What I didn't realise until I read a review recently is that although the Bumper solves the antenna issue, it means that you cannot plug in your standard iPod/iPhone connectors!
The "solution" is that you have to take the phone partially out of the case so you can plug the connector in - in other words, every single time you plug it in to charge, sync or hook up to your car stereo!
I'm rather surprised that a company that prides itself on the quality of its products manage to muck up what should be a simple plastic case.
Specifics? Last time I checked, there is nothing that the iPhone OS can do that Android can't do (and, aside from Android being "open", the reverse is more or less true as well.)
Pft, you're not checking hard enough!:)
Against the iPhone, my HTC Desire cannot:
Copy and paste within the mail application.
Edit the text of a previous email upon replying or forwarding (eg. to cut things out)
Copy text from a received text message.
Continue to run whilst browsing the "no script" version of MSDN (it crashes hard and forces the phone to reboot)
The browsing is also pretty lousy on the Desire, which I'm surprised given that it is Google we are talking about. For example, the page sometimes scrolls down after loading, entering text into a text field can often give you two input boxes (a new one just randomly appears above the original one), sometimes the text field is selected but the keyboard doesn't appear until you tap it again.
The UK airlines flatly ban *all* electronic equipment from being switched on during take off or landing. Although the official excuse is always "to protect the delicate navigation equipment", this is demonstrably rubbish as aircraft equipment is pretty well screened and filtered.
Not to mention that if a turned on piece of electrical equipment could bring down a plane, it would instantly become a banned item and you've have to pack it in the hold.
The problem with facebook is not the centralised nature of the application, but the lack of control a user has over their data and what facebook intend to do with it
What I find interesting is that in a lot of cases, facebook actually gives you more control over what information about you is shared by others than people here realise.
For example, one of my friends runs his own photo album on his own server with over 10,000 pictures all tagged with everyone's names and cross referenced. If I want to get my name removed from a photo, I have to email him, ask him and hope that he does it.
If his photos were on Facebook, I could remove myself in three clicks.
Although John Gruber is one of the worlds biggest Apple fanboys (and can, therefore, be a tad biased at time) he hit the nail right on the head with this post called Herd Mentality.
In short, the only way to win is when you control both the hardware and the software. Companies who do not, generally get locked into a price war with little to nothing else to differentiate with.
Why be another Android purveyor when, if you get it right, you can be something much bigger and better? Of course, whilst owning both means you get a chance to win, it doesn't mean you can't lose (as Palm has shown).
Granted, HTC have done well, but they're still ultimately constrained by third parties who may or may not share HTC's best interests and aspirations.
While the standard given reason is to kill competition from Flash and other stacks, this story speculates that the real reason has to do with the unusually large die size of the A4 processor inside the iPads.
This isn't a great summary. To quote the article:
This week Apple confined developers to a specific set of tools (XCode). A lot of people think this is to kill Adobe Flash. Sure, that is a tactical reason, but there are much broader strategic reasons. By telling developers to move to XCode tools, Apple is setting the stage to potentially switch architectures.
History often repeats itself: In 2003, Apple advised developers to switch to XCode tools. This was not a coincidental move--2 years later Apple moved to Intel across its entire Mac line. Developers who complied could simply press a button and applications would run natively (full performance) on new Intel Macs.
As John Gruber noted Adobe shipped Intel-native versions of Creative Suite 16 months after Apple began shipping Intel-based Macs (and about two years after Apple announced the Intel transition).
If you are going to switch architectures, the last thing you want is to be held up waiting almost a year and a half for Adobe to get around to updating their developer tools.
(Then there is a whole bit about the iPad possibly already moving away from ARM but I don't know enough about that to be able to comment)
Over recent years Solid State Drives (SSDs) have moved from luxury to affordable additions to one's PC
When I can get a 1TB 3.5" SATA drive for £61.33 (approx $94.58), I'm not sure how something which is 42 times more expensive can be considered "affordable".
Given that they've barely changed the hardware in the last couple of iterations, I see no reason to suspect that they'll do anything different.
Before the 3GS came out, everyone went mad imagining what kind of new stuff it had and ended up being disappointed. Yet, if they'd looked at past performance, they should have realised they were being hopelessly optimistic.
My prediction is that there will obviously be new software but the hardware will remain largely unchanged with the exception being that they'll change to HSDPA (or maybe even HSUPA).
Um, in case you haven't noticed, more viruses, exploits and malware are coming out all the time.
I'd be very surprised if ANY antivirus software got smaller.
Whilst this is a good point, I personally believe that there is absolutely no need for an anti-virus program to have a skinning engine built in. It's not designed to look pretty (read: non-standard and usually worse), it's designed to be small, light and unobtrusive. The Windows UI may not win awards, but it's perfectly acceptable.
Any kind of non-standard skinning is adding bloat to a program that, if it works well, you hardly ever see the UI.
I've moved over from AVG to Microsoft Security Essentials and have been happy with it. It's lightweight, updated silently, doesn't nag me, doesn't pop up useless alerts and is ranked pretty highly in some of the antivirus test results I've seen.
HTC's been making smartphones for over a decade, so I hope they're able to fire back.
I doubt it. They may have been making phones for a long time but it was only in the last 3 years did they actually start trying to push their own user interface. In other words, they just took generic Windows Mobile software and UI and slapped it onto their hardware.
In the last couple of years we saw them gradually add a plugin to the homescreen and enhance that until eventually they took over the first layer of the UI with TouchFLO in Diamond. By that time the iPhone was already out and you could see several pieces of functionality "inspired" by the iPhone make it's way into later releases.
(mind you, they never fixed my pet peeve which was adding a sensor to the phone so the screen turned off when you held it to your ear - instead going for ugly software hacks that never really worked properly)
Surely that depends on what type of "time shifting" you mean. If you're talking about "recording to watch later" then VCRs do it, but "live TV pausing" time-shifts are presumably new to newer technology like the TiVo.
I've worked with a number of set top box hardware and firmware providers and they call the latter functionality (that is, pausing live TV and then playing it back whilst the programme is still being recorded) "chase play".
If memory serves, isn't the PSP one of those systems it's (relatively) easy to pirate for?
Yes and No. PSP's up to the TA-088v3 motherboard (which were generally up till PSP-2000's released last year) were pretty each to hack and install custom firmware.
To this day, no-one has currently managed to get CFW working on TA-088v3's, the PSP-3000's and the PSP-Go's. There is one homebrew enabler, but it gets lost when you power-cycle the PSP - which means it's not quite as useful as it could be.
On top of that, the main CFW hacker (Dark Alex) appears to have thrown in the towel and the remaining people have been unable to crack open the 6.0 firmware. So everyone has generally upgraded to 5.33 GEN-B and have had to patch any 6.0 only games to get them to run.
At some point, Sony will find a way to lock them out too - and when that happens (and given the current "recent success" of the homebrew community) then there won't be any way left to either run homebrew or pirate games.
Ubisoft is creating a new round of pirates from formerly legitimate customers.
The problem here is that pirating the game sends a number of messages. Two of which ("your copy protection is still too easy to crack" and "I'm too cheap to buy the game") drown out the message that you should be sending ("I'm not buying this because of your DRM").
The far better way would just to simply not buy the game. Buy something else if you have to, but don't pirate it.
Microsoft, the company that single-handedly destroyed email communications in the 90s by placing replies at the top of the message and refusing to support inline quoting, then relying on Word (WORD!) as the default editor... has finally discovered threading!
Whilst I don't disagree with you on the first two points, I should point out that I've been using "Arrange by conversation" in Outlook for the past 10 years as my default view.
Granted it doesn't include in the thread the emails that I've sent back to people, only the ones I've received - but they "discovered threading" at least since Outlook 2000.
Those which are locked down, limited and controlled by the vendors. In return customers will receive a superior user experience, will not need to perform maintenance tasks, make complicated decisions and just be able to get on and use the product without instruction.
On the other side, we'll have products which allow the user a greater freedom to install, modify and remove what they want. However, in return they'll have to put up with the maintenance tasks, some things which don't "just work" and the odd inconsistent UI.
Both will probably succeed, as they are targeted at different markets.
There is a condition known as "hypothyroidism". There are many causes; in my case it was an auto-immune disease known as "Grave's Disease". It caused my body to attack my own thyroid gland - a gland in the neck that secretes thyroid hormone, which controls most of a person's metabolism. The reaction from the thyroid is to over-produce thyroid hormone, sending your metabolism into overdrive.
You raise an extremely valid point and whilst I sympathise greatly with your medically diagnosed problem, you need to look at the figures to understand why people are saying what they do
According to wikipedia about 3% of the population suffer "hypothyroidism".
In 2008, only one state (Colorado) had a prevalence of obesity less than 20%. Thirty-two states had a prevalence equal to or greater than 25%; six of these states (Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia) had a prevalence of obesity equal to or greater than 30%.
Once you take the 3% out of those numbers, the sad fact is that too many people just eat too much and exercise too little.
Airlines have overcrammed more seats into each plane than the original designers would have believed possible. When people complain, they respond with "You're freakishly tall," or "You're mbidly obese," when the real answer is "The airlines are so greedy they're cramming so many people into their cargo hold it would make a slave trader of old boggle."
IMDB says that Kevin Smith is 5'9" and according to this site his target weight should be 157lb.
One of the comments indicated that he was 350lb which means that he is 2.2x the target weight for that height. Or to put it another way, two healthy 6'1" men together weigh less than one 5'9" Kevin Smith!
Whilst airlines are guilty of cramming in (partly in an effort to satisfy our demand for cheap air fares), in this case the "real answer" you want to hear is simply that he's morbidly obese.
All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being 'mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights' even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems.
(emphasis mine)
The problem here isn't the state of mobile phones in general. In short, Linus has limited himself (rightly or wrongly) to phones running open source operating systems and, surprise, until Android they've all sucked.
This isn't really news to anyone who works in the mobile industry and I didn't quite expect it to be news on Slashdot either.
There are lots of things that a iPod Touch with a larger screen would be useful for, like web browsing,...
Except that you have no flash, no adblock and no ability to load another web-browser which competes against Apple because their store policy won't allow it.
...book reading
Reading in direct sunlight is going to be next to impossible. No information as yet on whether it is possible to load your own content onto there.
...and movie watching.
Just so long as you're happy encoding all your movies from XviD into Apple's preferred format. Want another media player that supports that codec? No sorry, Apple won't allow it. Fingers crpssed you don't get the infamous "Invalid Public Atom" Quicktime error as Apple still haven't got around to fixing that one yet.
Finally the $499 one has only 16Gb which isn't going to leave you much space once you've loaded up some music, books, pictures, applications and movies. Better suck it and upgrade to the one with more memory. Ouch.
Shrinking salaries, H1B's and the outsourcing of work to India and other countries.
I can't help wondering if there is a forum on the internet populated by music industry professionals who are currently posting messages mocking our old business model and the need to change.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the clarification - and the message on the paper :)
I got the information from here but as someone else pointed out, it might just be the non-Apple ones which don't work.
Either way, I think I'm going to hold out buying a new phone for a month or so, just in case these kinks work themselves out.
What I didn't realise until I read a review recently is that although the Bumper solves the antenna issue, it means that you cannot plug in your standard iPod/iPhone connectors!
The "solution" is that you have to take the phone partially out of the case so you can plug the connector in - in other words, every single time you plug it in to charge, sync or hook up to your car stereo!
I'm rather surprised that a company that prides itself on the quality of its products manage to muck up what should be a simple plastic case.
Pft, you're not checking hard enough! :)
Against the iPhone, my HTC Desire cannot:
The browsing is also pretty lousy on the Desire, which I'm surprised given that it is Google we are talking about. For example, the page sometimes scrolls down after loading, entering text into a text field can often give you two input boxes (a new one just randomly appears above the original one), sometimes the text field is selected but the keyboard doesn't appear until you tap it again.
I have plenty more :(
Not to mention that if a turned on piece of electrical equipment could bring down a plane, it would instantly become a banned item and you've have to pack it in the hold.
What I find interesting is that in a lot of cases, facebook actually gives you more control over what information about you is shared by others than people here realise.
For example, one of my friends runs his own photo album on his own server with over 10,000 pictures all tagged with everyone's names and cross referenced. If I want to get my name removed from a photo, I have to email him, ask him and hope that he does it.
If his photos were on Facebook, I could remove myself in three clicks.
Although John Gruber is one of the worlds biggest Apple fanboys (and can, therefore, be a tad biased at time) he hit the nail right on the head with this post called Herd Mentality.
In short, the only way to win is when you control both the hardware and the software. Companies who do not, generally get locked into a price war with little to nothing else to differentiate with.
Why be another Android purveyor when, if you get it right, you can be something much bigger and better? Of course, whilst owning both means you get a chance to win, it doesn't mean you can't lose (as Palm has shown).
Granted, HTC have done well, but they're still ultimately constrained by third parties who may or may not share HTC's best interests and aspirations.
This isn't a great summary. To quote the article:
As John Gruber noted Adobe shipped Intel-native versions of Creative Suite 16 months after Apple began shipping Intel-based Macs (and about two years after Apple announced the Intel transition).
If you are going to switch architectures, the last thing you want is to be held up waiting almost a year and a half for Adobe to get around to updating their developer tools.
(Then there is a whole bit about the iPad possibly already moving away from ARM but I don't know enough about that to be able to comment)
When I can get a 1TB 3.5" SATA drive for £61.33 (approx $94.58), I'm not sure how something which is 42 times more expensive can be considered "affordable".
Maybe I have a different definition of the word.
Given that they've barely changed the hardware in the last couple of iterations, I see no reason to suspect that they'll do anything different.
Before the 3GS came out, everyone went mad imagining what kind of new stuff it had and ended up being disappointed. Yet, if they'd looked at past performance, they should have realised they were being hopelessly optimistic.
My prediction is that there will obviously be new software but the hardware will remain largely unchanged with the exception being that they'll change to HSDPA (or maybe even HSUPA).
And nothing else.
Whereas we call it a USB Modem, in Italy they call it "Internet Key".
Basically, they got his IP address from Facebook, took it to the Mobile Broadband supplier who gave up his billing address.
Whilst this is a good point, I personally believe that there is absolutely no need for an anti-virus program to have a skinning engine built in. It's not designed to look pretty (read: non-standard and usually worse), it's designed to be small, light and unobtrusive. The Windows UI may not win awards, but it's perfectly acceptable.
Any kind of non-standard skinning is adding bloat to a program that, if it works well, you hardly ever see the UI.
I've moved over from AVG to Microsoft Security Essentials and have been happy with it. It's lightweight, updated silently, doesn't nag me, doesn't pop up useless alerts and is ranked pretty highly in some of the antivirus test results I've seen.
I doubt it. They may have been making phones for a long time but it was only in the last 3 years did they actually start trying to push their own user interface. In other words, they just took generic Windows Mobile software and UI and slapped it onto their hardware.
In the last couple of years we saw them gradually add a plugin to the homescreen and enhance that until eventually they took over the first layer of the UI with TouchFLO in Diamond. By that time the iPhone was already out and you could see several pieces of functionality "inspired" by the iPhone make it's way into later releases.
(mind you, they never fixed my pet peeve which was adding a sensor to the phone so the screen turned off when you held it to your ear - instead going for ugly software hacks that never really worked properly)
I'm guessing that the "enhanced privacy features" doesn't yet extend to being able to turn off the RLZ identifier?
(Good job we have SRWare Iron instead)
I've worked with a number of set top box hardware and firmware providers and they call the latter functionality (that is, pausing live TV and then playing it back whilst the programme is still being recorded) "chase play".
Yes and No. PSP's up to the TA-088v3 motherboard (which were generally up till PSP-2000's released last year) were pretty each to hack and install custom firmware.
To this day, no-one has currently managed to get CFW working on TA-088v3's, the PSP-3000's and the PSP-Go's. There is one homebrew enabler, but it gets lost when you power-cycle the PSP - which means it's not quite as useful as it could be.
On top of that, the main CFW hacker (Dark Alex) appears to have thrown in the towel and the remaining people have been unable to crack open the 6.0 firmware. So everyone has generally upgraded to 5.33 GEN-B and have had to patch any 6.0 only games to get them to run.
At some point, Sony will find a way to lock them out too - and when that happens (and given the current "recent success" of the homebrew community) then there won't be any way left to either run homebrew or pirate games.
The problem here is that pirating the game sends a number of messages. Two of which ("your copy protection is still too easy to crack" and "I'm too cheap to buy the game") drown out the message that you should be sending ("I'm not buying this because of your DRM").
The far better way would just to simply not buy the game. Buy something else if you have to, but don't pirate it.
Whilst I don't disagree with you on the first two points, I should point out that I've been using "Arrange by conversation" in Outlook for the past 10 years as my default view.
Granted it doesn't include in the thread the emails that I've sent back to people, only the ones I've received - but they "discovered threading" at least since Outlook 2000.
In the future there will be two types of devices:
Those which are locked down, limited and controlled by the vendors. In return customers will receive a superior user experience, will not need to perform maintenance tasks, make complicated decisions and just be able to get on and use the product without instruction.
On the other side, we'll have products which allow the user a greater freedom to install, modify and remove what they want. However, in return they'll have to put up with the maintenance tasks, some things which don't "just work" and the odd inconsistent UI.
Both will probably succeed, as they are targeted at different markets.
You raise an extremely valid point and whilst I sympathise greatly with your medically diagnosed problem, you need to look at the figures to understand why people are saying what they do
According to wikipedia about 3% of the population suffer "hypothyroidism".
Yet, according to the CDC:
Once you take the 3% out of those numbers, the sad fact is that too many people just eat too much and exercise too little.
IMDB says that Kevin Smith is 5'9" and according to this site his target weight should be 157lb.
One of the comments indicated that he was 350lb which means that he is 2.2x the target weight for that height. Or to put it another way, two healthy 6'1" men together weigh less than one 5'9" Kevin Smith!
Whilst airlines are guilty of cramming in (partly in an effort to satisfy our demand for cheap air fares), in this case the "real answer" you want to hear is simply that he's morbidly obese.
Not to mention inertia.
For example, I use Windows Live Messenger. Not because it's the best IM protocol (it certainly isn't) but because all my friends are on it.
(emphasis mine)
The problem here isn't the state of mobile phones in general. In short, Linus has limited himself (rightly or wrongly) to phones running open source operating systems and, surprise, until Android they've all sucked.
This isn't really news to anyone who works in the mobile industry and I didn't quite expect it to be news on Slashdot either.
In related news, only 3% of make-up firms and 1% of flower firms were founded by men.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
Except that you have no flash, no adblock and no ability to load another web-browser which competes against Apple because their store policy won't allow it.
Reading in direct sunlight is going to be next to impossible. No information as yet on whether it is possible to load your own content onto there.
Just so long as you're happy encoding all your movies from XviD into Apple's preferred format. Want another media player that supports that codec? No sorry, Apple won't allow it. Fingers crpssed you don't get the infamous "Invalid Public Atom" Quicktime error as Apple still haven't got around to fixing that one yet.
Finally the $499 one has only 16Gb which isn't going to leave you much space once you've loaded up some music, books, pictures, applications and movies. Better suck it and upgrade to the one with more memory. Ouch.
It's sexy kit, but flawed in a lot of ways.
Shrinking salaries, H1B's and the outsourcing of work to India and other countries.
I can't help wondering if there is a forum on the internet populated by music industry professionals who are currently posting messages mocking our old business model and the need to change.