These may be ultra low power but they still require a power source either wireless or need to be charged. Aside of the power needed to transmit stereo audio data surely the power of moving the tiny speaker diaphragms is significant enough. Especially if you like some music loud or bass heavy.
I would be a fan of the ear bud type design although it's hard enough to get ones these days that sound well. The ones available in the mid 1990s seemed better to me.
Wireless charging would concern me a little if beamed to my ears. I don't worry excessively about such things normally but doesn't that data rate seem high for that proximity to your brain too?
If they're battery powered, it's just another device to be charged daily along with the phone, the tablet, the smart watch watch etc. I'd think I'd prefer the old fashioned wires until batter technology improves improves.
One more thought, something similar was done for a tiny fm radio also in ear based by Sinclair Research in the 1990s. That didn't catch on either.
I welcome these steps because it is shocking how little people realise that they have shared unknowingly. Or worse that others have shared on their behalf. How often do you encounter family or friends or colleagues who proudly boast that they don't have a social media account therefore they have nothing to fear. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Not having an account just makes you ignorant to what has been posted about you or your children or other privacy concerns.
With the advent of smartphones, public cloud storage and various dubious smartphone malware dressed as popular apps, we've all become custodians of each others data to some extent. But few are aware or understand the implications.
I wonder should they be teaching more data security and privacy to kids instead of concentrating their efforts on teaching them all how to be coders.
I think this is where a third platform may have a place logically if perhaps not cocommercially.
There's a growing demand for people who want their device to 'just work'. In a way that needs the singular vision of a dictatorship style of leader to ensure it happens without more bloat and without evermore power hungry hardware to achieve much the same goals
As I look back from my current Android at some of the old Symbian Nokia phones. Did they have massive issues towards the end? Yes but they were a lot more effective and dependable on meagre hardware. Long battery life, proper multi multitasking, sturdy hardware. Sometimes I wonder are we going forwards or backwards in mobile computing.
Login with a real account, anonymous coward! Just trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
Other puns in the stack include RAM, flock, feta and sheeple. Push/Pop from the stack at will!
There'll be forks, there'll be distros that die out but ultimately choice is good. Out of all the traditional Linux distributions eventually a status quo develops of some core popular ones. Over time they fall out of favour and the critical mass slowly moves to another.
In the medium term maybe some fresh eyes and fresh thinking will solve some of the current issues that plague users now.
Will they have vested interests? May they take things down a path that turns out ba? At times, probably but there's a fork for that
Things nobody has mentioned here for those not using cloud services are losses due to 'acts of God' for want of a better description. In short if you have RAID on your home NAS you're still at risks from fire or floods or even tornadoes.
Fire proof safe not much good if it's been torn into the air and basically lost.
It's always a good idea to have a remote backup solution be that a host you pay or a trusted friend. I always think it's a good idea to collaborate. You mind your friends data and they mind yours. You both have a vested interest in safeguarding each other's data. Encryption still good of course but geography and mother earth are foolish to ignore.
Windows Phone 7.x was abandoned very quickly though by hardware as well as MS and developers. They burnt a lot of potential loyal customers pre 8.x on devices like Nokia 900 lumia so trust was lost there from an already very precarious situation.
Agree on this, sapphire crystal (crystal rather than glass) is something I've always seen on mid and above range watches. I have it on one of mine (an Eternal which I bought in the 90s which were briefly affordable)
I suspect the sapphire works better at smaller size whereas the engineered glass products like Corning Gorilla glass work better at larger size where risk of shattering from bending or pressure outweighs the risk of sharps scraping the surface.
First adopters of a new "method" like this may not have any economic benefits now, as they offset investment in R&D overheads etc. But in time with economies of scale it'll probably make for cheaper/quicker/easier production. They'll probably re-licence their conflict free production methods to other brands as social pressure grows and then that's where they'll likely make a profit. Money drives these things ultimately in big businesses even if it's being sold to the consumer with a warm fuzzy feeling of doing the right thing.
Two that spring to mind are the Nokia N900 which already runs a format of *nix, Maemo. Probably pick one up on ebay pretty cheap. But slow and not much graphics ability, but has Web server ports of all sorts available via a nice easy apt-get.
Possibly more useful for many would be the Nokia N8, complete with hdmi out and apps like 'Big screen' and both dnla serving and client software etc. You can even hook up a wiimote with official Nokia and Noka beta labs software without any hacking or soldering.
The power consumption on these devices is tiny, there's definitely phone devices that will do a lot of what a pi can, on original firmware.
For many Nokians like me, they'll be moving from resistive screens which although prone to frustrating scratches are remarkably strong. I think the convex will give it more strength actually, curves are generally robust. Like arches in architecture for example.
I'm still quite fond of my stylus too on the N900 and N97 and 5800. Great for writing lists in my own handwriting or selecting precise areas on google maps mashups in a browser etc
Moving parts are traditionally points of failure. Remove the stuff that can wear out or fall apart and the device is more reliable and less warranty calls. Combine that with alloy case and Gorrilla glass screen and you can see the advantages.
It's also the direction that the industry has been heading as originally steered by Apple design so it's what they think will sell.
I think this N9 device is more about Nokia flexing it's muscles and showing that they can still
compete with HTC and Apple with desirable hardware.
It does cause massive, MASSIVE confusion if you look beyond that. Currently Nokia has the following platforms:
Symbian ^3, Symbian S40 (Feature phones aka dumbphones), Windows Phone 7, Maemo 5, Symbian S60 v3 and Symbian S60 v5 (aka Symbian ^1) are all forthcoming or still on sale.
Then there's MeeGo forthcoming as well as this partial implementation of MeeGo on a development only N950 as well as the production N9.
Confused yet? oh there's also a rumour of a final Maemo 6 for the N900 in addition to unsupported development releases of MeeGo for the existing N900.
And you can write for ALL of these using the Qt development suite? well now that's another mess...
I agree, best not arrive to the party late with a poor product. Maybe Windows 8 will have a tablet edition or as above - maybe Windows Phone 7 will be the OS for their Android/iOS tablet competitor. Lets also remember the recent big news regarding collaboration between Microsoft and Nokia. Nokia who have a infamous history of light reliable mobile phones and small internet tablets like the Maemo Linux (somewhat Debian based) N900. I would say that any Microsoft offering could appear badged as a Nokia using much of their feedback and hardware know-how.
The only fly in the ointment here is Nokia's involvement with the MeeGo operating system to replaced Maemo Linux (largely Intel supported).
Certainly exciting times for MS/Nokia/Intel with all this mobile technology. And the pressure is on those guys as Apple and Google are pulling ahead right now.
Well firstly it's location independent clustered storage, so you've less single points of failure (if any at all) as the data is spread across multiple sites and servers.
Your single sftp server fails, bye bye data. Your data centre of several load balanced servers goes on fire, bye bye data. It's harder to kill the cloud basically.
Plus all the power saving features of virtualisation etc etc
Steganography and plausible deniability remain open to your consideration
The question also is how would they prohibit such encrypted/obscured uploads anyway? Unless they scan upload on the fly to see if they're a known openable/parsable filetype or distinguishable binary format.
What is also interesting is a file may alter as it is amended. So really they're keeping all states of all files for an indefinite period. Wow thats a lot of version storage. I presume it's incremental file states to save space but still, that's a lot of overhead for the service.
And presumably all cloud storage providers like dropbox, amazon, sugarsync, microsoft etc are all doing much the same. Just dropbox's name is synonymous with personal cloud storage so it's more newsworthy.
it's time to send ftp to where gopher is
on
FTP Is 40 Years Old
·
· Score: 1
ftp was great in it's day. But it's insecure and outdated now and better protocols exist. For system administrators it is a pain to manage with plain text passwords etc. It should be consigned to the history books for better replacements like scp or sftp etc
Not too sure how to achieve this (well depends on OS I suppose) but maybe a setting could be implemented that caps lock only activates/deactivates after a long press - say 3 to 4 seconds.
Now unless you want to wRiTe iN a MaNiC wAy - it should be less annoying for those who are bothered by accidentally pressing it now and again.
Far more irritating for me personally, is accidental press against the trackpad on my laptop causing cursor focus to change or browser "back" to occur causing loss of whatever form I happen to be filling in.
N8 is nothing all that dramatic. Symbian ^3 is just an evolutionary rather than revolutionary departure from Symbian ^1 (aka S60 v5). Symbian ^4 is due towards the end of the year which is apparently much more advanced. Also bear in mind Nokia isn't the only brand using Symbian. Sony Ericsson and Samsung both use it.
So Symbian is in acurrently somewhat transitional phase. I wouldn't bank on it not remaining very popular in the medium to long term.
Symbian certainly dropped the ball on interface and GUI innovation but it's code is tried and tested and considered rock solid at the back end.
I wouldn't write it off yet nor consider its future based on N8 or some current phones with a few issues. Lets also not forget that despite some bad press the N97 has sold really well.
1. Symbian is opensource too!
2. MeeGo is only replacing Symbian on N series Nokia
There are E,X and C and numbered SmartPhones also in Nokia'a range
4. Its not clear if Nokia are branchin off N series as a level above N97 style smartphones
Slashdot Mirror
As with so many services, if you're not paying - there's a strong possibility that you're the product.
In this case the product is user data, users are paying with their privacy and the data gained from their likes (targeted advertising etc).
These may be ultra low power but they still require a power source either wireless or need to be charged. Aside of the power needed to transmit stereo audio data surely the power of moving the tiny speaker diaphragms is significant enough. Especially if you like some music loud or bass heavy.
I would be a fan of the ear bud type design although it's hard enough to get ones these days that sound well. The ones available in the mid 1990s seemed better to me.
Wireless charging would concern me a little if beamed to my ears. I don't worry excessively about such things normally but doesn't that data rate seem high for that proximity to your brain too?
If they're battery powered, it's just another device to be charged daily along with the phone, the tablet, the smart watch watch etc. I'd think I'd prefer the old fashioned wires until batter technology improves improves.
One more thought, something similar was done for a tiny fm radio also in ear based by Sinclair Research in the 1990s. That didn't catch on either.
I welcome these steps because it is shocking how little people realise that they have shared unknowingly. Or worse that others have shared on their behalf.
How often do you encounter family or friends or colleagues who proudly boast that they don't have a social media account therefore they have nothing to fear. Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Not having an account just makes you ignorant to what has been posted about you or your children or other privacy concerns.
With the advent of smartphones, public cloud storage and various dubious smartphone malware dressed as popular apps, we've all become custodians of each others data to some extent. But few are aware or understand the implications.
I wonder should they be teaching more data security and privacy to kids instead of concentrating their efforts on teaching them all how to be coders.
I think this is where a third platform may have a place logically if perhaps not cocommercially. There's a growing demand for people who want their device to 'just work'. In a way that needs the singular vision of a dictatorship style of leader to ensure it happens without more bloat and without evermore power hungry hardware to achieve much the same goals As I look back from my current Android at some of the old Symbian Nokia phones. Did they have massive issues towards the end? Yes but they were a lot more effective and dependable on meagre hardware. Long battery life, proper multi multitasking, sturdy hardware. Sometimes I wonder are we going forwards or backwards in mobile computing.
Login with a real account, anonymous coward! Just trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Other puns in the stack include RAM, flock, feta and sheeple. Push/Pop from the stack at will!
Oops ba/bad - no sheep were harmed in this typo
There'll be forks, there'll be distros that die out but ultimately choice is good. Out of all the traditional Linux distributions eventually a status quo develops of some core popular ones. Over time they fall out of favour and the critical mass slowly moves to another. In the medium term maybe some fresh eyes and fresh thinking will solve some of the current issues that plague users now. Will they have vested interests? May they take things down a path that turns out ba? At times, probably but there's a fork for that
Things nobody has mentioned here for those not using cloud services are losses due to 'acts of God' for want of a better description. In short if you have RAID on your home NAS you're still at risks from fire or floods or even tornadoes. Fire proof safe not much good if it's been torn into the air and basically lost. It's always a good idea to have a remote backup solution be that a host you pay or a trusted friend. I always think it's a good idea to collaborate. You mind your friends data and they mind yours. You both have a vested interest in safeguarding each other's data. Encryption still good of course but geography and mother earth are foolish to ignore.
...a Beowulf cluster of these! :)
Windows Phone 7.x was abandoned very quickly though by hardware as well as MS and developers. They burnt a lot of potential loyal customers pre 8.x on devices like Nokia 900 lumia so trust was lost there from an already very precarious situation.
Agree on this, sapphire crystal (crystal rather than glass) is something I've always seen on mid and above range watches. I have it on one of mine (an Eternal which I bought in the 90s which were briefly affordable) I suspect the sapphire works better at smaller size whereas the engineered glass products like Corning Gorilla glass work better at larger size where risk of shattering from bending or pressure outweighs the risk of sharps scraping the surface.
First adopters of a new "method" like this may not have any economic benefits now, as they offset investment in R&D overheads etc. But in time with economies of scale it'll probably make for cheaper/quicker/easier production. They'll probably re-licence their conflict free production methods to other brands as social pressure grows and then that's where they'll likely make a profit. Money drives these things ultimately in big businesses even if it's being sold to the consumer with a warm fuzzy feeling of doing the right thing.
Two that spring to mind are the Nokia N900 which already runs a format of *nix, Maemo. Probably pick one up on ebay pretty cheap. But slow and not much graphics ability, but has Web server ports of all sorts available via a nice easy apt-get. Possibly more useful for many would be the Nokia N8, complete with hdmi out and apps like 'Big screen' and both dnla serving and client software etc. You can even hook up a wiimote with official Nokia and Noka beta labs software without any hacking or soldering. The power consumption on these devices is tiny, there's definitely phone devices that will do a lot of what a pi can, on original firmware.
For many Nokians like me, they'll be moving from resistive screens which although prone to frustrating scratches are remarkably strong. I think the convex will give it more strength actually, curves are generally robust. Like arches in architecture for example. I'm still quite fond of my stylus too on the N900 and N97 and 5800. Great for writing lists in my own handwriting or selecting precise areas on google maps mashups in a browser etc
Moving parts are traditionally points of failure. Remove the stuff that can wear out or fall apart and the device is more reliable and less warranty calls. Combine that with alloy case and Gorrilla glass screen and you can see the advantages. It's also the direction that the industry has been heading as originally steered by Apple design so it's what they think will sell.
Good question, also is the curved surfaced capacitive screen a first too? It's very striking in pictures from some angles
I think this N9 device is more about Nokia flexing it's muscles and showing that they can still compete with HTC and Apple with desirable hardware.
It does cause massive, MASSIVE confusion if you look beyond that. Currently Nokia has the following platforms: Symbian ^3, Symbian S40 (Feature phones aka dumbphones), Windows Phone 7, Maemo 5, Symbian S60 v3 and Symbian S60 v5 (aka Symbian ^1) are all forthcoming or still on sale.
Then there's MeeGo forthcoming as well as this partial implementation of MeeGo on a development only N950 as well as the production N9.
Confused yet? oh there's also a rumour of a final Maemo 6 for the N900 in addition to unsupported development releases of MeeGo for the existing N900. And you can write for ALL of these using the Qt development suite? well now that's another mess...
I agree, best not arrive to the party late with a poor product. Maybe Windows 8 will have a tablet edition or as above - maybe Windows Phone 7 will be the OS for their Android/iOS tablet competitor. Lets also remember the recent big news regarding collaboration between Microsoft and Nokia. Nokia who have a infamous history of light reliable mobile phones and small internet tablets like the Maemo Linux (somewhat Debian based) N900. I would say that any Microsoft offering could appear badged as a Nokia using much of their feedback and hardware know-how. The only fly in the ointment here is Nokia's involvement with the MeeGo operating system to replaced Maemo Linux (largely Intel supported). Certainly exciting times for MS/Nokia/Intel with all this mobile technology. And the pressure is on those guys as Apple and Google are pulling ahead right now.
Well firstly it's location independent clustered storage, so you've less single points of failure (if any at all) as the data is spread across multiple sites and servers. Your single sftp server fails, bye bye data. Your data centre of several load balanced servers goes on fire, bye bye data. It's harder to kill the cloud basically. Plus all the power saving features of virtualisation etc etc
Steganography and plausible deniability remain open to your consideration The question also is how would they prohibit such encrypted/obscured uploads anyway? Unless they scan upload on the fly to see if they're a known openable/parsable filetype or distinguishable binary format.
What is also interesting is a file may alter as it is amended. So really they're keeping all states of all files for an indefinite period. Wow thats a lot of version storage. I presume it's incremental file states to save space but still, that's a lot of overhead for the service. And presumably all cloud storage providers like dropbox, amazon, sugarsync, microsoft etc are all doing much the same. Just dropbox's name is synonymous with personal cloud storage so it's more newsworthy.
ftp was great in it's day. But it's insecure and outdated now and better protocols exist. For system administrators it is a pain to manage with plain text passwords etc. It should be consigned to the history books for better replacements like scp or sftp etc
Not too sure how to achieve this (well depends on OS I suppose) but maybe a setting could be implemented that caps lock only activates/deactivates after a long press - say 3 to 4 seconds. Now unless you want to wRiTe iN a MaNiC wAy - it should be less annoying for those who are bothered by accidentally pressing it now and again. Far more irritating for me personally, is accidental press against the trackpad on my laptop causing cursor focus to change or browser "back" to occur causing loss of whatever form I happen to be filling in.
N8 is nothing all that dramatic. Symbian ^3 is just an evolutionary rather than revolutionary departure from Symbian ^1 (aka S60 v5). Symbian ^4 is due towards the end of the year which is apparently much more advanced. Also bear in mind Nokia isn't the only brand using Symbian. Sony Ericsson and Samsung both use it. So Symbian is in acurrently somewhat transitional phase. I wouldn't bank on it not remaining very popular in the medium to long term. Symbian certainly dropped the ball on interface and GUI innovation but it's code is tried and tested and considered rock solid at the back end. I wouldn't write it off yet nor consider its future based on N8 or some current phones with a few issues. Lets also not forget that despite some bad press the N97 has sold really well.
1. Symbian is opensource too! 2. MeeGo is only replacing Symbian on N series Nokia There are E,X and C and numbered SmartPhones also in Nokia'a range 4. Its not clear if Nokia are branchin off N series as a level above N97 style smartphones