IMO, the mental defect is not knowing that you're behaving like a fanboy. The ones that are unaware of their blatant fanboyism are usually the worst and most annoying...
WiFi geolocation, not internet access via WiFi. Should work with pretty much any app that does WiFi geolocation a la Google Maps, but with offline maps. I'm sure there are quite a few OSM candidates available... as long as you're in more or less densely populated areas, WiFi geolocation should be quite accurate (accurate to about 50m here in a small German town)...
Good point, didn't think of that. I'm in a long term relationship, so yes, that would explain my lack of a need for SMS. Buying the girlfriend a decent Android phone and teaching all my friends to use IM and E-Mail to reach me (since I'm always instantly available on either thanks to my smartphone) has proven very useful;)
... I've been boycotting SMS for, well, years. I only send or receive them when absolutely necessary (activating some service or other, or for Google's two-step authentication)...
SMS is bullshit, plain and simple. Then again, I doubt anyone at Slashdot wasn't already aware of that.
If you're getting something for free in exchange for viewing ads, how is that a bad thing? Unintrusive ads are no problem, IMO...
However, I end up blocking most ads too, because they are all far too detrimental to the experience:
-Flash banners slow down my older PC hardware to a crawl, whereas the experience is more than fast enough when the banners are blocked -TV ads are, well, also entirely intrusive... to the point that I don't watch TV unless it's torrented
If my browser only displayed ads that were static and didn't obscure content, I'd have absolutely no problem turning off adblock. Hell, browsing on my Android Phone is an excruciating experience compared to Firefox with AdBlockPlus... pop-overs alone are worth ABP.
Really? Here in Germany they're not always accepted on the other end. This would allow people to verify that the signed document actually came from the person who supposedly sent it...
Hmmm, I haven't gotten much info about this, but IIRC it's not really about replacing or upgrading E-Mail, but rather about replacing snail-mail entirely. Documents with signatures and so on can now be sent as e-mail instead of in quaint old envelopes...
I haven't bought a video card for a few years (been buying Thinkpads pretty much exclusively since my last gaming PC), but I'm assuming $300 is still mid-range...?
Hell, last time I bought a video card for gaming, I spent 500€ (brand new 7800GTX)... have prices come down so far?
Seriously, I'd pay twice that just to get rid of the fingerprint magnets.
The responses in his thread pretty much hit my point of view: If I had $1000 to blow on a gaming setup in 2010, I sure as hell wouldn't have brought 3 cheap-ass POS monitors, an off-the-rack Compaq and what look like the crappiest speakers money can buy...
If I was planning on spending just a grand on a gaming PC, it'd be a single $200 monitor setup with a $300 video card, $200 processor and $300 for the rest (Mobo, RAM, maybe a system drive if I'm not allowed to use one of the many drives I have lying around here)... seems I'd get much better performance.
10 hours of actual runtime is fantastic, but you know what would be even better? 20 hours. Why not just keep the size and fill the extra space with additional LiPo cells? The old design was MUCH prettier anyway...
I'm not in the market for a tablet anyway (smartphone + subnotebook for me, thank you), but this is actually a little bit disappointing... why thinner and lighter? For those that want something lighter, just release a 7" model...
It's not true, the guy who wrote the article just doesn't seem to have any idea what he's talking about. The info in there (the bits that are correct, at least) could have been gleaned completely from early reviews or even the previews on the various gadget blogs...
Moto is by far the worst culprit so far. HTC has refrained (so far) from measures as extreme as booting only signed kernels, and Samsung seems to allow one to roll back to older bootloaders quite easily (which also don't check kernel signatures)...
We'll see what the next batch brings, but I have a feeling HTC have already caught on...
Unfortunately, most people are too stupid to vote with their wallets when buying their first Android device. When the Droid X came out with the locked bootloader, I and many other people (mostly annoyed Milestone owners like me, I suppose) spent time posting comments on EVERY article we could find about the damned thing, warning people not to buy if they wanted to be able to change their system in any way... seriously, there's not an article out there from the Droid X launch that doesn't have somebody yelling, "Don't buy it, it's locked down!" in the comments. Most of the replies were along the lines of, "I don't use custom software, the X is going to rock even with a locked bootloader, don't assume that your needs apply to everyone here..."
Now, a few months later, all the comments on articles about newer Moto phones are filled with Droid X/2 owners whining about their locked down pieces of shit.
Why would you want access to Motorola's crappy sources?
The problem with Motorola devices and their locked down bootloaders is that you can't get RID of Motorola's software and replace it with something decent (AOSP or CyanogenMod, for instance)...
No point, the author is obviously an idiot who has no idea what he's talking about.
"When you dock the Atrix, the Firefox browser and other dock-provided services aren't running from the Atrix but instead from a stripped-down Linux PC inside the dock. A real post-PC device would run everything from the smartphone or tablet, and it would use the dock to add more processing or take advantage of peripherals."
The stripped down Linuxy interface might make it seem that way, but that's not really the case...
"Running the Atrix's native Android apps on the big screen proved disappointing. All you get is a blown-up version of the Atrix's screen in a window. Android apps such as Quickoffice don't adjust to take advantage of the bigger screen as you would expect -- unlike many iOS apps when run on an iPad [12] instead of an iPhone [13]. For the "lite" PC concept to work, native Android apps will have to take advantage of the larger screen, keyboard, and mouse. Otherwise, you're paying essentially just to have a desktop browser run off your smartphone."
Because QuickOffice and all the other Android apps were surely designed with desktop use in mind, sure... it's not like the Atrix is the first device of its kind and software makers would need a little time to catch up, huh? Not to mention that the Android apps being shown on the screen are shown by way of simple screencasting - no point in doing anything else as the touch interface isn't there anyway.
Sounds like this guy didn't really do much research before buying. All the stuff in the article was pretty much in, well, any normal review of the Atrix. I was hoping for a little more perspective as to installing a more full featured Linux ARM build as the Webtop... which is pretty much the only way I could imagine using the Atrix as a PC. Although come to think of it, custom software on a Motorola device is very unlikely... I'm sure they've locked down and encrypted the webtop in some way as well.
I went from a Thinkpad (which I bought with SUSE preinstalled, and which now is used as a linux server and is still in great condition) to a Macbook Pro, and I had exactly the same concerns you did: keyboard & mouse nub, and glossy screen (I have a 13"). I don't care about the convertible tablet thing, but that's kind of an unusual requirement (and I didn't know you could get a Thinkpad that does that?)
Sure, they're pretty much the only serious option if you're in the market for a convertible tablet:
I spent plenty of time trying them out in the store, and I was fairly used to the keyboard and OS X for light use as I frequently used the Mac computer lab while in grad school as it was conveniently located (I generally only used those computers to kill time). When I bought it, I still wasn't sure I would like not having those features I thought were so important on the Thinkpad, but thought the thing was so nice otherwise that it was worth it.
Well, within a couple days, my opinion totally changed about those Thinkpad features. They keyboard on the Macbook Pro is fantastic - it doesn't seem like it should be if you look at it, but it's almost perfect. The only thing I don't like is that the "fn" key is farthest to the left on the bottom row, rather than the control key - but it's like that on the Thinkpad too! Otherwise, the feel and usability of the keyboard is excellent. When I type on the Thinkpad now, I still consider it good compared to most keyboards these days, but not *as* good.
Matter of preference, I suppose. The MacBooks and MacBookPros I've typed on (most of the MacBooks I've typed on were last-gen, and the MBP was the one that was just replaced) had decent keyboards, but still nothing compared to the compact shallow-travel clicky keyboards on an X series Thinkpad, or a R/T 6x/400/500 with an NMB keyboard...
There's also the matter of the butt-ugliness of the black chiclet keys on brushed metal, but I'm sure most people would disagree with me on that.
The mouse nub? The Macbook Pro touchpad is easily 100x more useful and easy to use (and the touchpad on the Thinkpad is essentially unusable, as with most non-Apple laptops). It's, again, fantastic - I have a mouse plugged in when I'm at my desk, but I only use it for really precise stuff in e.g. Photoshop (though most of my photo editing gets done with the touchpad - there are just a few photoshop things where it isn't easy to use).
Now that makes me feel like you were nowhere near as big a trackpoint fan as most Thinkpad users are. The beauty of the trackpoint is, essentially, that you never need to move your hands away from the keyboard. If you type a lot (I should think that most Slashdot users do:P), that's a fantastic feature that won't ever be outdone by the fanciest of multitouch gestures and ever larger trackpads.
A lesser, but still very important feature: Scrolling multiple windows is just so much more efficient with a trackpoint - take a two-paned text editor (Notepad++ in my case, love that little program), comparing two documents one another, and having to scroll each pane separately quite often... this is something I do daily. With the trackpoint, I keep my finger on the nipple, my thumb on the scroll button, and am able to scroll each pane with minimal effort. On a trackpad, it's much more complicated - not only to I have to take my fingers off of my home row, but I also need to lift my fingers between scrolls (trackpoint scrolling is continuous, hold the scroll button and push the trackpoint up, down, left or right, depending which way you want to scroll, and press harder or softer to control the scrolling speed), lift my fingers when switching between scrolling and moving the mouse pointer (to tell the system which of the two panes I want to scroll -
It really is true. Even as an absolute Thinkpad fan, I have to admit that Apple just produces the superior package for "Buy it, use it, forget it." types...
The only thing that's keeping me on Thinkpads is the fantastic keyboard + trackpoint combo (OK, the fact that Apple doesn't offer a convertible tablet, which is something I need, also helps)... and the fact that my desired screen size for non-tablets (high-res 13-14", preferably 13) doesn't seem to come in non-glossy on MBPs.
For any non-techie who can afford it... don't think I'd recommend anything other than a MacBook these days. Windows 7 has come a long way towards being usable, but even high-end Windows laptops have tons of quirky issues that need to be worked around - usually driver stuff:(... not to mention a new device usually requires a full wipe and reinstall anyway.
Not saying that the effort I put into my Thinkpads wasn't all worth it (hell, my girlfriend couldn't be happier with hers after I finished tuning it up a little), and the result is likely quite a bit better than an off-the-shelf MPB, but for someone who just wants to use the device they just bought, the experience with a MacBook would be much better.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, the mental defect is not knowing that you're behaving like a fanboy. The ones that are unaware of their blatant fanboyism are usually the worst and most annoying...
So was "What?" ;)
You read the part about "Since January 1st of this year", right?
0.35*350k*0.99=$121275. It's March now, so let's call it 4x that amount => ~$485k.
Sounds about right to me if we consider the three weeks or so still left in March...
WiFi geolocation, not internet access via WiFi. Should work with pretty much any app that does WiFi geolocation a la Google Maps, but with offline maps. I'm sure there are quite a few OSM candidates available... as long as you're in more or less densely populated areas, WiFi geolocation should be quite accurate (accurate to about 50m here in a small German town)...
In rural areas you're screwed, of course ;)
Probably programmed into a database somewhere... it's not like the towers are mobile ;)
That leaves WiFi ;)
So is Google Maps with WiFi/Cellular geolocation... GPS not working still sucks though.
And GPS isn't about maps... it's about knowing exactly where on that map you are.
Good point, didn't think of that. I'm in a long term relationship, so yes, that would explain my lack of a need for SMS. Buying the girlfriend a decent Android phone and teaching all my friends to use IM and E-Mail to reach me (since I'm always instantly available on either thanks to my smartphone) has proven very useful ;)
... I've been boycotting SMS for, well, years. I only send or receive them when absolutely necessary (activating some service or other, or for Google's two-step authentication)...
SMS is bullshit, plain and simple. Then again, I doubt anyone at Slashdot wasn't already aware of that.
If you're getting something for free in exchange for viewing ads, how is that a bad thing? Unintrusive ads are no problem, IMO...
However, I end up blocking most ads too, because they are all far too detrimental to the experience:
-Flash banners slow down my older PC hardware to a crawl, whereas the experience is more than fast enough when the banners are blocked
-TV ads are, well, also entirely intrusive... to the point that I don't watch TV unless it's torrented
If my browser only displayed ads that were static and didn't obscure content, I'd have absolutely no problem turning off adblock. Hell, browsing on my Android Phone is an excruciating experience compared to Firefox with AdBlockPlus... pop-overs alone are worth ABP.
Then why the fuss? Sure, end-to-end encryption would be nice, but the main purpose (sender verification) is fulfilled, as far as I can tell...
Is end-to-end encryption absolutely necessary for sender verification?
Really? Here in Germany they're not always accepted on the other end. This would allow people to verify that the signed document actually came from the person who supposedly sent it...
Hmmm, I haven't gotten much info about this, but IIRC it's not really about replacing or upgrading E-Mail, but rather about replacing snail-mail entirely. Documents with signatures and so on can now be sent as e-mail instead of in quaint old envelopes...
I haven't bought a video card for a few years (been buying Thinkpads pretty much exclusively since my last gaming PC), but I'm assuming $300 is still mid-range...?
Hell, last time I bought a video card for gaming, I spent 500€ (brand new 7800GTX)... have prices come down so far?
Seriously, I'd pay twice that just to get rid of the fingerprint magnets.
The responses in his thread pretty much hit my point of view: If I had $1000 to blow on a gaming setup in 2010, I sure as hell wouldn't have brought 3 cheap-ass POS monitors, an off-the-rack Compaq and what look like the crappiest speakers money can buy...
If I was planning on spending just a grand on a gaming PC, it'd be a single $200 monitor setup with a $300 video card, $200 processor and $300 for the rest (Mobo, RAM, maybe a system drive if I'm not allowed to use one of the many drives I have lying around here)... seems I'd get much better performance.
10 hours of actual runtime is fantastic, but you know what would be even better? 20 hours. Why not just keep the size and fill the extra space with additional LiPo cells? The old design was MUCH prettier anyway...
I'm not in the market for a tablet anyway (smartphone + subnotebook for me, thank you), but this is actually a little bit disappointing... why thinner and lighter? For those that want something lighter, just release a 7" model...
It's not true, the guy who wrote the article just doesn't seem to have any idea what he's talking about. The info in there (the bits that are correct, at least) could have been gleaned completely from early reviews or even the previews on the various gadget blogs...
Not interesting, just wrong.
Moto is by far the worst culprit so far. HTC has refrained (so far) from measures as extreme as booting only signed kernels, and Samsung seems to allow one to roll back to older bootloaders quite easily (which also don't check kernel signatures)...
We'll see what the next batch brings, but I have a feeling HTC have already caught on...
Unfortunately, most people are too stupid to vote with their wallets when buying their first Android device. When the Droid X came out with the locked bootloader, I and many other people (mostly annoyed Milestone owners like me, I suppose) spent time posting comments on EVERY article we could find about the damned thing, warning people not to buy if they wanted to be able to change their system in any way... seriously, there's not an article out there from the Droid X launch that doesn't have somebody yelling, "Don't buy it, it's locked down!" in the comments. Most of the replies were along the lines of, "I don't use custom software, the X is going to rock even with a locked bootloader, don't assume that your needs apply to everyone here..."
Now, a few months later, all the comments on articles about newer Moto phones are filled with Droid X/2 owners whining about their locked down pieces of shit.
Dear lemmings: Don't say we didn't warn you...
Why would you want access to Motorola's crappy sources?
The problem with Motorola devices and their locked down bootloaders is that you can't get RID of Motorola's software and replace it with something decent (AOSP or CyanogenMod, for instance)...
No point, the author is obviously an idiot who has no idea what he's talking about.
"When you dock the Atrix, the Firefox browser and other dock-provided services aren't running from the Atrix but instead from a stripped-down Linux PC inside the dock. A real post-PC device would run everything from the smartphone or tablet, and it would use the dock to add more processing or take advantage of peripherals."
The stripped down Linuxy interface might make it seem that way, but that's not really the case...
"Running the Atrix's native Android apps on the big screen proved disappointing. All you get is a blown-up version of the Atrix's screen in a window. Android apps such as Quickoffice don't adjust to take advantage of the bigger screen as you would expect -- unlike many iOS apps when run on an iPad [12] instead of an iPhone [13]. For the "lite" PC concept to work, native Android apps will have to take advantage of the larger screen, keyboard, and mouse. Otherwise, you're paying essentially just to have a desktop browser run off your smartphone."
Because QuickOffice and all the other Android apps were surely designed with desktop use in mind, sure... it's not like the Atrix is the first device of its kind and software makers would need a little time to catch up, huh? Not to mention that the Android apps being shown on the screen are shown by way of simple screencasting - no point in doing anything else as the touch interface isn't there anyway.
Sounds like this guy didn't really do much research before buying. All the stuff in the article was pretty much in, well, any normal review of the Atrix. I was hoping for a little more perspective as to installing a more full featured Linux ARM build as the Webtop... which is pretty much the only way I could imagine using the Atrix as a PC. Although come to think of it, custom software on a Motorola device is very unlikely... I'm sure they've locked down and encrypted the webtop in some way as well.
I went from a Thinkpad (which I bought with SUSE preinstalled, and which now is used as a linux server and is still in great condition) to a Macbook Pro, and I had exactly the same concerns you did: keyboard & mouse nub, and glossy screen (I have a 13"). I don't care about the convertible tablet thing, but that's kind of an unusual requirement (and I didn't know you could get a Thinkpad that does that?)
Sure, they're pretty much the only serious option if you're in the market for a convertible tablet:
http://shop.lenovo.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/x-series-tablet
I spent plenty of time trying them out in the store, and I was fairly used to the keyboard and OS X for light use as I frequently used the Mac computer lab while in grad school as it was conveniently located (I generally only used those computers to kill time). When I bought it, I still wasn't sure I would like not having those features I thought were so important on the Thinkpad, but thought the thing was so nice otherwise that it was worth it.
Well, within a couple days, my opinion totally changed about those Thinkpad features. They keyboard on the Macbook Pro is fantastic - it doesn't seem like it should be if you look at it, but it's almost perfect. The only thing I don't like is that the "fn" key is farthest to the left on the bottom row, rather than the control key - but it's like that on the Thinkpad too! Otherwise, the feel and usability of the keyboard is excellent. When I type on the Thinkpad now, I still consider it good compared to most keyboards these days, but not *as* good.
Matter of preference, I suppose. The MacBooks and MacBookPros I've typed on (most of the MacBooks I've typed on were last-gen, and the MBP was the one that was just replaced) had decent keyboards, but still nothing compared to the compact shallow-travel clicky keyboards on an X series Thinkpad, or a R/T 6x/400/500 with an NMB keyboard...
There's also the matter of the butt-ugliness of the black chiclet keys on brushed metal, but I'm sure most people would disagree with me on that.
The mouse nub? The Macbook Pro touchpad is easily 100x more useful and easy to use (and the touchpad on the Thinkpad is essentially unusable, as with most non-Apple laptops). It's, again, fantastic - I have a mouse plugged in when I'm at my desk, but I only use it for really precise stuff in e.g. Photoshop (though most of my photo editing gets done with the touchpad - there are just a few photoshop things where it isn't easy to use).
Now that makes me feel like you were nowhere near as big a trackpoint fan as most Thinkpad users are. The beauty of the trackpoint is, essentially, that you never need to move your hands away from the keyboard. If you type a lot (I should think that most Slashdot users do :P), that's a fantastic feature that won't ever be outdone by the fanciest of multitouch gestures and ever larger trackpads.
A lesser, but still very important feature: Scrolling multiple windows is just so much more efficient with a trackpoint - take a two-paned text editor (Notepad++ in my case, love that little program), comparing two documents one another, and having to scroll each pane separately quite often... this is something I do daily. With the trackpoint, I keep my finger on the nipple, my thumb on the scroll button, and am able to scroll each pane with minimal effort. On a trackpad, it's much more complicated - not only to I have to take my fingers off of my home row, but I also need to lift my fingers between scrolls (trackpoint scrolling is continuous, hold the scroll button and push the trackpoint up, down, left or right, depending which way you want to scroll, and press harder or softer to control the scrolling speed), lift my fingers when switching between scrolling and moving the mouse pointer (to tell the system which of the two panes I want to scroll -
It really is true. Even as an absolute Thinkpad fan, I have to admit that Apple just produces the superior package for "Buy it, use it, forget it." types...
The only thing that's keeping me on Thinkpads is the fantastic keyboard + trackpoint combo (OK, the fact that Apple doesn't offer a convertible tablet, which is something I need, also helps)... and the fact that my desired screen size for non-tablets (high-res 13-14", preferably 13) doesn't seem to come in non-glossy on MBPs.
For any non-techie who can afford it... don't think I'd recommend anything other than a MacBook these days. Windows 7 has come a long way towards being usable, but even high-end Windows laptops have tons of quirky issues that need to be worked around - usually driver stuff :(... not to mention a new device usually requires a full wipe and reinstall anyway.
Not saying that the effort I put into my Thinkpads wasn't all worth it (hell, my girlfriend couldn't be happier with hers after I finished tuning it up a little), and the result is likely quite a bit better than an off-the-shelf MPB, but for someone who just wants to use the device they just bought, the experience with a MacBook would be much better.