Google Docs is only a poor replacement for MS Office. Either you squeeze what you have to do into what Google Docs supports or you leave it. I think it is clunky and has a terrible UI, too. But as always with Google it it as free as air and everyone is breathing it.
Wasn't there a hack, published recently, that allowed a user to bypass all security & protections on an IOS device, simply through the standard connector?
No, not all, just some. There are different levels of protection, some were broken and some not. iOS has some newer APIs for that which aren't widely used yet by apps, but they're there and used right they're secure.
They just need to get an Android tablet out. Amazon is preparing an own App Store for Android, now they offer streaming... They're selling music anyway. The users are there, too. Amazon is in a perfect position to go into the mobile content/apps market and then it can deliver real goods, too. Actually both Google and Apple are *not* in a better position.
For sure, web browsing and reading books on a smaller screen isn't quite as comfortable, but it gets me by. Are those two things worth lugging around a book-sized device and paying an extra $50/mo (as per your amortization of the cost)? For me, no way. My iPhone improves my life 99% as well as the iPad would.
Same situation here. I *would* perfectly be willing to pay $150 for an "empty" tablet consisting just of a 7" display, a case and a battery in which I could snap in my iPhone which then disables its display and uses the larger one. 960x640 on 7" would be nice for reading and browsing and you wouldn't need two devices.
Sadly you can't install any drivers on the iPhone, so the chances of a company building such a thing are pretty much zero.
What's hilarious is all of the people who forgot the expected base price of the iPad would be $999. Everyone was shocked when it was half of that. And now tablets are expensive?
Yeah, tablets are too expensive. Like the $800 Motorola Xoom. The iPad isn't too expensive, obviously.
Soon, people will say, "Why buy a Blackberry when I'm just running Android apps?"
I've said it twice in this thread so far: because for actual communication - SMS, email, phone, IM and the like - the BlackBerry absolutely spanks the iPhone and Android hands down.
But you could implement those as well as Android apps (and/or add features supporting these to Android). What makes a Blackberry special (in a useful way) is not the OS. What people want is the features and maybe some aspects of the hardware. Maybe the "brand" or things like enterprise/business support. People don't buy Operating Systems.
They know very well how it "helped" OS/2 to be able to run Windows software... which meant that nobody wrote native OS/2 applications -- it ran Windows apps after all.
One thing I'm always wondering in these OS wars: You can take Android, leave out the Google App market and other Google apps and add your own instead. OK, this is some work but you're free from Google then, you don't even have to pay them license fees, and whatever you have to do yourself you had to do for your very own OS anyway: Write apps, supply services, build an ecosystem.
Microsoft could have done this: Build on Android, use Bing instead of Google, supply cloud services, offer an app market. And offer a port of MS Office. Instant victory.
RIM could have done that: Build on Android, add all the RIM messaging magic and some security features: Hit.
Nokia could have done that: Build on Android, adapt for low-end hardware (and Android *comes* from low-end hardware, at first it even didn't support touch screens), offer some high-end smartphones. They have 2500 developers working on Symbian (unbelievable but true). Discontinue Symbian, let those devs work on Nokia Android.
I mean, Android is Open Source, isn't it? OK, all the Google stuff isn't, but base Android is. Even if you don't get access to the Google Market it's easier to be fully compatible and just get the app developers to sell through your store instead of forcing them to outright port their apps.
I just don't get it.
And where's the Free Android distribution? With an own market with only Open Source apps? No, there's MeeGo instead... yet.
Smartphones are replacing computers for more and more people. That's all.
I've been lugging around a Nokia dumbphone and an iPod touch for three years. And a compact camera now and then. Now I have an iPhone and need just one device instead of two or three. And I can get at the net whenever I want (which is not always, but whenever I want or need I can). I like that very much. Dumbphones are still too expensive and too heavy and too large for what they're doing. Which is hardly anything.
I predict dumbphones will continue to dominate until the major carriers stop this ridiculous pricing model. In my eyes, my DROID is waste -- albeit enjoyable and convenient. It's very hard to convince me that there is a $50 dollar per month difference in what these devices do on the carrier's network.
Well, you surely realize that your Droid is *not* free and you're just paying it in monthly installments? A smartphone costs $400 to $800, even if you don't pay this at the start. Put you will pay it (and then some) later.
I guess Apple needs to reconsider the protection level of sensitive data like passwords. It sounds reasonable to me to force user to enter a passcode before, say, logging into a wireless network, so that the passwords are protected by the user passcode.
But this would mean the device couldn't stay connected while in standby, receiving mail etc.
*Lots* of these security shortcomings seem to be compromising between security and convenience. At least the iPhone has a fully encrypted file system, even if this doesn't always help.
Ever since the Samsung Galaxy Tab looked like priced way to high I have had a theory: They just fear to have their tablets to be looked upon as "cheap iPad clones". They think people have learned to think "expensive = good", so they price the things up through the roof. And then there's the fear of the death spiral downwards, with razor-thin margins and high volume sales with no profits.
But have no fear: There's an armada of cheap chinese tablets coming. Not really fast and not really good, but fast and good enough. And cheap. Once you can buy a 7" tablet running on a 800 MHz CPU with 512 MB RAM for $299 from ZTE or so, Motorola and the like will start to react. And of course the iPad 2 will give them something to think about.
Personally I'm still not convinced tablets aren't a fad, much like an overpriced Tamigotchi or flares.
Judging from the earnest interest I experience from real (non-technophile) people, I'd say no. People are just yearning to turn their backs toward "computers". PCs still are glorified office machinery and except for work everyone hates them. The time has come for "computers" turning into mature appliance-like things for casual use you don't have to waste a single thought on before or after using them.
And Google should be very careful not to turn Android into another highly complex and confusing OS with an desktop-like interface. This is exactly what most people are running away from. They want something plain, pretty and "magic". There's only a very small part of the population wanting widgets and full customization abilities. For *these* users tablets may well be a fad anyway.
Both the 2% and the 16% may be correct. Samsung could be relating the actual returns to devices they have sold into the distribution channels (but many of which are not yet in the hands of any customers), while the 16% returns are from those devices actually sold to actual users.
This press release is not talking about actual Android alone but about "Google OS-based smart phones (Android, OMS and Tapas)". OMS and Tapas are chinese Android-based systems with not a single Google app on them. By this count Android could theoretically reach nearly market domination in a few years without you seeing an Android phone at all...
The chinese market is huge. And there is little doubt that Android will become for Smartphones worldwide what Symbian was/is for dumbphones. Doesn't mean that much, though. Most of those phones won't mean a single dollar for Google or for Android app developers. It also won't mean much for users, since these Systems aren't really compatible with "real" Android.
Still, Android *is* on its way to world domination. We will have to see if this is a good thing or not.
Nevertheless Wikipedia search totally sucks. It's even case sensitive, so searching for an article with the wrong case yields no hits and when you then search for article content you hit it right away and get redirected to the article with the title you were searching for in the first place. This is really idiotic.
Make it a one-step process: The last pro photog I met simply reviewed pictures as she shot (when she had a free moment) and simply deleted poor photos right then and there. You can immediately re-shoot if there's an issue, and it keeps your storage free for other, better photos.
Yeah, but the thing is... most people won't do this. Most camera displays are far too small and low resolution to really see which of the five shots you made is in focus and which is not. The next best thing is to delete them when you view them at a computer and even then you'll often think "well, maybe with some cropping and some post processing..." and don't delete them. And once you've accumulated thousands and thousands of photos this way you *never* go through all of them and delete.
So just flag those photos that are not really good. You're still putting off the decision to really get rid of them, but at least now you can delete them later with a single click (or not much more).
I know that many people have problems to keep their photo collections down to a managable size. I always recommend to first somehow mark photos for deletion and then delete them later. Why? Because deleting a photo is something nobody likes to do -- you *may* want to look at it again, so you don't delete it outright and later you never come around to go through all your photos and delete those you don't need.
So use some photo managing app and flag those photos as soon as you see them. If you use some app that has this one to five stars thing, use a one star rating for photos you think you could delete (because "no star" could also mean you haven't rated them at all yet). Later then it's easy to just delete all photos flagged this way.
Everything else is futile. Keep your photo collection small. Do not try to delete photos immediatly because you very probably won't do it anyway. Flag them for deletion. A year later or so you will have no problem at all to wipe them away then.
The completions are often wrong because they're not just completions. Especially iOS tries to guess what letters you *meant* to type. Completions that would just work with what you actually *have* typed at the beginning of a word would be much less often be wrong.
Yeah, I have often thought I would much prefer a way to explicitely enter words into a dictionary (by hitting some button after typing them) from which the keyboard then tries to complete words as I type them. I mean, I like it when I don't have to type the very same long names and similar words over and over. But I hate this kind of Artificial Idiocy that tries to guess what I actually meant to write when I typed something else.
The thing is that as soon as you switch autocorrect off you also don't get any more completions. How silly is this?
Re:Apple's soft keyboards are awful
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Well, taking a screenshot on an iPhone is very simple (press the power and the home button at the same time), on most Android phones not so much.
And then I think most of this site is nothing but one big fake anyway. They're just serving the preconceptions of a certain kind of audience.
It has to be dual core because Android renders its UI almost fully on the CPU and since even scrolling a dumb list can use nearly 100% CPU with a second core you then have some CPU power left to do other things...
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Google Docs is only a poor replacement for MS Office. Either you squeeze what you have to do into what Google Docs supports or you leave it. I think it is clunky and has a terrible UI, too. But as always with Google it it as free as air and everyone is breathing it.
Wasn't there a hack, published recently, that allowed a user to bypass all security & protections on an IOS device, simply through the standard connector?
No, not all, just some. There are different levels of protection, some were broken and some not. iOS has some newer APIs for that which aren't widely used yet by apps, but they're there and used right they're secure.
They just need to get an Android tablet out. Amazon is preparing an own App Store for Android, now they offer streaming... They're selling music anyway. The users are there, too. Amazon is in a perfect position to go into the mobile content/apps market and then it can deliver real goods, too. Actually both Google and Apple are *not* in a better position.
For sure, web browsing and reading books on a smaller screen isn't quite as comfortable, but it gets me by. Are those two things worth lugging around a book-sized device and paying an extra $50/mo (as per your amortization of the cost)? For me, no way. My iPhone improves my life 99% as well as the iPad would.
Same situation here. I *would* perfectly be willing to pay $150 for an "empty" tablet consisting just of a 7" display, a case and a battery in which I could snap in my iPhone which then disables its display and uses the larger one. 960x640 on 7" would be nice for reading and browsing and you wouldn't need two devices.
Sadly you can't install any drivers on the iPhone, so the chances of a company building such a thing are pretty much zero.
What's hilarious is all of the people who forgot the expected base price of the iPad would be $999. Everyone was shocked when it was half of that. And now tablets are expensive?
Yeah, tablets are too expensive. Like the $800 Motorola Xoom. The iPad isn't too expensive, obviously.
Soon, people will say, "Why buy a Blackberry when I'm just running Android apps?"
I've said it twice in this thread so far: because for actual communication - SMS, email, phone, IM and the like - the BlackBerry absolutely spanks the iPhone and Android hands down.
But you could implement those as well as Android apps (and/or add features supporting these to Android). What makes a Blackberry special (in a useful way) is not the OS. What people want is the features and maybe some aspects of the hardware. Maybe the "brand" or things like enterprise/business support. People don't buy Operating Systems.
They know very well how it "helped" OS/2 to be able to run Windows software... which meant that nobody wrote native OS/2 applications -- it ran Windows apps after all.
One thing I'm always wondering in these OS wars: You can take Android, leave out the Google App market and other Google apps and add your own instead. OK, this is some work but you're free from Google then, you don't even have to pay them license fees, and whatever you have to do yourself you had to do for your very own OS anyway: Write apps, supply services, build an ecosystem.
Microsoft could have done this: Build on Android, use Bing instead of Google, supply cloud services, offer an app market. And offer a port of MS Office. Instant victory.
RIM could have done that: Build on Android, add all the RIM messaging magic and some security features: Hit.
Nokia could have done that: Build on Android, adapt for low-end hardware (and Android *comes* from low-end hardware, at first it even didn't support touch screens), offer some high-end smartphones. They have 2500 developers working on Symbian (unbelievable but true). Discontinue Symbian, let those devs work on Nokia Android.
I mean, Android is Open Source, isn't it? OK, all the Google stuff isn't, but base Android is. Even if you don't get access to the Google Market it's easier to be fully compatible and just get the app developers to sell through your store instead of forcing them to outright port their apps.
I just don't get it.
And where's the Free Android distribution? With an own market with only Open Source apps? No, there's MeeGo instead... yet.
Nothing worse than aging geeks, really.
Smartphones are replacing computers for more and more people. That's all.
I've been lugging around a Nokia dumbphone and an iPod touch for three years. And a compact camera now and then. Now I have an iPhone and need just one device instead of two or three. And I can get at the net whenever I want (which is not always, but whenever I want or need I can). I like that very much. Dumbphones are still too expensive and too heavy and too large for what they're doing. Which is hardly anything.
I predict dumbphones will continue to dominate until the major carriers stop this ridiculous pricing model. In my eyes, my DROID is waste -- albeit enjoyable and convenient. It's very hard to convince me that there is a $50 dollar per month difference in what these devices do on the carrier's network.
Well, you surely realize that your Droid is *not* free and you're just paying it in monthly installments? A smartphone costs $400 to $800, even if you don't pay this at the start. Put you will pay it (and then some) later.
I guess Apple needs to reconsider the protection level of sensitive data like passwords. It sounds reasonable to me to force user to enter a passcode before, say, logging into a wireless network, so that the passwords are protected by the user passcode.
But this would mean the device couldn't stay connected while in standby, receiving mail etc.
*Lots* of these security shortcomings seem to be compromising between security and convenience. At least the iPhone has a fully encrypted file system, even if this doesn't always help.
Ever since the Samsung Galaxy Tab looked like priced way to high I have had a theory: They just fear to have their tablets to be looked upon as "cheap iPad clones". They think people have learned to think "expensive = good", so they price the things up through the roof. And then there's the fear of the death spiral downwards, with razor-thin margins and high volume sales with no profits.
But have no fear: There's an armada of cheap chinese tablets coming. Not really fast and not really good, but fast and good enough. And cheap. Once you can buy a 7" tablet running on a 800 MHz CPU with 512 MB RAM for $299 from ZTE or so, Motorola and the like will start to react. And of course the iPad 2 will give them something to think about.
Personally I'm still not convinced tablets aren't a fad, much like an overpriced Tamigotchi or flares.
Judging from the earnest interest I experience from real (non-technophile) people, I'd say no. People are just yearning to turn their backs toward "computers". PCs still are glorified office machinery and except for work everyone hates them. The time has come for "computers" turning into mature appliance-like things for casual use you don't have to waste a single thought on before or after using them.
And Google should be very careful not to turn Android into another highly complex and confusing OS with an desktop-like interface. This is exactly what most people are running away from. They want something plain, pretty and "magic". There's only a very small part of the population wanting widgets and full customization abilities. For *these* users tablets may well be a fad anyway.
Well, we will see.
Both the 2% and the 16% may be correct. Samsung could be relating the actual returns to devices they have sold into the distribution channels (but many of which are not yet in the hands of any customers), while the 16% returns are from those devices actually sold to actual users.
This press release is not talking about actual Android alone but about "Google OS-based smart phones (Android, OMS and Tapas)". OMS and Tapas are chinese Android-based systems with not a single Google app on them. By this count Android could theoretically reach nearly market domination in a few years without you seeing an Android phone at all...
The chinese market is huge. And there is little doubt that Android will become for Smartphones worldwide what Symbian was/is for dumbphones. Doesn't mean that much, though. Most of those phones won't mean a single dollar for Google or for Android app developers. It also won't mean much for users, since these Systems aren't really compatible with "real" Android.
Still, Android *is* on its way to world domination. We will have to see if this is a good thing or not.
Nevertheless Wikipedia search totally sucks. It's even case sensitive, so searching for an article with the wrong case yields no hits and when you then search for article content you hit it right away and get redirected to the article with the title you were searching for in the first place. This is really idiotic.
Since Google is the new Microsoft, it would be available only on Windows. Android may be based on Linux but this is a mere technicality.
Make it a one-step process: The last pro photog I met simply reviewed pictures as she shot (when she had a free moment) and simply deleted poor photos right then and there. You can immediately re-shoot if there's an issue, and it keeps your storage free for other, better photos.
Yeah, but the thing is... most people won't do this. Most camera displays are far too small and low resolution to really see which of the five shots you made is in focus and which is not. The next best thing is to delete them when you view them at a computer and even then you'll often think "well, maybe with some cropping and some post processing..." and don't delete them. And once you've accumulated thousands and thousands of photos this way you *never* go through all of them and delete.
So just flag those photos that are not really good. You're still putting off the decision to really get rid of them, but at least now you can delete them later with a single click (or not much more).
I know that many people have problems to keep their photo collections down to a managable size. I always recommend to first somehow mark photos for deletion and then delete them later. Why? Because deleting a photo is something nobody likes to do -- you *may* want to look at it again, so you don't delete it outright and later you never come around to go through all your photos and delete those you don't need.
So use some photo managing app and flag those photos as soon as you see them. If you use some app that has this one to five stars thing, use a one star rating for photos you think you could delete (because "no star" could also mean you haven't rated them at all yet). Later then it's easy to just delete all photos flagged this way.
Everything else is futile. Keep your photo collection small. Do not try to delete photos immediatly because you very probably won't do it anyway. Flag them for deletion. A year later or so you will have no problem at all to wipe them away then.
Every screenshot is from an iPhone. It seems like this is the only phone that has this problem.
Well, taking a screenshot with an Android phone isn't that easy at all... with an iPhone you just press the sleep and home buttons and you're done.
The completions are often wrong because they're not just completions. Especially iOS tries to guess what letters you *meant* to type. Completions that would just work with what you actually *have* typed at the beginning of a word would be much less often be wrong.
FU Autocorrect!
Yeah, I have often thought I would much prefer a way to explicitely enter words into a dictionary (by hitting some button after typing them) from which the keyboard then tries to complete words as I type them. I mean, I like it when I don't have to type the very same long names and similar words over and over. But I hate this kind of Artificial Idiocy that tries to guess what I actually meant to write when I typed something else.
The thing is that as soon as you switch autocorrect off you also don't get any more completions. How silly is this?
Well, taking a screenshot on an iPhone is very simple (press the power and the home button at the same time), on most Android phones not so much.
And then I think most of this site is nothing but one big fake anyway. They're just serving the preconceptions of a certain kind of audience.
Heh. I think most photographes/videographers would be offended by that notion, unless you're being sarcastic. 8-)
Still, it's works basically the same way. The iPhone camera in HDR mode takes three exposures and combines them.
It has to be dual core because Android renders its UI almost fully on the CPU and since even scrolling a dumb list can use nearly 100% CPU with a second core you then have some CPU power left to do other things...
And I'm not really joking here.
It's not about playing Doom on a smart phone, it's about the phone being able to do everything we ask it to do without having to wait too long.
I've been playing Doom on my iPod touch years ago and didn't have to wait too long for anything...