9000 series are not considered smartphones in the modern world, where even a $10 7-11 feature phone has more functionality.

Comparing a Nokia 9000 to a modern smartphone, you can see just how stupid your comment is.

The reason they don't, is because they don't want 150 different models of Macs for people to choose from. Look at how many Samsung Galaxy phones/tablets there are. People are much more likely to buy if they understand what product they are actually buying. With the iPhone, you get 2 things to figure out. Black or White, and then storage space 16GB, 32GB, or 64 GB. That's it. Same goes for their laptops, desktops, and a tablets. Simple choices. Don't confuse people. Let people know what they are buying. HP / Lenovo / Dell /Samsung/ HTC and all the others could learn quite a bit from looking at Apple in this perspective.

any camera phone for the last 6-8 years has supported MMS

Wrong, one of Nokia's high end smartphones doesn't. If you google a while, you'll find it's a "missing feature". (in particular, it's the one I own, and the first one with a camera I've owned).

, you probably used it a dozen times with out knowing about...

anyone ever txt you a photo (hint:MMS)

Nope, never.

ever part of a group txt from someone with a iPhone? (hint:MMS)

Nope, never even heard of group texts.

ever send a picture? yup MMS

Nope, I use e-mail when I need to send a photo.

a lot of older dumb phones actually sent anything over 160 characters as MMS

it all set-up by default on phones...

Nope, previous phones I owned were Nokia 1600 and Nokia 1100. They split the text into several SMS.

The truth is, there's a great deal of people out there who've never used MMS, a great deal who don't even know what it is. It's just on of those things that never gained global popularity, only amongst some groups of people.

Thinner by 0.36mm, true.

But the iPhone 4S lasts far longer than the Nexus in web browsing and video playback, though it loses in talk time.

This despite the Nexus having a 22% higher battery capacity:
Nexus: 1750 mAh
iPhone 4S: 1432 mAh

Obviously the larger screen and pixel count account for the poor web and video test results, so the user has to decide if the tradeoff is worth it for them.

Huawei should not be ignored. They're going to come onto the world market in a big way this year. For instance, I am truly looking forward to their new flagship coming later this year -- 1.5GHz, 1280x720 and 2500mAH without crazy Android customization that every big manufacturer seems to be in love with. Samsung may make nice displays but they focus more on a diaspora of handsets rather than making exceptional ones.

It's in all the articles :(

http://www.phonearena.com/news/Skype-for-Windows-Phone-goes-out-of-beta-final-version-released_id29363
http://blog.gsmarena.com/skype-for-windows-phone-no-longer-in-beta/
http://www.technobuffalo.com/companies/microsoft/windows-phone/skype-for-windows-phone-drops-beta-tag-but-still-wont-work-in-background/
http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/22/2967087/skype-for-windows-phone-version-1-0-final

Apple tries to produce good products (even though they fail a lot at that), but generally honors the warranty.

They also try to produce products that are extremely difficult for a consumer to service or repair themselves.

Apple was the first to fully adopt industry standards like USB and Thunderbolt, while creating their own industry standards like IEEE1394 (FireWire) and OpenCL.

Show me an iPhone with micro-USB connector. Apple actually voluntarily agreed to conform to the new EU standard that all phones should be chargeable by micro-USB, then "conformed" by releasing a micro-USB to 30-pin adapter (available as a separate purchase, of course).

They were the first cellphone maker to use the 3.5mm audio connector.

See Motorola ROKR, released 2006 - and I don't cite that as the first phone to use a 3.5mm connector, just one example which pre-dates the iPhone by over a year. I'm quite sure there are earlier examples.

I've often drawn parallels between Sony and Apple, and as others have already said here, I think what Sony is going through now is only foreshadowing what will happen to Apple.

The only current-generation one I'm aware of is the Motorola Droid 4, which isn't GSM. Or the Droid 3 which is about 8 months old. I wish the list of options were longer since I prefer physical buttons too.

http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_droid_3-4036.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_droid_4_xt894-4418.php

The only current-generation one I'm aware of is the Motorola Droid 4, which isn't GSM. Or the Droid 3 which is about 8 months old. I wish the list of options were longer since I prefer physical buttons too.

http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_droid_3-4036.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_droid_4_xt894-4418.php

Since TFS was probably submitted by someone in the US, we can only reluctantly recommend the phone he is not allowed to have. Nokia decided not to embarrass their Lumia models in the USA, UK, Japan, Germany by releasing the N9 in competition.

No, the Motorola Atrix is a phone with a 4.0" screen, not a tablet. http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_atrix-3709.php

Am I to understand that this older, cheaper flip phone can actually read him texts that he receives? Or is it just send-only unless he finds a sighted person to read him his texts?

Plenty of them around, for example: http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_a732-1235.php

you know that these three pieces of pork chop came from pig number 123

Yeah riiiight...
You trust about two dozen people, handling all those pigs/pork, labeling them, etc, on saying that they came from pig number 123.
People in horrible work conditions, who naturally will do trickery if it means they can make some extra money and eat something better than rice with rice tomorrow.
People who might sell you fake rice made from plastic and cellulose, fake eggs made from the same stuff as flubber, and fake USB drives. (And given their situation, you can't even blame them.)

Exactly. That's how stupid this sounds It's the "reliable sources" syndrome from Wikipedia all over again.
Total ignorance of the only guaranteed fact: That you have not observed it for yourself, but rely on "sources", whose trustworthiness is different for different people, and who themselves has an inherent, inevitable filter bias in their senses, their brains, and their communication media.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Just imagine: in 2013 having a windows phone that:
a) Can be used as a phone (of course!)
b) Can be used as a tablet (windows 8 with the Metro UI)
c) Can be used as a computer (windows 8 with the Classic UI)
d) Can be used as a game console (it is rumored that the next xbox could run in ARM processors a variant of the windows 8 kernel).

Microsoft is known for improving its products version after version... Everyone thinks that Windows Phone 7.5 is a very goog start: just read the reviews:
- Engadget ( http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/27/windows-phone-7-5-mango-review/ )
"While Windows Phone still needs a glass of water to get rid of a few hiccups -- and let's face it, every mobile OS has plenty of their own -- it ironed out a lot of the wrinkles from earlier versions and made it a much more feature-laden, user-friendly experience. With Mango, WP7 has caught up with Android and iOS in nearly every way, and in some areas it's even surpassed the other two in functionality. Despite a grim first year, the bright future of Windows Phone is forcing Ballmer to wear shades."
- The Verge ( http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/24/2509332/windows-phone-75-mango-review )
"Put simply, regardless of your preconceptions, Windows Phone finally deserves an honest look the next time you’re ready to buy a phone — particularly as we start to see new devices come to market over the next few weeks."
- gsmarena ( http://www.gsmarena.com/windows_phone_7_5-review-655.php )
"WP7 lacked key functionality, which deterred potential consumers. Version 7.5 however brings things that will appeal to businesspeople, social networking buffs and people who like a novel software experience. If you're using Microsoft software (chances are you're using at least Office at work), WP7.5 offers the smoothest, most well-rounded experience. The rich bundle of several social networks and IM clients and emails and texts is beautifully organized too. And let's face it, the Windows Phone interface is the only UI around that's truly different - iOS, Android, even Symbian are becoming harder and harder to tell apart. The only thing that held it back was the lack of multitasking and now that's been sorted out."

http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_lumia_800_becomes_best_seller_for_dutch_carrier_kpn-news-3481.php