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User: jfanning

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Comments · 210

  1. Re:Hardly a mexican standoff on Apple vs. Nokia vs. Google vs. HTC · · Score: 1

    The CDMA group are fudging their figures like crazy. Don't you get that? Even their map says "Coverage or trials". Trials being the operative word in this case.

    Have a look at this and tell me how successful CDMA is.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operators

  2. Re:Hardly a mexican standoff on Apple vs. Nokia vs. Google vs. HTC · · Score: 1

    Are you serious? Most of those place listed were some little island in the middle of nowhere. Have fun roaming to most of them.

    CDMA (as in the Verizon kind) is a total dead end. Everyone is dropping any future expansion CDMA for 4G and going with LTE. It is the only logical choice.

    If you think anyone in Europe is seriously going to roll out a CDMA network I have a nice bridge to sell you.

  3. Re:Hardly a mexican standoff on Apple vs. Nokia vs. Google vs. HTC · · Score: 1

    Uh huh. So an 18 month old article quoting the "CDMA Development Group" and a list of countries that are busy rolling out UMTS and LTE instead of going further with CDMA...

    CDMA is a dead end.

  4. Re:Hardly a mexican standoff on Apple vs. Nokia vs. Google vs. HTC · · Score: 1

    That would help a lot considering 60% of iPhone sales are now outside of the US, and nobody else uses CDMA (except S. Korea).

  5. Re:Now I *know* iPad is killing the netbook on iPad Isn't "Killing" Netbook Sales, According To Paul Thurrott · · Score: 2, Interesting

    He also said of Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" that "he can't disagree more" with it. That shows Thurrott knows nothing about mobiles, where there is no FlashPlayer at all, and nothing about the consumer market, where vendor neutral standardized audio video is not just the norm, it's a religion.

    Actually I think you misrepresented Paul's statements on just about everything there. But in any case you show your ignorance with this statement.

    Flash exists on pretty much every Nokia Symbian based smartphone in existence. So that means at least 40% of all smartphones have Flash Mobile. The Nokia tablet range including the N900 phone include full Flash, and it works perfectly fine.

    Jobs just has a vendetta against Adobe. Nothing more, nothing less.

  6. Re:Cheaper costs on Devs Discuss Android's Possible Readmission To Linux Kernel · · Score: 1

    You're european.

    Is that an insult or a compliment?

  7. Re:Here come the DRM whiners on Apple iPad Reviewed · · Score: 1

    If any of them were TCP/IP or network enabled then, yes, I would.

    Heh, bummer then, because it seems that many TVs coming out now are network enabled.

  8. Re:Article summary on Why Some Devs Can't Wait For NoSQL To Die · · Score: 1

    Okay, I'll bite. You do know that "organisation" is a perfectly valid spelling in many countries?!

  9. Re:"antivax" people on Court Rules Against Vaccine-Autism Claims Again · · Score: 1

    As someone who just had shingles a couple of months ago I would gladly give any kid a vaccination to prevent them from ever having to suffer the same thing.

    I can tell you that it was one of the most painful things I have ever experienced and I had a very mild case that was caught in time to take anti-virus medication. I can't imagine those cases that go on for months.

  10. Re:Streaming music player + other app on Multitasking In For iPhone 4.0? · · Score: 1

    That whooshing noise was your answers going over the head of most commenters here.

    It is obvious that hardly anyone actually has any concept of how a modern operating system works and how multitasking is done.

    People listen! Unless you are doing something incredibly stupid like running a while(true){} loop then your program will spend almost all of its time doing nothing! It will almost always be blocked in some system call or waiting on an input event.

    So all those background applications for the most part are not consuming any processor cycles, they are not using battery, they are not doing anything except taking up RAM (and in the N900 they can even be swapped out).

    Only if the application is actively doing something like fetching data from the network, playing audio, using the GPS, etc will it have any effect and any smart developer will minimize this activity anyway.

  11. Re:ipad might be worthwile on Multitasking In For iPhone 4.0? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You obviously don't think about the usecases very much.

    I was using my Nokia E71 the other day and it was tracking my walking using GPS (Sports tracker) in the background. I was checking directions with Ovi maps and looking things up online in the browser. So all were running at once.

    In your world my tracker application would been killed the moment I switched to another tool. That it totally useless and the reason I will never use an iPhone as long as multitasking is missing.

  12. Re:Science or Religion? on A Warming Planet Can Mean More Snow · · Score: 1

    The amount of moisture the air can hold is directly related to its temperature. Snowfall can happen for any surface temperature of about 4 degrees C or lower (depending on temperatures higher up). So warmer than normal winter temperatures, say -2 instead of -8 would therefore give greater snowfalls.

    Snowfall can happen at lower temperatures as I have seen this winter in Finland. We had often snowfall at -15C this year in southern Finland and have had much cooler than normal temperatures. But I don't doubt global warming because I understand the difference between weather and climate and I also understand that there are effects such as localized cooling. And I also know that the oceanic temperatures have been warmer this winter (as previously reported here) even though the continental areas have been cooler.

  13. Re:Wait, I take it back on Android and the Linux Kernel Community · · Score: 1

    I think it is very funny how every time it is proved beyond any doubt that Nokia is the absolute king of smart phones that some whiney geek gets upset and thinks that they somehow redefined smartphone just to prove them wrong. Although I thought I had to be on AppleInsider to see comments like this.

    Nokia produces 40% of all smartphones on the planet. Get over it.

    Symbian is a smartphone OS, Maemo is a smartphone OS. It doesn't matter one fetid dingo's kidney if they can manage to put it in a phone that costs USD 100. Just because it conflicts with your world view that a smartphone must cost USD600 and be limited to white rich people doesn't make it so.

  14. Re:Nokia N810? on Firefox Mobile Reaches 1.0 · · Score: 1

    I would avoid it as the N810 is basically too low powered. But on the other hand if you want a faster browser on the N810 download Tear or one of the other webkit ones. Tear works fine and with the browser switcher tool also available I can replace the system MicroB browser with it for most things.

  15. Re:Nokia N900 win on Firefox Mobile Reaches 1.0 · · Score: 1

    The N900 already has a excellent FF based browser in MicroB. It is also much faster than FF Mobile. And it also supports several plug-ins already.

  16. Re:Outdated on Nokia To Make GPS Navigation Free On Smartphones · · Score: 1

    You are making too many assumptions about many things and are plain wrong about others.

    1. Nokia did not lose money on mobile phones. It was purely a book-keeping writedown in the network division that showed up as a loss. The phones are extremely profitable.
    2. The drop in smartphone market share happened over a year ago. Nokia's smartphone market share has been basically steady for a year now (up till Q3 09, we will see Q4 in a few days). So the Symbian phones everyone loves to hate are selling like hotcakes.
    3. You are not "everyone". There are still huge global markets where people DO NOT WANT a smartphone.
    4. Function phones are getting smarter and smarter. There are already announced S40 feature phones from Nokia that include GPS and mapping. Those models sell unlocked for around 100 EUR.

  17. Re:I Just Did... on Making Sense of the Cellphone Landscape · · Score: 1

    Maybe you should read the presentation here.

    http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2009/11/04/#20091104-android_mythbusters

    The Executive Summary is that "Android is a screwed, hard-coded, non-portable abomination."

    And it has nice juicy parts like "how Google has simply thrown 5-10 years of Linux userspace evolution into the trashcan and re-implemented it partially for no reason."

  18. Re:What's the value of an unlocked US cellphone? on Making Sense of the Cellphone Landscape · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Your GSM phone was probably locked to the original provider. That is why it is important to buy an _unlocked_ phone.

    All operators in Europe are basically on the same frequencies. I can go to any country in Europe and my phone "just works". If I don't want to pay roaming fees then I can stick in a local SIM and it "just works".

    The problem in the US is that your stupid providers choose/got assigned different bands to operate on. So phones physically have to be capable of working on those frequency bands. In most cases Nokia will make them work on one or the other (so AT&T or TMobile), but not both.

    If you want to find what frequencies each network supports you can check them all out at GSM World. They also cover UMTS 3G networks. http://gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/index.shtml

  19. Re:All in the data on Making Sense of the Cellphone Landscape · · Score: 1

    Um, in Finland now I can get a 10EUR /month data plan (1 Mbit/s 3G) and the voice plan is optional. If I make voice calls I just pay per minute, same for text messages and MMS.

    In Finland the data plans are typically uncapped, but limited by speed. So they range from 1MBit/s up to 5 or so.

    Remember US != World.

  20. Re:I Just Did... on Making Sense of the Cellphone Landscape · · Score: 1

    Everyone in the US has such a total blind spot about Nokia it is truely astounding. I was listening to the FLOSS Weekly (ep 100) this morning and they were fauning over Android as being "the" opensource phone platform (it was a Google discussion though). Barely a mention about Android not actually being Linux at all and nothing about the only Real Linux distro on a phone (with any actual market share), ie Maemo.

    Comments from the US about the mobile market either make me laugh or cringe. Usually both in equal amounts. The US analysts don't have a clue about anything except their own totally blinkered view of the world and the US fanboys of Android and iPhone are equally clueless.

    The parent comment is totally correct. For most of the world Nokia IS the mobile phone. There are no alternatives. If you really want to know what is going on in the global mobile industry follow someone like Tomi Ahonen.

  21. Re:Native development on Android on Why Open Source Phones Still Fail · · Score: 1

    But Android is definitely not a standard Linux distro, far from it. Google has ripped the guts out of most of the normal Linux and userspace. The N900 is probably as close to a full distro as you are going to get on a mobile phone sized device. It is practically Debian.

  22. Re:First post on Chrome OS and Android "Will Likely Converge" In the Future · · Score: 1

    And Android is not even proper Linux distribution.

    Android is a hacked up bastard child of Linux only. Does anyone have any info on the ChromeOS. Has Google gutted that just as much as they did to Android?

  23. Re:parent != troll on Apple Voiding Smokers' Warranties? · · Score: 1

    When walking on our country road I find that the smell from smokers driving past can hang in the air for several minutes and is quite disgusting.

    And when I used to live in an apartment block I wished we could have banned people from smoking on their balconies. The smell would always come inside our apartment.

  24. Re:My experience on Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala · · Score: 1

    Snow Leopard was supposed to handle this. Not that I wanted to test it.

    On the other hand, I got strange things like Maven builds failing because of "too many open files". No problem at all with 9.04.

  25. Re:No. on Will Google and Android Kill Standalone GPS? · · Score: 1

    All A-GPS units that I know off still have a fully functional GPS chip in them. The biggest problem with GPS is the initial lock on (cold start) to the satellites. This can be made much faster by giving some information on either a rough estimate of the current location or the positioning information for the satellites. In either case you need some kind of data connection to get the information. Either to get a position based on the visible cell sites or to download the satellite positioning information. The end result is that if you have coverage you probably get a lock in under 20 seconds. If you don't have coverage (and you haven't used GPS for a while) then it might take several minutes. But it will still work eventually. Once you have a lock the A-GPS is working like any other GPS. Some stand-alone GPS units also are actually A-GPS. They may use your phone via Bluetooth to do the same thing or they may be updated via USB with the latest satellite positions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS As far as I know all Nokia phones have full GPS capability with the A-GPS function provided by a server (supl.nokia.com). You can change this in the phone settings though as other providers could supply the service as well. http://www.openmobilealliance.org/Technical/release_program/supl_v2_0.aspx