The Kindle and other eInk displays have a contrast ratio of 6:1 to 7:1. The iPad backlit IPS display is 750:1 to 930:1.
And how does it compare to netbooks, and other tablets?
I mean, I'm confused by this obsession of only comparing the Ipad to e-readers, as if other LCD portable computers didn't exist. I mean, you either want the benefits of e-ink (in which case, the Ipad doesn't count), or you don't (in which case, there was never any point in buying an e-reader compared with LCD devices). Perhaps this means the Ipad doesn't do well compared with other LCD devices, and thus can only compete as being an "e-reader" with LCD.
Sure, but it's still absurd for the summary and others to act as if the Ipad is now the only device that does any of that. There have been millions of netbooks and other tablets etc selling around for years.
And the point isn't that people are saying you can only read on an e-reader; the point is that people are claiming that the Ipad is a Kindle replacement, which ignores the point that it doesn't do what the Kindle does. The fact that you don't need the Kindle's features is irrelevant - if people make the claim that the Ipad improves on the Kindle, then we expect to compare it on those features. Just as we used to everytime someone claimed that a netbook or non-Apple tablet was a Kindle replacement. Why is it a different rule for the Ipad?
Indeed - and furthermore, if people are willing to neglect these benefits, then we should ask what's so special about the Ipad? There are numerous more popular, and cheaper, netbooks, tablets, PMPs and so on, that are out there competing with e-readers.
And remember in the past when there was some article talking about a netbook or tablet being an e-reader competitor? There'd be no end of comments from people pointing out that these things weren't e-readers, due to the lack of e-ink. Yet now, because it's Apple, suddenly it's pretended that these differences don't exist. This is just yet another attempt to force the obligitary Ipad advert, into a story about e-readers where the Ipad is off-topic.
To be fair, this is how it is for the Iphone: "look, it now has copy/paste", "look, it now has 3G"; and now we have the same thing again with the fourth generation of Iphones, with the hype about multitasking and the non-low resolution. All of these things - and many more - were only improvements compared to previous Iphones.
And Google had to go and make it popular all over again. It's a flashback to the year 2000.
Java is used on about two billion phones. For most phones, it's the only language they use. Java was popular on phones long before Google decided to also use it for Android.
Don't get me wrong, I prefer C/C++ to Java. But it does have it's uses, in that we can have applications that run on all the different devices out there (e.g., Google Maps, Opera Mini). It's Apple who gave us a flashback to the 1980s by not supporting it, preferring the days when you had to rewrite your application separately for every different platform out there.
Indeed. And the funnier thing is to then look at Apple - they actually do release phones that don't even have copy/paste, and portable tablet computers that can only run one application at once, nevermind three. Yet that is not only seen as not a problem here on Slashdot, but you even have people claiming how it's a good thing!
I realise that Slashdot has a slant towards Apple, but I wish they'd at least be a bit more subtle - after years of hyping the Iphone, it's absurd to ridicule Microsoft for lacking the same features.
(Of course, users of Symbian, Blackberry, Android, and indeed every other platform, are allowed to be smug against both the Iphones and Windows phone 7:)
I've got bad news for you. "Text is images." The only reason you haven't needed to treat it this way is because various character sets and fonts define specific images as numbers.
What an earth does that have to do with what I said? You are the one who made a point dependent on images being separate to text.
Sure. 32 - 40 are "problems" with people who either have no name or have a name that changes, making it useless for identification.
Right, so you agree that 1-31 are valid points. End of story - even if 32-40 were flawed, there are still 31 valid useful points the article makes. The whole point of the article is that you should rely on a fixed name for identification, due to these problems. You do realise that people change their names for all sorts of reasons, e.g., marriage?
I see an academic job in your future.
I'm a professional programmer - and it's we who have to deal with these sorts of practical issues. I hope you're not doing a non-academic job, if your response is to tell customers who break your system that they're the ones with the problem.
Oh, and - you can't fix every bug, so there's no point trying to fix any at all?
Just because we can't handle everything perfectly, doesn't stop us reading and learning to avoid many of the common pitfuls, in order to minimise the chance of a problem occuring.
I.e., your response is "39. People whose names break my system are weird outliers"
And the article says no such thing. Can you point me to where the article said "People have names which are pictures and not text"? Yes, that would be an unreasonable restriction, as you're trying to conflate text with images. But none of the points the article makes come anywhere near close.
All of the points are reasonable cases. Are you seriously suggesting that the points are anywhere near as unreasonable as your example? Go on, give us an example that the article actually gives, rather than arguing with a straw man.
The only thing Nokia has going for it is Qt, which they bought in from Trolltech (along with TT itself), and they'll probably find a way to kill.
Qt is now their standard development kit for Symbian and Maemo, so to suggest they only bought it to kill it is false. And as a new learner on Symbian, I have to say I'm very impressed. Qt looks to be a very good API. It's also cross-platform, not only meaning the same code will compile for Symbian and Maemo, but also making it easy to develop for Windows, Mac and Linux (so you can pretty much compile for 100% of the desktop market, and 50% of the mobile market). And it means you can use standard C++, where as the old development kit for Symbian apparently used an awkward cut down version.
And as for "only thing Nokia has going for it", there's more to Nokia than Maemo. Like the small matter of their other OS with 50% market share, or the hundreds of millions of phones they sell every year. Never used an N900, but I love my 5800.
In fact your entire post seems to be extrapolating from the single point of "Maemo is discontinued". By all means warn the OP, but your claims about how they therefore kill all their phones, OSs, and SDKs, is just plain ludicrous. Symbian has been around for many years. You might as well claim that because Apple have ditched their Mac OS before (not to mention 68K, PPC), that therefore they're about to ditch OS X or IphoneOS at any moment!
The Market does decide, why do you think Android and iOS are leading the pack when it comes to growth?
Presumably because they're the newest - a platform starting from nothing is going to see larger growth in relative terms. And it's not like there are many platforms in the phone market. For Nokia, they have Symbian at 50% of the market - it's hard to push further when you're already number one.
And remember - when we say Nokia are at 50%, that's not total phones ever shipped, that's still based on current sales. So we're already looking at the first derivative. What you're doing is looking at the second derivative, and saying "But look, these small platforms are increasing their sales at a faster rate, at the moment". Well sure, but for now, if your criterion is "what the market has decided", then the market is still deciding Nokia. (And as an aside, even if we were looking solely at the US where Nokia have no presence - I believe RIM are still number one, but for some reason they're another platform that Slashdot never covers.)
The faster growth might be a prediction of future sales - but it's foolish to assume we can just extrapolate linearly. In any case, let's just wait and see. If in three years' time, 50% of people are using Android, then great - we can say the market has chosen Android. But you can't say the market has already chosen a platform with lower share, merely based on what the second order derivatives are!
Why do you think all the other phone manufacturers are scrambling to keep up?
"Scrambling"? They're not. There are things that one has added first; but this is true with other platforms too. Also we shouldn't conflate phone manufacturers with OS - for Android, many manufacturers such as Motorola are switching to it anyway, which is indeed one of the good things about Android; it's true that that OSs that these companies previously used weren't very good. If Motorola previously produced non-Android phones, and now they produce Android phones, who is scrambling to catch up? Is Motorola scrambling to catch themselves up?
But for Nokia? No, they're doing fine, I see no evidence of "scrambling". They may have introduced some features later, but let's list all the things that Apple added, in some cases years after they were commonplace on dirt cheap feature phones, and in some cases they've yet to add: 3G, copy/paste, Java, Flash, multitasking, video recording, tethering, forward facing cameras, high resolution, running 3rd party unapproved apps (yes, someone will probably reply saying these things aren't important - well I say the same of whatever things Apple might have added first).
MS were big in the desktop/PC market - and they still are. They still shift this market.
MS aren't so big in phones - and they never have been (not that I see a problem with that - Apple are happy being number 3 in smartphone OSs and number 6 or so in terms of phones; MS might not be number 1, but neither are Apple here, as long as MS make extra money from it, that's all that matters).
If you mean that Apple get far more hype, well if anything, that's more a change for Apple, in the media giving absurd disproportionate coverage to the Iphone and now Ipad; I don't think media coverage of MS has dropped. (And to be honest, there's always been extra coverage on Apple in the media, from back in the days when the Mac would always have to be covered, even when many other non-PC niche platforms were ignored by the media - possibly it stems from Macs traditionally being used in media, thus there being higher than average Mac users?)
To at least one person on Slashdot, MS are a joke - but I think you'll find that at least some people have always thought this on Slashdot!
Although Nokia also have Maemo, which is Linux:) And note that whilst Symbian isn't Unix, it is open source which I think deserves some credit (not that you ever hear about it on Slashdot - once upon a time, Slashdot would focus on open source even when they were less popular; now, the open source platforms get ignored in place of closed locked down platforms, even when the open source one has vastly more market share).
Even for products that are market leaders (which the Iphone is not) - consider, plenty of people here laugh at Windows. Does that make them idiots?
The OP makes a valid point, in that Ballmer was criticising something that MS have now gone and done. But it is a flawed argument for you to say that people are wrong to criticise products at all, just because it's Apple (for the Iphone) or it's a market leader (for the Wii).
And why do you single out Apple in contrast to the dozens of other huge companies that contract with Foxconn like Microsoft, Logitech, Intel, Cisco, Dell, Nokia, HP, or Sony?
Fair's fair. We get a news story (or possibly ten) when Apple does some mundane thing, whilst the same thing is done by many other companies (e.g., releases a phone, or indeed this very story about making an ARM CPU); so they're also going to be singled out when they do something bad:)
I agree about the fears, but note you're being too generous to Apple about them being anywhere near monopoly status yet:
***Lets face it, iDevices are on the verge of being the "standard" platform for mobile applications.
"Standard" as in 5% of the mobile market?:) Even if we count just the "high end" platforms, they're at about 15-20% IIRC, behind Symbian (who have 50%) and RIM (and possibly falling behind Android too now)...
You're right, but this still leads us to the same conclusion - since this is how it works for every ARM processor (none of them are "off-the-shelf"), there's still nothing special about the A4, and we don't get news stories about every other ARM processor manufacturer.
So investors are caught up in the hype and RDF as much as the media or anyone else right now...
But yes - maybe now people can drop the myth that Apple are a "little company": "Look how amazing it is that Apple have done so well, managing a whole 5% of the phone market in just 3 years" they cry, as if Apple weren't some billion dollar company that can easily enter any market it wants. Or "Isn't it amazing that Apple can create a device for me to access the Internet" as if this was anything special in 2007 onwards; or "Let's all root for the small guys, against those nasty big companies like Intel and Microsoft"...
If your implication is that the Apple A4 is going to outdo Intel x86 just because of market cap, I don't think so. Intel x86 is well established on the desktop (as well as laptops and netbooks), and isn't going anywhere, especially with the dominance of Windows. And anyhow, the A4 is based on ARM anyway, so it's they who ultimately get the credit for owning the embedded/portable market.
It's really more like Apple is sprouting up a bunch of ARM devices and sadly, not opening them as much as any given x86 system.
Note that ARM is widely used on mobile computing platforms in general, of which Apple are just one little fish in a big sea; for example, ARM CPUs are used in about 98% of the more than one billion phones shipped a year. They've shipped more than 15 billion proessors in total.
And thankfully, these devices are far more open than Apple's:) (Well, to be fair, I dislike that phone platforms in general still tend to be less open than Windows or Linux, but at least nowhere near as locked down as Apple's feature phones.)
As an aside, I can't hope noting that all of those additions (which were met with much fanfare in the media) were commonplace in dirt cheap five year old feature phones, like the one I threw out in the trash six months ago. I can't wait to see what new feature the 4th generation gives us...
Yep, no answer, other than to be modded down as Troll in the hopes that no one sees the criticism (how is it a Troll?). So that answers my question - there is no justification for the Mac Mini's premium, and no one can answer why a more portable laptop wouldn't be a better choice.
Slashdot Mirror
The Kindle and other eInk displays have a contrast ratio of 6:1 to 7:1. The iPad backlit IPS display is 750:1 to 930:1.
And how does it compare to netbooks, and other tablets?
I mean, I'm confused by this obsession of only comparing the Ipad to e-readers, as if other LCD portable computers didn't exist. I mean, you either want the benefits of e-ink (in which case, the Ipad doesn't count), or you don't (in which case, there was never any point in buying an e-reader compared with LCD devices). Perhaps this means the Ipad doesn't do well compared with other LCD devices, and thus can only compete as being an "e-reader" with LCD.
Sure, but it's still absurd for the summary and others to act as if the Ipad is now the only device that does any of that. There have been millions of netbooks and other tablets etc selling around for years.
And the point isn't that people are saying you can only read on an e-reader; the point is that people are claiming that the Ipad is a Kindle replacement, which ignores the point that it doesn't do what the Kindle does. The fact that you don't need the Kindle's features is irrelevant - if people make the claim that the Ipad improves on the Kindle, then we expect to compare it on those features. Just as we used to everytime someone claimed that a netbook or non-Apple tablet was a Kindle replacement. Why is it a different rule for the Ipad?
Indeed - and furthermore, if people are willing to neglect these benefits, then we should ask what's so special about the Ipad? There are numerous more popular, and cheaper, netbooks, tablets, PMPs and so on, that are out there competing with e-readers.
And remember in the past when there was some article talking about a netbook or tablet being an e-reader competitor? There'd be no end of comments from people pointing out that these things weren't e-readers, due to the lack of e-ink. Yet now, because it's Apple, suddenly it's pretended that these differences don't exist. This is just yet another attempt to force the obligitary Ipad advert, into a story about e-readers where the Ipad is off-topic.
To be fair, this is how it is for the Iphone: "look, it now has copy/paste", "look, it now has 3G"; and now we have the same thing again with the fourth generation of Iphones, with the hype about multitasking and the non-low resolution. All of these things - and many more - were only improvements compared to previous Iphones.
You make good points - this post shouldn't have been modded down.
Indeed, but it also makes the statement rather weak, as anyone can claim that would they did wasn't "murder".
And Google had to go and make it popular all over again. It's a flashback to the year 2000.
Java is used on about two billion phones. For most phones, it's the only language they use. Java was popular on phones long before Google decided to also use it for Android.
Don't get me wrong, I prefer C/C++ to Java. But it does have it's uses, in that we can have applications that run on all the different devices out there (e.g., Google Maps, Opera Mini). It's Apple who gave us a flashback to the 1980s by not supporting it, preferring the days when you had to rewrite your application separately for every different platform out there.
Indeed. And the funnier thing is to then look at Apple - they actually do release phones that don't even have copy/paste, and portable tablet computers that can only run one application at once, nevermind three. Yet that is not only seen as not a problem here on Slashdot, but you even have people claiming how it's a good thing!
I realise that Slashdot has a slant towards Apple, but I wish they'd at least be a bit more subtle - after years of hyping the Iphone, it's absurd to ridicule Microsoft for lacking the same features.
(Of course, users of Symbian, Blackberry, Android, and indeed every other platform, are allowed to be smug against both the Iphones and Windows phone 7:)
I've got bad news for you. "Text is images." The only reason you haven't needed to treat it this way is because various character sets and fonts define specific images as numbers.
What an earth does that have to do with what I said? You are the one who made a point dependent on images being separate to text.
Sure. 32 - 40 are "problems" with people who either have no name or have a name that changes, making it useless for identification.
Right, so you agree that 1-31 are valid points. End of story - even if 32-40 were flawed, there are still 31 valid useful points the article makes. The whole point of the article is that you should rely on a fixed name for identification, due to these problems. You do realise that people change their names for all sorts of reasons, e.g., marriage?
I see an academic job in your future.
I'm a professional programmer - and it's we who have to deal with these sorts of practical issues. I hope you're not doing a non-academic job, if your response is to tell customers who break your system that they're the ones with the problem.
because they're completely clueless about what developers and users want from modern smartphone platform.
Do you have evidence or examples of this? Not saying they're perfect, but I've yet to see evidence that other phones are particularly better.
Oh, and - you can't fix every bug, so there's no point trying to fix any at all?
Just because we can't handle everything perfectly, doesn't stop us reading and learning to avoid many of the common pitfuls, in order to minimise the chance of a problem occuring.
I.e., your response is "39. People whose names break my system are weird outliers"
And the article says no such thing. Can you point me to where the article said "People have names which are pictures and not text"? Yes, that would be an unreasonable restriction, as you're trying to conflate text with images. But none of the points the article makes come anywhere near close.
All of the points are reasonable cases. Are you seriously suggesting that the points are anywhere near as unreasonable as your example? Go on, give us an example that the article actually gives, rather than arguing with a straw man.
The only thing Nokia has going for it is Qt, which they bought in from Trolltech (along with TT itself), and they'll probably find a way to kill.
Qt is now their standard development kit for Symbian and Maemo, so to suggest they only bought it to kill it is false. And as a new learner on Symbian, I have to say I'm very impressed. Qt looks to be a very good API. It's also cross-platform, not only meaning the same code will compile for Symbian and Maemo, but also making it easy to develop for Windows, Mac and Linux (so you can pretty much compile for 100% of the desktop market, and 50% of the mobile market). And it means you can use standard C++, where as the old development kit for Symbian apparently used an awkward cut down version.
And as for "only thing Nokia has going for it", there's more to Nokia than Maemo. Like the small matter of their other OS with 50% market share, or the hundreds of millions of phones they sell every year. Never used an N900, but I love my 5800.
In fact your entire post seems to be extrapolating from the single point of "Maemo is discontinued". By all means warn the OP, but your claims about how they therefore kill all their phones, OSs, and SDKs, is just plain ludicrous. Symbian has been around for many years. You might as well claim that because Apple have ditched their Mac OS before (not to mention 68K, PPC), that therefore they're about to ditch OS X or IphoneOS at any moment!
The Market does decide, why do you think Android and iOS are leading the pack when it comes to growth?
Presumably because they're the newest - a platform starting from nothing is going to see larger growth in relative terms. And it's not like there are many platforms in the phone market. For Nokia, they have Symbian at 50% of the market - it's hard to push further when you're already number one.
And remember - when we say Nokia are at 50%, that's not total phones ever shipped, that's still based on current sales. So we're already looking at the first derivative. What you're doing is looking at the second derivative, and saying "But look, these small platforms are increasing their sales at a faster rate, at the moment". Well sure, but for now, if your criterion is "what the market has decided", then the market is still deciding Nokia. (And as an aside, even if we were looking solely at the US where Nokia have no presence - I believe RIM are still number one, but for some reason they're another platform that Slashdot never covers.)
The faster growth might be a prediction of future sales - but it's foolish to assume we can just extrapolate linearly. In any case, let's just wait and see. If in three years' time, 50% of people are using Android, then great - we can say the market has chosen Android. But you can't say the market has already chosen a platform with lower share, merely based on what the second order derivatives are!
Why do you think all the other phone manufacturers are scrambling to keep up?
"Scrambling"? They're not. There are things that one has added first; but this is true with other platforms too. Also we shouldn't conflate phone manufacturers with OS - for Android, many manufacturers such as Motorola are switching to it anyway, which is indeed one of the good things about Android; it's true that that OSs that these companies previously used weren't very good. If Motorola previously produced non-Android phones, and now they produce Android phones, who is scrambling to catch up? Is Motorola scrambling to catch themselves up?
But for Nokia? No, they're doing fine, I see no evidence of "scrambling". They may have introduced some features later, but let's list all the things that Apple added, in some cases years after they were commonplace on dirt cheap feature phones, and in some cases they've yet to add: 3G, copy/paste, Java, Flash, multitasking, video recording, tethering, forward facing cameras, high resolution, running 3rd party unapproved apps (yes, someone will probably reply saying these things aren't important - well I say the same of whatever things Apple might have added first).
I'm not sure there's anything new here.
MS were big in the desktop/PC market - and they still are. They still shift this market.
MS aren't so big in phones - and they never have been (not that I see a problem with that - Apple are happy being number 3 in smartphone OSs and number 6 or so in terms of phones; MS might not be number 1, but neither are Apple here, as long as MS make extra money from it, that's all that matters).
If you mean that Apple get far more hype, well if anything, that's more a change for Apple, in the media giving absurd disproportionate coverage to the Iphone and now Ipad; I don't think media coverage of MS has dropped. (And to be honest, there's always been extra coverage on Apple in the media, from back in the days when the Mac would always have to be covered, even when many other non-PC niche platforms were ignored by the media - possibly it stems from Macs traditionally being used in media, thus there being higher than average Mac users?)
To at least one person on Slashdot, MS are a joke - but I think you'll find that at least some people have always thought this on Slashdot!
Although Nokia also have Maemo, which is Linux :) And note that whilst Symbian isn't Unix, it is open source which I think deserves some credit (not that you ever hear about it on Slashdot - once upon a time, Slashdot would focus on open source even when they were less popular; now, the open source platforms get ignored in place of closed locked down platforms, even when the open source one has vastly more market share).
I laugh at the Iphone.
Even for products that are market leaders (which the Iphone is not) - consider, plenty of people here laugh at Windows. Does that make them idiots?
The OP makes a valid point, in that Ballmer was criticising something that MS have now gone and done. But it is a flawed argument for you to say that people are wrong to criticise products at all, just because it's Apple (for the Iphone) or it's a market leader (for the Wii).
And why do you single out Apple in contrast to the dozens of other huge companies that contract with Foxconn like Microsoft, Logitech, Intel, Cisco, Dell, Nokia, HP, or Sony?
Fair's fair. We get a news story (or possibly ten) when Apple does some mundane thing, whilst the same thing is done by many other companies (e.g., releases a phone, or indeed this very story about making an ARM CPU); so they're also going to be singled out when they do something bad :)
I agree about the fears, but note you're being too generous to Apple about them being anywhere near monopoly status yet:
***Lets face it, iDevices are on the verge of being the "standard" platform for mobile applications.
"Standard" as in 5% of the mobile market? :) Even if we count just the "high end" platforms, they're at about 15-20% IIRC, behind Symbian (who have 50%) and RIM (and possibly falling behind Android too now)...
You're right, but this still leads us to the same conclusion - since this is how it works for every ARM processor (none of them are "off-the-shelf"), there's still nothing special about the A4, and we don't get news stories about every other ARM processor manufacturer.
Except this is how ARM work - they don't make the CPUs themselves, they license the architecture designs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#ARM_licensees ). There's no such thing as an "off-the-shelf" CPU from ARM!
Are we going to get stories about every other company that makes an ARM CPU? No, because this is an Apple new site.
So investors are caught up in the hype and RDF as much as the media or anyone else right now...
But yes - maybe now people can drop the myth that Apple are a "little company": "Look how amazing it is that Apple have done so well, managing a whole 5% of the phone market in just 3 years" they cry, as if Apple weren't some billion dollar company that can easily enter any market it wants. Or "Isn't it amazing that Apple can create a device for me to access the Internet" as if this was anything special in 2007 onwards; or "Let's all root for the small guys, against those nasty big companies like Intel and Microsoft"...
If your implication is that the Apple A4 is going to outdo Intel x86 just because of market cap, I don't think so. Intel x86 is well established on the desktop (as well as laptops and netbooks), and isn't going anywhere, especially with the dominance of Windows. And anyhow, the A4 is based on ARM anyway, so it's they who ultimately get the credit for owning the embedded/portable market.
It's really more like Apple is sprouting up a bunch of ARM devices and sadly, not opening them as much as any given x86 system.
Note that ARM is widely used on mobile computing platforms in general, of which Apple are just one little fish in a big sea; for example, ARM CPUs are used in about 98% of the more than one billion phones shipped a year. They've shipped more than 15 billion proessors in total.
And thankfully, these devices are far more open than Apple's :) (Well, to be fair, I dislike that phone platforms in general still tend to be less open than Windows or Linux, but at least nowhere near as locked down as Apple's feature phones.)
As an aside, I can't hope noting that all of those additions (which were met with much fanfare in the media) were commonplace in dirt cheap five year old feature phones, like the one I threw out in the trash six months ago. I can't wait to see what new feature the 4th generation gives us...
Yep, no answer, other than to be modded down as Troll in the hopes that no one sees the criticism (how is it a Troll?). So that answers my question - there is no justification for the Mac Mini's premium, and no one can answer why a more portable laptop wouldn't be a better choice.