This sounds like a story that would come out of the former East Germany. Not the United States of America.
I'm an Aussie so it could just be that I only hear about the bad stuff, but from the sounds of things over your side of the pond lately it seems spot on.
aggressively using the inactive (locked) screen state to display useful information
I don't know exactly what that means but I like the sound of it. Mobile operating systems, especially ones from Apple, should be a lot better than they are at at displaying device and communications status. It's one of the... maybe two things Windows Mobile is good at: at a glance I can see how many emails I have in each individual account, how many appointments I have today and the two or three coming up, how many active tasks I have and the first few highest priority/earliest due, how much data I've used this month, what the weather will be like tomorrow, and of course the time, date, battery and signal et cetera. All from one button press. And of course there are lots of other Today plugins available and they are easy to develop.
If you cringe at that, that's fine. You don't like it and most people I know don't want "clutter" on their home screen either. That's fine for them but iPhone OS doesn't give the choice to those of us who would like to use an otherwise purposeless blank screen for displaying useful information. The key word there is choice... you can have it your way and I can have it my way. At least, we could, if iPhone supported a single bit of customisation...
They do not. They have a higher ppi than 24" 1920x1200, but only just. Compare them both to my laptop's 17" screen at 1920x1200. It looks so crisp and detailed in comparison.
2560x1600 30" = 100ppi
1920x1200 24" = 94ppi
1920x1200 17" = 133ppi
800x480 3" = 310ppi (my phone)
(see ppi)
I hate how there are no affordable high-dpi displays, because everything looks so much nicer on them. You don't need to have tiny text or images, modern OSes can scale everything according to the pixel density, you just have to tell them to (which a lot of people don't seem to realise).
High-dpi displays would be more common if more people knew how much better they are. It's another case of "you don't know how much your current equipment sucks until you try something better". If they were more common, they wouldn't be so expensive. Obviously not as cheap as your standard ~96dpi display but still, cheaper.
Here in.au I have 2Mbps/0.5Mbps. And that is a great speed considering I'm 6.1km from the exchange. I'd be ecstatic if these improvements let me take that up to, say, 15Mbps/2Mbps but I really don't think we'll see them here anyway. At least, not at affordable prices.
Diminishing returns applies to most products though. Cars, computers, mobile phones, food, houses, clothing... And audio equipment. Most people can't appreciate the quality and faithful sound reproduction of a good audio system, which is a shame because if more people could, then more people would buy better equipment, and consequently, the really expensive stuff wouldn't be as expensive as it is.
Like with wine, I believe that most people would be able to hear the difference between the cheap $0.05 shit that Apple bundles with their products and an infinitely nicer pair of $60-$100 phones, if only they'd actually take the time to listen. Also like wine, being able to appreciate a $2000 set of headphones is not common. And again like wine, you don't know how bad Apple headphones are until you try something better.
In case they hadn't noticed, IrDA is dead for a good reason. The fact that the last two versions of it are much faster than Bluetooth (2.x) is irrelevant, it's too much of an inconvenience for most of its potential users in comparison to Bluetooth. It was great before Bluetooth came about and I used the latest versions of it with my old phone because it was much faster than Bluetooth, and I never had a problem with it for that purpose. Most potential users prefer the convenience of Bluetooth though, for obvious reasons. My new phone doesn't have IrDA, and hardly any new phones do, and as far as consumers go, that technology is all but dead. I can see LED networking going the same way.
I'm with you, all that BS can stay on 2.4GHz. I run a 2.4GHz as well as 5GHz 802.11n wireless network at home and I am able to get very low latency and high throughput with the 5GHz, and I'd like it to stay that way thank you very much. If my neighbour wants to hook up his wireless internets computer laptop machine to surf up his email pages and download his digital photographies, he'll be fine using 2.4GHz. Fortunately none of my neighbours seem to understand what 5GHz is let alone if their routers support it. If devices that use it by default start appearing, I can say goodbye to my almost-as-good-as-100Mb-wired wireless network.
While we're at it, everyone else in my area can quit getting ADSL. It's already slow enough, thanks to this country's (Oz) completely arsed infrastructure, and then all these other people in the same bundle as I am sign up. Not to mention the latency, a few years ago I used to get 5ms pings to local servers. Not any more.
I would like to point out HTC's Touch Pro 2 and Sony Ericsson's XPERIA X1, as two examples of one of the kinds of phone keyboards he has missed, the larger physical slide-out QWERTY keyboard. They are much easier to use than the Treo's tiny, fiddly keys, as the keyboard spans the entire width of the longer side of the phone as opposed to the shorter side. I would expect that many people would be quicker with the iPhone than with the Treo after equal practise at both, but then you try a larger physical keyboard like the ones offered by either of the two devices I just mentioned (or countless other devices).
Oh, of course! Why didn't I ever think of that!? If you play them both at once, as long as they are synchronised, then you get the FLAC at 1411Kbps plus the MP3 at 320Kbps and you end up with a significantly improved of 1731Kbps!! Awesome!
Sounds pretty cool. But it is by HP, so too bad it will be 3.5GB to download, which will unpack into a 12GB program that needs 2GB of RAM to run and uses up 50% of your paging file before it even starts processing an image, and will advise that you need to invest in your own 64TB SAN full of 15krpm SCSI disks to make it work properly.
And will use custom form controls.
That are black.
And made in Flash.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like a story that would come out of the former East Germany. Not the United States of America.
I'm an Aussie so it could just be that I only hear about the bad stuff, but from the sounds of things over your side of the pond lately it seems spot on.
aggressively using the inactive (locked) screen state to display useful information
I don't know exactly what that means but I like the sound of it. Mobile operating systems, especially ones from Apple, should be a lot better than they are at at displaying device and communications status. It's one of the... maybe two things Windows Mobile is good at: at a glance I can see how many emails I have in each individual account, how many appointments I have today and the two or three coming up, how many active tasks I have and the first few highest priority/earliest due, how much data I've used this month, what the weather will be like tomorrow, and of course the time, date, battery and signal et cetera. All from one button press. And of course there are lots of other Today plugins available and they are easy to develop.
If you cringe at that, that's fine. You don't like it and most people I know don't want "clutter" on their home screen either. That's fine for them but iPhone OS doesn't give the choice to those of us who would like to use an otherwise purposeless blank screen for displaying useful information. The key word there is choice... you can have it your way and I can have it my way. At least, we could, if iPhone supported a single bit of customisation...
http://www.google.com/search?q=free+epilepsy+test
They do not. They have a higher ppi than 24" 1920x1200, but only just. Compare them both to my laptop's 17" screen at 1920x1200. It looks so crisp and detailed in comparison.
2560x1600 30" = 100ppi
1920x1200 24" = 94ppi
1920x1200 17" = 133ppi
800x480 3" = 310ppi (my phone)
(see ppi)
I hate how there are no affordable high-dpi displays, because everything looks so much nicer on them. You don't need to have tiny text or images, modern OSes can scale everything according to the pixel density, you just have to tell them to (which a lot of people don't seem to realise).
High-dpi displays would be more common if more people knew how much better they are. It's another case of "you don't know how much your current equipment sucks until you try something better". If they were more common, they wouldn't be so expensive. Obviously not as cheap as your standard ~96dpi display but still, cheaper.
True, but they're the same thing if the DSLAM is inside the exchange. Which isn't always the case, so I shouldn't assume it is.
Here in .au I have 2Mbps/0.5Mbps. And that is a great speed considering I'm 6.1km from the exchange. I'd be ecstatic if these improvements let me take that up to, say, 15Mbps/2Mbps but I really don't think we'll see them here anyway. At least, not at affordable prices.
Diminishing returns applies to most products though. Cars, computers, mobile phones, food, houses, clothing... And audio equipment. Most people can't appreciate the quality and faithful sound reproduction of a good audio system, which is a shame because if more people could, then more people would buy better equipment, and consequently, the really expensive stuff wouldn't be as expensive as it is.
Like with wine, I believe that most people would be able to hear the difference between the cheap $0.05 shit that Apple bundles with their products and an infinitely nicer pair of $60-$100 phones, if only they'd actually take the time to listen. Also like wine, being able to appreciate a $2000 set of headphones is not common. And again like wine, you don't know how bad Apple headphones are until you try something better.
Dang, cos I only know Australianese.
Scientology is prohibited in Germany
I am packing my bags now. Any idea where I can learn Germanese?
In case they hadn't noticed, IrDA is dead for a good reason. The fact that the last two versions of it are much faster than Bluetooth (2.x) is irrelevant, it's too much of an inconvenience for most of its potential users in comparison to Bluetooth. It was great before Bluetooth came about and I used the latest versions of it with my old phone because it was much faster than Bluetooth, and I never had a problem with it for that purpose. Most potential users prefer the convenience of Bluetooth though, for obvious reasons. My new phone doesn't have IrDA, and hardly any new phones do, and as far as consumers go, that technology is all but dead. I can see LED networking going the same way.
I'm with you, all that BS can stay on 2.4GHz. I run a 2.4GHz as well as 5GHz 802.11n wireless network at home and I am able to get very low latency and high throughput with the 5GHz, and I'd like it to stay that way thank you very much. If my neighbour wants to hook up his wireless internets computer laptop machine to surf up his email pages and download his digital photographies, he'll be fine using 2.4GHz. Fortunately none of my neighbours seem to understand what 5GHz is let alone if their routers support it. If devices that use it by default start appearing, I can say goodbye to my almost-as-good-as-100Mb-wired wireless network. While we're at it, everyone else in my area can quit getting ADSL. It's already slow enough, thanks to this country's (Oz) completely arsed infrastructure, and then all these other people in the same bundle as I am sign up. Not to mention the latency, a few years ago I used to get 5ms pings to local servers. Not any more.
I would like to point out HTC's Touch Pro 2 and Sony Ericsson's XPERIA X1, as two examples of one of the kinds of phone keyboards he has missed, the larger physical slide-out QWERTY keyboard. They are much easier to use than the Treo's tiny, fiddly keys, as the keyboard spans the entire width of the longer side of the phone as opposed to the shorter side. I would expect that many people would be quicker with the iPhone than with the Treo after equal practise at both, but then you try a larger physical keyboard like the ones offered by either of the two devices I just mentioned (or countless other devices).
Oh, of course! Why didn't I ever think of that!? If you play them both at once, as long as they are synchronised, then you get the FLAC at 1411Kbps plus the MP3 at 320Kbps and you end up with a significantly improved of 1731Kbps!! Awesome!
Sounds pretty cool. But it is by HP, so too bad it will be 3.5GB to download, which will unpack into a 12GB program that needs 2GB of RAM to run and uses up 50% of your paging file before it even starts processing an image, and will advise that you need to invest in your own 64TB SAN full of 15krpm SCSI disks to make it work properly. And will use custom form controls. That are black. And made in Flash.