Microsoft has got it all wrong with the SkyDrive. Firstly, there are TWO DIFFERENT services: (1) SkyDrive gives you 25GB of free cloud space but WITHOUT synchronization capabilities, so you need to manually keep track of your files, (2) a synchronization service that goes by the name of Live SkyDrive or LiveMesh, with only 5GB space. This second service is the one that can truly be compared to Dropbox. The problems with SkyDrive are not limited to this mind boggling confusion. The 25GB service does not allow you to upload folders. You MUST manually create your folders and only then can you upload your files, though you can select more than one file at this stage. Microsoft really expects you to carefully examine your directory tree and create folders manually!
But then, you don't carry a photocopier around with you and certainly not take one home! Blackberry was first and foremost a mobile device, and there is a great pressure for mobile devices to double as a camera, portable music/media player, portable game console, satnav, etc. When the very first camera phones were introduced way before the heyday of Blackberry, people said "what a useless thing!" but there was a logic to it and that logic was convenience. Some people may want their gadgets to be well focused and be willing to carry around many different gadgets, each doing its thing well, but for the great majority of people, a gadget that is "the jack of all trades but master of none" is a desirable solution.
Nokia doesn't even have to differentiate its Android handsets from the others via a proprietary UI layer on top of standard Android. They are ALREADY capable of differentiating their handsets on their HARDWARE. Their collaboration with Carl Zeiss brings great quality phone camera capabilities, their design, finish and quality are all very much admired. A Nokia Android phone is already different from the rest of the pack even if it runs stock android.
Going the WP7 route does not save Nokia from competing with other handset manufacturers. A Nokia phone MUST compete with phones by Apple, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, LG, Sony and others in any case. If a Nokia phone running Android is BETTER than Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, or other top of the line Android phones, people will queue in front of Nokia stores and buy it in millions.
I currently own a Samsung Galaxy S2 (on android 2.3 but expecting ICS soon) and an Asus Transformer tablet (already upgraded to ICS). My wife has an HTC Desire. I have not encountered an app not working on any of these devices. Android app development maybe more difficult than iOS, and it might be partly due to the fragmentation, but there are now as many android devices as there are iOS devices and the balance will only shift in android's favor in time. If this developer could not make money out of android, then it is sad for him, because he will never have a chance to get a piece of my money.
Are you sure you saw phones with Honeycomb (Android version 3.x)? Because it was never intended for the phones and Google did not release its source code. I do not recall ever seeing an android phone with Honeycomb. For the phones, Gingerbread (2.3) is only one version behind ICS (4.x).
I would say the trip you have chosen is the dream trip of highway planners, because 90% of it goes through a highway and bypasses the heavy city traffic altogether. In contrast, the public transportation option needs to send the passenger to a hub in the city and in the end the passenger covers far more distance going into the city and out. Let me now create a similar trip for you in London. Say you are travelling from Enfield in the northeastern outskirts of London to Brunel University in the west, just to the north of Heathrow Airport. For this trip, DC's Beltway (I-495) is replaced by London's M25 that circles the city in similar fashion. Luckily, both the start and end points of the journey are near M25, so Google Maps would indicate a total distance of about 34 miles that can be taken in 46 minutes. But using public transport, you would use 2 buses and 2 metro trips (Bus 121 to Oakwood Station on Piccadilly Line, then switch to the Metropolitan Line at King's Cross until Uxbridge and finally take Bus U3 to Brunel University), which would take about 2 hours. So I have the following 2 points to make:
- If a large part of a trip in a metropolitan area takes place on highways, it can be especially fast, but then at rush hours even highways come to a standstill. I have lived in the DC area for a year and I know from experience that it could easily take 40 minutes to cover I495 part of your trip from the I270 junction to the Greenbelt junction, so during rush hour the entire trip could well end up longer than one and a half hour.
- Public transportation works especially great if you work in the downtown, live in a suburb and the two are connected by a single line. In Washington DC many
outlying metro stations have "Park&Ride" carparks so you drive with your car to the station in the morning, and go to the city center by metro.
For those who prefer a 7" tablet over 10", smaller is really better and their numbers are much more than Steve Jobs could ever imagine. Oh, and by the way, you have forgotten to compare the weights of the two (0.9 pounds vs 1.3 pounds).
If Steve Jobs had not been so arrogant in rejecting the 7" form factor and Apple released a 7" iPad, they might have ruled the tablet market completely for a veery long time, but they did not and we shall now see that there is indeed a huge market for 7" tablets. B&N Nook Color did not receive the media attention it deserved, but I think this time, thanks to Amazon's Kindle Fire, the Nook Tablet will turn out to be the surprise hit of this holiday season.
This is what the upcoming B&N Nook Tablet promises to be: $50 more expensive than Kindle Fire but with better specs and an SD Card slot which should make rooting it much easier.
Releasing too many phones with too little difference among them was a mortal mistake Nokia made for many years. About two years ago, when I was thinking of buying a new phone, I looked at the available Nokia offerings. There were maybe more than 20 different Nokia phones at the time. 20! And from a distance most of them looked just the same. Their four digit model numbers made things more confusing. Once I decided NOT to buy a Nokia phone, life was much simpler. There is a big lesson Android vendors need to learn here. With Apple's iPhone lineup, it is very easy for a customer to decide which iPhone to buy. With Samsung, HTC, Motorola or Sony, it is a much more complicated and potentially frustrating shopping experience.
The Samsung Galaxy S as pictured here is NOT in its home screen mode, but in "App Drawer" mode. That it is not the home screen can be easily understood by noting the bottom right icon, labeled Home, which means, if you press it, it will take you home.
When Apple lawyers showed a photoshopped image of Samsung's tablet to the judge, the image did not show Galaxy Tab's home screen, it showed what is known in Android as "app drawer". Galaxy Tab's (or any other Android tablet's) homescreen does not resemble iPad's in any way, because it has widgets while iPad has none.
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Microsoft has got it all wrong with the SkyDrive. Firstly, there are TWO DIFFERENT services: (1) SkyDrive gives you 25GB of free cloud space but WITHOUT synchronization capabilities, so you need to manually keep track of your files, (2) a synchronization service that goes by the name of Live SkyDrive or LiveMesh, with only 5GB space. This second service is the one that can truly be compared to Dropbox. The problems with SkyDrive are not limited to this mind boggling confusion. The 25GB service does not allow you to upload folders. You MUST manually create your folders and only then can you upload your files, though you can select more than one file at this stage. Microsoft really expects you to carefully examine your directory tree and create folders manually!
But then, you don't carry a photocopier around with you and certainly not take one home! Blackberry was first and foremost a mobile device, and there is a great pressure for mobile devices to double as a camera, portable music/media player, portable game console, satnav, etc. When the very first camera phones were introduced way before the heyday of Blackberry, people said "what a useless thing!" but there was a logic to it and that logic was convenience. Some people may want their gadgets to be well focused and be willing to carry around many different gadgets, each doing its thing well, but for the great majority of people, a gadget that is "the jack of all trades but master of none" is a desirable solution.
Nokia doesn't even have to differentiate its Android handsets from the others via a proprietary UI layer on top of standard Android. They are ALREADY capable of differentiating their handsets on their HARDWARE. Their collaboration with Carl Zeiss brings great quality phone camera capabilities, their design, finish and quality are all very much admired. A Nokia Android phone is already different from the rest of the pack even if it runs stock android.
Going the WP7 route does not save Nokia from competing with other handset manufacturers. A Nokia phone MUST compete with phones by Apple, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, LG, Sony and others in any case. If a Nokia phone running Android is BETTER than Samsung Galaxy S3, HTC One X, or other top of the line Android phones, people will queue in front of Nokia stores and buy it in millions.
I currently own a Samsung Galaxy S2 (on android 2.3 but expecting ICS soon) and an Asus Transformer tablet (already upgraded to ICS). My wife has an HTC Desire. I have not encountered an app not working on any of these devices. Android app development maybe more difficult than iOS, and it might be partly due to the fragmentation, but there are now as many android devices as there are iOS devices and the balance will only shift in android's favor in time. If this developer could not make money out of android, then it is sad for him, because he will never have a chance to get a piece of my money.
Are you sure you saw phones with Honeycomb (Android version 3.x)? Because it was never intended for the phones and Google did not release its source code. I do not recall ever seeing an android phone with Honeycomb. For the phones, Gingerbread (2.3) is only one version behind ICS (4.x).
I would say the trip you have chosen is the dream trip of highway planners, because 90% of it goes through a highway and bypasses the heavy city traffic altogether. In contrast, the public transportation option needs to send the passenger to a hub in the city and in the end the passenger covers far more distance going into the city and out. Let me now create a similar trip for you in London. Say you are travelling from Enfield in the northeastern outskirts of London to Brunel University in the west, just to the north of Heathrow Airport. For this trip, DC's Beltway (I-495) is replaced by London's M25 that circles the city in similar fashion. Luckily, both the start and end points of the journey are near M25, so Google Maps would indicate a total distance of about 34 miles that can be taken in 46 minutes. But using public transport, you would use 2 buses and 2 metro trips (Bus 121 to Oakwood Station on Piccadilly Line, then switch to the Metropolitan Line at King's Cross until Uxbridge and finally take Bus U3 to Brunel University), which would take about 2 hours. So I have the following 2 points to make:
- If a large part of a trip in a metropolitan area takes place on highways, it can be especially fast, but then at rush hours even highways come to a standstill. I have lived in the DC area for a year and I know from experience that it could easily take 40 minutes to cover I495 part of your trip from the I270 junction to the Greenbelt junction, so during rush hour the entire trip could well end up longer than one and a half hour.
- Public transportation works especially great if you work in the downtown, live in a suburb and the two are connected by a single line. In Washington DC many outlying metro stations have "Park&Ride" carparks so you drive with your car to the station in the morning, and go to the city center by metro.
For those who prefer a 7" tablet over 10", smaller is really better and their numbers are much more than Steve Jobs could ever imagine. Oh, and by the way, you have forgotten to compare the weights of the two (0.9 pounds vs 1.3 pounds).
If Steve Jobs had not been so arrogant in rejecting the 7" form factor and Apple released a 7" iPad, they might have ruled the tablet market completely for a veery long time, but they did not and we shall now see that there is indeed a huge market for 7" tablets. B&N Nook Color did not receive the media attention it deserved, but I think this time, thanks to Amazon's Kindle Fire, the Nook Tablet will turn out to be the surprise hit of this holiday season.
This is what the upcoming B&N Nook Tablet promises to be: $50 more expensive than Kindle Fire but with better specs and an SD Card slot which should make rooting it much easier.
Releasing too many phones with too little difference among them was a mortal mistake Nokia made for many years. About two years ago, when I was thinking of buying a new phone, I looked at the available Nokia offerings. There were maybe more than 20 different Nokia phones at the time. 20! And from a distance most of them looked just the same. Their four digit model numbers made things more confusing. Once I decided NOT to buy a Nokia phone, life was much simpler. There is a big lesson Android vendors need to learn here. With Apple's iPhone lineup, it is very easy for a customer to decide which iPhone to buy. With Samsung, HTC, Motorola or Sony, it is a much more complicated and potentially frustrating shopping experience.
http://peanutbuttereggdirt.com/e/custom/Apple-vs-Samsung-1-Hardware-Design.html
The Samsung Galaxy S as pictured here is NOT in its home screen mode, but in "App Drawer" mode. That it is not the home screen can be easily understood by noting the bottom right icon, labeled Home, which means, if you press it, it will take you home.
When Apple lawyers showed a photoshopped image of Samsung's tablet to the judge, the image did not show Galaxy Tab's home screen, it showed what is known in Android as "app drawer". Galaxy Tab's (or any other Android tablet's) homescreen does not resemble iPad's in any way, because it has widgets while iPad has none.