>I'm looking at the Symbian phones, particularly from Nokia, myself.
some people by all accounts have terrible trouble with them. i have heard of symbian devices that crash a lot when the phone companies preload them with crappy flaky software. so far i have had a 3650, n70, e61, e61i and now the e71 (swapping when a newer shinier device caught my eye). the 3650 crashed a bit but once i learned to disable the extra preloaded software it was fine.
>I used to have a Psion Series 5mx and I still miss it.
had the 5mx, 5, 3c and the 3a myself. it's only in the last year that the symbian platform as sold over the counter with no extra paid for software replaces the psion. handles word and excel files ok. web. email. programming language python is a free download. only took 10 years to catch up to the psion 5.
if i were ms i wouldn't be boasting about windows mobile. the development forums have quite a few people still waiting for ms to fix bugs that have existed in winmobile for quite a while.
in the states the iphone is the big thing! in europe not so much. i've only seen one in use on the streets of dublin ireland.
when it was announced i knew about 10-15 people who would have jumped to the platform instantly if it had of been perceived to be better than what they currently used. nobody jumped ship. it's nice but quite lacking. for me i shoot a lot of video in hardware support to send back to manufacturers showing their hardware failing. the iphone doesn't do this so it's no good to me. i do a lot of typing on the e71 so i prefer a keyboard. i had a nokia 770 and tried the touch type on that and it never felt right. i'm sure the iphone variant is better but i prefer buttons to tapping on onscreen keyboards.
that's not to say that the next version or 2-3 generations down the line it won't become the best phone ever but right now... meh.
those 10-15 people are now looking towards android to see what they come out with in the next few months. of course if i did jump to an android device i would loose the nokia battery. there is no better battery on the planet than a nokia battery. now if nokia were to release an android device...
i always thought they did bugger all. have yet to see one go a day with out a crash/needing a recharge after 60 minutes away from a power supply.
recently added to the list of of it looked cool but didn't last 5 minutes with the guy who was going to buy one. htc touch diamond. reason for giving up on it. he fired it up. went to the browser. took 3-4 clicks before it launched for some reason. it connected to google using our wifi. all well and good. till he tried to type in a url. took 3 attempts and the device erased his first 2 when he switched to symbols to get the . in.com didn't even bother at that point to see if lasted with out a crash. it looked great in demos but was sluggish and jerky in use. better than previous versions but still wouldn't touch/trust it.
wouldn't touch a iphone myself either. too expensive and i prefer a keyboard. have a nice new shiny nokia e71 that does everything that i want. however to each their own. different folks want very different things from portable devices.
On 30 September three workers were preparing a small batch of fuel for the JOYO experimental fast breeder reactor, using uranium enriched to 18.8% U-235. It was JCO's first batch of fuel for that reactor in three years, and no proper qualification and training requirements had been established to prepare those workers for the job. They had previously used this procedure many times with much lower-enriched uranium - less than 5%, and had no understanding of the criticality implications of 18.8% enrichment. At around 10:35, when the volume of solution in the precipitation tank reached about 40 litres, containing about 16 kg U, a critical mass was reached.
insufficiently trained staff mixing nuclear mmaterials. 2 died, but hey they probably saved a buck.
i remember them. would have loved one when they came out but too poor:-( just a little checking and i can see that they are still been sold and maintained. not bad for a 20 year old piece of hardware.
i got one of these for a friend through an end of line sale. at a time when laptops cost way over £1000 she was able to work remotely as she did a lot of typing for a publishing company.
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! don't do it!" "Why shouldn't I?" he said. I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!" He said, "Like what?" I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?" He said, "Religious." I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?" He said, "Christian." I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?" He said, "Baptist!" I said,"Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?" He said, "Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?" He said,"Reformed Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off. -- Emo Phillips
Poverty in the United States is cyclical in nature with roughly 12% to 15% living below the federal poverty line at any given point in time, and roughly 40% falling below the poverty line at some time within a 10 year time span.
if you are living below the poverty line then a computer and the increasingly large amount of power it uses are a unavailable luxury.
he lives in wexford. rural area in a valley with no broadband or wifi coverage. they've been promised broadband sometime in the next 2 years maybe. satellite is out of his price range. he had a pc and with dialup he was barely getting 32kbps. when ever he connected to the web the antivirus would then try and pull down a few megs of updates which took 10-15 minutes. this was usually cancelled as they wanted the web to go faster leaving the system open for viruses. i went there every 2-3 months to fix the system.
i finally talked him into getting a mac mini. added a modem and give him updates on cd every few months. now all his bandwidth as little of it as there is is now used for web and email. the system is secure and i go down there about once a year now just to check on the system.
i'm sure linux can do the same. it is just windows that needs daily anti virus downloads that will hog your limited bandwidth. it is possible to use windows without antivirus but not for non technical person and his kids.
showing him all the mobile news web sites and rss feeds also allows him to access the web with out having to suck down 500k web pages for a list of headlines.
the macs friendlyness has been a real sucess for my brother. he now convincing his mates to switch over. recently when his printer died he bought and installed a new one without calling me. he never managed that with any version of windows.
written in basic on a compucorp in the late 70s or early 80s and still running in libraries in vb6 programs are some date functions. the code may have been lifted from a mini computer in the 60s but the oldest person in our company isn't sure as it was before his time. transfered to quickbasic 4, qbx 7 all the vb variations for windows. sure we could learn the inbuilt functions for whatever basic version we were using but we already had a working library that was tested so...
> Who is there first is interesting, but who is at least moderately successful first is what is important - and Palm was both that company, and the first company to be wildly successful in that space.
i'd still say that psion were moderately successful. maybe not in the states but every where else they did ok.
14.6 million smartphone sales in the first quarter of this year for symbian the successor to epoc isn't too shabby. its only the strange us phone market that seems immune to their charm.
> Too bad about that whole lead-squandering thing.
as a small british company they never had the pockets to fight microsoft who began targetting them around the time of the psion 5 by hiring key staff and buying out software they relied on. ultimately they created symbian to give their technology a push and since nokia took it over it has done quite well.
i like palm os. had a iiix, iiic, m125 and palm e. also had a visor neo which i thought was the best of them all. the treo is nice but is really showing it's age. i was one of the very few people i think who last year was looking forward to the foleo. if it had of been released i would have bought it over the eee pc. 10 hour battery life would have been the decider even if it were twice the price.
one thing the palm has and no other device has even been close to emulating is its syncing ability. the palm sync just worked. the nokia syncs fine with macos but is a bit of a resource hog on windows. the pocketpc platform is a disaster at syncing. every week at work i have to coax some device into talking with its desktop again.
i think one thing that is interesting is that both of these companies nokia (770 and 810) and palm (foleo was to run linux) are looking at linux for the future. just hope they keep the good parts of their current os/ui if/when they do make that move.
> The market for handheld computers was created by Palm Computing.
not even close. psion was operational way before palm were thought off (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Organiser). i find it amusing that their last stab at the portable market was called the netbook. during the 90s every accountant, architect worth their salt had one in the uk and ireland.
the nokia symbian os is the current iteration of their epoc os. tried the nokia 770 myself but it didn't do much that my nokia e61i didn't. was in hospital for 3 weeks recently and was loaned a nokia 810. still used my e61i for web and email as it was more comfortable for me. YMMV
bought a eee pc simply for handling the million pdfs that i have to work with. with a four hour commute it is the perfect laptop. small and sturdy. when i have the space for it i use the eee when i don't i use the nokia. one major advantage of the nokia is battery life. the advantage of the eee is screen size.
> 1) Commuters drag their phone with them everywhere.
damn right. i don't leave home without my nokia e61i.
> 2) Commuters stuck on public transport for over three hours a day crave portable entertainment.
4 hours a day myself. i also drag my ipod 150gb. this is loaded with about 40 movies, umpteen hours of music and 3-4 tv series such as fr. ted, it crowd, drew carey.
> 3) Sell Commuters entertainment they can watch on a device they're already carrying.
good idea. however as a commuter you are moving traffic permitting. what will this do when you are using a high bandwidth device trying to suck down a tv show? along the motorways and railways here in ireland the phone companies have placed masts so as to allow mobile communications for those on the move. even allowing for these masts there are black spots were signal will drop to almost zero so that voice calls are dropped. you'll have to hope that your phone can switch perfectly between masts and not lose your tv show which is trying to suck down a huge amount of data.
i was recently in hospital for 3 weeks and it was my nokia that kept me entertained with web and email. even in a static location with a good 3g signal the line was dropped at regular intervals. usually at certain times when others would have been using it.
> 4) Who cares if we profit from this? We're a monopoly. We'll find another way to screw consumers if this fails.
they offered tv on mobiles here in ireland. don't know anybody who tried it myself. for most the small size of the screen makes it too akward to watch sports (were did the ball go?). the other channels offered were of little interest. i would have watched the discovery channel myself but the cost of data was too expensive. at the moment for somebody on prepay who can't get a contract i'm looking at 99c for 50mb.
i prefer his third law 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'
the sci fi show stargate seems to be based on it. loved that they referred to him in show when mentioning how to create a sun.
it's a great loss but he's left behind so many books and fired the imagination of so many people that i can only ask the question are there writers writing today who will have such an impact?
> First of all, all these little laptops are really cute
bullshit! it is really practical. as somebody who travels for about 4 hours every day on public transport i used to carry a 15" vaio laptop. even when i got that i was looking for a smaller laptop. over the 2 years i carried that laptop even though it was carefully packed and surrounded by padding the case was cracked and the harddrive killed by accidents while travelling by bus. even on the mac forums you will find people who want the old 12 inch macbook rather than the current 13 inch version. smaller is better if using public transport/bike/foot.
> you also buy computers more powerful than what you need because you MIGHT want to want decent quality video clips. You might want to do some video and audio editing,
i have never needed to edit audio or video. not even at home on my desktop. just something i have never needed to do.
> you MIGHT want to keep more than 8-16gb's worth of data on your computer, and
i can plug in my 150gb ipod as an external hd no probs. 32gb sdhc cards are available so it's only a matter of time i reckon before 64gb cards will be available. that's up there with the mac air.
> you MIGHT want to use the plethora of programs/ features that are found on XP that simply don't work that well or at all in Linux.
i could install xp on to the eee pc but as it already has firefox, thunderbird and open office 90% of what i need on the road are already there in an os that boots from cold in 25 seconds. a customer who saw my eee pc on wednesday who does powerpoint presentations on the road constantly saw that it displayed his powerpoint files and was half the size and 1/3 the weight and as he uses over head projection he can use the vga port no problems. he was in awe with the size of the power brick which was 1/4 than the usual laptop behemoth.
> I don't know about you, but surfing the internet on a 8" screen with a 800 x 480 resolution screen sounds like a nightmare, especially if you are used to even an SXGA. I personally think these are cute little gimmicks, but only time will tell for sure.
well i also surf on the 3" screen on my nokia e61i with no problems so i reckon by now that i'm used to using small screens (i've been using portable devices since the psion series 3a in 94).
for me the major decider in getting the eee pc was that i could view the 1000s of pdfs i need on a portable device with out having to scroll left and right to see a single line. that it does beautifully.
i would have gotten a olpc for the battery life and reader mode but they are not available in ireland.
i'm just glad that somebody is catering for this market.
i wouldn't have thought it needed to be repressed.
* in the us the iphone is considered the state of the art. * in europe iphones sales haven't been great by all accounts. a few folk i know who were initially interested decided not to go for the iphone as it was feature light. shoot video, 3g etc plus a terrible contract. * i always thought asia was way ahead of both asia and europe in terms of mobile capability so i never would have thought it would have made a dent there. (i do see the asian tourists on public transport with some seriously cool devices.)
so my question is is it a prestige device in china were even a tiny precentage of the population equals millions of iphones or is the iphone touch interface enough of a reason to lose capabilities that other 'superior' phones have?
it also warns against taking the numbers as verbatim but it is using 5 sources. this is a problem with browser market share. how can you tell a good survey? how can you correct for browsers reporting as something else?
the numbers from this site aren't much different than the other survey. what do you work at? how often do you see ie6? hell i've seen ie4 and ie5 in the past month on old servers. within the last 18 months i've seen win3.1 on a laptop. those are exceptions but ie6 is still very very common.
at my job it is split about 90% ie6 v 10% ie7 for internet explorer users. thankfully the number of ie users is dropping as more switch to firefox. ie7 has speeded up that switch as many hate the interface.
but to be on topic firefox has a serious bug. i expect it will be patched in a day or so. firefox is good at that.
> Microsoft products are getting better.
only because they have serious competition from firefox, apache etc.
i too have an eee. great little unit. however asus seem to have configured it by default to write out word docs (.doc) and not oo (.odt) files. so as good as open office is people still want or more importantly are perceived as wanting.doc.
sure a simple menu option will change that but how many people will know how to do that or that there is even a difference?
Slashdot Mirror
>I'm looking at the Symbian phones, particularly from Nokia, myself.
some people by all accounts have terrible trouble with them. i have heard of symbian devices that crash a lot when the phone companies preload them with crappy flaky software. so far i have had a 3650, n70, e61, e61i and now the e71 (swapping when a newer shinier device caught my eye). the 3650 crashed a bit but once i learned to disable the extra preloaded software it was fine.
>I used to have a Psion Series 5mx and I still miss it.
had the 5mx, 5, 3c and the 3a myself. it's only in the last year that the symbian platform as sold over the counter with no extra paid for software replaces the psion. handles word and excel files ok. web. email. programming language python is a free download. only took 10 years to catch up to the psion 5.
if i were ms i wouldn't be boasting about windows mobile. the development forums have quite a few people still waiting for ms to fix bugs that have existed in winmobile for quite a while.
in the states the iphone is the big thing! in europe not so much. i've only seen one in use on the streets of dublin ireland.
when it was announced i knew about 10-15 people who would have jumped to the platform instantly if it had of been perceived to be better than what they currently used. nobody jumped ship. it's nice but quite lacking. for me i shoot a lot of video in hardware support to send back to manufacturers showing their hardware failing. the iphone doesn't do this so it's no good to me. i do a lot of typing on the e71 so i prefer a keyboard. i had a nokia 770 and tried the touch type on that and it never felt right. i'm sure the iphone variant is better but i prefer buttons to tapping on onscreen keyboards.
that's not to say that the next version or 2-3 generations down the line it won't become the best phone ever but right now... meh.
those 10-15 people are now looking towards android to see what they come out with in the next few months. of course if i did jump to an android device i would loose the nokia battery. there is no better battery on the planet than a nokia battery. now if nokia were to release an android device...
>Windows Mobile phones get shit done
i always thought they did bugger all. have yet to see one go a day with out a crash/needing a recharge after 60 minutes away from a power supply.
recently added to the list of of it looked cool but didn't last 5 minutes with the guy who was going to buy one. htc touch diamond. reason for giving up on it. he fired it up. went to the browser. took 3-4 clicks before it launched for some reason. it connected to google using our wifi. all well and good. till he tried to type in a url. took 3 attempts and the device erased his first 2 when he switched to symbols to get the . in .com didn't even bother at that point to see if lasted with out a crash. it looked great in demos but was sluggish and jerky in use. better than previous versions but still wouldn't touch/trust it.
wouldn't touch a iphone myself either. too expensive and i prefer a keyboard. have a nice new shiny nokia e71 that does everything that i want. however to each their own. different folks want very different things from portable devices.
because they never cut corners in japan?
http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf37.html
On 30 September three workers were preparing a small batch of fuel for the JOYO experimental fast breeder reactor, using uranium enriched to 18.8% U-235. It was JCO's first batch of fuel for that reactor in three years, and no proper qualification and training requirements had been established to prepare those workers for the job. They had previously used this procedure many times with much lower-enriched uranium - less than 5%, and had no understanding of the criticality implications of 18.8% enrichment. At around 10:35, when the volume of solution in the precipitation tank reached about 40 litres, containing about 16 kg U, a critical mass was reached.
insufficiently trained staff mixing nuclear mmaterials. 2 died, but hey they probably saved a buck.
and when you piss them of by out sourcing then sometimes they may seek revenge.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/01/outsourcing_porn/
homeless people don't have any way of paying the money that the riaa want.
if however they had a law were you could legally harvest their organs i wouldn't put it past these vultures.
i remember them. would have loved one when they came out but too poor :-( just a little checking and i can see that they are still been sold and maintained. not bad for a 20 year old piece of hardware.
http://www.rwapsoftware.co.uk/z88.html
there was also the amstrad nc100 launched in 92.
http://www.ncus.org.uk/intro.htm
i got one of these for a friend through an end of line sale. at a time when laptops cost way over £1000 she was able to work remotely as she did a lot of typing for a publishing company.
best described by emo phillips
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! don't do it!" "Why shouldn't I?" he said. I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!" He said, "Like what?" I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?" He said, "Religious." I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?" He said, "Christian." I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?" He said, "Baptist!" I said,"Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?" He said, "Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?" He said,"Reformed Baptist church of god!" I said, "Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off. -- Emo Phillips
from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
Poverty in the United States is cyclical in nature with roughly 12% to 15% living below the federal poverty line at any given point in time, and roughly 40% falling below the poverty line at some time within a 10 year time span.
if you are living below the poverty line then a computer and the increasingly large amount of power it uses are a unavailable luxury.
he lives in wexford. rural area in a valley with no broadband or wifi coverage. they've been promised broadband sometime in the next 2 years maybe. satellite is out of his price range. he had a pc and with dialup he was barely getting 32kbps. when ever he connected to the web the antivirus would then try and pull down a few megs of updates which took 10-15 minutes. this was usually cancelled as they wanted the web to go faster leaving the system open for viruses. i went there every 2-3 months to fix the system.
i finally talked him into getting a mac mini. added a modem and give him updates on cd every few months. now all his bandwidth as little of it as there is is now used for web and email. the system is secure and i go down there about once a year now just to check on the system.
i'm sure linux can do the same. it is just windows that needs daily anti virus downloads that will hog your limited bandwidth. it is possible to use windows without antivirus but not for non technical person and his kids.
showing him all the mobile news web sites and rss feeds also allows him to access the web with out having to suck down 500k web pages for a list of headlines.
the macs friendlyness has been a real sucess for my brother. he now convincing his mates to switch over. recently when his printer died he bought and installed a new one without calling me. he never managed that with any version of windows.
written in basic on a compucorp in the late 70s or early 80s and still running in libraries in vb6 programs are some date functions. the code may have been lifted from a mini computer in the 60s but the oldest person in our company isn't sure as it was before his time. transfered to quickbasic 4, qbx 7 all the vb variations for windows. sure we could learn the inbuilt functions for whatever basic version we were using but we already had a working library that was tested so...
> Who is there first is interesting, but who is at least moderately successful first is what is important - and Palm was both that company, and the first company to be wildly successful in that space.
i'd still say that psion were moderately successful. maybe not in the states but every where else they did ok.
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/7100_Nokia_in_Quarter_1_2008.php
14.6 million smartphone sales in the first quarter of this year for symbian the successor to epoc isn't too shabby. its only the strange us phone market that seems immune to their charm.
> Too bad about that whole lead-squandering thing.
as a small british company they never had the pockets to fight microsoft who began targetting them around the time of the psion 5 by hiring key staff and buying out software they relied on. ultimately they created symbian to give their technology a push and since nokia took it over it has done quite well.
i like palm os. had a iiix, iiic, m125 and palm e. also had a visor neo which i thought was the best of them all. the treo is nice but is really showing it's age. i was one of the very few people i think who last year was looking forward to the foleo. if it had of been released i would have bought it over the eee pc. 10 hour battery life would have been the decider even if it were twice the price.
one thing the palm has and no other device has even been close to emulating is its syncing ability. the palm sync just worked. the nokia syncs fine with macos but is a bit of a resource hog on windows. the pocketpc platform is a disaster at syncing. every week at work i have to coax some device into talking with its desktop again.
i think one thing that is interesting is that both of these companies nokia (770 and 810) and palm (foleo was to run linux) are looking at linux for the future. just hope they keep the good parts of their current os/ui if/when they do make that move.
> The market for handheld computers was created by Palm Computing.
not even close. psion was operational way before palm were thought off (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Organiser). i find it amusing that their last stab at the portable market was called the netbook. during the 90s every accountant, architect worth their salt had one in the uk and ireland.
the nokia symbian os is the current iteration of their epoc os. tried the nokia 770 myself but it didn't do much that my nokia e61i didn't. was in hospital for 3 weeks recently and was loaned a nokia 810. still used my e61i for web and email as it was more comfortable for me. YMMV
bought a eee pc simply for handling the million pdfs that i have to work with. with a four hour commute it is the perfect laptop. small and sturdy. when i have the space for it i use the eee when i don't i use the nokia. one major advantage of the nokia is battery life. the advantage of the eee is screen size.
> 1) Commuters drag their phone with them everywhere.
damn right. i don't leave home without my nokia e61i.
> 2) Commuters stuck on public transport for over three hours a day crave portable entertainment.
4 hours a day myself. i also drag my ipod 150gb. this is loaded with about 40 movies, umpteen hours of music and 3-4 tv series such as fr. ted, it crowd, drew carey.
> 3) Sell Commuters entertainment they can watch on a device they're already carrying.
good idea. however as a commuter you are moving traffic permitting. what will this do when you are using a high bandwidth device trying to suck down a tv show? along the motorways and railways here in ireland the phone companies have placed masts so as to allow mobile communications for those on the move. even allowing for these masts there are black spots were signal will drop to almost zero so that voice calls are dropped. you'll have to hope that your phone can switch perfectly between masts and not lose your tv show which is trying to suck down a huge amount of data.
i was recently in hospital for 3 weeks and it was my nokia that kept me entertained with web and email. even in a static location with a good 3g signal the line was dropped at regular intervals. usually at certain times when others would have been using it.
> 4) Who cares if we profit from this? We're a monopoly. We'll find another way to screw consumers if this fails.
they offered tv on mobiles here in ireland. don't know anybody who tried it myself. for most the small size of the screen makes it too akward to watch sports (were did the ball go?). the other channels offered were of little interest. i would have watched the discovery channel myself but the cost of data was too expensive. at the moment for somebody on prepay who can't get a contract i'm looking at 99c for 50mb.
they should try and get their hands on the uk 'bugger off' drone
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/26/phoenix_says_goodbye/
if only so future generations can learn how not to make a drone.
with the inaccuracy of gps how can i be sure i'm dancing on the right grave? wouldn't want to disrespect the wrong grave.
i prefer his third law 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'
the sci fi show stargate seems to be based on it. loved that they referred to him in show when mentioning how to create a sun.
it's a great loss but he's left behind so many books and fired the imagination of so many people that i can only ask the question are there writers writing today who will have such an impact?
> First of all, all these little laptops are really cute
bullshit! it is really practical. as somebody who travels for about 4 hours every day on public transport i used to carry a 15" vaio laptop. even when i got that i was looking for a smaller laptop. over the 2 years i carried that laptop even though it was carefully packed and surrounded by padding the case was cracked and the harddrive killed by accidents while travelling by bus. even on the mac forums you will find people who want the old 12 inch macbook rather than the current 13 inch version. smaller is better if using public transport/bike/foot.
> you also buy computers more powerful than what you need because you MIGHT want to want decent quality video clips. You might want to do some video and audio editing,
i have never needed to edit audio or video. not even at home on my desktop. just something i have never needed to do.
> you MIGHT want to keep more than 8-16gb's worth of data on your computer, and
i can plug in my 150gb ipod as an external hd no probs. 32gb sdhc cards are available so it's only a matter of time i reckon before 64gb cards will be available. that's up there with the mac air.
> you MIGHT want to use the plethora of programs/ features that are found on XP that simply don't work that well or at all in Linux.
i could install xp on to the eee pc but as it already has firefox, thunderbird and open office 90% of what i need on the road are already there in an os that boots from cold in 25 seconds. a customer who saw my eee pc on wednesday who does powerpoint presentations on the road constantly saw that it displayed his powerpoint files and was half the size and 1/3 the weight and as he uses over head projection he can use the vga port no problems. he was in awe with the size of the power brick which was 1/4 than the usual laptop behemoth.
> I don't know about you, but surfing the internet on a 8" screen with a 800 x 480 resolution screen sounds like a nightmare, especially if you are used to even an SXGA. I personally think these are cute little gimmicks, but only time will tell for sure.
well i also surf on the 3" screen on my nokia e61i with no problems so i reckon by now that i'm used to using small screens (i've been using portable devices since the psion series 3a in 94).
for me the major decider in getting the eee pc was that i could view the 1000s of pdfs i need on a portable device with out having to scroll left and right to see a single line. that it does beautifully.
i would have gotten a olpc for the battery life and reader mode but they are not available in ireland.
i'm just glad that somebody is catering for this market.
> Only an idiot would take their word on issues like this
you've just described 95% of management. +/-10% margin of error.
i wouldn't have thought it needed to be repressed.
* in the us the iphone is considered the state of the art.
* in europe iphones sales haven't been great by all accounts. a few folk i know who were initially interested decided not to go for the iphone as it was feature light. shoot video, 3g etc plus a terrible contract.
* i always thought asia was way ahead of both asia and europe in terms of mobile capability so i never would have thought it would have made a dent there. (i do see the asian tourists on public transport with some seriously cool devices.)
so my question is is it a prestige device in china were even a tiny precentage of the population equals millions of iphones or is the iphone touch interface enough of a reason to lose capabilities that other 'superior' phones have?
is that the symbol for this story is a crown. or would that be goldy?
no, it looks like you have to install silver light shite. that's way too expensive for my tastes.
fair enough, how about a different survey.
http://upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
it also warns against taking the numbers as verbatim but it is using 5 sources. this is a problem with browser market share. how can you tell a good survey? how can you correct for browsers reporting as something else?
the numbers from this site aren't much different than the other survey. what do you work at? how often do you see ie6? hell i've seen ie4 and ie5 in the past month on old servers. within the last 18 months i've seen win3.1 on a laptop. those are exceptions but ie6 is still very very common.
> Everyone knows IE6 was horrible. I'm running IE7 under protected mode. If you're going to talk shit, at least talk shit about current software.
well in their defence more people still use ie6. so they are talking about current software.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
at my job it is split about 90% ie6 v 10% ie7 for internet explorer users. thankfully the number of ie users is dropping as more switch to firefox. ie7 has speeded up that switch as many hate the interface.
but to be on topic firefox has a serious bug. i expect it will be patched in a day or so. firefox is good at that.
> Microsoft products are getting better.
only because they have serious competition from firefox, apache etc.
> Deal with it. Quit living in the past.
i don't live in the past i use linux and mac osx.
yeah they'd never prosecute an eu corporation now would they?
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/012407-eu-fines-siemens-for-role.html
i too have an eee. great little unit. however asus seem to have configured it by default to write out word docs (.doc) and not oo (.odt) files. so as good as open office is people still want or more importantly are perceived as wanting .doc.
sure a simple menu option will change that but how many people will know how to do that or that there is even a difference?