I know it may seem mean, and all that, but I tell friends and family that if they want my help fixing their computer, they have to abide by my "rules". Which is that I will lock the system down, and remove a lot of the common ways in which viruses and malware ends up on someone's system. For example: If they want Internet Explorer instead of Firefox, then they're on their own to fix anything that goes wrong. Usually after they see the rates places like Geek Squad charge for what is ultimately a far less comprehensive service, they come around pretty quickly.
I've found you need to be rather Machiavellian about it. YOU are the one with the expertise needed to fix this problem, so YOU hold the power. YOU set the conditions by which you will share your expertise with them, and they either accept your terms or they seek out some kind of alternate solution on their own. And it may seem disrespectful to your parents, but it's disrespectful to you if you fix things, try and explain how to avoid it in the future, and they turn around completely disregard everything you say. All you're doing now by helping them, is reinforcing a behavioral pattern of learned helplessness. What you're doing is teaching them that they can do whatever they want, and then you'll come along and fix it when they screw things up. You need to disabuse them of this notion post-haste. Either they put up with your restrictions, or they start chipping in some money for your time and expertise.
Unlike the iPhone, the Droid has removable storage, so apps can be split between the phone's onboard storage and the memory card. Google is also working on a way to introduce loading off of SD cards, similar to apps2sd. So, as an example, you could have the main DOOM binary file on the phone's memory, and the WAD file on the memory card.
The physical keyboard's fine. Yes, it might have been better if it were thicker, but it's hardly the worst keyboard out there. And since it doesn't take up half the bloody screen, I prefer it. The store mock-up units have a keyboard that's nearly impossible to press down, but that's not how it is with actual units. When they gutted the phone of anything valuable to put on display, they probably took out the bits behind the keyboard. I've only used the on screen keyboard for a few simple things, like entering my YouMail PIN, but it seems just as good as the iPhone's portrait keyboard. Which is to say they both suck, and take up half the bloody screen.
There is multi-touch, but something people seem to have problems understanding is that pinch zoom != multi-touch. I don't understand the fascination with pinch zooming anyway. It seems a completely unnatural way to use your phone to me.
My Droid is amazingly fast. At least as fast as I remember the 3GS being the about 2 weeks I had one. Even some of the areas reviews says it lags a little, I'm not seeing it. My Droid ranks right up there with the iPhone and has multi-tasking.
The Droid's browser is based on the same WebKit engine Safari and Safari Mobile are, so you might want to know what it is you're knocking before you actually knock it. Because right now, you're basically attacking the foundation for your beloved iPhone's Safari Mobile. So in case that was too subtle... To say that the Droid browser sucks is to say that the iPhone's browser sucks, because they're based on the same rendering engine. Actually, the Droid's browser is based on a more recent version of WebKit than the iPhone. This may well change with the next OS update, but for the present time... Also, while I'm as big a supporter of open standards as the next person, from a pragmatic standpoint let's be honest. Being 100% ACID compliant doesn't really mean much. The bulk of the web pages out there are generated by some program, or just poorly written in general. And so long as Internet Explorer, with it's rather spotty standards support, remains the dominate browser, that is what people are going to be writing to. Very few people will use features that aren't supported by Internet Explorer, so until Microsoft starts setting its sights a bit higher with regards to standards support, passing the ACID tests is really just one of those feel-good-do-nothing sort of things. It's unfortunate, I wish it weren't the case, but that doesn't change the way things are. If I could change the world just because I wanted something to be a certain way, I'd probably have about 10 different supermodel wives who are complete nymphos. Sadly I don't.
The camera is maybe a bit sub-par for a high end phone, and allegedly there's a fix in the works, but honestly for a cell phone camera, virtually every photo I've seen taken with it is pretty good. I don't expect $500+ DSLR level quality out of a cell phon camera myself, but there are apparently some people who fancy themselves some kind of great and glorious master photographer, yet refuse to use anything more than a cell phone camera. I just sit and scratch my head in a strange mix of confusion and curiosity when I encounter these people.
The Droid supports more formats than the iPhone, out of the box, from my recollection. The media player app that ships by default may be rather spartan, but this is another one of those things I wonder about. Do you want a cell phone or an MP3 player? Any company that tries to make a device that's everything to everyone will generally fail at doing both. I can understand having some basic abi
This seems unlikely to do anything for the amount of piracy, which will probably remain pretty constant, but it will save Ubisoft the license fees on DRM that will just be cracked in hours/days anyway.
People who want to pirate will pirate whether there's DRM or not. So while I understand the concerns of game developers/publishers, they may as well be burning the money spent on DRM license fees. That way, there would be some benefit to be had, fleeting as it might be.
Of course based on the comments of that Ubi official, it sounds like he's already expecting this to fail, and anything short of overwhelming figures to the contrary is going to be deemed a failure. If I were to don my tinfoil hat for a moment, I might think Ubisoft was using PoP as a justification for future DRM. They can point to how PoP PC had no DRM but it didn't affect piracy rates, so they obviously need MORE DRM in the future, and probably even more restrictive DRM. They seem all set to completely ignore that piracy rates (will likely have) remained constant and they saved the DRM license fees to boot, and proclaim the entire thing a failure. You can almost imagine that they have the press release already typed up and ready to be distributed.
As for myself, I imagine as far as Ubisoft is concerned I fall into the piracy category since I intend to make use of my GameFly subscription. If the game is good, I might look for a used copy for my 360, if not it'll just go right on back like Ninja Gaiden II.
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I know it may seem mean, and all that, but I tell friends and family that if they want my help fixing their computer, they have to abide by my "rules". Which is that I will lock the system down, and remove a lot of the common ways in which viruses and malware ends up on someone's system. For example: If they want Internet Explorer instead of Firefox, then they're on their own to fix anything that goes wrong. Usually after they see the rates places like Geek Squad charge for what is ultimately a far less comprehensive service, they come around pretty quickly.
I've found you need to be rather Machiavellian about it. YOU are the one with the expertise needed to fix this problem, so YOU hold the power. YOU set the conditions by which you will share your expertise with them, and they either accept your terms or they seek out some kind of alternate solution on their own. And it may seem disrespectful to your parents, but it's disrespectful to you if you fix things, try and explain how to avoid it in the future, and they turn around completely disregard everything you say. All you're doing now by helping them, is reinforcing a behavioral pattern of learned helplessness. What you're doing is teaching them that they can do whatever they want, and then you'll come along and fix it when they screw things up. You need to disabuse them of this notion post-haste. Either they put up with your restrictions, or they start chipping in some money for your time and expertise.
Unlike the iPhone, the Droid has removable storage, so apps can be split between the phone's onboard storage and the memory card. Google is also working on a way to introduce loading off of SD cards, similar to apps2sd. So, as an example, you could have the main DOOM binary file on the phone's memory, and the WAD file on the memory card.
The physical keyboard's fine. Yes, it might have been better if it were thicker, but it's hardly the worst keyboard out there. And since it doesn't take up half the bloody screen, I prefer it. The store mock-up units have a keyboard that's nearly impossible to press down, but that's not how it is with actual units. When they gutted the phone of anything valuable to put on display, they probably took out the bits behind the keyboard. I've only used the on screen keyboard for a few simple things, like entering my YouMail PIN, but it seems just as good as the iPhone's portrait keyboard. Which is to say they both suck, and take up half the bloody screen.
There is multi-touch, but something people seem to have problems understanding is that pinch zoom != multi-touch. I don't understand the fascination with pinch zooming anyway. It seems a completely unnatural way to use your phone to me.
My Droid is amazingly fast. At least as fast as I remember the 3GS being the about 2 weeks I had one. Even some of the areas reviews says it lags a little, I'm not seeing it. My Droid ranks right up there with the iPhone and has multi-tasking.
The Droid's browser is based on the same WebKit engine Safari and Safari Mobile are, so you might want to know what it is you're knocking before you actually knock it. Because right now, you're basically attacking the foundation for your beloved iPhone's Safari Mobile. So in case that was too subtle... To say that the Droid browser sucks is to say that the iPhone's browser sucks, because they're based on the same rendering engine. Actually, the Droid's browser is based on a more recent version of WebKit than the iPhone. This may well change with the next OS update, but for the present time... Also, while I'm as big a supporter of open standards as the next person, from a pragmatic standpoint let's be honest. Being 100% ACID compliant doesn't really mean much. The bulk of the web pages out there are generated by some program, or just poorly written in general. And so long as Internet Explorer, with it's rather spotty standards support, remains the dominate browser, that is what people are going to be writing to. Very few people will use features that aren't supported by Internet Explorer, so until Microsoft starts setting its sights a bit higher with regards to standards support, passing the ACID tests is really just one of those feel-good-do-nothing sort of things. It's unfortunate, I wish it weren't the case, but that doesn't change the way things are. If I could change the world just because I wanted something to be a certain way, I'd probably have about 10 different supermodel wives who are complete nymphos. Sadly I don't.
The camera is maybe a bit sub-par for a high end phone, and allegedly there's a fix in the works, but honestly for a cell phone camera, virtually every photo I've seen taken with it is pretty good. I don't expect $500+ DSLR level quality out of a cell phon camera myself, but there are apparently some people who fancy themselves some kind of great and glorious master photographer, yet refuse to use anything more than a cell phone camera. I just sit and scratch my head in a strange mix of confusion and curiosity when I encounter these people.
The Droid supports more formats than the iPhone, out of the box, from my recollection. The media player app that ships by default may be rather spartan, but this is another one of those things I wonder about. Do you want a cell phone or an MP3 player? Any company that tries to make a device that's everything to everyone will generally fail at doing both. I can understand having some basic abi
This seems unlikely to do anything for the amount of piracy, which will probably remain pretty constant, but it will save Ubisoft the license fees on DRM that will just be cracked in hours/days anyway.
People who want to pirate will pirate whether there's DRM or not. So while I understand the concerns of game developers/publishers, they may as well be burning the money spent on DRM license fees. That way, there would be some benefit to be had, fleeting as it might be.
Of course based on the comments of that Ubi official, it sounds like he's already expecting this to fail, and anything short of overwhelming figures to the contrary is going to be deemed a failure. If I were to don my tinfoil hat for a moment, I might think Ubisoft was using PoP as a justification for future DRM. They can point to how PoP PC had no DRM but it didn't affect piracy rates, so they obviously need MORE DRM in the future, and probably even more restrictive DRM. They seem all set to completely ignore that piracy rates (will likely have) remained constant and they saved the DRM license fees to boot, and proclaim the entire thing a failure. You can almost imagine that they have the press release already typed up and ready to be distributed.
As for myself, I imagine as far as Ubisoft is concerned I fall into the piracy category since I intend to make use of my GameFly subscription. If the game is good, I might look for a used copy for my 360, if not it'll just go right on back like Ninja Gaiden II.