The ROKR was NOT a bad phone, and its main handicap (100 songs) was set by Apple, not Motorola.
The E398 that the ROKR was based on still has some of the best loudspeakers of any phone out there, and overall sound quality is still on par with the best (decent, solid bass, which seems to be lacking on almost every other phone I've tried).
It was a good phone, and even though the UI was confusing, it still has the best shortcut system of any phone out there. Heck, thinking about it, I may drag the old E398 out of the drawer and bring it back into use. Its battery life was pretty good too....
Oh come on, what grounds could Apple have for action against LG? The Prada phone will hit the market before the iPhone, will be available in more markets, and doesn't support multi-touch.
If Apple do take legal action, then they're just getting engaged in a stupid pissing contest, it would be mildly ridiculous.
For me, the LG looks massively better than the iPhone, I love the slick white on black UI, it just oozes so much more design cool than the iPhone could ever do.
I'd love to know the patents that Apple actually holds though - I can't see how they can hold a patent on multi-touch, as its been around one way or other for a good number of years. Having said that, prior art seems to have very little influence on the issuing of patents.
I guess thats where Symbian has a major one up on every other mobile platform at the moment - there is a port of Bit Torrent available, so if you get yourself a Nokia N80, or any other WiFi enabled S60 handset, find yourself a hotspot and start downloading from p2p with your mobile phone.
I was under the impression that Visual Voicemail wasn't a unique feature - theres a product doing the same job, with the same name, available for internal corporate voicemail systems, its not new in any way, other than Apple "convincing" the operators that its worthwhile.
And it must have taken a fair bit of work - it will possibly cut revenue gained from having to repeatedly listen through all of your voicemail.
I've been using a variety of Motos for years, and haven't had any issues.
My T720 always felt like it would break, but its lasted as good as any other phone. The UI was basic, but never lagged. The V525 kept on going no matter what, and its had one heckuva beating, the UI was slightly nicer than the T720, never had any issues with menu lag. Finally got a V3, overall worked exactly the same as the V525.
I've heard of plenty of issues with Motos lagging on the menus, but that seems to be as much down to operator customisations. If you go on the vanilla/stock Moto firmware, these issues don't tend to exist.
And iTap still works better for me than any other text entry system.
Whilst its apparent that porn assisted in the VHS/Beta war back in the 80s, zoom forward a few years, and look at DVD.
Was porn a major decider in the massive takeup of DVD? Not particularly.
And right now, its the on-line business thats doing well for the porn industry. Physical media will probably continue to be a small-time player in the increasingly on-line porn industry.
Nice idea, shame its useless. Most of these are used out in the field, and it may not be realistic/practical to take several laptops out into the field, and when one dies, swap out the harddrive. Half the users probably aren't capable of swapping the drives themselves either.
And as another posted said, Samsung/B&O have had their Serene upside-down phone on the market for quite a while now. Prior art is obviously of no interest to the patent office, or those applying for patents on concepts that are real to other manufacturers. Bunch of eejits.
Its only marketed in Italy? Hows that awfully short sighted?
The first release of a product, designed in europe, and they go for a european carrier? No surprises there. Not totally sure why they've chosen italy, but best guesses are that Italy is a major user of mobile technology (greatest number of sms per capita in europe?), and possibly TIM were more willing to roll with the technology than other carriers.
no doubt it will spread throughout europe/rest of the world in due course.
I'll give you that DRM is irritating, but its not even slightly surprising, is it?
Some of the new "N-Gage" games are already out there, and playing quite nicely.
I'm running the new Tomb Raider release on my N73, and it looks and plays as well as the Nintendo DS version. Asphalt2 looks and plays absolutely fantastic. Brothers in Arms 3D is a fantastic WW2 game. Massive Snowboarding works incredibly well. KRally looks and plays just as well as the DS version.
The only problem with a "new N-Gage" is that Nokia seem to be incapable of marketing/pricing it properly.
The current range of S60 phones are generally running 200+mHz processors, and the top end are 300+mHz, with some graphics accelerator as well.
Symbian has grown a fair bit over the years. Its still as easy to use as ever.
I've gone through the certification of apps a couple of times (for personal usage), and its ridiculously easy.
There are 4 distinct variants of Symbian - S60v3 and S60 prior to v3, UIQ and the Japanese DoCoMo releases.
On the more popular S60v3 platform (on new releases) there is a huge array of full blown office apps;- wordprocessing, spreadsheets, extremely workable GPS applications, some stunning games (that easily look as good as, if not better than the DS equivalents).
There is absolutely no way that anyone can justly state that the iPhone is 5 years ahead without having tried to develop on it. S60 has a large number of developers actively working on it, its considerably more mature than any other smartphone OS.
i don't normally get wound up by these things, but this ones just got me fuming. Feck feck feck. Had to get that out. Sorry.
I've had a PSP since christmas, and its essential for the hour long commute each way into London.
I see plenty of people with PSPs on the same journey, invariably in the early 20s to 40 age range, either playing games or watching movies on them.
I hardly ever see anyone on the same journey using a DS, although that has been targeted at a different demographic. In the office at work, there are plenty of people with PSPs as well.
It does emulation incredibly well - GBA, Megadrive, SNES, and its tour-de-force is definitely doing an incredibly good job of emulating the PS1 (GT1 and GT2 play perfectly).
Porn has already decided on its format, and thats on-line. Much easier/more flexible medium for the great (and not so great) porn barons of our time to control on-line distribution of media.
Aspects of that are already here, although not that widespread.
You can get bluetooth keyboards for Symbian phones, and with Quick Office, you're set to go with wordprocessor and spreadsheets, albeit relatively limited, but good enough for keying in small documents. The only real catch is that the S60 screens are generally not that large (at the moment).
Heck, I'm pretty sure one of the keyboards had a phone dock in it - unfold the keyboard, stick the phone in the dock at the top, and you've got quite a nice little toy.
Likewise. My first phone, a Nokia 6130 (branded Nk702) took a major dip in Tango, which just made the keys a bit sticky, open up, clean keyboard, and it was fine.
After it got retired, I passed it to my son for use as a kiddies toy, and it took years of that abuse. Never really checked to see if it worked, but then realised it had a bunch of numbers in it I needed. Powered it up after 3 years of being a toddlers toy (hate to think the abuse it experienced), and everything worked perfectly.
Menu was snappier than most of the current batch of phones as well. And battery life was considerably better. Progress, eh?
I used to work at a UK government weapons facility, AWE, that isn't even slightly blurred, weapons manufacturing, massive conventional weapons storage... all there in full colour from the google maps site.
Surprising level of detail, way more than I ever expected. Even the well hidden (from the ground) Burghfield site is perfectly visible, with its Trident storage.
More like the "discussions" in trying to get SCMS onto DAT, which pretty much killed off DAT as a consumer medium (early signs of things to come for DRM?).
You could easily say that Minidisc, whilst not a massive success, at least kept going for quite a good few years (DCC lasted what, 5 minutes?) - its only in the last 6 months that players haven't easily been available in the high street in the UK (no surprises where you can still get them - Sony stores).
Slightly off topic, but my Sony Net MD player has been working absolutely perfectly now for about 5 years. Battery life is way beyond pretty much all current mp3 players (50+ hours out of 1xAA battery), and sound quality is arguably better than any iPod I've listened to so far.
With respect to the browser. What a load of rubbish.
The current range of Nokia S60 phones (N73, N80, N93, etc.) have a similarly fully featured browser. Works absolutely perfectly. Why bother with the mobile gmail client when I can go straight into the main gmail web page? The web works incredibly well on these phones.
So Nokia already have the whole of the web in your pocket. With 3G data access speeds to boot.
Turning down music playback whilst in a call? Thats new? My Siemens SX1 had that years back. My little old SE W550 did exactly that.
Nokia and SE have been doing such things for years.
And its a minor thing, but for those interested (and with N80s, or other WiFi nokias), you can get a BitTorrent client for these phones. Kinda useless, but still pretty cool.
I don't keep 3G switched on all the time on my N73, but the idea of using WiFi as a "replacement" is a non-starter.
Yesterday, I was out and about trying to find tyres for my car. My main local supplier was shut - switched on 3G, did a quick google search on the fully featured browser for one of the other main dealers, got their number...
Doing the same over GPRS/EDGE is just a pain in the back end.
I can't use WiFi on the train on the way into work. Ditto whilst driving through the country.
As for the Samsung - their UI is generally not that hot, whilst the phones themselves (D500, D600, D900) look absolutely stunning.
Try a typical Nokia, Motorola or SE. Heck, the majority of SE phones have the down button as a shortcut to the phone book. Really simple.
They do a variant on this theme with XP - XP for Legacy PCs, has a much smaller footprint/memory/hardware requirements.
Not something that they advertise in a big way though, as it could be pretty useful for some of the kids PCs at home - older spec, PII/PIII boxes that are good enough for basic browsing/wordprocessing/msn.
Having said that, they're all running Win2k without any major issues.... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
We're holding off the auto updates here (thankfully), as the guys on that side of the IS team haven't had a chance to evaluate IE7.
I installed IE7 just to "see what all the fuss was about", and alternate between IE7 and FF2 depending on how the mood takes me. Admit that I really do like the scaling of the screens on IE7 - hold ctrl and the mouse scroll wheel to rescale, does work a lot nicer than the FF2 implementation.
And at home I can't actually use IE7 - it just plain dies on my old Vaio way too regularly to make it viable. FF2, whilst being a resource hog, is at least stable.
Symbian and Windows phones (and I guess the Treo and Blackberry to a lesser extent) have a massive range of 3rd party applications available, and have you heard any incidents of their taking down the network in the years that they've been around? Nope, it hasn't happened.
Of course, maybe Cingulars network is that shaky that they can't risk such things. they must be real scared of europeans with Symbian phones with their range of 3rd party apps roaming in the US, and potentially bringing down their network....
Slashdot Mirror
The ROKR was NOT a bad phone, and its main handicap (100 songs) was set by Apple, not Motorola.
....
The E398 that the ROKR was based on still has some of the best loudspeakers of any phone out there, and overall sound quality is still on par with the best (decent, solid bass, which seems to be lacking on almost every other phone I've tried).
It was a good phone, and even though the UI was confusing, it still has the best shortcut system of any phone out there. Heck, thinking about it, I may drag the old E398 out of the drawer and bring it back into use. Its battery life was pretty good too
Oh come on, what grounds could Apple have for action against LG? The Prada phone will hit the market before the iPhone, will be available in more markets, and doesn't support multi-touch.
If Apple do take legal action, then they're just getting engaged in a stupid pissing contest, it would be mildly ridiculous.
For me, the LG looks massively better than the iPhone, I love the slick white on black UI, it just oozes so much more design cool than the iPhone could ever do.
I'd love to know the patents that Apple actually holds though - I can't see how they can hold a patent on multi-touch, as its been around one way or other for a good number of years. Having said that, prior art seems to have very little influence on the issuing of patents.
I guess thats where Symbian has a major one up on every other mobile platform at the moment - there is a port of Bit Torrent available, so if you get yourself a Nokia N80, or any other WiFi enabled S60 handset, find yourself a hotspot and start downloading from p2p with your mobile phone.
I was under the impression that Visual Voicemail wasn't a unique feature - theres a product doing the same job, with the same name, available for internal corporate voicemail systems, its not new in any way, other than Apple "convincing" the operators that its worthwhile.
And it must have taken a fair bit of work - it will possibly cut revenue gained from having to repeatedly listen through all of your voicemail.
I've been using a variety of Motos for years, and haven't had any issues.
My T720 always felt like it would break, but its lasted as good as any other phone. The UI was basic, but never lagged.
The V525 kept on going no matter what, and its had one heckuva beating, the UI was slightly nicer than the T720, never had any issues with menu lag.
Finally got a V3, overall worked exactly the same as the V525.
I've heard of plenty of issues with Motos lagging on the menus, but that seems to be as much down to operator customisations. If you go on the vanilla/stock Moto firmware, these issues don't tend to exist.
And iTap still works better for me than any other text entry system.
Whilst its apparent that porn assisted in the VHS/Beta war back in the 80s, zoom forward a few years, and look at DVD.
Was porn a major decider in the massive takeup of DVD? Not particularly.
And right now, its the on-line business thats doing well for the porn industry. Physical media will probably continue to be a small-time player in the increasingly on-line porn industry.
Nice idea, shame its useless. Most of these are used out in the field, and it may not be realistic/practical to take several laptops out into the field, and when one dies, swap out the harddrive. Half the users probably aren't capable of swapping the drives themselves either.
But that wasn't a phone ....
And as another posted said, Samsung/B&O have had their Serene upside-down phone on the market for quite a while now. Prior art is obviously of no interest to the patent office, or those applying for patents on concepts that are real to other manufacturers. Bunch of eejits.
Its only marketed in Italy? Hows that awfully short sighted?
The first release of a product, designed in europe, and they go for a european carrier? No surprises there. Not totally sure why they've chosen italy, but best guesses are that Italy is a major user of mobile technology (greatest number of sms per capita in europe?), and possibly TIM were more willing to roll with the technology than other carriers.
no doubt it will spread throughout europe/rest of the world in due course.
I'll give you that DRM is irritating, but its not even slightly surprising, is it?
Some of the new "N-Gage" games are already out there, and playing quite nicely.
.....
I'm running the new Tomb Raider release on my N73, and it looks and plays as well as the Nintendo DS version. Asphalt2 looks and plays absolutely fantastic. Brothers in Arms 3D is a fantastic WW2 game. Massive Snowboarding works incredibly well. KRally looks and plays just as well as the DS version.
The only problem with a "new N-Gage" is that Nokia seem to be incapable of marketing/pricing it properly.
The current range of S60 phones are generally running 200+mHz processors, and the top end are 300+mHz, with some graphics accelerator as well.
Don't discount it yet
I can't believe how lousy those writeups are.
Symbian has grown a fair bit over the years. Its still as easy to use as ever.
I've gone through the certification of apps a couple of times (for personal usage), and its ridiculously easy.
There are 4 distinct variants of Symbian - S60v3 and S60 prior to v3, UIQ and the Japanese DoCoMo releases.
On the more popular S60v3 platform (on new releases) there is a huge array of full blown office apps;- wordprocessing, spreadsheets, extremely workable GPS applications, some stunning games (that easily look as good as, if not better than the DS equivalents).
There is absolutely no way that anyone can justly state that the iPhone is 5 years ahead without having tried to develop on it. S60 has a large number of developers actively working on it, its considerably more mature than any other smartphone OS.
i don't normally get wound up by these things, but this ones just got me fuming. Feck feck feck. Had to get that out. Sorry.
Or the N80, which is probably the most popular GSM/3G/WiFi phone on the market.
I've had a PSP since christmas, and its essential for the hour long commute each way into London.
I see plenty of people with PSPs on the same journey, invariably in the early 20s to 40 age range, either playing games or watching movies on them.
I hardly ever see anyone on the same journey using a DS, although that has been targeted at a different demographic. In the office at work, there are plenty of people with PSPs as well.
It does emulation incredibly well - GBA, Megadrive, SNES, and its tour-de-force is definitely doing an incredibly good job of emulating the PS1 (GT1 and GT2 play perfectly).
What, there actually is a FA? I only ever see a headline and dive straight into the "discussion".
Boy, are you wrong, or are you wrong?
Porn has already decided on its format, and thats on-line. Much easier/more flexible medium for the great (and not so great) porn barons of our time to control on-line distribution of media.
Aspects of that are already here, although not that widespread.
You can get bluetooth keyboards for Symbian phones, and with Quick Office, you're set to go with wordprocessor and spreadsheets, albeit relatively limited, but good enough for keying in small documents. The only real catch is that the S60 screens are generally not that large (at the moment).
Heck, I'm pretty sure one of the keyboards had a phone dock in it - unfold the keyboard, stick the phone in the dock at the top, and you've got quite a nice little toy.
Likewise. My first phone, a Nokia 6130 (branded Nk702) took a major dip in Tango, which just made the keys a bit sticky, open up, clean keyboard, and it was fine.
After it got retired, I passed it to my son for use as a kiddies toy, and it took years of that abuse. Never really checked to see if it worked, but then realised it had a bunch of numbers in it I needed. Powered it up after 3 years of being a toddlers toy (hate to think the abuse it experienced), and everything worked perfectly.
Menu was snappier than most of the current batch of phones as well. And battery life was considerably better. Progress, eh?
I used to work at a UK government weapons facility, AWE, that isn't even slightly blurred, weapons manufacturing, massive conventional weapons storage ... all there in full colour from the google maps site.
s ton&sll=53.098145,-2.443696&sspn=12.55008,28.43261 7&ie=UTF8&z=16&ll=51.365297,-1.145024&spn=0.009726 ,0.027122&t=h&om=1&iwloc=addr
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=alderma
Surprising level of detail, way more than I ever expected. Even the well hidden (from the ground) Burghfield site is perfectly visible, with its Trident storage.
Its a different situation to DCC versus Minidisc.
More like the "discussions" in trying to get SCMS onto DAT, which pretty much killed off DAT as a consumer medium (early signs of things to come for DRM?).
You could easily say that Minidisc, whilst not a massive success, at least kept going for quite a good few years (DCC lasted what, 5 minutes?) - its only in the last 6 months that players haven't easily been available in the high street in the UK (no surprises where you can still get them - Sony stores).
Slightly off topic, but my Sony Net MD player has been working absolutely perfectly now for about 5 years. Battery life is way beyond pretty much all current mp3 players (50+ hours out of 1xAA battery), and sound quality is arguably better than any iPod I've listened to so far.
Microsoft doing immoral computing? Like how would that be news?
With respect to the browser. What a load of rubbish.
The current range of Nokia S60 phones (N73, N80, N93, etc.) have a similarly fully featured browser. Works absolutely perfectly. Why bother with the mobile gmail client when I can go straight into the main gmail web page? The web works incredibly well on these phones.
So Nokia already have the whole of the web in your pocket. With 3G data access speeds to boot.
Turning down music playback whilst in a call? Thats new? My Siemens SX1 had that years back. My little old SE W550 did exactly that.
Nokia and SE have been doing such things for years.
And its a minor thing, but for those interested (and with N80s, or other WiFi nokias), you can get a BitTorrent client for these phones. Kinda useless, but still pretty cool.
I don't keep 3G switched on all the time on my N73, but the idea of using WiFi as a "replacement" is a non-starter.
...
Yesterday, I was out and about trying to find tyres for my car. My main local supplier was shut - switched on 3G, did a quick google search on the fully featured browser for one of the other main dealers, got their number
Doing the same over GPRS/EDGE is just a pain in the back end.
I can't use WiFi on the train on the way into work. Ditto whilst driving through the country.
As for the Samsung - their UI is generally not that hot, whilst the phones themselves (D500, D600, D900) look absolutely stunning.
Try a typical Nokia, Motorola or SE. Heck, the majority of SE phones have the down button as a shortcut to the phone book. Really simple.
They do a variant on this theme with XP - XP for Legacy PCs, has a much smaller footprint/memory/hardware requirements.
.... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Not something that they advertise in a big way though, as it could be pretty useful for some of the kids PCs at home - older spec, PII/PIII boxes that are good enough for basic browsing/wordprocessing/msn.
Having said that, they're all running Win2k without any major issues
We're holding off the auto updates here (thankfully), as the guys on that side of the IS team haven't had a chance to evaluate IE7.
I installed IE7 just to "see what all the fuss was about", and alternate between IE7 and FF2 depending on how the mood takes me. Admit that I really do like the scaling of the screens on IE7 - hold ctrl and the mouse scroll wheel to rescale, does work a lot nicer than the FF2 implementation.
And at home I can't actually use IE7 - it just plain dies on my old Vaio way too regularly to make it viable. FF2, whilst being a resource hog, is at least stable.
Steves argument is indeed a total non-starter.
....
Symbian and Windows phones (and I guess the Treo and Blackberry to a lesser extent) have a massive range of 3rd party applications available, and have you heard any incidents of their taking down the network in the years that they've been around? Nope, it hasn't happened.
Of course, maybe Cingulars network is that shaky that they can't risk such things. they must be real scared of europeans with Symbian phones with their range of 3rd party apps roaming in the US, and potentially bringing down their network