XBMC runs very badly on Allwinner A10 and A13 CPUs found in the MK802, since the stock Android they come with don't support the regular hardware accelration in Android. (I imagine this has something to do with licensing and patents.)
The devices usually come with a custom video player which works really well (the MALI GPU is quite powerfull), and I believe the youtube app has also been optimized. Hopefully the producers of the cheap Android sticks and tablets can work together with the XBMC team - the market must be enormous.
I'm sure lots of people here remembers the previous Microsoft produced phone, the Microsoft Kin series of phones. After all, they lasted all, oh, 4 weeks? 40 days? Something like that.
There is probably a lot of "slack" in the Windows 8 phone pricing as well - if the Windows RT "OEM license fee" is 80-95$, the Phone OS OEM price can't be far off. I'm sure Nokia, HTC and Samsung won't mind if they've got to add an extra 80$ in cost for each phone they produce which Microsoft doesn't have to worry about..
Sure, it is possible that they will start building mainly robot based factories in mainland Chinal, but why bother? In its purest form a robot factory would just take raw materials and energy as input, with product as output. You want to place a factory like that in a location with a really stable energy supply, good infrastructure, and a stable political situation. Staff costs wouldn't be such a big issue, since you wouldn't have too many staff anyway. So, why choose China, where you would have to deal wiith rampant corruption, bad infrastructure and millions of starving former factory workers?
Personally I would put the factories in Japan, northern Europe and Canada, that way they would be closer to the consumers as well. It would certainly save a fortune in security!
MMC was one of the first distributions - I distinctly remember writing the floppies using DOS, it took something like 15 minutes per floppy, as they were written byte-by-byte, not fancy block-by-block as the young folks are using these days:P
After MMC I switched to SLS, then Slackware, RedHat (bought on those really cheap CDs you could order online), OpenSUSE, finaly Ubuntu.
The biggest change is probably that for the last couple of years all my networking equipment runs some version of Linux, my phone (Android), hell, even my DSLR runs Linux (http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/DI/SLT-A55.html). This has not been a conscious choice by me btw, but it seems Linux really is everywhere these days.
It is not too strange that you end up with an end-user price of 600$ - the 85$ should be added to the component cost, which is what, 150$ for a tablet of this class? Basically Microsoft adds at least 50% to the base cost of the device, all other costs comes on top of that.
Google gives away Android for free, so you end up with 49.99$ tablets on Alibaba. (I should get one of those in the mail this week - looking forward to taking it apart). Apple probably does something similar, but then they're not really aiming for the cost-conscious part of the market.
If you're self-employed, and plan to stay so, it is nearly impossible, as far as I know there are no "bring so-so-and so much money / create this many jobs" exemptions in any Scandinavian country.
What you can do is to get hired by a company, in which case it is just a couple of forms to fill out for the company in question [*], or get married.
*: This assumes that you've got some "valuable skills", and that you'll be able to make a livelihood here.
Later Nokia switched to AMD for their 9100, then to ARM for the 9210 series. I bought a 9201i in 2002, I believe I paid t something like 1500usd..
There were also a few Japanese intel based phones, but those ran Windows XP.. Not really what I would call a smart phone. So, it might be correct to say that this is the "first Intel based smart-phone which might launch in the US".
Or, if you pay a bit of attention: The indefinite detention paragraphs are most likely illegal under the US constitution. By noting his reservations the comming court cases (appeals all the way up to the supreme court) will be quite a bit simpler. After all, it is the executive branch (where the president is), which has to prosecute in favour of the law, and the president stating reservations is a boon to any defense attorney. This is obvious, and has been covered in the news, but hey, most people complaning doesn't seem to know what the NDAA act really is.
The court cases, in case you don't know, will be judged by the judiciary part of the US system. Of course, if you and the republicans get their way the next president will be a republican, and the one or two new supreme court justices which will be appointed in the next presidential period will be really, really conservative. Then, the indefinite detention will most likely become law.
I'm not an American, but this should be obvious even with the most cursory glance.
That is unlikely, as the P2P technology that Skype is built on is licensed from Joltid (a company owned by the Skype founders - google Joltid and lawsuit).
The only thing that Microsoft is buying (as far as I can see) are a lot of users, a license for some P2P software, and some video chat software which pretty much duplicates what Microsoft already has.
It used to be that for someone else to get a log of where you've been in a given time period the police would have to ask the telecoms for their logs. (One can argue about how easy it is to get those logs, but the fact remains: It is not something everyone can get hold of.)
The iPhone log changes all of this. If you get your phone from your employer the employer has access to (and probably the right to) this information. It is not just access to your phone, but imagine you've synced your personal iPhone with a company computer at any time? Or what if it not your employer, but your (ex) husband's computer? Also, it is much easier for a lawyer in a civil case to request the information, as they don't have to involve the telecom as a part. Or what if you're a foreigner simply crossing the border to the USA? (Clearly, there are US government agencies who would love to get position tracking of every single iPhone owner who crosses the US border.)
It doesn't really matter how exact the information is, the point is that this is a change in how easily accessible the information is, and who can can access it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/7/22/252 is a fun post on the Linux-Kernel list about missing caching of ACPI tables leading to 20 minute boot times. I get that problem every day! (I wish:P)
It is a pretty safe bet that you don't have to worry about Linux and more than 48 cores, as it is the OS of choice for a lot of the top supercomputers and OS research in general. Of course, applications which can take advantage of such systems is another problem, but that is hardly a Linux problem.
Another quite good book on statistics is Edward Tufte's "Data Analysis for Politics and Policy", which is posted at http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/dapp/
(All the examples are real life examples, often quite important ones as well.)
I've traveled in China several times, and as a "rich white guy" you won't have serious problems even if you make loud political statements that the party disagrees with. (E.g. here is a short list of forbidden words).
What you should be careful about is discussing politics with the locals. At worst you'll be asked to leave the country, but they can be thrown in jail or "disappeared" if they say, criticize party leaders.
In other words, using a ssh proxy is fine. There is probably even no law against it, except for the general "don't do things not in the interest of the Party".
Mobile videoconferencing is great for deaf people, as they can use sign language.
(This is the only use of videoconferencing I've observed after quite a few years of pretty common availability here in northern Europe)
I've got an 2G iPod touch, with iPhone OS 2.x. This means there is software that simply won't run because it is not an iPhone (such as Sleep Cycle), and software which won't run because it is not the 3.x version of the OS (games - at least the Street fighter demo and some others). With an iPod Touch you have to buy the OS upgrades, which I haven't bothered to do.
By this summer you'll have to support the 1G, 2G and 3G versions of the iPod touch, the 1G, 2G and 3G iPhones, the 3G iPhone with more RAM and a faster processor, and the 4G iPhone with both more RAM and a higher resolution. Oh, and the iPad of course.
The biggest new challenge with "iphone 4g" is the higher resolution - some say this will be 960x640 (i.e 2x the current resolution hor/ver), which is imho unlikely as this would be the first use of such a LCD resolution ever.
To me this doesn't sound simpler than the Android fragmentation, at least with Android the market lets you know which apps you can install, and the vast majority actually works with 1.5. With the Appstore you might only get "oh, don't install this on an iPod touch, it won't work".
Android is also more developer friendly, e.g. the new feature introduced just before the 2.2 release - at least my N1 got a "report this crash button" before I upgraded to 2.2. (I don't want to speculate on the developer friendlyness of Apple, but recent news haven't been very good.
I've got an 2G iPod touch, with iPhone OS 2.x. This means there is software that simply won't run because it is not an iPhone (such as Sleep Cycle), and software which won't run because it is not the 3.x version of the OS (games - at least the Street fighter demo). With an iPod Touch you have to buy the OS upgrades, which I haven't bothered to do.
By this summer you'll have to support the 1G, 2G and 3G versions of the iPod touch, the 1G, 2G and 3G iPhones, the 3G iPhone with more RAM and a faster processor, and the 4G iPhone with both more RAM and a higher resolution. Oh, and the iPad of course.
The biggest new challenge is the higher resolution - some say this will be 960x640 (i.e 2x the current resolution hor/ver), which is imho unlikely as this would be the first use of such a LCD resolution ever.
To me this doesn't sound simpler than the Android fragmentation, at least with Android the market lets you know which apps you can install, with the Appstore you might only get "oh, don't install this on an iPod touch, it won't work".
I would be more interested in articles comparing the wave of 100$/100euro Android tablets which will arrive this summer..
Whitehouse.gov is mirrored through akamai (netcraft).
Transparent mirroring is of course only one way among many to use drupal (or any other cms) securely. It is my impression that the current US administration actually allows hiring someone with a higher IQ than the president, so someone probably did a google search.
Browsing through this thread I can't help but recognise the same old arguments: "It is too hard to use for casual users", "it is no fun", "windows is good enough", "developers want to make money", "the gui is ugly" and so on. These arguments are not new, you would find the exact same arguments if you look at old slashdot stories.
The reality is (as usual) quite different, and the old arguments have nothing to do with the kernel anyway. Look at the latest statistics of who actually writes the kernel: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/whowriteslinux.pdf. From this paper it is clear that the rate of changes has increased quite a bit, and that the latest Linux release probably had something like 1800 different contributors. If you go back 5 years that number is just 400, so the assumption that there are "no new developers" is clearly false. What the first article is really about is that there are "no new subtree maintainers", but that should hardly surprise anyone. The Linux kernel is a huge pyramid (similar to a big corporation in a way), the people on the bottom of the pyramid are not the ones who get sent to the kernel summit, and the people on the top tend to like it there. I doubt that the _average_ age of all the Linux kernel developers have changed all that much in the last 5 years, it might even have gone down a bit, as more of the development is done in China, Japan and India these days.
Linux on the desktop might not be growing as quickly as some might hope, but it keeps growing faster and faster in almost every other market segment. When was the last time you heard about a new mobile phone, set-up box, web-service or computer science project which was not based on Linux? Sure, Microsoft and Apple might launch their new products now and then, but they are tiny compared to the rest of the market.
The iPhone keyboard allows chording - that is, you can hold one key down, press another key, and the other key will be registered as a keypress as well. If you type with more than one finger (or thumb) this will improve the speed.
This does not work on my Nexus One (android), but I'm not sure about the other platforms.
Another alternative, which is probably faster than any of the tested keyboards is swype, where you just draw a line which represents the word. There is a public beta at http://beta.swype.com/ (Android only)
I've got three possible platforms for "electronic reading":
A first generation Sony Librie (bought used in Tokyo)
An iPod Touch with Stanza
Various portable and not-so portable computers
Depending on what I do all three can be said to be the "best device". If I'm reading technical documentation, such as a PDF manual a computer screen with easy access to search and online services is clearly the best choice. Reading fiction outdoors when the sun is shining the Sony would be best. On the subway or on the bus the iPod is easily portable and lets me block out inane chatter.
No device is currently the best one for all possible uses, and there might be a while before a single "best solution" will be available. (Some kind of A4 foldable organic led display, with a touch screen and really fast searching would do.) In the mean time I plan to buy an Android phone with 800x480 resolution (or more) for reading fiction. I would consider buying a Notion Ink Adam though, but it wouldn't be quite as portable.
The software side is of course really important - On the server / computer side I use Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com) for converting content, pulling text from websites. You can also use it as a "content server", which is really neat.
It is really easy to make fun of translate.google.com based on how it translates Chinese to English. This is quite silly IMHO, as Chinese is possibly the hardest language in the world. (Travel around China and you'll find semi-literate taxi drivers, even in the major cities.[*]) This is a good article on why Chinese is hard: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html.
A better example would be say Dutch. Translate the OP from English to Dutch and back to English (i.e. a worst case scenario), and you end up with this:
"The company has an automatic system for translating texts on computers, sweetened by scanning millions of multilingual websites and documents. Until now includes 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google has a system telephone speech recognition that allows users to query websites by speaking commands into their phones instead of typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to software to understand voice of a caller and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language to produce. "
This is perfectly legible to me, and vastly better than what you got when babelfish was introduced 11 years ago. There is a good TechTalk about the topic at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_PzPDRPwlA which should be required viewing before making fun of google's machine translation efforts.
Voice recognition is harder, but for continuous untrained speech recognition google voice is pretty cool - I've gotten some barely intelligible voice messages on my google voice number, and where google voice is sure (i.e. black text) it is 95%+ correct, where it is not sure it is maybe 30% correct, but for another 30% it is not possible to figure out what was said, except when taking context into consideration. Google Voice transcribing a call from a mobile phone is better than what you got with Dragon Dictate 5 years ago even with a good microphone, so it is not unlikely that in a few years it will be better than naive human transcription. Humans will be better at guessing based on context thought.
Basically, in 5 years the kind of system google is talking about will work good enough to successfully flirt with a french girl (see http://www.youtube.com/user/searchstories):P
[*] This is why you should always bring a mobile phone, and have the number for the place you're going.
Make sure your phone is GSM and unlocked, and you can pick up a cheap "pay as you go" sim card in most countries. GPRS is slow, but with the Opera Mini browser (http://mobile.opera.com/next) and the Gmail applet (http://mail.google.com/mobile) it is quite cheap to stay connected, and often much more convenient than trying to find a wifi hotspot.
Post your new number on facebook or similar if people need to keep in touch with you..
If you don't speak the local language a local pone number is quite useful - imagine it is late and you're lost you can call the place you're planning to stay, and have them explain how to get there to the taxi driver. (That call would probably cost more than the stay if you used your US SIM card;)
The current lowest price I know of for an unlocked windows mobile phone is 136.50$ including shipping worldwide. (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.12811)
It is a pretty conservative prediction that by early 2012 you'll be able to buy a number of 99$ unlocked android phones - something similar to the HTC Hero I would guess, or similar to the 2G iPhone. This makes it an impulse buy much more than the iPhone. What the label is on the phone won't matter - by then phone hardware will be even more of a commodity hardware than today, basically just a big screen, and the vendors will differ based on software.
The 99$ market is not where I expect Apple to go, they'll probably stay with their current market, which is limited to what, the richest 10% of the world?
As an aside: By 2012 I expect a high end phone for the European market will have a 5" 1024x480 screen (the same resolution you find on high end Japanese phones today, but lower dot pitch), 2Ghz main cpu with multiple specialized cores, and a 10mp camera which can record 1080p HD. The screen will probably be borderless on two sides, the phone itself will be even thinner than today's phones. I've not seen many signs that Apple are planing to extend their platform to the next generations of hardware, but Android certainly is. (Things like resolution independence and APIs for social media and close integration with web services are really important imho.)
Slashdot Mirror
There has been some work in making XBMC work better, but that requires flashing your own ROM file, and that can be a really big pain with the extremely cheap but really unsupported systems.. (See http://www.cnx-software.com/2012/11/12/xbmc-for-linux-on-allwinner-a10-devices-it-works-sort-of/ for an example of how to make it work.)
The devices usually come with a custom video player which works really well (the MALI GPU is quite powerfull), and I believe the youtube app has also been optimized. Hopefully the producers of the cheap Android sticks and tablets can work together with the XBMC team - the market must be enormous.
There is probably a lot of "slack" in the Windows 8 phone pricing as well - if the Windows RT "OEM license fee" is 80-95$, the Phone OS OEM price can't be far off. I'm sure Nokia, HTC and Samsung won't mind if they've got to add an extra 80$ in cost for each phone they produce which Microsoft doesn't have to worry about..
Sure, it is possible that they will start building mainly robot based factories in mainland Chinal, but why bother? In its purest form a robot factory would just take raw materials and energy as input, with product as output. You want to place a factory like that in a location with a really stable energy supply, good infrastructure, and a stable political situation. Staff costs wouldn't be such a big issue, since you wouldn't have too many staff anyway. So, why choose China, where you would have to deal wiith rampant corruption, bad infrastructure and millions of starving former factory workers?
Personally I would put the factories in Japan, northern Europe and Canada, that way they would be closer to the consumers as well. It would certainly save a fortune in security!
After MMC I switched to SLS, then Slackware, RedHat (bought on those really cheap CDs you could order online), OpenSUSE, finaly Ubuntu.
The biggest change is probably that for the last couple of years all my networking equipment runs some version of Linux, my phone (Android), hell, even my DSLR runs Linux (http://www.sony.net/Products/Linux/DI/SLT-A55.html). This has not been a conscious choice by me btw, but it seems Linux really is everywhere these days.
It is not too strange that you end up with an end-user price of 600$ - the 85$ should be added to the component cost, which is what, 150$ for a tablet of this class? Basically Microsoft adds at least 50% to the base cost of the device, all other costs comes on top of that.
Google gives away Android for free, so you end up with 49.99$ tablets on Alibaba. (I should get one of those in the mail this week - looking forward to taking it apart). Apple probably does something similar, but then they're not really aiming for the cost-conscious part of the market.
What you can do is to get hired by a company, in which case it is just a couple of forms to fill out for the company in question [*], or get married.
*: This assumes that you've got some "valuable skills", and that you'll be able to make a livelihood here.
Later Nokia switched to AMD for their 9100, then to ARM for the 9210 series. I bought a 9201i in 2002, I believe I paid t something like 1500usd..
There were also a few Japanese intel based phones, but those ran Windows XP.. Not really what I would call a smart phone. So, it might be correct to say that this is the "first Intel based smart-phone which might launch in the US".
They've also shown flexible and transparent displays, so hopefully that 27" 8K display will come rolled up in a tube ready to hang on the wall.
Or, if you pay a bit of attention: The indefinite detention paragraphs are most likely illegal under the US constitution. By noting his reservations the comming court cases (appeals all the way up to the supreme court) will be quite a bit simpler. After all, it is the executive branch (where the president is), which has to prosecute in favour of the law, and the president stating reservations is a boon to any defense attorney. This is obvious, and has been covered in the news, but hey, most people complaning doesn't seem to know what the NDAA act really is.
The court cases, in case you don't know, will be judged by the judiciary part of the US system. Of course, if you and the republicans get their way the next president will be a republican, and the one or two new supreme court justices which will be appointed in the next presidential period will be really, really conservative. Then, the indefinite detention will most likely become law.
I'm not an American, but this should be obvious even with the most cursory glance.
The only thing that Microsoft is buying (as far as I can see) are a lot of users, a license for some P2P software, and some video chat software which pretty much duplicates what Microsoft already has.
The iPhone log changes all of this. If you get your phone from your employer the employer has access to (and probably the right to) this information. It is not just access to your phone, but imagine you've synced your personal iPhone with a company computer at any time? Or what if it not your employer, but your (ex) husband's computer? Also, it is much easier for a lawyer in a civil case to request the information, as they don't have to involve the telecom as a part. Or what if you're a foreigner simply crossing the border to the USA? (Clearly, there are US government agencies who would love to get position tracking of every single iPhone owner who crosses the US border.)
It doesn't really matter how exact the information is, the point is that this is a change in how easily accessible the information is, and who can can access it.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/7/22/252 is a fun post on the Linux-Kernel list about missing caching of ACPI tables leading to 20 minute boot times. I get that problem every day! (I wish :P)
It is a pretty safe bet that you don't have to worry about Linux and more than 48 cores, as it is the OS of choice for a lot of the top supercomputers and OS research in general. Of course, applications which can take advantage of such systems is another problem, but that is hardly a Linux problem.
(All the examples are real life examples, often quite important ones as well.)
Just that makes this pretty big news I think..
I've traveled in China several times, and as a "rich white guy" you won't have serious problems even if you make loud political statements that the party disagrees with. (E.g. here is a short list of forbidden words).
What you should be careful about is discussing politics with the locals. At worst you'll be asked to leave the country, but they can be thrown in jail or "disappeared" if they say, criticize party leaders.
In other words, using a ssh proxy is fine. There is probably even no law against it, except for the general "don't do things not in the interest of the Party".
Mobile videoconferencing is great for deaf people, as they can use sign language. (This is the only use of videoconferencing I've observed after quite a few years of pretty common availability here in northern Europe)
By this summer you'll have to support the 1G, 2G and 3G versions of the iPod touch, the 1G, 2G and 3G iPhones, the 3G iPhone with more RAM and a faster processor, and the 4G iPhone with both more RAM and a higher resolution. Oh, and the iPad of course.
The biggest new challenge with "iphone 4g" is the higher resolution - some say this will be 960x640 (i.e 2x the current resolution hor/ver), which is imho unlikely as this would be the first use of such a LCD resolution ever.
To me this doesn't sound simpler than the Android fragmentation, at least with Android the market lets you know which apps you can install, and the vast majority actually works with 1.5. With the Appstore you might only get "oh, don't install this on an iPod touch, it won't work".
Android is also more developer friendly, e.g. the new feature introduced just before the 2.2 release - at least my N1 got a "report this crash button" before I upgraded to 2.2. (I don't want to speculate on the developer friendlyness of Apple, but recent news haven't been very good.
By this summer you'll have to support the 1G, 2G and 3G versions of the iPod touch, the 1G, 2G and 3G iPhones, the 3G iPhone with more RAM and a faster processor, and the 4G iPhone with both more RAM and a higher resolution. Oh, and the iPad of course.
The biggest new challenge is the higher resolution - some say this will be 960x640 (i.e 2x the current resolution hor/ver), which is imho unlikely as this would be the first use of such a LCD resolution ever.
To me this doesn't sound simpler than the Android fragmentation, at least with Android the market lets you know which apps you can install, with the Appstore you might only get "oh, don't install this on an iPod touch, it won't work".
I would be more interested in articles comparing the wave of 100$/100euro Android tablets which will arrive this summer..
Transparent mirroring is of course only one way among many to use drupal (or any other cms) securely. It is my impression that the current US administration actually allows hiring someone with a higher IQ than the president, so someone probably did a google search.
The reality is (as usual) quite different, and the old arguments have nothing to do with the kernel anyway. Look at the latest statistics of who actually writes the kernel: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/whowriteslinux.pdf. From this paper it is clear that the rate of changes has increased quite a bit, and that the latest Linux release probably had something like 1800 different contributors. If you go back 5 years that number is just 400, so the assumption that there are "no new developers" is clearly false. What the first article is really about is that there are "no new subtree maintainers", but that should hardly surprise anyone. The Linux kernel is a huge pyramid (similar to a big corporation in a way), the people on the bottom of the pyramid are not the ones who get sent to the kernel summit, and the people on the top tend to like it there. I doubt that the _average_ age of all the Linux kernel developers have changed all that much in the last 5 years, it might even have gone down a bit, as more of the development is done in China, Japan and India these days.
Linux on the desktop might not be growing as quickly as some might hope, but it keeps growing faster and faster in almost every other market segment. When was the last time you heard about a new mobile phone, set-up box, web-service or computer science project which was not based on Linux? Sure, Microsoft and Apple might launch their new products now and then, but they are tiny compared to the rest of the market.
This does not work on my Nexus One (android), but I'm not sure about the other platforms.
Another alternative, which is probably faster than any of the tested keyboards is swype, where you just draw a line which represents the word. There is a public beta at http://beta.swype.com/ (Android only)
Depending on what I do all three can be said to be the "best device". If I'm reading technical documentation, such as a PDF manual a computer screen with easy access to search and online services is clearly the best choice. Reading fiction outdoors when the sun is shining the Sony would be best. On the subway or on the bus the iPod is easily portable and lets me block out inane chatter.
No device is currently the best one for all possible uses, and there might be a while before a single "best solution" will be available. (Some kind of A4 foldable organic led display, with a touch screen and really fast searching would do.) In the mean time I plan to buy an Android phone with 800x480 resolution (or more) for reading fiction. I would consider buying a Notion Ink Adam though, but it wouldn't be quite as portable.
The software side is of course really important - On the server / computer side I use Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com) for converting content, pulling text from websites. You can also use it as a "content server", which is really neat.
A better example would be say Dutch. Translate the OP from English to Dutch and back to English (i.e. a worst case scenario), and you end up with this:
"The company has an automatic system for translating texts on computers, sweetened by scanning millions of multilingual websites and documents. Until now includes 52 languages, adding Haitian Creole last week. Google has a system telephone speech recognition that allows users to query websites by speaking commands into their phones instead of typing them in. Now it is working on combining the two technologies to software to understand voice of a caller and translating it into a synthetic equivalent in a foreign language to produce. "
This is perfectly legible to me, and vastly better than what you got when babelfish was introduced 11 years ago. There is a good TechTalk about the topic at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_PzPDRPwlA which should be required viewing before making fun of google's machine translation efforts.
Voice recognition is harder, but for continuous untrained speech recognition google voice is pretty cool - I've gotten some barely intelligible voice messages on my google voice number, and where google voice is sure (i.e. black text) it is 95%+ correct, where it is not sure it is maybe 30% correct, but for another 30% it is not possible to figure out what was said, except when taking context into consideration. Google Voice transcribing a call from a mobile phone is better than what you got with Dragon Dictate 5 years ago even with a good microphone, so it is not unlikely that in a few years it will be better than naive human transcription. Humans will be better at guessing based on context thought.
Basically, in 5 years the kind of system google is talking about will work good enough to successfully flirt with a french girl (see http://www.youtube.com/user/searchstories) :P
[*] This is why you should always bring a mobile phone, and have the number for the place you're going.
This is in addition to the earlier posts:
Make sure your phone is GSM and unlocked, and you can pick up a cheap "pay as you go" sim card in most countries. GPRS is slow, but with the Opera Mini browser (http://mobile.opera.com/next) and the Gmail applet (http://mail.google.com/mobile) it is quite cheap to stay connected, and often much more convenient than trying to find a wifi hotspot.
Post your new number on facebook or similar if people need to keep in touch with you..
If you don't speak the local language a local pone number is quite useful - imagine it is late and you're lost you can call the place you're planning to stay, and have them explain how to get there to the taxi driver. (That call would probably cost more than the stay if you used your US SIM card ;)
The current lowest price I know of for an unlocked windows mobile phone is 136.50$ including shipping worldwide. (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.12811)
It is a pretty conservative prediction that by early 2012 you'll be able to buy a number of 99$ unlocked android phones - something similar to the HTC Hero I would guess, or similar to the 2G iPhone. This makes it an impulse buy much more than the iPhone. What the label is on the phone won't matter - by then phone hardware will be even more of a commodity hardware than today, basically just a big screen, and the vendors will differ based on software.
The 99$ market is not where I expect Apple to go, they'll probably stay with their current market, which is limited to what, the richest 10% of the world?
As an aside: By 2012 I expect a high end phone for the European market will have a 5" 1024x480 screen (the same resolution you find on high end Japanese phones today, but lower dot pitch), 2Ghz main cpu with multiple specialized cores, and a 10mp camera which can record 1080p HD. The screen will probably be borderless on two sides, the phone itself will be even thinner than today's phones. I've not seen many signs that Apple are planing to extend their platform to the next generations of hardware, but Android certainly is. (Things like resolution independence and APIs for social media and close integration with web services are really important imho.)
What I would like for myself is a phone where I can boot Windows (Mobile), Apple OS (iPhone), and Linux (such as Android), much like you can do with a modern PC if you really want to. Something similar to this: http://intruders.tv/inqtv/2009/04/20/nvidias-tegra-demo-dual-boot-to-boot/.