They've quite publicly stated that they are... and the CM7 code review has been as busy as ever.
Steve Kondik is now working for Samsung: what that will do to his priorities (and to what is actually allowed to do on CMx) is hard to say.
He's still approving CM7 code, so I'd say he's managing OK...
I hope it goes on: that one project has advanced the state-of-the-Android-art considerably. For the past couple of years, I won't even consider a device that I can't root and put my CM on.
Funnily enough, it's even possible that Google might agree with you -- that story claims that they choose a set of CM developers to work on the Galaxy Nexus and ICS.
I also suspect that -- given Samsung famously gave the CM7 devs a Galaxy SII each in exchange for getting CM7 running on the SII -- that Samsung has no wish to see CM7 die either. Or at least, they certainly don't mind seeing it running on their phones. Reading between the lines, I think that Google realises just what a great thing they've got going with the CM team, and are encouraging them to keep on keeping-on; after all, CM has fixed heaps of bugs in the Android code base.
It's certainly a very different strategy to Apple's response to jailbreaking (you may recall that they tried, unsuccessfully, to declare it illegal through DRM circumvention).
This post is a joke -- it focuses on the comments on an engineer who has nothing to do with the ICS code release, and says as much. However, some people seem so convinced that Google's gone full-evil that they're jumping on every "no comment".
Don't/. editors check stories for troll submissions these days?
Sure -- all PDAs have been a gradual evolution from the original Psion organiser, and the Newton was one of the major influences in that progression (and a great PDA, just ten years too soon). But it'd be crazy to think that the iPhone was designed somehow in a vacuum and didn't pay any attention to Palm (which was the Apple of the late 90s in many ways -- new tech, cult following, "just works", must-have-status-symbol-for-executives) or Psion. And it's all still, ultimately, a continuation of what was conceived at PARC.
My point is that this "who-copied-whom" game is stupid and pointless. Technology evolves through competition and takes influences from many sources. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on innovation, any more than any company does. I'm not really sure why we can't just acknowledge that and move on and away from these patent wars, which serve no purpose other than to help companies build monopolies.
I came across this yesterday and found it interesting (comparisons of what Samsung's tablets looked like before and after the iPad came out)
The problem is that these troll pages pretend that there was only ever Apple and Samsung designing phones and tablets. That wasn't the case.
If I wanted to play the same game, I'd say that the iPad is itself designed from the rounded-rectangle tablet PCs that came before it, like this and the iPhone from the PDAs that came before it, like this.
Far be it from me to defend an Apple fanboi, but the Apple Lisa predates this, being released in 1983. Everything, of course, stemmed from PARC, and a rather inexplicit agreement to "look" at Xerox's operations in return for Apple stock didn't give Apple IP rights to all GUIs (and thank god, too!)
The difference is between wanting and enforcing. I'm seriously concerned if you don't understand that difference, because it's pretty much what our entire society is based upon.
If you think Stallman wants to prevent anyone from releasing closed source software that doesn't use GPL code, then you've got rocks in your head. He'll shout out his opposition to closed-source models from the mountain tops, but curtailing your freedom to develop closed-source software if you want to? Never in a million years.
You have a very, very strange view of the open-source software paradigm...
They copied the design, logo, and color scheme for icons.
The logo??? How, exactly, does the word "SAMSUNG" look like an apple with a chunk taken out of it?
There is significant reason to think Samsung tried to confuse consumers.
You really think this? I guess it'd go like this then:
Customer: Hello, good shopkeeper! I would like to buy an Apple iPad please. Salesman: Certainly sir, here you go. Customer: But, my good man, why does this box have the words "SAMSUNG" and "Galaxy Tab" upon it? Salesman: Well... er... that's just the model of the iPad. It's an Apple SAMSUNG Galaxy Tab iPad, you see... Customer: Oh yes? But where is that trendy fruit logo that I know and love so well? Salesman: Sure, well, I think they took that off the box because it was just too popular... Customer: Ah, I see. Who knew?
Bet that exchange would be happening all over the world had Apple's valiant legal team not intervened.
Need it to connect up to the Internet? Just slide the whole cylinder into a port on your laptop, tablet, etc.
But the beauty about smart phones is that you've got fully-fledged internet connectivity in a pocket-sized form factor. I want internet/email/maps/games/pdfs in something that I've got with me all the time -- that's why I've got a smart phone.
As far as battery life goes, though, there's a couple of lower-spec'ed androids out there that people claim give three or four days of battery life. Thing is, most of us want the higher-resolution screens and faster processors, and are happy to sacrifice battery life to do so. I easily get 4 hours of screen-on time with my phone (plus extra time making calls, playing music, etc -- but it's the screen that does the damage charge-wise), which is fine to last a day -- and I've got no probs with charging it overnight.
I've been using Ubuntu for 6+ years, and I'm ready to give it up, thanks to Unity.
Why does everyone equate not using Unity to not using Ubuntu?
The world has truly gone mad when linux users can't install software for themselves anymore -- especially when returning to the "GNOME classic" look is a one line apt-get command (and probably also available through the cutesy GUI of the Software Centre, no terminal-use necessary) detailed in the release notes.
I'm scared that all Ubuntu has achieved over the years is the dumbing-down of their users.
Ubuntu has given up on its users, and is turning into an interface for the elderly, the disabled and netbook people.
I'd rather have my advanced UI that lets me do whatever I want with my workstation, thank you very much.
Um... did anyone on/. try reading the release notes?? More specifically, the bit that says:
"GNOME 3.2 is included and is a major upgrade from GNOME 2.32 included in Ubuntu 11.04. GNOME Classic is no longer installed by default, but can be enabled after installation completes by installing gnome-panel." (my emphasis)
Honestly, this site is turning into one giant PEBKAC-fest. Read and think, people! Besides, it's linux... you can install whatever GUI you want. You don't have to use Unity. Mark Shuttleworth will never know.
Fixed that up a bit. Why shouldn't developers be Free to release products however they want them to be released.
Uh, dude, people are free to release products however they want. Stallman was not questioning anyone's right to be able to do this. But that doesn't mean he can't say that a closed, walled-garden approach is wrong, and argue his case.
I hope you understand the difference, because it's a hell of a big one.
HÃ.... ? What are you writing about? PalmOs is the successor of Newton?
If you can tell me the difference between a Newton and a Palm in terms of concept, I'd love to hear it. They were both PDAs. They both used stylli for input. They even both used an input based on handwriting (although with opposite takes on how that should work). Your UID is old enough to suggest you should have been around at least in the era of Palm computing, and probably the elusive Newton as well. They're so similar in concept, with one obviously inspired by the other, that I honestly don't know what else to say.
Well, the first Android Handy came out in 2008 or was it 2009?
Hardly the point. Android started life much earlier than the first iPhones, and was being developed before the first iPhones. Android and iPhone are examples of convergent evolution, and although they've both borrowed from each other since release they owed much of their initial design concepts to the PDAs that came before (a home screen with icons, need I say more??)
No one said Steve Jobs invented "something"... fact is he made stuff where no one wanted to make it.
Not exactly. People were making GUIs (Xerox Star, which was a commercial product), mp3 players (many examples pre-iPod, but all/.ers should remember the Creative NOMAD at least!), smartphones (e.g. Palm Treos, WinCE devices) and tablets (many, many Windows attempts) long before Apple got on the scene. Jobs, however, took these things and made them popular. There's a difference.
Even Windows would not exist if he had not started with it on the Lisa.
That's also debatable. Development of Windows 1.0 (with the sexy name of "Interface Manager" as it was then) started in 1981, and probably resulted from the Xerox Star (released in 1981) rather than the Lisa (which was released in 1983). However, Apple's aggressive stance on it's Lisa/Mac look-and-feel (which came from Xerox anyway) did force Microsoft to severely cripple the resulting Windows 1.0. So you could definitely say that Apple had a role in its development, just a negative one:)
Don't judge others feelings dude. They're no more or less valid than yours. They're personal.
I think people are starting to wonder if these feelings are personal, though -- it seems as if they're fed not from any personal knowledge of the individual, but from a concurrent mass-hysteria that operates on a feedback mechanism.
It was exactly the same with Princess Diana in the UK and Steve Irwin here in Australia, to name a few other examples. In both cases, people who didn't know these people from a bar of soap felt inclined to grieve more strongly than they would for their own relatives. I completely acknowledge that these were genuine feelings, but the response in itself was not normal.
Just to make sure I insult everyone equally, Operation Rescue -- the anti-abortion group -- also did more harm than help to their cause with their Planned Parenthood blockades.
Wow. So a comment on a personal blog, which nobody who didn't know RMS had to read, somehow equates to violence and intimidation in public. What a curious and strange world you live in...!
RMS has certainly been strident in his views, but to my knowledge he has never used violence or indeed done anything outrageous to promote his advocacy. Challenging peoples' entrenched opinions through writing is not the same as intimidating people with violence or offensive physical acts.
He could have explained his views in a more polite manner, but he chose not to.
How was he being impolite? He stated very clearly that nobody deserved to die, but also succinctly gave his own thoughts about Jobs' role in advocating computing freedoms. A fair comment in the circumstances, I would have thought, and you can hardly accuse the man of slander -- iOS is a locked-down platform, and I think that's pretty inarguable. Hell, even the LA Times article from the submission makes the point that RMS's comments have merit.
Besides, the comments were on his personal blog -- it wasn't a press release. He wasn't going down to the funeral, tap-dancing on Jobs' pyre and shouting "Huzzah!" to the world. Why is it that death of a public figure equates to instant sainthood these days?
Do you really think Android would exist if there was no iOS?
Considering Google purchased Android in 2005, then yes, I suspect so. I also suspect that it would have looked pretty similar to what it does now. Android and iOS were the natural successors to PalmOS, itself a successor to the Newton which in turn succeeded the Psion Organiser from 1984. (Although Psion, of course, was developing all through the 90s, gave rise to the hugely successful Symbian OS and probably needs to be mentioned as a separate branch as well...)
People seem to think that Jobs invented things out of thin air. The man had some great ideas and some not so great ideas, but I think his real talent was in using Apple's elite factor and mass marketing to make existing concepts appeal to the public. He popularised GUIs, mice, mp3 players and PDAs. But he didn't invent them or even substantially innovate them, and his talent for popularising went hand-in-hand with a desire for lock-down and control. He was certainly an important figure, and his particular spin on things helped to shape the way particular concepts evolved -- but really, a little bit of perspective would be helpful here.
Don't forget the number of phones that don't even HAVE a GPU. I love my intercept compared to the old blackberry I had but even with an 800mhz cpu there are times where I am painfully aware of the fact I'm rendering in software.
To be fair, most phones these days are using Qualcomm processors with built-in GPUs... the good ones have at least an Adreno 205, but even the really budget phones have an Adreno 200 now (which is as good as what's in my Desire, although, really, that's not very good!)
Android phone hardware is getting pretty decent now; we just need the software to start taking full advantage of it. If only Google and Samsung would stop paying their respects to a dead white man and release ICS, things could start moving forward again. Gingerbread was the first decent release of Android, but there's still a lot of shortcomings that I'd like to see fixed in ICS.
And the Kindle Fire presold, sight unseen, over 250,000 units in the first five days of presales - on its way to an estimated 2.5 million units its first month.
That's quite impressive! Let's hope we can root the damn thing...
The iPad is nice gear. But this race isn't over yet.
I think the problem is that tablets are both pricey and a bit pointless. If you want a tablet, unless you happen to work in a rather obscure area where they're actually useful, chances are you're either rich, bored or both -- i.e. the Apple crowd. The transformer's a damn nice tablet, but it's nice on the internals rather than the externals. It doesn't turn heads the way an iPad2 does as a tablet, or a Galaxy S II does as a phone.
I don't think Android has had it's "wow" tablet yet (although price-wise, Amazon's definitely giving it a shot...)
You misunderstand how much more portable a tablet is compared to any traditional laptop, regardless of the format. The iPad goes from off to on in a few seconds. You can run presentations off of it for hours without a power source. For pure consumption of media or as a fancy drive that plugs into the projector, nothing beats the iPad. Nothing. And that's why businesses are adopting the iPad far faster than any iPhone.
Hmmm... my netbook wakes from sleep in two seconds; I can leave it sleeping for days without draining the battery; and I get six hours of battery life from it. It's great for watching films on when traveling, and it even stands up by itself on a table. It's light enough to use one-handed.
Not quite as convenient as an iPad, perhaps, and a touchscreen would be useful at times... but on the other hand, it's got a real keyboard, runs linux and all my work software, has a huge HDD and was cheaper to buy. Oh, and I can run Powerpoint presentations from it too, of course.
Hey, don't knock netbooks -- they're are awesome things to travel with, small and lightand cheaper than a tablet to boot. Even better, they can run a real OS and you can actually do work on them, with nary an angry bird in sight. I managed to write a couple of academic papers (complete with complicated figures) on my netbook whilst backpacking around the world for five months.
As far as how the iPhone is doing overseas, Last quarter Apple sold about 21 million phones with around 6 million being activated in the US (according to the two carriers who carried iPhones at the time.
But the world >> US. And if you look at the stats (be it sales or web browser hits) Apple does substantially better in the US than elsewhere.
So if market share is so important, then why is HP -- the worlds largest PC manufacturer --- trying to get rid if their PC business?
Well, I didn't say it was important. All I'm saying is that if you want Apple to take over the world, their current strategy isn't working.
How is Apple getting "overrun" when it makes 2/3's of the world's mobile phone profit. Grosses 17x it's nearest competitor in app sales (see previous response), and makes more selling computers than anyone else in the world?
Again, see above. If making lots of money by selling fewer units at higher prices floats your boat, then by all means praise Apple. It's a great success capitalism-wise; it's probably not such a great success if you want to count popularity as one of your objectives.
How much "less" are you paying for your Android phone than the equivalent iPhone (if you're in the US)> The fact is, that the carrier is paying a higher subsidy for the iPhone and you're still paying the same amount for your Android as the equivalent iPhone and your monthly bill is the same.
I'm not in the US, so I can't comment on the situation there. I was also buying my phone outright. Nevertheless, in buying an HTC Desire a year ago I saved more than $300 compared to buying the iPhone 4 here in Australia, and more than $200 compared to buying the 3GS. I'd call that a win by any account.
I'd also guess that in comparing plans in the US, you're comparing the 4S with the Galaxy S2. However, I'd assume that you can get cheaper Android phones on cheaper plans over there? It'd be pretty crazy if you couldn't. Even on a plan here in Oz, the Galaxy S2 is substantially cheaper than an iPhone 4 (not S); and I can get a Nexus S on a plan cheaper than an iPhone 3GS.
Maybe Apple has prices that favour the US over other countries? Certainly they seem to be doing better over there than in the rest of the world.
And when you finally do decide to use those forbidden or more difficult to reach cereal boxes/bread, you'll learn from your earlier experience and really work to spread them out over a longer time than your original box.
... and will therefore never run out of cereal again??
Whichever way you look at it, that dude is going to go hungry for breakfast at some stage unless he starts investing in alternative breakfast sources soon...
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Well, I hope the Cyanogenmod project continues.
They've quite publicly stated that they are ... and the CM7 code review has been as busy as ever.
Steve Kondik is now working for Samsung: what that will do to his priorities (and to what is actually allowed to do on CMx) is hard to say.
He's still approving CM7 code, so I'd say he's managing OK ...
I hope it goes on: that one project has advanced the state-of-the-Android-art considerably. For the past couple of years, I won't even consider a device that I can't root and put my CM on.
Funnily enough, it's even possible that Google might agree with you -- that story claims that they choose a set of CM developers to work on the Galaxy Nexus and ICS.
I also suspect that -- given Samsung famously gave the CM7 devs a Galaxy SII each in exchange for getting CM7 running on the SII -- that Samsung has no wish to see CM7 die either. Or at least, they certainly don't mind seeing it running on their phones. Reading between the lines, I think that Google realises just what a great thing they've got going with the CM team, and are encouraging them to keep on keeping-on; after all, CM has fixed heaps of bugs in the Android code base.
It's certainly a very different strategy to Apple's response to jailbreaking (you may recall that they tried, unsuccessfully, to declare it illegal through DRM circumvention).
4.0 is out? Where? The first phone running 4.0 (the Galaxy Nexus) doesn't come out til next month.
You can run ICS quite happily in the android emulator from the SDK right now. So, yeah, it's out.
The source isn't out yet, but Google's been very specific that it will be released in the next few weeks ("We plan to release the source for the recently-announced Ice Cream Sandwich soon, once it’s available on devices") just as Gingerbread was.
This post is a joke -- it focuses on the comments on an engineer who has nothing to do with the ICS code release, and says as much. However, some people seem so convinced that Google's gone full-evil that they're jumping on every "no comment".
Don't /. editors check stories for troll submissions these days?
Sure -- all PDAs have been a gradual evolution from the original Psion organiser, and the Newton was one of the major influences in that progression (and a great PDA, just ten years too soon). But it'd be crazy to think that the iPhone was designed somehow in a vacuum and didn't pay any attention to Palm (which was the Apple of the late 90s in many ways -- new tech, cult following, "just works", must-have-status-symbol-for-executives) or Psion. And it's all still, ultimately, a continuation of what was conceived at PARC.
My point is that this "who-copied-whom" game is stupid and pointless. Technology evolves through competition and takes influences from many sources. Apple doesn't have a monopoly on innovation, any more than any company does. I'm not really sure why we can't just acknowledge that and move on and away from these patent wars, which serve no purpose other than to help companies build monopolies.
I came across this yesterday and found it interesting (comparisons of what Samsung's tablets looked like before and after the iPad came out)
The problem is that these troll pages pretend that there was only ever Apple and Samsung designing phones and tablets. That wasn't the case.
If I wanted to play the same game, I'd say that the iPad is itself designed from the rounded-rectangle tablet PCs that came before it, like this and the iPhone from the PDAs that came before it, like this.
Secondly, "Desktop style OS" existed in 1984 on UNIX too. It just wasn't "popular".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
Far be it from me to defend an Apple fanboi, but the Apple Lisa predates this, being released in 1983. Everything, of course, stemmed from PARC, and a rather inexplicit agreement to "look" at Xerox's operations in return for Apple stock didn't give Apple IP rights to all GUIs (and thank god, too!)
The difference is between wanting and enforcing. I'm seriously concerned if you don't understand that difference, because it's pretty much what our entire society is based upon.
If you think Stallman wants to prevent anyone from releasing closed source software that doesn't use GPL code, then you've got rocks in your head. He'll shout out his opposition to closed-source models from the mountain tops, but curtailing your freedom to develop closed-source software if you want to? Never in a million years.
You have a very, very strange view of the open-source software paradigm ...
They copied the design, logo, and color scheme for icons.
The logo??? How, exactly, does the word "SAMSUNG" look like an apple with a chunk taken out of it?
There is significant reason to think Samsung tried to confuse consumers.
You really think this? I guess it'd go like this then:
Customer: Hello, good shopkeeper! I would like to buy an Apple iPad please. ... er ... that's just the model of the iPad. It's an Apple SAMSUNG Galaxy Tab iPad, you see ... ...
Salesman: Certainly sir, here you go.
Customer: But, my good man, why does this box have the words "SAMSUNG" and "Galaxy Tab" upon it?
Salesman: Well
Customer: Oh yes? But where is that trendy fruit logo that I know and love so well?
Salesman: Sure, well, I think they took that off the box because it was just too popular
Customer: Ah, I see. Who knew?
Bet that exchange would be happening all over the world had Apple's valiant legal team not intervened.
That probably suggests a lack of an awareness of non-apple tablets rather than anything else ...
Need it to connect up to the Internet? Just slide the whole cylinder into a port on your laptop, tablet, etc.
But the beauty about smart phones is that you've got fully-fledged internet connectivity in a pocket-sized form factor. I want internet/email/maps/games/pdfs in something that I've got with me all the time -- that's why I've got a smart phone.
As far as battery life goes, though, there's a couple of lower-spec'ed androids out there that people claim give three or four days of battery life. Thing is, most of us want the higher-resolution screens and faster processors, and are happy to sacrifice battery life to do so. I easily get 4 hours of screen-on time with my phone (plus extra time making calls, playing music, etc -- but it's the screen that does the damage charge-wise), which is fine to last a day -- and I've got no probs with charging it overnight.
I've been using Ubuntu for 6+ years, and I'm ready to give it up, thanks to Unity.
Why does everyone equate not using Unity to not using Ubuntu?
The world has truly gone mad when linux users can't install software for themselves anymore -- especially when returning to the "GNOME classic" look is a one line apt-get command (and probably also available through the cutesy GUI of the Software Centre, no terminal-use necessary) detailed in the release notes.
I'm scared that all Ubuntu has achieved over the years is the dumbing-down of their users.
Ubuntu has given up on its users, and is turning into an interface for the elderly, the disabled and netbook people.
I'd rather have my advanced UI that lets me do whatever I want with my workstation, thank you very much.
Um ... did anyone on /. try reading the release notes?? More specifically, the bit that says:
"GNOME 3.2 is included and is a major upgrade from GNOME 2.32 included in Ubuntu 11.04. GNOME Classic is no longer installed by default, but can be enabled after installation completes by installing gnome-panel." (my emphasis)
Honestly, this site is turning into one giant PEBKAC-fest. Read and think, people! Besides, it's linux ... you can install whatever GUI you want. You don't have to use Unity. Mark Shuttleworth will never know.
Fixed that up a bit. Why shouldn't developers be Free to release products however they want them to be released.
Uh, dude, people are free to release products however they want. Stallman was not questioning anyone's right to be able to do this. But that doesn't mean he can't say that a closed, walled-garden approach is wrong, and argue his case.
I hope you understand the difference, because it's a hell of a big one.
HÃ .... ? What are you writing about? PalmOs is the successor of Newton?
If you can tell me the difference between a Newton and a Palm in terms of concept, I'd love to hear it. They were both PDAs. They both used stylli for input. They even both used an input based on handwriting (although with opposite takes on how that should work). Your UID is old enough to suggest you should have been around at least in the era of Palm computing, and probably the elusive Newton as well. They're so similar in concept, with one obviously inspired by the other, that I honestly don't know what else to say.
Well, the first Android Handy came out in 2008 or was it 2009?
Hardly the point. Android started life much earlier than the first iPhones, and was being developed before the first iPhones. Android and iPhone are examples of convergent evolution, and although they've both borrowed from each other since release they owed much of their initial design concepts to the PDAs that came before (a home screen with icons, need I say more??)
No one said Steve Jobs invented "something" ... fact is he made stuff where no one wanted to make it.
Not exactly. People were making GUIs (Xerox Star, which was a commercial product), mp3 players (many examples pre-iPod, but all /.ers should remember the Creative NOMAD at least!), smartphones (e.g. Palm Treos, WinCE devices) and tablets (many, many Windows attempts) long before Apple got on the scene. Jobs, however, took these things and made them popular. There's a difference.
Even Windows would not exist if he had not started with it on the Lisa.
That's also debatable. Development of Windows 1.0 (with the sexy name of "Interface Manager" as it was then) started in 1981, and probably resulted from the Xerox Star (released in 1981) rather than the Lisa (which was released in 1983). However, Apple's aggressive stance on it's Lisa/Mac look-and-feel (which came from Xerox anyway) did force Microsoft to severely cripple the resulting Windows 1.0. So you could definitely say that Apple had a role in its development, just a negative one :)
Don't judge others feelings dude. They're no more or less valid than yours. They're personal.
I think people are starting to wonder if these feelings are personal, though -- it seems as if they're fed not from any personal knowledge of the individual, but from a concurrent mass-hysteria that operates on a feedback mechanism.
It was exactly the same with Princess Diana in the UK and Steve Irwin here in Australia, to name a few other examples. In both cases, people who didn't know these people from a bar of soap felt inclined to grieve more strongly than they would for their own relatives. I completely acknowledge that these were genuine feelings, but the response in itself was not normal.
Just to make sure I insult everyone equally, Operation Rescue -- the anti-abortion group -- also did more harm than help to their cause with their Planned Parenthood blockades.
Wow. So a comment on a personal blog, which nobody who didn't know RMS had to read, somehow equates to violence and intimidation in public. What a curious and strange world you live in ...!
RMS has certainly been strident in his views, but to my knowledge he has never used violence or indeed done anything outrageous to promote his advocacy. Challenging peoples' entrenched opinions through writing is not the same as intimidating people with violence or offensive physical acts.
He could have explained his views in a more polite manner, but he chose not to.
How was he being impolite? He stated very clearly that nobody deserved to die, but also succinctly gave his own thoughts about Jobs' role in advocating computing freedoms. A fair comment in the circumstances, I would have thought, and you can hardly accuse the man of slander -- iOS is a locked-down platform, and I think that's pretty inarguable. Hell, even the LA Times article from the submission makes the point that RMS's comments have merit.
Besides, the comments were on his personal blog -- it wasn't a press release. He wasn't going down to the funeral, tap-dancing on Jobs' pyre and shouting "Huzzah!" to the world. Why is it that death of a public figure equates to instant sainthood these days?
Do you really think Android would exist if there was no iOS?
Considering Google purchased Android in 2005, then yes, I suspect so. I also suspect that it would have looked pretty similar to what it does now. Android and iOS were the natural successors to PalmOS, itself a successor to the Newton which in turn succeeded the Psion Organiser from 1984. (Although Psion, of course, was developing all through the 90s, gave rise to the hugely successful Symbian OS and probably needs to be mentioned as a separate branch as well ...)
People seem to think that Jobs invented things out of thin air. The man had some great ideas and some not so great ideas, but I think his real talent was in using Apple's elite factor and mass marketing to make existing concepts appeal to the public. He popularised GUIs, mice, mp3 players and PDAs. But he didn't invent them or even substantially innovate them, and his talent for popularising went hand-in-hand with a desire for lock-down and control. He was certainly an important figure, and his particular spin on things helped to shape the way particular concepts evolved -- but really, a little bit of perspective would be helpful here.
Don't forget the number of phones that don't even HAVE a GPU. I love my intercept compared to the old blackberry I had but even with an 800mhz cpu there are times where I am painfully aware of the fact I'm rendering in software.
To be fair, most phones these days are using Qualcomm processors with built-in GPUs ... the good ones have at least an Adreno 205, but even the really budget phones have an Adreno 200 now (which is as good as what's in my Desire, although, really, that's not very good!)
Android phone hardware is getting pretty decent now; we just need the software to start taking full advantage of it. If only Google and Samsung would stop paying their respects to a dead white man and release ICS, things could start moving forward again. Gingerbread was the first decent release of Android, but there's still a lot of shortcomings that I'd like to see fixed in ICS.
And the Kindle Fire presold, sight unseen, over 250,000 units in the first five days of presales - on its way to an estimated 2.5 million units its first month.
That's quite impressive! Let's hope we can root the damn thing ...
The iPad is nice gear. But this race isn't over yet.
I think the problem is that tablets are both pricey and a bit pointless. If you want a tablet, unless you happen to work in a rather obscure area where they're actually useful, chances are you're either rich, bored or both -- i.e. the Apple crowd. The transformer's a damn nice tablet, but it's nice on the internals rather than the externals. It doesn't turn heads the way an iPad2 does as a tablet, or a Galaxy S II does as a phone.
I don't think Android has had it's "wow" tablet yet (although price-wise, Amazon's definitely giving it a shot ...)
You misunderstand how much more portable a tablet is compared to any traditional laptop, regardless of the format. The iPad goes from off to on in a few seconds. You can run presentations off of it for hours without a power source. For pure consumption of media or as a fancy drive that plugs into the projector, nothing beats the iPad. Nothing. And that's why businesses are adopting the iPad far faster than any iPhone.
Hmmm ... my netbook wakes from sleep in two seconds; I can leave it sleeping for days without draining the battery; and I get six hours of battery life from it. It's great for watching films on when traveling, and it even stands up by itself on a table. It's light enough to use one-handed.
Not quite as convenient as an iPad, perhaps, and a touchscreen would be useful at times ... but on the other hand, it's got a real keyboard, runs linux and all my work software, has a huge HDD and was cheaper to buy. Oh, and I can run Powerpoint presentations from it too, of course.
Tablets are this year's netbook.
Hey, don't knock netbooks -- they're are awesome things to travel with, small and lightand cheaper than a tablet to boot. Even better, they can run a real OS and you can actually do work on them, with nary an angry bird in sight. I managed to write a couple of academic papers (complete with complicated figures) on my netbook whilst backpacking around the world for five months.
Much, much more useful than a tablet!
As far as how the iPhone is doing overseas, Last quarter Apple sold about 21 million phones with around 6 million being activated in the US (according to the two carriers who carried iPhones at the time.
But the world >> US. And if you look at the stats (be it sales or web browser hits) Apple does substantially better in the US than elsewhere.
So if market share is so important, then why is HP -- the worlds largest PC manufacturer --- trying to get rid if their PC business?
Well, I didn't say it was important. All I'm saying is that if you want Apple to take over the world, their current strategy isn't working.
How is Apple getting "overrun" when it makes 2/3's of the world's mobile phone profit. Grosses 17x it's nearest competitor in app sales (see previous response), and makes more selling computers than anyone else in the world?
Again, see above. If making lots of money by selling fewer units at higher prices floats your boat, then by all means praise Apple. It's a great success capitalism-wise; it's probably not such a great success if you want to count popularity as one of your objectives.
How much "less" are you paying for your Android phone than the equivalent iPhone (if you're in the US)> The fact is, that the carrier is paying a higher subsidy for the iPhone and you're still paying the same amount for your Android as the equivalent iPhone and your monthly bill is the same.
I'm not in the US, so I can't comment on the situation there. I was also buying my phone outright. Nevertheless, in buying an HTC Desire a year ago I saved more than $300 compared to buying the iPhone 4 here in Australia, and more than $200 compared to buying the 3GS. I'd call that a win by any account.
I'd also guess that in comparing plans in the US, you're comparing the 4S with the Galaxy S2. However, I'd assume that you can get cheaper Android phones on cheaper plans over there? It'd be pretty crazy if you couldn't. Even on a plan here in Oz, the Galaxy S2 is substantially cheaper than an iPhone 4 (not S); and I can get a Nexus S on a plan cheaper than an iPhone 3GS.
Maybe Apple has prices that favour the US over other countries? Certainly they seem to be doing better over there than in the rest of the world.
And when you finally do decide to use those forbidden or more difficult to reach cereal boxes/bread, you'll learn from your earlier experience and really work to spread them out over a longer time than your original box.
... and will therefore never run out of cereal again??
Whichever way you look at it, that dude is going to go hungry for breakfast at some stage unless he starts investing in alternative breakfast sources soon ...
I keep forgetting who to credit for this quote, but it's not mine:
The stone age did not end for a sudden lack of stones. Likewise, the oil age will not end because we have run out of oil.
The person to credit is Sheikh Zaki Yamani, a former Saudi oil minister. That's fairly significant, don't you think?