the iphone doesn't win on features, it wins on status symbolism ($800, really?), flashy advertising, and eye candy.
Speaking as someone who has used and evaluated most Smartphones released in the past three years, whilst the iPhone is most definitely not perfect - it does a lot of things right, far more than the three points you quote above.
In fact, it sounds like you haven't actually used an iPhone to be able to accurately comment about it.
disclaimer: i don't even own a cellphone
I rest my case. Why you got a +5 for guessing about something you freely admit you've never used and hence have no authority to comment on is beyond me.
And a good mobile version of Slashdot is coming... when?
Avantslash is what you need. It'll produce a mobile version which is perfect for Windows Mobile, Smartphones, Blackberries and iPhone. I use it every day to read Slashdot on the train. Disclaimer: I wrote it.
I did read the site linked in your signature and commend you for a making a good effort. To be honest, although mine is more convoluted, I think it produces a better result. However if you've got some ideas on how to improve it then do let me know.
I'm aware than h1 tags aren't rendering properly on the iPhone causing the headline to be smaller than the actual text in landscape mode. I'm not sure why that is, but I'm working on it.
No, but it pretty much made them saleable. If you remember back to the dawn of the MP3 era, everyone either had a small (like 128 or 256mb, tops) flash-based mp3 player, maybe with a few memory cards (I went threw several Rios before my first iPod). Almost nobody actually bought HDD MP3 players.
Not really surprising when you think that the iPod was up against something like this Archos. It was a long time ago but I remember the Archos UI being really poor and you had to manually copy all your music across.
It was no surprise that the iPod kicked the MP3 HD market up the arse. The competition was woeful.
I think of Windows like skiing and Linux like snowboarding.
I've been skiing for years and (dare I say it) I'm not bad. I can do reds and blacks (although I might not be the most elegant on the blacks). I've started trying to do jumps. I'm not great, I fall over a lot, but I'm getting there.
When I snowboard, I can do the basics. I can go forwards, I can turn left and right (sort of) and sometimes I can stop in an elegant way without falling over. If I stuck at it, then I could do it just as well as I could skiing.
But you know what? I can't be bothered.
Here I am, 1 week a year out in the glorious slopes of France and I have two choices: (1) go and explore the mountains, take the cable cars up, do the blacks from the glacier, hit the snowpark, do the winding reds through the trees or (2) fall over a lot on the greens.
Yes, I'm lazy. I could stick at it, I could become an expert at snowboarding - but that 1 week a year when I've paid a bucket load of money to go on holiday, I want to actually do something with it. Skiing does that.
Moving from Windows to Linux is like that. I could, but Windows does what I want it to do. Shove cygwin on there and I've not really got much of a reason to move at all.
From the sounds of it, the story was written in such a way that television was not the right way of transmitting it. If, like the link said, you needed to have seen every single episode to fully understand what was going on - then something like iTunes (or other download service) could be a perfect home for it.
If the programme is really that amazing (I don't know, I never watched it) then there could be a good chance to make money that way and so fund future seasons.
Whilst I quite like my PSP (running custom firmware), the one thing that it is pretty poor is at providing games which you can pick up for 10 minutes and play.
Every game I have seems to want you to dedicate at least 30-40 minutes on it. This might not be a long problem for long trips, but for whiling away 20 minutes on a bus journey isn't going to work.
Downloadable content may be able to resolve this issue although my gut feel is that, based on the way I play the portable, I probably should have got a DS.
Are you paid to astroturf? Thy did not follow it to the letter and they ignored the reference implementations and if they tested for compatibility like everyone else they did so to make sure things would not work. Given their market share, that's criminal.
My point, which you conveniently glossed over, was that whilst Microsoft haven't exactly gone out of their way to resolve the huge gaping holes in the ODF specification - it's still a bit much for the ODF Alliance to think they are completely blameless on releasing, essentially, an incomplete spec. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
1.2 appears to address most of these concerns. If Microsoft don't get that right, then we have them and no-one else to blame.
(ps. "astroturf" doesn't mean "raise points which are valid but that I don't agree with")
So far it's been able to handle most of the stuff I've thrown at it, albeit not at the highest possible resolution - but then I've only got a 17" monitor.
This smells of arse covering wrapped up in finger-pointing.
Microsoft followed the ODF specification to the letter and now the ODF Alliance have the cheek to blame them for the fact that the documentation turns out to be incomplete, poorly written and makes a bucket load of assumptions?
This is going to do nothing to help ODF adoption and whilst Microsoft deserve some critisism for not being flexible when came to implementing it, the Alliance shouldn't think it is entirely blameless in the whole matter.
Maybe I'm just being overly paranoid, but I think I'll stick to the tried and true path of waiting until Service Pack 1 comes out before I decide whether or not to switch.
My first experience was with HP-UX in November 1995 at the University lab. I remember thinking that the hardware looks ancient, the command line didn't accept "dir" and the concept of moving files to rename them was a little odd. I do remember enjoying the possible window managers (fvwm95 was the one of choice in the end) and using "--display" to lock other peoples terminals or display hundreds of xeyes.
My first experience of Linux was some ancient version of Slackware a uni friend (Pete) loaded onto his PC in the dorms in 1996. They were owned by the uni and close to the labs, so it had wired access to every room. Outside of the city (where the rest of the digs were) you didn't get such luxury. It was called "Cameron" (after Diaz, I think) and had the IP address 138.253.85.33 which, oddly, is ingrained in my head to this day as it was the only way we could telnet to it.
We persuaded him to keep it running as a server and even managed to load an ewtoo based talker onto there. Although it was always quite amusing that he had to shut it down a couple of evenings a week to boot into Windows so he could write his dissertation.
My first personal experience of Linux was loading Redhat 5.2 onto my brand new Pentium 133 which I bought for the second year. It was in a shared house in Liverpool that I dual booted Windows 95 and Redhat - eventually moving on to triple boot NT4, Windows 95 (for games) and Redhat for uni work. I remember editing/etc/fstab to get the various partitions to be seen - something we take for granted now.
I stuck with Redhat for a couple of years before realising that I didn't boot into Linux often enough to make it worthwhile. I dabbled with Ubuntu on an ancient IBM laptop but it never really worked properly. These days I find that XP and Cygwin does everything I need. At some point, I may buy a Mac.
I am not on Facebook and don't feel any loss because I see most of my friends in person, for example at salsa and tango classes or at the weekly pub quiz a few of us attend, or at parties.
People use Facebook in different ways.
Although some of my close friends are on there, I generally tend to use it for keeping in contact with people who sit in the grey area between "know and keep regularly in contact with at social events" and "used to know, haven't seen for years and have no great desire to hunt them down".
What they SHOULD learn is that they need to lower their #&@%ing prices. We're not talking rocket science here: People buy used games because they're - gasp! - not $60 or more. $30 to $40 is a far more realistic price range for games, and thus that's what most people are going to pay. Basic economics is a little too difficult for these people though.
The price of games has no relevance to to levels of piracy.
If it did, no-one would have swapped C120 cassettes of £2 Spectrum games and the Amiga would have had no "scene" existing around people's desire to get a £20 game for nothing.
Or to put it in a more modern concept, there wouldn't be a group of people willing to avoid paying 99p for an Apple Application Store download.
well, then among the many "cool" updates on the way you will appreciate the work that is currently being expended to make low-bandwidth, small screen, iphone, etc, interfaces much less buggy and faster-loading.:)
I'd be perfectly happy if you just ripped off the layout of AvantSlash.
It's low-bandwidth, small screen, iphone etc interface done correctly and was written over seven and a half years ago to get around the abomination that is slashdot.org/palm.
In practice, I just checked my mail on my phone, saw a slashdot reply notification, and clicked the link. Then stared at the screen in disbelief, as the phone showed me that to show me a message maybe 2KB in size it had to download 1MB worth of crap.
I know your pain, so I wrote AvantSlash to get around this very issue. When the Slashdot developers see fit to produce a decent mobile/PDA friendly site then I'll retire this - but i've been saying that since 2001 and it still hasn't happened.
I use LinkedIn in the same way that I would keep a business card that someone gives me. However, the advantages of LinkedIn are:
When they move company, their details are automatically updated and I don't lose contact. I've got a load of business cards which I have no quick way of verifying if they're still accurate.
I can export my contacts into a format which Outlook will happily read. Not a chance with Facebook.
LinkedIn is geared around working connections, so you don't get all the fluff that you'd get with Facebook. This allows me to keep working contacts and friends separate.
I can see how people are related to people I know - which is useful when I'd like to get some references from people I trust.
It shows employees that when I say I have links to certain people in companies, I'm actually being truthful.
It allows me to have a "way in" to a company as someone working there invariably used to work with someone else I know. I found a great software development team through a colleague of a colleague.
It allows me to find people for specific requests easier. Someone I know wanted to talk to someone at Apple about iSync support for a device, LinkedIn provided him with the Product Managers name and a person they both knew.
They have quite a good jobs selection which, whilst small, is generally more targeted to the roles you're interested in doing.
It's great for being head-hunted or job hunting as a whole as recruiters can access your details (provided you let them) and offer you possible opportunities.
There are probably more. If I was forced to drop Facebook or LinkedIn, I'd drop Facebook as LinkedIn is significantly more useful to me.
Unless i'm mistaken, I (as a user) could download an application and run it on the mistaken assumption that my UAC settings would alert me if anything suspicious is going to happen.
The application could then drop my security level to the lowest possible (without me knowing) and then start silently installing a bunch of other stuff with no UAC prompts. If it was particulary careful, it could then reset the UAC level back to the what it was before it started.
I'm now completely compromised without the slightest indication that anything suspicious happened.
Sadly for me, Entanet don't have 8 meg available on my exchange but given that they have no throttling and their caps are well documented (30GB peak & 300GB off-peak rather than "unlimited" but with an undefined "fair use policy") I'm not complaining too much.
When Apple place a product in between their Mac Mini and their Mac Pro then Microsoft should start to get worried. At the moment there is a gaping hole which is being serviced by only Windows.
I'm in the market for a new computer. Requirements are headless, big hard-drive (750GB) and good enough graphics card (no GMA 950) for the odd game or two. Paying £1,700 for a Mac Pro is just not an option I'm willing to remotely entertain - when a Windows box goes for £400-£500.
Similarly, an Apple laptop that doesn't cost £749 would also bite Microsoft on the bottom. It's a little hard justifying paying £350 more when - if you want a laptop for email, web and IM - a £399 Dell job does that just fine.
There was a Question Time (BBC programme where people get to question the political parties) where one of the party members asked Jeff Hoon (the transport secretary) "how far is the government willing to go undermine civil liberties to monitor extremists?".
His answer? "To stop terrorists killing people in our society quite a long way, actually." Which sent a chill down my spine.
It also didn't help by the fact that he was deliberately trying to confuse the audience into thinking that the police getting a court order to monitor someone's internet traffic was the same as continually monitoring everyone's internet traffic in case a court order is sought. Even though several people attempted to correct him.
You can see it on iPlayer here. Start at about 40 minutes in.
London also needs to understand the idea of running their subway all night. It was insane that I had to take a taxi to St. Pancras because the train to Paris was boarding before the tube started running for the day.
Slightly OT but the reason they don't is because the geniuses that designed it didn't consider a second backup tunnel. Therefore if they want to do any kind of engineering work (and they do, as the UK loves the idea of running something without maintenance until it spectaculary breaks down) then they have to close the whole tunnel down.
There has been pressure to run the underground later on Friday and Saturday evenings but due to the large amount of work required on the tunnels (see why in paragraph above), this doesn't seem to get off the ground.
Oh, it also means that the slightest break-down or signal failure (of which there are a lot, again see why in paragraph above) then it brings the entire service to a grinding halt. Which is always handy at 8am on a Monday morning.
Finally free public WiFi anywhere in the UK (let alone London) is a rarity. So much so I was rather surprised to find one in Kingston one afternoon.
(Which explains why you don't see many people out with their iPod Touches surfing the web)
Serious question, is it really worth installing the Homebrew channel if you don't plan to do any development and don't have any intention of buying a classic controller?
I took a look at what was offered about 2 months ago and nothing that was developed really made me want to rush out and install the channel. Don't get me wrong, people are doing great things, but I just ended up saying "meh" and went about playing Super Mario Galaxy.
If I want emulators I can get that on the PSP now and the control system is better suited for the task. If I want DVD playback, then I already have a great Philips box which does DivX too.
So... is there something absolutely fantastic which I'm missing out on?
When I moved to a new flat last year, I did my research and eventually signed up for one of the Entanet resellers. When I tell people I'm paying £20/month for 30GB peak (8am-10pm weekdays) and 300GB offpeak (all other times, including all weekend) they look at me as if I have a screw loose and invariably ask why I didn't got with Provider X who is half the price and "unlimited".
The problem, I explain, is that every provider I've looked at that offered "unlimited" had a FUP and from a site on the web (which i've sadly lost) I found out that that FUP could be down to as low as 5GB per month.
In the year I've had the broadband (living on my own), I've only managed to get at most 15GB peak and 70GB offpeak in a month. It's true I don't work from home, don't stream music or video during peak hours and download really big files offpeak - but I've not found it to severly impact my browsing abilities. Hell, I'll happily suck down a 500MB update in peak - simply because I have tonnes of it to go around.
Thankfully Entanet offer a nice set of tools to monitor my usage, so if I start to get near their limits (due to changes in the way I use the web) then I'll re-evaluate the options again. It's not like I'm tied in, I only have a months notice period.
Apologies, Slashdot is a haven for acronyms that even I don't get so I didn't really think to expand mine.
PHF is Portable Hands-Free. It usually contains a couple of buttons, a microphone and a 3.5mm connector. ID is Industrial Design - the design of the device. Regarding regionalism, I'm British and customers generally call it hands-free kit or even remote control. In the mobile industry it's always called PHF, both here in the UK and the rest of the world.
Regarding the iPod's custom controller, if you look next to the 3.5mm you'll see a small oblong slot, this is their custom controller to allow them to extend the hands-free functionality to more than one button.
2. It also really bugs me that they haven't used a standard headphone jack. I know this is not a problem unique to this handset, but it annoys the hell out of me that manufacturers can't just use the standard jack size. I don't want multiple different headphones, one for each device, I want one set which I can use with all of them.
As someone who has worked with design teams to produce mobile phones, I can tell you the major advantages of using mini-USB over 3.5mm:
It takes up less space on the PCB, which means thinner and smaller handsets.
It allows customers to use a PHF with more than one control button without having to resort to a custom controller (a la the iPod)
It reduces the number of ports on a phone (as you have a single one for headphones, charging and syncing) which in turn reduces the size of the ID.
The issue with the lack of 3.5mm jack for customers own headphones is solved with a PHF containing the required buttons, a microphone and 3.5mm connector.
This is a winner all around because we can actually give what our customers want - that is a thin design, more than one control button and the ability to use their own headphones for both music AND calls (remember, with a 3.5mm set up, you could plug your headphones directly into the device but would have to use the phones built in mic for calls - doable, but not nice).
(side note: this is all based on very large scale targeted customer research and evaluation so I fully expect that for a few on Slashdot this is completely the opposite to what they want)
ps. I too was disappointed to find no desktop sync - it'll make managing my 100+ contacts, months of calendar entries, 50+ tasks and 20+ notes (stored in Outlook) a right pain in the backside.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as someone who has used and evaluated most Smartphones released in the past three years, whilst the iPhone is most definitely not perfect - it does a lot of things right, far more than the three points you quote above.
In fact, it sounds like you haven't actually used an iPhone to be able to accurately comment about it.
I rest my case. Why you got a +5 for guessing about something you freely admit you've never used and hence have no authority to comment on is beyond me.
Avantslash is what you need. It'll produce a mobile version which is perfect for Windows Mobile, Smartphones, Blackberries and iPhone. I use it every day to read Slashdot on the train. Disclaimer: I wrote it.
I did read the site linked in your signature and commend you for a making a good effort. To be honest, although mine is more convoluted, I think it produces a better result. However if you've got some ideas on how to improve it then do let me know.
I'm aware than h1 tags aren't rendering properly on the iPhone causing the headline to be smaller than the actual text in landscape mode. I'm not sure why that is, but I'm working on it.
Not really surprising when you think that the iPod was up against something like this Archos. It was a long time ago but I remember the Archos UI being really poor and you had to manually copy all your music across.
It was no surprise that the iPod kicked the MP3 HD market up the arse. The competition was woeful.
I think of Windows like skiing and Linux like snowboarding.
I've been skiing for years and (dare I say it) I'm not bad. I can do reds and blacks (although I might not be the most elegant on the blacks). I've started trying to do jumps. I'm not great, I fall over a lot, but I'm getting there.
When I snowboard, I can do the basics. I can go forwards, I can turn left and right (sort of) and sometimes I can stop in an elegant way without falling over. If I stuck at it, then I could do it just as well as I could skiing.
But you know what? I can't be bothered.
Here I am, 1 week a year out in the glorious slopes of France and I have two choices: (1) go and explore the mountains, take the cable cars up, do the blacks from the glacier, hit the snowpark, do the winding reds through the trees or (2) fall over a lot on the greens.
Yes, I'm lazy. I could stick at it, I could become an expert at snowboarding - but that 1 week a year when I've paid a bucket load of money to go on holiday, I want to actually do something with it. Skiing does that.
Moving from Windows to Linux is like that. I could, but Windows does what I want it to do. Shove cygwin on there and I've not really got much of a reason to move at all.
From the sounds of it, the story was written in such a way that television was not the right way of transmitting it. If, like the link said, you needed to have seen every single episode to fully understand what was going on - then something like iTunes (or other download service) could be a perfect home for it.
If the programme is really that amazing (I don't know, I never watched it) then there could be a good chance to make money that way and so fund future seasons.
Whilst I quite like my PSP (running custom firmware), the one thing that it is pretty poor is at providing games which you can pick up for 10 minutes and play.
Every game I have seems to want you to dedicate at least 30-40 minutes on it. This might not be a long problem for long trips, but for whiling away 20 minutes on a bus journey isn't going to work.
Downloadable content may be able to resolve this issue although my gut feel is that, based on the way I play the portable, I probably should have got a DS.
Read these:
My point, which you conveniently glossed over, was that whilst Microsoft haven't exactly gone out of their way to resolve the huge gaping holes in the ODF specification - it's still a bit much for the ODF Alliance to think they are completely blameless on releasing, essentially, an incomplete spec. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
1.2 appears to address most of these concerns. If Microsoft don't get that right, then we have them and no-one else to blame.
(ps. "astroturf" doesn't mean "raise points which are valid but that I don't agree with")
Maybe I'm missing something but I bought a Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB card for £57 (about $89) and I consider that budget.
So far it's been able to handle most of the stuff I've thrown at it, albeit not at the highest possible resolution - but then I've only got a 17" monitor.
This smells of arse covering wrapped up in finger-pointing.
Microsoft followed the ODF specification to the letter and now the ODF Alliance have the cheek to blame them for the fact that the documentation turns out to be incomplete, poorly written and makes a bucket load of assumptions?
This is going to do nothing to help ODF adoption and whilst Microsoft deserve some critisism for not being flexible when came to implementing it, the Alliance shouldn't think it is entirely blameless in the whole matter.
Maybe I'm just being overly paranoid, but I think I'll stick to the tried and true path of waiting until Service Pack 1 comes out before I decide whether or not to switch.
My first experience was with HP-UX in November 1995 at the University lab. I remember thinking that the hardware looks ancient, the command line didn't accept "dir" and the concept of moving files to rename them was a little odd. I do remember enjoying the possible window managers (fvwm95 was the one of choice in the end) and using "--display" to lock other peoples terminals or display hundreds of xeyes.
My first experience of Linux was some ancient version of Slackware a uni friend (Pete) loaded onto his PC in the dorms in 1996. They were owned by the uni and close to the labs, so it had wired access to every room. Outside of the city (where the rest of the digs were) you didn't get such luxury. It was called "Cameron" (after Diaz, I think) and had the IP address 138.253.85.33 which, oddly, is ingrained in my head to this day as it was the only way we could telnet to it.
We persuaded him to keep it running as a server and even managed to load an ewtoo based talker onto there. Although it was always quite amusing that he had to shut it down a couple of evenings a week to boot into Windows so he could write his dissertation.
My first personal experience of Linux was loading Redhat 5.2 onto my brand new Pentium 133 which I bought for the second year. It was in a shared house in Liverpool that I dual booted Windows 95 and Redhat - eventually moving on to triple boot NT4, Windows 95 (for games) and Redhat for uni work. I remember editing /etc/fstab to get the various partitions to be seen - something we take for granted now.
I stuck with Redhat for a couple of years before realising that I didn't boot into Linux often enough to make it worthwhile. I dabbled with Ubuntu on an ancient IBM laptop but it never really worked properly. These days I find that XP and Cygwin does everything I need. At some point, I may buy a Mac.
People use Facebook in different ways.
Although some of my close friends are on there, I generally tend to use it for keeping in contact with people who sit in the grey area between "know and keep regularly in contact with at social events" and "used to know, haven't seen for years and have no great desire to hunt them down".
The price of games has no relevance to to levels of piracy.
If it did, no-one would have swapped C120 cassettes of £2 Spectrum games and the Amiga would have had no "scene" existing around people's desire to get a £20 game for nothing.
Or to put it in a more modern concept, there wouldn't be a group of people willing to avoid paying 99p for an Apple Application Store download.
I'd be perfectly happy if you just ripped off the layout of AvantSlash.
It's low-bandwidth, small screen, iphone etc interface done correctly and was written over seven and a half years ago to get around the abomination that is slashdot.org/palm.
Glad to see you're finally getting there :)
I know your pain, so I wrote AvantSlash to get around this very issue. When the Slashdot developers see fit to produce a decent mobile/PDA friendly site then I'll retire this - but i've been saying that since 2001 and it still hasn't happened.
I use LinkedIn in the same way that I would keep a business card that someone gives me. However, the advantages of LinkedIn are:
There are probably more. If I was forced to drop Facebook or LinkedIn, I'd drop Facebook as LinkedIn is significantly more useful to me.
Seems like an odd bit of "by design".
Unless i'm mistaken, I (as a user) could download an application and run it on the mistaken assumption that my UAC settings would alert me if anything suspicious is going to happen.
The application could then drop my security level to the lowest possible (without me knowing) and then start silently installing a bunch of other stuff with no UAC prompts. If it was particulary careful, it could then reset the UAC level back to the what it was before it started.
I'm now completely compromised without the slightest indication that anything suspicious happened.
http://www.samknows.com/broadband/ is a good site for checking exchanges.
Sadly for me, Entanet don't have 8 meg available on my exchange but given that they have no throttling and their caps are well documented (30GB peak & 300GB off-peak rather than "unlimited" but with an undefined "fair use policy") I'm not complaining too much.
When Apple place a product in between their Mac Mini and their Mac Pro then Microsoft should start to get worried. At the moment there is a gaping hole which is being serviced by only Windows.
I'm in the market for a new computer. Requirements are headless, big hard-drive (750GB) and good enough graphics card (no GMA 950) for the odd game or two. Paying £1,700 for a Mac Pro is just not an option I'm willing to remotely entertain - when a Windows box goes for £400-£500.
Similarly, an Apple laptop that doesn't cost £749 would also bite Microsoft on the bottom. It's a little hard justifying paying £350 more when - if you want a laptop for email, web and IM - a £399 Dell job does that just fine.
There was a Question Time (BBC programme where people get to question the political parties) where one of the party members asked Jeff Hoon (the transport secretary) "how far is the government willing to go undermine civil liberties to monitor extremists?".
His answer? "To stop terrorists killing people in our society quite a long way, actually." Which sent a chill down my spine.
It also didn't help by the fact that he was deliberately trying to confuse the audience into thinking that the police getting a court order to monitor someone's internet traffic was the same as continually monitoring everyone's internet traffic in case a court order is sought. Even though several people attempted to correct him.
You can see it on iPlayer here. Start at about 40 minutes in.
Slightly OT but the reason they don't is because the geniuses that designed it didn't consider a second backup tunnel. Therefore if they want to do any kind of engineering work (and they do, as the UK loves the idea of running something without maintenance until it spectaculary breaks down) then they have to close the whole tunnel down.
There has been pressure to run the underground later on Friday and Saturday evenings but due to the large amount of work required on the tunnels (see why in paragraph above), this doesn't seem to get off the ground.
Oh, it also means that the slightest break-down or signal failure (of which there are a lot, again see why in paragraph above) then it brings the entire service to a grinding halt. Which is always handy at 8am on a Monday morning.
Finally free public WiFi anywhere in the UK (let alone London) is a rarity. So much so I was rather surprised to find one in Kingston one afternoon.
(Which explains why you don't see many people out with their iPod Touches surfing the web)
Serious question, is it really worth installing the Homebrew channel if you don't plan to do any development and don't have any intention of buying a classic controller?
I took a look at what was offered about 2 months ago and nothing that was developed really made me want to rush out and install the channel. Don't get me wrong, people are doing great things, but I just ended up saying "meh" and went about playing Super Mario Galaxy.
If I want emulators I can get that on the PSP now and the control system is better suited for the task. If I want DVD playback, then I already have a great Philips box which does DivX too.
So ... is there something absolutely fantastic which I'm missing out on?
When I moved to a new flat last year, I did my research and eventually signed up for one of the Entanet resellers. When I tell people I'm paying £20/month for 30GB peak (8am-10pm weekdays) and 300GB offpeak (all other times, including all weekend) they look at me as if I have a screw loose and invariably ask why I didn't got with Provider X who is half the price and "unlimited".
The problem, I explain, is that every provider I've looked at that offered "unlimited" had a FUP and from a site on the web (which i've sadly lost) I found out that that FUP could be down to as low as 5GB per month.
In the year I've had the broadband (living on my own), I've only managed to get at most 15GB peak and 70GB offpeak in a month. It's true I don't work from home, don't stream music or video during peak hours and download really big files offpeak - but I've not found it to severly impact my browsing abilities. Hell, I'll happily suck down a 500MB update in peak - simply because I have tonnes of it to go around.
Thankfully Entanet offer a nice set of tools to monitor my usage, so if I start to get near their limits (due to changes in the way I use the web) then I'll re-evaluate the options again. It's not like I'm tied in, I only have a months notice period.
Apologies, Slashdot is a haven for acronyms that even I don't get so I didn't really think to expand mine.
PHF is Portable Hands-Free. It usually contains a couple of buttons, a microphone and a 3.5mm connector. ID is Industrial Design - the design of the device. Regarding regionalism, I'm British and customers generally call it hands-free kit or even remote control. In the mobile industry it's always called PHF, both here in the UK and the rest of the world.
Regarding the iPod's custom controller, if you look next to the 3.5mm you'll see a small oblong slot, this is their custom controller to allow them to extend the hands-free functionality to more than one button.
As someone who has worked with design teams to produce mobile phones, I can tell you the major advantages of using mini-USB over 3.5mm:
The issue with the lack of 3.5mm jack for customers own headphones is solved with a PHF containing the required buttons, a microphone and 3.5mm connector.
This is a winner all around because we can actually give what our customers want - that is a thin design, more than one control button and the ability to use their own headphones for both music AND calls (remember, with a 3.5mm set up, you could plug your headphones directly into the device but would have to use the phones built in mic for calls - doable, but not nice).
(side note: this is all based on very large scale targeted customer research and evaluation so I fully expect that for a few on Slashdot this is completely the opposite to what they want)
ps. I too was disappointed to find no desktop sync - it'll make managing my 100+ contacts, months of calendar entries, 50+ tasks and 20+ notes (stored in Outlook) a right pain in the backside.