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The remote for the Apple TV absolutely sucks. Designers can't seem to get it through their heads that the #1 priority for TV remote is for it to be usable without looking away from the TV. So touchscreens and touchpads are out (except maybe for keyboard entry). You want tactile buttons so people can find the proper button to press without looking away from the screen. (The Logitech Harmonies make this mistake too.)

There are 6 buttons on the Apple TV remote. Are you saying you can't manage 6 buttons without looking down? How do you touch type? With my Roku, I am stuck hitting the navigation buttons like 100 times to navigate anywhere and the navigation is painfully slow. With the Apple TV, I start a swipe and hold it and it keeps scrolling. The Roku is so much better than the Apple TV for a lot of things (like using a proxy to stream blacked out sports games, etc). The UI is not great at all, however.

The remote for the Apple TV absolutely sucks. Designers can't seem to get it through their heads that the #1 priority for TV remote is for it to be usable without looking away from the TV. So touchscreens and touchpads are out (except maybe for keyboard entry). You want tactile buttons so people can find the proper button to press without looking away from the screen. (The Logitech Harmonies make this mistake too.)

The pad in the picture is just LRUD, click like a laptop... you don't look at it to use it. The biggest problems with the new Apple TV remote is cost of replacement and you almost can't tell by feel alone which end is up. That is annoying for sure, but I have brand new Samsung and Sony TV remotes that also lack a grip of some sort on the back or sides and I need to look at or fumble with. It's no excuse, but it's nothing to do with touch pads either.

Biggest upside is you can hold a button down and give voice commands, which works pretty damned well.

The remote for the Apple TV absolutely sucks. Designers can't seem to get it through their heads that the #1 priority for TV remote is for it to be usable without looking away from the TV. So touchscreens and touchpads are out (except maybe for keyboard entry). You want tactile buttons so people can find the proper button to press without looking away from the screen. (The Logitech Harmonies make this mistake too.)

Yeah how many phones supported bluetooth file sharing in 2007? NONE.

Bluetooth file transfer was a basic feature of any Nokia Symbian device at the time. See for example http://www.knowyourmobile.com/nokia/n73/2184/sending-and-receiving-files-bluetooth-n73

Their profits and sales dropped after a massive recall and their products and even their replacements bursting into flame? I did not see that coming!

Don't take it too bad. An entire company was Elopped because they didn't see this coming and they believed "Samsung would be well-placed [to] dominate, which would leave no room for anyone else". This would have been their chance to take back the lead. They might be able to use this to get back into the market, but I bet they are kicking themselves that they didn't go with Android when they had the chance originally.

If these rumored specs are correct then the Pixel phone will be a winner. The same reasonable, non-phablet 5.5 inch size as the 5/5X with conservative improvements across the board. I don't care who builds it. It's all Google/Nexus to me as long as the updates are timely, the battery doesn't explode and the prices are reasonable. The rest of the Android world continues to be that same sad fail it's been since forever and I plan to continue ignoring it.

How did Cyanogen screw over phone makers? Not saying they didn't I just have never heard that.

Where they acted like children:
http://www.engadget.com/2014/1...

The fun continues:
http://phandroid.com/2015/01/2...

And then this:
http://www.knowyourmobile.com/...

So yeah - they're nowhere near a mature company - and lets not forget when they forked CyanogenMod and pulled the "You made this? .... I made this!" move when getting venture capital in the first place...

Apples's marketing must be indeed be far better, since it gets them a better result than Samsung with one tenth the marketing budget.

http://static.knowyourmobile.c...

http://www.knowyourmobile.com/android-apps/18049/best-airplay-apps-android

guess that means they all can?

I run Airplay on two stereo receivers and 3+ different XBMC boxes. I'll admit I've not bothered to put an Android implementation on my toy tablet but I guess I'll try it out. Airplay works great from both iPad and iPhone here though - to Linux\XBMC and to my Yamaha receivers.

http://www.knowyourmobile.com/android-apps/18049/best-airplay-apps-android

That was the top hit, I'm sure if you can figure out Google you will find more. Once Apple's Airplay keys leaked a bunch of apps were built for Linux and obviously Android too. the XBMC community talked about this awhile ago when XBMC implemented Airplay but having an IOS device I've never had to worry about it except when Apple has stupidly tried to interfere with the compatibility - that never lasts long :-)

Then you need to keep up because I already have several controllers on GNU/Linux

So do I. I just wonder whether a platformer optimized for a controller (but also playable with a keyboard to the same extent as, say, emulated Mega Man) will have any chance of selling, especially given the button mapping phase that the player has to go through for any controller that isn't an Xbox 360 controller.

and One on my Phone (Xperia Play Baby!)

Unfortunately, there aren't enough others like you. Another web site reports "poor retail performance" for the Xperia Play. Only once Ouya comes out will games other than casual games and strategy games have a chance of being viable on Android.

It annoys me when Apple defenders use poor examples to back up their position. "Distinctive rows of colorful icons" made me cringe.

Large parts of the modern mobile touchscreen user interface, however, *were* seen integrated together for the first time when the iPhone was introduced and live-demo'ed in January 2007. Some people trot out the LG Prada as a touchscreen phone that was announced before the iPhone, but only by a month, and it was obviously in no way an inspiration for the latter.

The Prada had no virtual keyboard (text input via T9). There was no swipe to scroll (they used desktop-style scrollbars that a reviewer had a hell of a time using), or multitouch, or pinch-zoom. The traditional contacts and other phone programs looked like they'd been transplanted from a traditional candybar phone, and didn't take advantage of the larger screen space at all. Setting up mobile internet on it looked like instructions for setting a dial-up connection in Windows 3 Trumpet Winsock. And the browser was so bad anyway, I couldn't find any review that ever touched on it except to say it was a disaster.

The iPhone also used subtle effects to make the interface polished. For all the protestations that this is useless fluff, didn't add anything, and form over function, all the major Android competitors did the same thing and then some, some including animated "wallpapers" that truly didn't add any functionality.

Obviously, not every feature seen in 2012 smartphones were inspired from iPhone. The pull-down notifications page in iOS5 came from either Android or the iPhone jailbreaking community, for example. And there's parts of iOS that seem dated next to some Android UI features.

But, there should be no doubt that Apple's iPhone was the dividing line that separated pre- and post-2007 smartphone+touchscreen interfaces, as clear as the Iridium layer marks the end of the age of dinosaurs (an apt analogy there, too).

The blog here: http://www.knowyourmobile.com/blog/1263008/nokia_808_pureview_photo_samples_released.html has bot a brief explanation of how the pixels are used and some sample images. Same images as in the zip file in the previous post.

the most popular android phones are the cheap ones

Why is the Samsung Galaxy S II the one breaking sales records then ? It's certainly not cheap, being dubbed a "Superphone" by local carriers around here and being as expensive as an iPhone on contract most everywhere.

http://www.knowyourmobile.com/blog/994578/samsung_confirms_5_million_galaxy_s2_shipments_in_85_days.html

Well obviously one of them will be along presently to point out that "nobody knows" how well WP7 is doing since release because Microsoft won't tell us. Since I know, I may as well nip that one in the bud: Abysmal is not an exaggeration. Panglozz has been scraping the Facebook user statistics weekly since November for all the major phone platforms, and has assembled that delightful analytical spreadsheet that tells us week-by-week how it's doing relative to other platforms.

Facebook user stats may not be perfect, but it's a huge sample and lines up perfectly with other reports, which seem to be bending over backwards to avoid stating the obvious truth. The phone is not selling. After six months WP7 total facebook users don't add up to two days worth of increase in iPhone and Android platforms. The user base is not there, and ultimately that's what developers care about. They don't care if it's fun to write apps for the phone. They care if there are users to use the apps - and there aren't enough to speak of. The trend is clearly in decline, so not only are the users not there, they're not ever going to be there. Writing Windows Phone apps is not going to be profitable for nearly any developer, and it's not going to make them famous either. Nokia can't save this.

Some of the numbers we've seen for WP7 are totally bogus. Obviously if nearly three times as many people downloaded the software development kit for WP7 as use WP7 for Facebook, something is amiss. Phone software development is not a 3x more common activity than Facebook posting. Somebody is trying to make it look like the thing is more popular than it actually is - perhaps by including the WP7 SDK with some other tools.

Which makes me glad that Panglozz is keeping track of this for us. It may be a little bit OCD, but it's helpful.

Hint: The reason why tablets are popular is not because of their features. It's because you can carry the damn things around with you without your arm falling off. Slapping a tablet screen on a notebook does not fix this problem.

Not necessarily...

http://www.knowyourmobile.com/smartphones/asus/eeepadtransformer/eeepadtransformerreviews/726684/asus_eee_pad_transformer_review_first_look.html

Though it does depend on whether the problem with them is the weight (not an issue with that device) or the lack of full-functionality (still an issue with that device)...

It will come as no surprise to hear Apple dominates the world of apps, not just in terms of support but also in revenue. $1.7 billion dollars were generated in 2010, and the App Store now accounts for 82.7 per cent of the market.

Um, have you looked at the options when you "Report a problem" with an app? There are people who have had purchases refunded from the App Store after complaints, presumably on a case-by-case basis.

Also, watch my Google Fu.