I have a Hanlin v3 (chinese 6" reader) and a Kindle DX.
I agree with you on the "fail at non-linear reads".
At the same time, paper books and printed scientific articles fail at the portability read. I am tired of hauling 10 books in my luggage whenever I go on vacation. At the academic usage, I can easily carry and read 1000s of articles in my Kindle DX. That makes the articles much easier to find and file than having stacks of printed stuff to be physically organized and kept.
Reading digital books also adds the relief of not adding even more books to my (overcrowded) shelfs. Some friends of mine like the idea of having a hard-cover of a given book in a shelf. For me that always sounds like a sort of fetishism.
The deal is that the phone is defective in the way it is sold.
What I find the most amazing thing in this whole story is how so many blogs/"news" sites didn't dare to call apple on it wrt the iphone4 antenna. Engadget, cnet all of them just gave the defective phone a stupidly high rating. Now that the cat is out of the bag they will all back-pedal on it.
Then there are the folks like you under the reasoning: "you bought a luxury phone that is defective by design, you were already ripped off, what are 30 bucks against that? Get over it". For a customer that values the design of a phone, adding a rubber band around it pretty much nullifies the value of it.
The whole idea that the product needs to be good for what it advertises, and that customers are entitled to get what they paid for apparently doesn't apply to this particular brand.
They do. It's called version 1. Don't you people learn anything? Never buy a version 1 product from any vendor unless you have an absolute, overriding reason to do so or you're just a masochist.
Google provides enterprise support for Docs and Gmail (at the very least). These services have uptime & backup guarantees and monthly bills as you ought to expect.
If you just use the free service and never pay them a dime, then you indeed don't get a support center contact to call/email.
I have a high end smartphone that I need to recharge almost daily, I reckon however that *many* users do prefer high-end smart phones whose battery lasts at least one week.
Nokia is not fucked up in the "high end smart phone" market per se, they are fucked up in the fashion/cool high-end phone market.
If you *think* that that is a myth, I *know* you... hum... that need to check some facts;-)
You are either only looking at high end Android phones, or not considering the contract prices as part of the total price.
When I bought my G1, getting an Iphone 3G (not the 3GS) would have cost ~220 euros more. In Europe, LG has dozens of cheap phones running Android being sold unlocked. As I mentioned in another post, a friend has been to South Korea where Samsung was selling Android phones (unlocked & without contract) for 70 euros.
Although I get the sad feeling that some people out there are buying expensive Iphones just because they've swallowed the marketing hype that you need an expensive Iphone just to access the Internet on a phone...
The "fancy phone" public right now is far beyond the user group that actually uses mobile internet.
I think the main point of sales (of top phones like the iphone 4) is that phones have become fashion accessories. So people will pay multi-hundred dollars/euros for phones just like they pay multi-hundred bucks for sunglasses, watches, shoes etc.
Think about all the previous "simple" blackberries that had a much longer battery life, and extreme utility for reading email. Couple of years later all new BBerries lasted much less (for the sake of features that almost no one used) but higher up managers would only have the shinny new ones with low battery. Because those were the fashionable ones.
A friend has been to South-Korea recently. She said that local Samsung shops were selling Android phones for 70 euros there (she didn't buy one because they told her it would not work in Europe).
Yesterday at the Droid X launch, the quote was of 160.000 Android phones being sold per day. I assume that this number is global. So at any 4 working days Android (sales world wide) matches the iphone 4 (US) launch. How well do you think the sales between these two fare on a normal week world wide? Truth is, we both don't know.
I think that at the high-end price point, the iphone seems to sell a lot more. But the trick is that, world wide, not that many people have the disposable money. Android OTOH is present both at the high-end and at the mid-range.
Many minds greater than both of ours combined have whole heartedly believed that everything was created by a God (uppercase 'G')
I believe you are falling in this "false authority" fallacy.
I mean, how can this be pertinent? If Fermi didn't brush his teeth, would that by itself be a valid argument for not brushing teeth?
There is just as much evidence for a creator as there is for multiverses, for example, yet no one has a problem with the theory of multiverses being taught in the classroom.
Do you _really_ believe this comparison to be valid?
The reason (most) people don't have problem with some forms of "abstract non-sense" being taught in universities is that: 1. it normally comes without a political agenda of its own. 2. students at that level are well trained to understand abstract non sense as such, and are well trained to understand how the scientific method works.
Now, you are trying to make that somehow equivalent to teaching some specific form of abstract non-sense:
1. at lower education classes (where students are not trained in the scientific method yet, and barely know how to refute false claims); 2. with the specific political agenda of _denying_ well established science.
You know, people say "So what if Apple doesn't allow this, allow that? Just don't buy it.", the people leading the industry are buying it and they think a closed environment, the most closed environment since ENIAC (!) is a good thing.
The people leading the industry make so much money that they can buy 2 units of the latest hype gadget each day and not even notice that in their bank balance.
For "normal" people income level, it amounts to watching a hyped movie (at home on tv) that all your friends are talking about it.
To be fair, I run the chrome nightly build (available as a ubuntu package).
I tried timing using % firefox -safe-mode
Firefox then opens a dialog asking me whether the safe options should be made permanent. Makes sense, but it doesn't help with benchmarking.
[...]
Do you know of any data showing how many extensions the average user uses? I am honestly curious to know. Last weekend while playing tech support for my mother-in-law, I discovered that she of all people had extensions enabled (color tabs).
I looked at your link. He used no extensions. My problem with it is that Firefox constantly checks for extensions updates when I start it.
I don't know if that is the only reason why firefox starts so slowly on my machines, but firefox (at least on my computers) does start a LOT slower than chrome.
Speed is the only reason both me and my wife are now using chrome as our primary browser.
CM Updater seems abandoned to me. The RSS feed of the cyanogen website has become a mess.
Cyanogen seems to be using his own twitter feed to announce stuff, which I find terribly shortsighted. BTW, a Android_2.1 image is about to be released for testing on the G1/Dream.
Regarding the radio, I have a version 2_22_19_26I. Is your G1 from Rogers? The 2_22_19_26I is the latest file on HTC's website. Where did you get this radio from?
What version of Android you are running? Cyanogen 4.2.14 was pretty problematic. The latest version 4.2.15.1 (and the one before that) did address loads of issues, and (at least) my G1 is working a lot better now.
I own a G1 and was able to convert the phone to a Google "ADP".
I've been running custom cyanogen roms for a long time, and my experience matches yours. Very often there are just annoying bugs in the roms, and sometimes they made the phone a lot slower.
In that regard Apple does a better job, since regular users unwilling to go through the trouble of rooting get updated. I wish Google had stricter requirements for updates for all the "with google" phones.
Then the article sounds like another case of "it's worse because it isn't the same".
Right on the spot. One day it would be nice to read a review of both systems written by someone that actually took the time to evaluate the strengths of both platforms.
Another thing that I wish *all* mobile phone reviewers would take into account as well is the *price* the phone+contract costs. Any other segment of hardware reviews understands that you need to evaluate the hardware against, among other things, price. On the phone market, people forget to account for contract pricing differences.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a Hanlin v3 (chinese 6" reader) and a Kindle DX.
I agree with you on the "fail at non-linear reads".
At the same time, paper books and printed scientific articles fail at the portability read. I am tired of hauling 10 books in my luggage whenever I go on vacation. At the academic usage, I can easily carry and read 1000s of articles in my Kindle DX. That makes the articles much easier to find and file than having stacks of printed stuff to be physically organized and kept.
Reading digital books also adds the relief of not adding even more books to my (overcrowded) shelfs. Some friends of mine like the idea of having a hard-cover of a given book in a shelf. For me that always sounds like a sort of fetishism.
(This message was sent from my Android phone on the Sprint network).
Oh, shit I did miss the last line of your post....
The deal is that the phone is defective in the way it is sold.
What I find the most amazing thing in this whole story is how so many blogs/"news" sites didn't dare to call apple on it wrt the iphone4 antenna. Engadget, cnet all of them just gave the defective phone a stupidly high rating. Now that the cat is out of the bag they will all back-pedal on it.
Then there are the folks like you under the reasoning: "you bought a luxury phone that is defective by design, you were already ripped off, what are 30 bucks against that? Get over it". For a customer that values the design of a phone, adding a rubber band around it pretty much nullifies the value of it.
The whole idea that the product needs to be good for what it advertises, and that customers are entitled to get what they paid for apparently doesn't apply to this particular brand.
They do. It's called version 1. Don't you people learn anything? Never buy a version 1 product from any vendor unless you have an absolute, overriding reason to do so or you're just a masochist.
I thought this was the third or fourth iphone...
Google provides enterprise support for Docs and Gmail (at the very least). These services have uptime & backup guarantees and monthly bills as you ought to expect.
If you just use the free service and never pay them a dime, then you indeed don't get a support center contact to call/email.
I have a high end smartphone that I need to recharge almost daily, I reckon however that *many* users do prefer high-end smart phones whose battery lasts at least one week.
Nokia is not fucked up in the "high end smart phone" market per se, they are fucked up in the fashion/cool high-end phone market.
If you *think* that that is a myth, I *know* you... hum... that need to check some facts ;-)
You are either only looking at high end Android phones, or not considering the contract prices as part of the total price.
When I bought my G1, getting an Iphone 3G (not the 3GS) would have cost ~220 euros more. In Europe, LG has dozens of cheap phones running Android being sold unlocked. As I mentioned in another post, a friend has been to South Korea where Samsung was selling Android phones (unlocked & without contract) for 70 euros.
Although I get the sad feeling that some people out there are buying expensive Iphones just because they've swallowed the marketing hype that you need an expensive Iphone just to access the Internet on a phone...
The "fancy phone" public right now is far beyond the user group that actually uses mobile internet.
I think the main point of sales (of top phones like the iphone 4) is that phones have become fashion accessories. So people will pay multi-hundred dollars/euros for phones just like they pay multi-hundred bucks for sunglasses, watches, shoes etc.
Think about all the previous "simple" blackberries that had a much longer battery life, and extreme utility for reading email. Couple of years later all new BBerries lasted much less (for the sake of features that almost no one used) but higher up managers would only have the shinny new ones with low battery. Because those were the fashionable ones.
A friend has been to South-Korea recently. She said that local Samsung shops were selling Android phones for 70 euros there (she didn't buy one because they told her it would not work in Europe).
Yesterday at the Droid X launch, the quote was of 160.000 Android phones being sold per day. I assume that this number is global. So at any 4 working days Android (sales world wide) matches the iphone 4 (US) launch. How well do you think the sales between these two fare on a normal week world wide? Truth is, we both don't know.
I think that at the high-end price point, the iphone seems to sell a lot more. But the trick is that, world wide, not that many people have the disposable money. Android OTOH is present both at the high-end and at the mid-range.
For a device that's inferior to real books for reading, and completely incapable of real computing,
I can:
You can hack the files and remove the DRM. It is a hassle but it (allegedly) works.
Many minds greater than both of ours combined have whole heartedly believed that everything was created by a God (uppercase 'G')
I believe you are falling in this "false authority" fallacy.
I mean, how can this be pertinent? If Fermi didn't brush his teeth, would that by itself be a valid argument for not brushing teeth?
There is just as much evidence for a creator as there is for multiverses, for example, yet no one has a problem with the theory of multiverses being taught in the classroom.
Do you _really_ believe this comparison to be valid?
The reason (most) people don't have problem with some forms of "abstract non-sense" being taught in universities is that:
1. it normally comes without a political agenda of its own.
2. students at that level are well trained to understand abstract non sense as such, and are well trained to understand how the scientific method works.
Now, you are trying to make that somehow equivalent to teaching some specific form of abstract non-sense:
1. at lower education classes (where students are not trained in the scientific method yet, and barely know how to refute false claims);
2. with the specific political agenda of _denying_ well established science.
You know, people say "So what if Apple doesn't allow this, allow that? Just don't buy it.", the people leading the industry are buying it and they think a closed environment, the most closed environment since ENIAC (!) is a good thing.
The people leading the industry make so much money that they can buy 2 units of the latest hype gadget each day and not even notice that in their bank balance.
For "normal" people income level, it amounts to watching a hyped movie (at home on tv) that all your friends are talking about it.
Because Apple stories always have so many posts --> views --> add clicks?
Why don't you factor in the costs of buying macs for all your staff in order to develop for the iphone as well?
> To be fair, I run the chrome nightly build (available as a ubuntu package).
Ah. Well, ok. Comparing apples to oranges... ;)
My wife does run only stable releases of both of them, and started running chrome exclusively on her XP nettop.
Notice that she was often using Explorer before that, as it started so much faster than Firefox (AFAICT due to MS preloading it).
To be fair, I run the chrome nightly build (available as a ubuntu package).
I tried timing using % firefox -safe-mode
Firefox then opens a dialog asking me whether the safe options should be made permanent. Makes sense, but it doesn't help with benchmarking.
[...]
Do you know of any data showing how many extensions the average user uses? I am honestly curious to know. Last weekend while playing tech support for my mother-in-law, I discovered that she of all people had extensions enabled (color tabs).
I looked at your link. He used no extensions. My problem with it is that Firefox constantly checks for extensions updates when I start it.
I don't know if that is the only reason why firefox starts so slowly on my machines, but firefox (at least on my computers) does start a LOT slower than chrome.
Speed is the only reason both me and my wife are now using chrome as our primary browser.
Cyanogen already has a beta release of Android 2.1 for the G1.
CM Updater seems abandoned to me. The RSS feed of the cyanogen website has become a mess.
Cyanogen seems to be using his own twitter feed to announce stuff, which I find terribly shortsighted. BTW, a Android_2.1 image is about to be released for testing on the G1/Dream.
Regarding the radio, I have a version 2_22_19_26I. Is your G1 from Rogers? The 2_22_19_26I is the latest file on HTC's website. Where did you get this radio from?
What version of Android you are running? Cyanogen 4.2.14 was pretty problematic. The latest version 4.2.15.1 (and the one before that) did address loads of issues, and (at least) my G1 is working a lot better now.
Incredible multitouch is better than the N1:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/26/confirmed-droid-incredibles-multitouch-support-is-better-than/
I own a G1 and was able to convert the phone to a Google "ADP".
I've been running custom cyanogen roms for a long time, and my experience matches yours. Very often there are just annoying bugs in the roms, and sometimes they made the phone a lot slower.
In that regard Apple does a better job, since regular users unwilling to go through the trouble of rooting get updated. I wish Google had stricter requirements for updates for all the "with google" phones.
Then the article sounds like another case of "it's worse because it isn't the same".
Right on the spot. One day it would be nice to read a review of both systems written by someone that actually took the time to evaluate the strengths of both platforms.
Another thing that I wish *all* mobile phone reviewers would take into account as well is the *price* the phone+contract costs. Any other segment of hardware reviews understands that you need to evaluate the hardware against, among other things, price. On the phone market, people forget to account for contract pricing differences.