What you're missing is that this is Soviet Afghanistan invasion in it's entire reiteration. West is doing exactly what Soviets did in 70s - when they realised that war simply cannot be won, they literally threw everything and a kitchen sink from their experimental labs into that theatre. Gloves were off, and everything short of nuclear and biological warfare was allowed (there was very strong circumstantial evidence to chemical warfare in some instances). On the other end, they tried really hard to spare the local population when high ups figured out that they can't win that war unless they either get locals on their side or purge them entirely - and purging is just not feasible against that nation in that terrain even if you have balls of Stalin when it comes to massacres.
This is just more of the same. It will work for a short time, insurgents will adapt as usual, and slow bleeding of the invaders' number will continue.
The point is that apple CANNOT admit to a fault. Much of their image, and their sales are based on image of "excellence, infallibity and quality". If they admit to having a serious fault in their phone, they risk an image problem far greater then any potential fallout from this issue - for which most users will blame the operator and their "shoddy network" rather then apple themselves.
It would be worth noting that "those who shout the loudest" rarely make the biggest, or the most influential group.
In this case, BB is largely owned by people who need to get ACTUAL WORK done on their phones. For them, complaint threshold on disconnected calls would be far, far lower then for "toy" smart phones that focus on user experience and gaming over function.
If people making noise over their phones actually counted as amount of people using, or returning phones, nokia would be nonexistent rather then biggest, and apple would be what they claim to be (biggest mobile device manifacturer) rather then what they actually are - a marginal western high end niche phone maker.
How many instantly associated this with advertisement billboard in mass effect 2? Those were tailored to the character as well, though quite more deeply so causing quite a bit of hilarity when system couldn't access parts of Shepard's personal file, or just coming up with gibberish, like "you have been dead for...".
If you count mitochondria as an "alien organism", and viruses as "cells" then yes, we can get some crazy count as every cell in the human body has at least one mitochondria and often many viral agents. Cold fact is, mitochondria is not a separate organism - it was one many millions of years ago. Right now mitochondria is a cellular organ that exists in every single cell of ANY organism that uses oxygen-glucose burning as it's primary energy source - this includes bacteria. This includes vast majority of non-plant life forms on this planet.
The proper biological term for mitochondria is "organelle", a cell organ. It is NOT a bacteria. In fact, bacteria typically have a mitochondria of their own.
What I suspect is that article you sourced counts both bacteria AND viruses, both internal and those on our skin + counts mitochondria as a separate organism. Because that's the only way to get anywhere close to "10 times" figure I can think of.
Essentially as far as I know (I've taken very good human and cellular biology courses in my high school under the teacher who taught molecular biology at the university back in 2000), main bacterial "payload" we have inside is in the intestinal tract. Bacteria on the skin can certainly be counted as well, but then one has to understand that those relate to many other things then human him/herself (i.e. climate). Most of the bacteria we have on the skin is essentially benign culture that feeds on various decomposition materials that come from dead skin flaking off without interacting with the skin or immune system in any harmful or beneficial way. It's largely inert as far as we are concerned, and just occupies the niche so that harmful bacteria doesn't occupy it instead (one of the main reasons why many doctors do not recommend antibacterial soap).
As for viruses, they're an entirely different story. First of all, viruses aren't cell organisms. Bacteria in general are cellular organisms similar in size to many kinds of human cells, and can be smaller or larger. Viruses are small agents that are always MUCH smaller then cellular organisms, as their main role is not a full function of a cell, but parasitic or symbiotic relationship with another cellular organism or a cell which typically involves penetration of the cell. As a result you can have a LOT of viral organisms infesting a single cell. It is important to understand however that viruses DO NOT HAVE CELLS. This is what threw me off. You're referring to viruses and bacteria as "cells", and then say that there are ten times the alien cells inside us. Viruses are not cellular organisms, and of course there can be more viruses then cells in a human being - unlike bacteria which is actively controlled and purged on cellular level by our immune system, viruses infest cells themselves - often out of immune system's reach, and finally several of our own completely natural mechanisms rely on viruses as delivery agents.
But once again - we may have a lot of bacteria inside us, but there's only a small fraction of cells inside us that aren't "us". On the other hand, non-cellular small agents such as viruses can be present in far larger quantities.
Could you please source this one? I'm no biologist, but I'm fairly certain that most of the human mass, and cell count is still that of human. You may be referring to our gastrointestinal tract, where indeed the human cells are just the superstructure and enzyme-generating tissue and various absorbing surfaces, and much of the actual work breaking down the food is done by bacterial cells that are non-human. Elsewhere however, I just don't see that being possible, seeing just how aggressive our immune system is, and how carefully tuned many issues (such as nerve and bone for example) are.
Some internal organs also utilize bacterial assistance for some chemical processes, but I find myself sceptical that they would form a majority of cells in human body.
This may not help. The problem seems to be that education as we have now to get us "up to the speed" with the current creative industries is increasing because of our speedily increasing amount of knowledge of issues. At the same time, the basic human biology is still from the stone age - we have not evolved biologically at anywhere near the same rate as we have evolved socially.
Perhaps this is a show of the fact that we as species are starting to hit our biological creativity/intelligence "ceiling"?
The problem with "playable vs non playable" FPS is personal, because the part of the eye that can see the difference is personal and changes with the person.
Essentially our focus cannot see the difference. It's physically impossible for pretty much any person to see over 30 pictures per second in eye's focus due to the way focus handles image capture and transfer to the brain. However peripheral vision is far greater in this aspect due to its original design purpose - to spot movement. The image seen by peripheral vision typically lacks color and detail due to far lower optical cell density, but is taken at a much greater frequency. As a result a person with really developed peripheral vision can see the difference between 30 and 60 easily, and ofter found even largely accepted as "not flickering" 85hz frequency on old CRT monitors to clearly flicker (I had to run monitors on 95hz+ or my head started to hurt after a couple of hours because of this, and 75hz was not just visibly flickery but give me serious headache within 30 min).
You can test this out yourself very easily. Look at the monitor. The look at the side of the monitor so that monitor image is just barely in your field of vision. You will notice that CRTs start to flicker noticeably where you saw none before, and you'll likely see that 30fps is pretty choppy. And the more developed your peripheral vision is, the more your eyes rely on it even when monitoring stuff that is near focus. And the more choppiness you see at low FPS. But this is a VERY personal trait, unique to each person. So one person can watch low fps and won't notice much flicker even at 60hz CRT. Another will get headaches at 85hz and can spot the difference easily even at high FPS.
Additionally it would be good to note that nokia is seen as "lamer's choice" by only one crowd - the hip people who look at ANYONE not wearing certain brands, going to certain restaurants, etc as "lame".
This hasn't changed in any way for last couple of decades, other then the fact that the crowd got as passionate about phones as it was before about clothes, fashion, accessories and cars. It also doesn't change the fact that this crowd is, and always will be a very small minority at best.
Actually, there have been some very nasty "rumors" that while folks in blizzard still get to decide how gameplay in the game actually works, the general maintenance is gone over under the command of activision drones. These are the people who do not understand how blizzard's community works, they are the ones used to short time communities centered around single game, that come to exist in a matter of weeks and usually die some time after game release.
As a result, these folks look at success of Zynga, and think "we have a very popular mmo, what if we actually put them onto facebook? We'd make billions!". What they don't realise is that wow and starcraft community is an old and well established one, and making sweeping changes will actually get a very focused and harsh response. If you rememer some time back, when MW2 was coming out, activision decided to pull dedicated servers from the game. Community was against, but community for that game was far less organised, and game still sold tons in spite of resistance to the lack of dedicated servers.
With blizzard's community, this just doesn't work. When a feature that everyone feels necessary is being removed, people will rally very fast - as the entire way both WoW and starcraft are structured is to reward those who set up and operate within powerful communities (i.e. guilds in WoW). As a result, these people tend to be used to far greater level of discipline when it comes to pursuing common goals then, say, MW fans.
Personally, I suspect that most folks at blizzard understood this, but they simply had no say in administrative issue like this one. The way they handled it seems to imply this too - the ONLY moderation on the topic they did was to force everyone to post into a single thread. This is what I would do if I wanted to convince my boss who has background in marketing why sweeping change is a bad idea: "we have solid evidence that x posters feel very much against this feature - just go and look for yourself [link]". The marketing exec takes a look at the thread, reads a few comments, gets freaked out by the sheer volume of posts (which blizzard mods make sure comes into that single thread and is easy to count) and decides it might be a good idea to back the hell off - as he might actually have to shoulder possible loss of revenue placed on himself. Nothing scares marketers more then large volume of negative feedback over short time on new upcoming (still in cancelable stage) features.
Take this with the obvious "rumors" grain of salt, but it still strikes one as fitting the direction blizzard took after activision merger (from massive cooldown reduction on transfers, opening transfers between PvE and PvP realms, removal of "free days" for server downtime, That Retarded Horse, and many others.
Holy hyperbole batman. The last piece of news from YLE (state TV and radio) last month was that over 85% of people still use nokias. I somehow find a drop of 5% to be very undramatic.
Re:Still waiting on the BioWare / Illusion merger.
on
Dragon Age 2 Announced
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· Score: 1
"nice sounding conversation lines" was a quote from the parent. It's pretty obvious that sim makers can (and do) make anything from masochists to dominas and from normal girls to killer stalkers.
Almost all symbian headsets, in spite of having several orders of magnitude more variation then ios and android combined support j2me just fine. Your argument is completely moot on this point.
Re:Still waiting on the BioWare / Illusion merger.
on
Dragon Age 2 Announced
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Given how much the BioWare games are turning into Japanese "dating" sims.
I call bullshit. The relationship aspect of BioWare games is an entirely option part of the experience, and involves no more strategy than picking the "nice" sounding conversational lines.
Hardly the same thing as a dating sim.
Actually, you just summarized an average dating sim. Picking "nice sounding conversational lines" is generally the only gameplay element in those games.
Full disclosure: I do not develop any software, hardware, or anything really for nokia, or symbian or any related company. My first smartphone is 5800XM which I still use, before that I used bare bones 3210 which was imho absolutely brilliant phone - it took tremendous amount of punishment, battery lasted forever and yet offered me all I needed (I'm a laptop + 3g modem kind of guy).
Honestly, I disagree with you on a personal level as well here, because you clearly work in programming - you said it yourself that your company "tried to port" your applications to other platforms. Most companies lack that option, and not being developers most of their phone tools include exchange integration, corporate email and intranet and internet browsing (which again, is mostly about intranet, possibly travel costs management, etc).
And most employers would strongly prefer a vastly limited browser - read on why explorer 6.0 is so popular among employers. Because it's so crippled on facebook et al, employers who keep it as the only browser on the workstation can actually expect people to get work done rather then sit filling their status updates.
Essentially your complaint remains not that you can't get work done on blackberry - which you can, easily, but that it's too crippled for entertainment. But work phone isn't supposed to be an entertainment phone. At all. It's a lot like my 5800 - I find myself using it for entertainment more then actual work (i.e. listening to music, watching videos, occasionally playing games). This was never a problem with 3210 where the only entertainment was occasional game of snake when sitting in an airport.
A responsive UI, high-resolution screen, and reasonable aesthetics, I argue, can indeed improve the usability of a device, even for business users.
It is funny how when it comes to both high res screen, and reasonable aesthetics, OS has nothing to do with it. In fact, symbian powers both highest resolution phones available (japanese symbian^2 phones) and quite possibly some of the most aesthetic phones available (vertu luxury models).
Response times are up to the hardware more so then OS, and mind you, symbian is FAR better then ios or android when it comes to response times on similar hardware - it's far more lightweight of an OS by design. Better response times on android and iphone nowadays has nothing to do with software and everything to do with far more powerful hardware used in those phones in comparison to most symbian phones out in the west (we're looking at 1/2 to 1/4 memory and slightly over 400mhz weak ARM11 vs powerful ARM4 at much higher clocks at the moment).
On the other hand if you're willing to fork over premium, a la iphone, symbian doesn't really have anything for you in the west at the moment - though upcoming N8 seems to be able to rectify the problem nicely. This is really the main gripe most people seem to have with symbian at the moment in the west - there just aren't any real flagship phones running it at the moment. N97 is just a poor excuse with same hardware as 120euro 5230 (and largely the same OS).
Similarly, RIM needs to watch its back, as the enterprise market is ripe for the picking. Developing applications for the Blackberry is like pulling teeth, and their mobile browser is slightly less capable than Netscape 4.
In the end, this is something that "smartphones are sooooo cooooool" crowd just doesn't seem to grasp - that they are merely a very small fraction of the smart phone market, and a far smaller fraction of the mobile phone market. Few people using blackberry or nokia's business offerings care at all about applications other then bare necessities. Instead they care about productivity - and there having many applications, especially entertainment ones usually are a detriment rather then an advantage. Which is why you see a LOT of execs nowadays use a "bling" phone as an image phone on golf course, and pull out a blackberry or nokia E series/communicator when real work needs to be done.
Even better, there's a slightly over 200 euro version of 5230 that comes with "nokia comes with music"-service, which is essentially "download all songs you want for a year to your phone" kind of a music download avenue.
Young kids love this one, as do their parents. For former it makes a nice social instrument often making those without NCWM phone outcasts (oh you can't get the music we like?), and latter can be sure that their offspring's music taste won't run up the bill.
Slashdot Mirror
What you're missing is that this is Soviet Afghanistan invasion in it's entire reiteration. West is doing exactly what Soviets did in 70s - when they realised that war simply cannot be won, they literally threw everything and a kitchen sink from their experimental labs into that theatre. Gloves were off, and everything short of nuclear and biological warfare was allowed (there was very strong circumstantial evidence to chemical warfare in some instances). On the other end, they tried really hard to spare the local population when high ups figured out that they can't win that war unless they either get locals on their side or purge them entirely - and purging is just not feasible against that nation in that terrain even if you have balls of Stalin when it comes to massacres.
This is just more of the same. It will work for a short time, insurgents will adapt as usual, and slow bleeding of the invaders' number will continue.
The point is that apple CANNOT admit to a fault. Much of their image, and their sales are based on image of "excellence, infallibity and quality". If they admit to having a serious fault in their phone, they risk an image problem far greater then any potential fallout from this issue - for which most users will blame the operator and their "shoddy network" rather then apple themselves.
It would be worth noting that "those who shout the loudest" rarely make the biggest, or the most influential group.
In this case, BB is largely owned by people who need to get ACTUAL WORK done on their phones. For them, complaint threshold on disconnected calls would be far, far lower then for "toy" smart phones that focus on user experience and gaming over function.
If people making noise over their phones actually counted as amount of people using, or returning phones, nokia would be nonexistent rather then biggest, and apple would be what they claim to be (biggest mobile device manifacturer) rather then what they actually are - a marginal western high end niche phone maker.
So now, instead of two fingers covering about 1/3-1/2 of the screen space, we can have 20 fingers covering... the entire thing?
Doesn't this define "form over function"?
How many instantly associated this with advertisement billboard in mass effect 2? Those were tailored to the character as well, though quite more deeply so causing quite a bit of hilarity when system couldn't access parts of Shepard's personal file, or just coming up with gibberish, like "you have been dead for...".
Mod parent up. This pretty much summed up my confusion about the article, i.e. "where's the DSLR?".
Interesting. Thank you for the source, it gave me a couple of books to rent next time I visit university library.
Inert bacteria in fact to NOT interact. They simply occupy the space. That's the very definition of "inert".
And as I noted, the biggest problem is that article seems to count viruses into the count on the same level as bacteria. Which is just ridiculous.
If you count mitochondria as an "alien organism", and viruses as "cells" then yes, we can get some crazy count as every cell in the human body has at least one mitochondria and often many viral agents. Cold fact is, mitochondria is not a separate organism - it was one many millions of years ago. Right now mitochondria is a cellular organ that exists in every single cell of ANY organism that uses oxygen-glucose burning as it's primary energy source - this includes bacteria. This includes vast majority of non-plant life forms on this planet.
The proper biological term for mitochondria is "organelle", a cell organ. It is NOT a bacteria. In fact, bacteria typically have a mitochondria of their own.
What I suspect is that article you sourced counts both bacteria AND viruses, both internal and those on our skin + counts mitochondria as a separate organism. Because that's the only way to get anywhere close to "10 times" figure I can think of.
Essentially as far as I know (I've taken very good human and cellular biology courses in my high school under the teacher who taught molecular biology at the university back in 2000), main bacterial "payload" we have inside is in the intestinal tract. Bacteria on the skin can certainly be counted as well, but then one has to understand that those relate to many other things then human him/herself (i.e. climate). Most of the bacteria we have on the skin is essentially benign culture that feeds on various decomposition materials that come from dead skin flaking off without interacting with the skin or immune system in any harmful or beneficial way. It's largely inert as far as we are concerned, and just occupies the niche so that harmful bacteria doesn't occupy it instead (one of the main reasons why many doctors do not recommend antibacterial soap).
As for viruses, they're an entirely different story. First of all, viruses aren't cell organisms. Bacteria in general are cellular organisms similar in size to many kinds of human cells, and can be smaller or larger. Viruses are small agents that are always MUCH smaller then cellular organisms, as their main role is not a full function of a cell, but parasitic or symbiotic relationship with another cellular organism or a cell which typically involves penetration of the cell. As a result you can have a LOT of viral organisms infesting a single cell. It is important to understand however that viruses DO NOT HAVE CELLS. This is what threw me off. You're referring to viruses and bacteria as "cells", and then say that there are ten times the alien cells inside us. Viruses are not cellular organisms, and of course there can be more viruses then cells in a human being - unlike bacteria which is actively controlled and purged on cellular level by our immune system, viruses infest cells themselves - often out of immune system's reach, and finally several of our own completely natural mechanisms rely on viruses as delivery agents.
But once again - we may have a lot of bacteria inside us, but there's only a small fraction of cells inside us that aren't "us". On the other hand, non-cellular small agents such as viruses can be present in far larger quantities.
Could you please source this one? I'm no biologist, but I'm fairly certain that most of the human mass, and cell count is still that of human. You may be referring to our gastrointestinal tract, where indeed the human cells are just the superstructure and enzyme-generating tissue and various absorbing surfaces, and much of the actual work breaking down the food is done by bacterial cells that are non-human. Elsewhere however, I just don't see that being possible, seeing just how aggressive our immune system is, and how carefully tuned many issues (such as nerve and bone for example) are.
Some internal organs also utilize bacterial assistance for some chemical processes, but I find myself sceptical that they would form a majority of cells in human body.
In this case, it's more of a fox and a hen. Namely latter seeking protection from former :)
This may not help. The problem seems to be that education as we have now to get us "up to the speed" with the current creative industries is increasing because of our speedily increasing amount of knowledge of issues. At the same time, the basic human biology is still from the stone age - we have not evolved biologically at anywhere near the same rate as we have evolved socially.
Perhaps this is a show of the fact that we as species are starting to hit our biological creativity/intelligence "ceiling"?
The problem with "playable vs non playable" FPS is personal, because the part of the eye that can see the difference is personal and changes with the person.
Essentially our focus cannot see the difference. It's physically impossible for pretty much any person to see over 30 pictures per second in eye's focus due to the way focus handles image capture and transfer to the brain.
However peripheral vision is far greater in this aspect due to its original design purpose - to spot movement. The image seen by peripheral vision typically lacks color and detail due to far lower optical cell density, but is taken at a much greater frequency. As a result a person with really developed peripheral vision can see the difference between 30 and 60 easily, and ofter found even largely accepted as "not flickering" 85hz frequency on old CRT monitors to clearly flicker (I had to run monitors on 95hz+ or my head started to hurt after a couple of hours because of this, and 75hz was not just visibly flickery but give me serious headache within 30 min).
You can test this out yourself very easily. Look at the monitor. The look at the side of the monitor so that monitor image is just barely in your field of vision. You will notice that CRTs start to flicker noticeably where you saw none before, and you'll likely see that 30fps is pretty choppy.
And the more developed your peripheral vision is, the more your eyes rely on it even when monitoring stuff that is near focus. And the more choppiness you see at low FPS. But this is a VERY personal trait, unique to each person. So one person can watch low fps and won't notice much flicker even at 60hz CRT. Another will get headaches at 85hz and can spot the difference easily even at high FPS.
Additionally it would be good to note that nokia is seen as "lamer's choice" by only one crowd - the hip people who look at ANYONE not wearing certain brands, going to certain restaurants, etc as "lame".
This hasn't changed in any way for last couple of decades, other then the fact that the crowd got as passionate about phones as it was before about clothes, fashion, accessories and cars. It also doesn't change the fact that this crowd is, and always will be a very small minority at best.
Actually, there have been some very nasty "rumors" that while folks in blizzard still get to decide how gameplay in the game actually works, the general maintenance is gone over under the command of activision drones. These are the people who do not understand how blizzard's community works, they are the ones used to short time communities centered around single game, that come to exist in a matter of weeks and usually die some time after game release.
As a result, these folks look at success of Zynga, and think "we have a very popular mmo, what if we actually put them onto facebook? We'd make billions!". What they don't realise is that wow and starcraft community is an old and well established one, and making sweeping changes will actually get a very focused and harsh response. If you rememer some time back, when MW2 was coming out, activision decided to pull dedicated servers from the game. Community was against, but community for that game was far less organised, and game still sold tons in spite of resistance to the lack of dedicated servers.
With blizzard's community, this just doesn't work. When a feature that everyone feels necessary is being removed, people will rally very fast - as the entire way both WoW and starcraft are structured is to reward those who set up and operate within powerful communities (i.e. guilds in WoW). As a result, these people tend to be used to far greater level of discipline when it comes to pursuing common goals then, say, MW fans.
Personally, I suspect that most folks at blizzard understood this, but they simply had no say in administrative issue like this one. The way they handled it seems to imply this too - the ONLY moderation on the topic they did was to force everyone to post into a single thread. This is what I would do if I wanted to convince my boss who has background in marketing why sweeping change is a bad idea: "we have solid evidence that x posters feel very much against this feature - just go and look for yourself [link]". The marketing exec takes a look at the thread, reads a few comments, gets freaked out by the sheer volume of posts (which blizzard mods make sure comes into that single thread and is easy to count) and decides it might be a good idea to back the hell off - as he might actually have to shoulder possible loss of revenue placed on himself. Nothing scares marketers more then large volume of negative feedback over short time on new upcoming (still in cancelable stage) features.
Take this with the obvious "rumors" grain of salt, but it still strikes one as fitting the direction blizzard took after activision merger (from massive cooldown reduction on transfers, opening transfers between PvE and PvP realms, removal of "free days" for server downtime, That Retarded Horse, and many others.
Holy hyperbole batman. The last piece of news from YLE (state TV and radio) last month was that over 85% of people still use nokias. I somehow find a drop of 5% to be very undramatic.
"nice sounding conversation lines" was a quote from the parent. It's pretty obvious that sim makers can (and do) make anything from masochists to dominas and from normal girls to killer stalkers.
Almost all symbian headsets, in spite of having several orders of magnitude more variation then ios and android combined support j2me just fine. Your argument is completely moot on this point.
Given how much the BioWare games are turning into Japanese "dating" sims.
I call bullshit. The relationship aspect of BioWare games is an entirely option part of the experience, and involves no more strategy than picking the "nice" sounding conversational lines.
Hardly the same thing as a dating sim.
Actually, you just summarized an average dating sim. Picking "nice sounding conversational lines" is generally the only gameplay element in those games.
Java. Works on almost every fucking phone out there, including most 100euro+ non-smartphones made in the last couple of years.
Why not use that?
Full disclosure:
I do not develop any software, hardware, or anything really for nokia, or symbian or any related company. My first smartphone is 5800XM which I still use, before that I used bare bones 3210 which was imho absolutely brilliant phone - it took tremendous amount of punishment, battery lasted forever and yet offered me all I needed (I'm a laptop + 3g modem kind of guy).
Honestly, I disagree with you on a personal level as well here, because you clearly work in programming - you said it yourself that your company "tried to port" your applications to other platforms. Most companies lack that option, and not being developers most of their phone tools include exchange integration, corporate email and intranet and internet browsing (which again, is mostly about intranet, possibly travel costs management, etc).
And most employers would strongly prefer a vastly limited browser - read on why explorer 6.0 is so popular among employers. Because it's so crippled on facebook et al, employers who keep it as the only browser on the workstation can actually expect people to get work done rather then sit filling their status updates.
Essentially your complaint remains not that you can't get work done on blackberry - which you can, easily, but that it's too crippled for entertainment.
But work phone isn't supposed to be an entertainment phone. At all. It's a lot like my 5800 - I find myself using it for entertainment more then actual work (i.e. listening to music, watching videos, occasionally playing games). This was never a problem with 3210 where the only entertainment was occasional game of snake when sitting in an airport.
A responsive UI, high-resolution screen, and reasonable aesthetics, I argue, can indeed improve the usability of a device, even for business users.
It is funny how when it comes to both high res screen, and reasonable aesthetics, OS has nothing to do with it. In fact, symbian powers both highest resolution phones available (japanese symbian^2 phones) and quite possibly some of the most aesthetic phones available (vertu luxury models).
Response times are up to the hardware more so then OS, and mind you, symbian is FAR better then ios or android when it comes to response times on similar hardware - it's far more lightweight of an OS by design. Better response times on android and iphone nowadays has nothing to do with software and everything to do with far more powerful hardware used in those phones in comparison to most symbian phones out in the west (we're looking at 1/2 to 1/4 memory and slightly over 400mhz weak ARM11 vs powerful ARM4 at much higher clocks at the moment).
On the other hand if you're willing to fork over premium, a la iphone, symbian doesn't really have anything for you in the west at the moment - though upcoming N8 seems to be able to rectify the problem nicely. This is really the main gripe most people seem to have with symbian at the moment in the west - there just aren't any real flagship phones running it at the moment. N97 is just a poor excuse with same hardware as 120euro 5230 (and largely the same OS).
Similarly, RIM needs to watch its back, as the enterprise market is ripe for the picking. Developing applications for the Blackberry is like pulling teeth, and their mobile browser is slightly less capable than Netscape 4.
In the end, this is something that "smartphones are sooooo cooooool" crowd just doesn't seem to grasp - that they are merely a very small fraction of the smart phone market, and a far smaller fraction of the mobile phone market. Few people using blackberry or nokia's business offerings care at all about applications other then bare necessities. Instead they care about productivity - and there having many applications, especially entertainment ones usually are a detriment rather then an advantage.
Which is why you see a LOT of execs nowadays use a "bling" phone as an image phone on golf course, and pull out a blackberry or nokia E series/communicator when real work needs to be done.
That's okay, as the famous guy is Leeroy Jenkins with two "e"s.
Even better, there's a slightly over 200 euro version of 5230 that comes with "nokia comes with music"-service, which is essentially "download all songs you want for a year to your phone" kind of a music download avenue.
Young kids love this one, as do their parents. For former it makes a nice social instrument often making those without NCWM phone outcasts (oh you can't get the music we like?), and latter can be sure that their offspring's music taste won't run up the bill.
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/11613_First_Symbian2_phones_ship_in_.php
Among first links on google. Really, this is slashdot, you can at least try google search before posting a question with obvious answer.