The EU has stepped in to bring down cross-border voice and SMS prices. I think their problem is that they move too slowly. I suspect that they started looking at voice and SMS costs before the iPhone was released and data was hardly used. The market moved too quickly for the bureaucratic machine to adapt.
Minor nitpick: Apple doesn't have separate 'US' and 'International' iPhone SKUs, they use the same SKU worldwide. The supported frequencies are the same as those that you listed for the N8, minus the 1700 MHz one that T-Mobile uses for 3G in the US.
To be fair, replacing the dock connector with Micro USB would be a downgrade, as you'd lose some functionality such as the analogue line-out.
I read somewhere that Apple's solution, which is a solution acceptable to the EC, is going to be to bundle dock connector -> Micro USB adapters with their phones.
You're not necessarily wrong, but I don't think this is true for all BlackBerry handsets. The Bold 9700 we have at work charges fine using the (UK) charger that came with my iPhone 4.
Nokia have this problem though. Being physically plugged in isn't enough, it has to make some kind of connection with the device it is being charged from. If you take a Nokia phone that it switched off and charging over USB, and turn it on, it will actually disconnect and stop charging while it boots up.
Needless to say, there needs to be enough power in the battery for it to survive the booting procedure and re-establish the connection with the charging device, otherwise it will die. This has caught me out a few times on the N86 and E72.
You're an idiot. The US cannot agree to a UK request that categorically violates the US Constitution. Britain should know better than to ask for such an idiotic thing in the first place.
US Senators made a lot of idiotic requests to the Scottish and UK governments while investigating possible links between the release of Al Megrahi and BP. In doing so they exposed their ignorance of the Scottish legal system and constitutional reality in the UK. Idiotic requests between nations aren't new, and they aren't one-way.
I'm also reminded of Chinese protestations to the Norwegian government over the award of this year's Nobel Peace Prize. The idea that the Norwegian government didn't have control over the Nobel committee was entirely alien to the Chinese.
My problem with SGU was that it started with the premise of this population of people isolated and having to survive on their own, and then instantly killed it with the communication stones bringing them into regular contact with Earth. That, and SGU was meant to be a big break from the previous Stargate series', but that didn't last long either because for the season 1 finale they brought in the Lucian Alliance for a rather disastrous story arc.
Also, why is it suddenly fashionable to split seasons into two? SGU and Caprica both just stopped half way through their first seasons. I watched SGU thinking that it was just slow to get going, but being told that the next episode is six months away, without any sort of season finale type episode to prepare me for it, really killed my interest in the show. Same for Caprica.
This has nothing to do with the usage of their data being 'commercial' or otherwise (despite their rather bizarre assertion that a free Android app constitutes commercial usage). It has everything to do with National Rail maintaining a monopoly over data pertaining to a public service, so that they can make money out of it.
This isn't the first time that National Rail have killed apps like this. The Apple App Store used to be full of them, until National Rail had them pulled because they competed with their own app. At £4.99, it's one of the most overpriced apps in the store, but they get away with it because they had the competition removed from the store.
I think it's that way with everyone's first language.
True for me. Java is my first language, but I hadn't used it for a while as my recent work has been in Python and the Qt for Symbian brand of C++. However, I recently started working on a BlackBerry app (which uses an extension of J2ME) and I was astounded by how quickly I actually got things done, and how few time-consuming mistakes I made along the way.
That's not to say that it doesn't infuriate the hell out of me sometimes (I especially miss Qt's slots and signals), especially as J2ME is still stuck at Java's 1.4 source level.
Resolution independence has been 'coming soon' in OS X for years now. I'm pretty sure it was meant to be one of the features of Leopard, which was quietly dropped and still hasn't made it into Snow Leopard.
Apple are previewing the next version of OS X next week, and I won't be at all surprised if resolution independence is mentioned. I'll be very surprised, however, if it makes it into the final product.
It's all about the platform though, and the mobile phone market is only half the picture given that iOS also ships on iPods and iPads; both markets where Apple's competition is still playing catch-up.
iOS, with version 4, is finally at the stage where it's 'complete' (which is more than can be said for Windows Phone 7 at least until next year). What Apple need to do now is actually start to think, can we make this better? Otherwise, improvements in newer Android and Windows Phone 7 will eclipse iOS which will be stuck in a user interface rut that Apple are too reticent to fiddle with.
By the way, congratulations on your use of the word 'lose' instead of 'loose', even if it still wasn't the word you were looking for.
The N-Gage was beset by compromises. As a gaming device, it was underpowered and overcomplicated (twelve button controller anyone?). The screen was too small and the memory card slot on the first revision was underneath the battery. As a phone... well, it invented a new verb, 'to sidetalk'. And it was chasing a non-existent market. Java games existed on phones but they certainly weren't a selling point.
Today, the biggest selling category on Apple's App Store is the Games section. The only thing holding back games on iOS is the lack of physical controls that make some games frustrating. Sony can't compete with Nintendo in the dedicated portable gaming section, but they sure could compete with Apple if they wanted to.
Sony already has all the tools it needs to make a great crossover device. Its joint venture with Ericsson makes smartphones, and its Computer Entertainment section makes dedicated portable gaming devices. They even use a similar form factor - replacing the physical keyboard on the likes of the Xperia X2 with PlayStation controls should be trivial, and the result looks just like a PSP Go. Sony also has its own games developers and publishers, and good relations with third parties, which Nokia lacked.
The technology is there, the know-how is there, the relationships are there and the market is there to make this device good and make it work. All that Sony lacks, I suspect, is the will and the vision. Heads will have to be knocked together within Sony itself in order to get this out the door.
The Sony/Google thing is pretty much moot because Sony Ericsson already make Android phones.
The real question is, can Sony Ericsson (a joint venture) work with Sony Computer Entertainment (a separate Sony department) in order to make such a product work? I seriously doubt it. It involves merging the work of two completely separate streams of product development and discarding a lot of work where the two overlap, and everybody involved is going to get their knickers in a twist about it.
phantomcircuit pointed out that it was the US and not the UK that did this.
The UK tried something along the same lines - they tried to train seagulls on the Firth of Forth to recognise u-boat periscopes. The principle was that u-boats trying to sneak into the firth would be surrounded by a flock of seagulls, just like a fishing boat, and would be easier to spot.
That doesn't mean that Android sales in the UK didn't get a helping hand from the US networks. Smartphone platforms have a chicken-and-egg problem; customers need to know that there is a viable ecosystem of applications, and the people developing those applications need to know that there is a market for them.
What has happened, in my opinion, AT&T's iPhone exclusivity in the US has given Android a leg-up, which has provided a customer base for the Android Marketplace, which has made Android a more attractive proposition to customers worldwide.
I've got no idea how well Android phones sell in the UK either. I know a large number of people with iPhones and only three (maybe four) with Android phones, but again, this is nowhere near representative.
I'm a happy owner of a Nook. The only faults ebooks have right now is that even basic typesetting is almost entirely non-existent on them. Things that could be done automatically by the ereader -- things you don't realize you want until you don't have them, like paragraph-optimized justification, automatic hyphenation, preventing lone paragraph lines on page boundaries, hanging punctuation, and ligatures -- aren't there. Ebooks are displayed either with left-aligned text or with an obnoxiously-spacious justification.
My single biggest complaint about my Sony Reader is that they've put exactly zero effort into this. Sony officially moved away from their proprietary BBeB ebook format a while ago and adopted EPUB, but their EPUB implementation doesn't even support justified text. I've found myself using Calibre to convert EPUBs to BBeB format because, although lacking all the things you mention, it at least displays justified text.
Of course, this is only possible because I can strip the Adobe DRM that comes with most EPUB ebooks relatively easily.
What I've started doing now is buying Kindle ebooks, stripping the DRM and converting them straight to BBeB, simply because they're so much cheaper. It's rather ridiculous and I'm considering just getting rid of the Sony and buying one of the new Kindles.
I didn't want to say earlier because the person I was replying to hadn't seen the film, but it was this scene (spoilers) that Miyazaki disliked. It plays out differently in the manga, probably more true to the way he intended.
In my opinion, yes, far better (although you have to account for the fact that it was made in 1984 so it's not as slickly made as Spirited Away).
The Nausicaä anime still only covers a small part of the full story that you get with all 7 manga books though, and it does give the impression of not quite being finished. And there's *that* scene at the end that Miyazaki was never happy with.
It's worth putting up with the English dub for at least one viewing though, because Yupa is voiced by Patrick Stewart.
In my opinion Princess Mononoke is still the best Miyazaki film. It stands on its own two feet better than Nausicaä does.
Decent storage capacity now, but if a larger optical format comes along, then you have just built the successor to the N64.
That's assuming, of course, that games will continue to become more complex and require larger amounts of storage, which I'm not convinced about. I think we're already reaching a point where the return on some games doesn't justify the massive amounts of investment required to make it look good, so we might see an increase in less graphically demanding games that will fit into that kind of space.
I apologise for any confusion caused... I'm arguing for both sides here.
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The EU has stepped in to bring down cross-border voice and SMS prices. I think their problem is that they move too slowly. I suspect that they started looking at voice and SMS costs before the iPhone was released and data was hardly used. The market moved too quickly for the bureaucratic machine to adapt.
Minor nitpick: Apple doesn't have separate 'US' and 'International' iPhone SKUs, they use the same SKU worldwide. The supported frequencies are the same as those that you listed for the N8, minus the 1700 MHz one that T-Mobile uses for 3G in the US.
Or get a charger with a USB-A connector, and just carry different cables.
To be fair, replacing the dock connector with Micro USB would be a downgrade, as you'd lose some functionality such as the analogue line-out.
I read somewhere that Apple's solution, which is a solution acceptable to the EC, is going to be to bundle dock connector -> Micro USB adapters with their phones.
You're not necessarily wrong, but I don't think this is true for all BlackBerry handsets. The Bold 9700 we have at work charges fine using the (UK) charger that came with my iPhone 4.
Nokia have this problem though. Being physically plugged in isn't enough, it has to make some kind of connection with the device it is being charged from. If you take a Nokia phone that it switched off and charging over USB, and turn it on, it will actually disconnect and stop charging while it boots up.
Needless to say, there needs to be enough power in the battery for it to survive the booting procedure and re-establish the connection with the charging device, otherwise it will die. This has caught me out a few times on the N86 and E72.
Fringe did that this week. Colour me unimpressed. But it gets a pass because it is all kinds of awesome.
US Senators made a lot of idiotic requests to the Scottish and UK governments while investigating possible links between the release of Al Megrahi and BP. In doing so they exposed their ignorance of the Scottish legal system and constitutional reality in the UK. Idiotic requests between nations aren't new, and they aren't one-way.
I'm also reminded of Chinese protestations to the Norwegian government over the award of this year's Nobel Peace Prize. The idea that the Norwegian government didn't have control over the Nobel committee was entirely alien to the Chinese.
My problem with SGU was that it started with the premise of this population of people isolated and having to survive on their own, and then instantly killed it with the communication stones bringing them into regular contact with Earth. That, and SGU was meant to be a big break from the previous Stargate series', but that didn't last long either because for the season 1 finale they brought in the Lucian Alliance for a rather disastrous story arc.
Also, why is it suddenly fashionable to split seasons into two? SGU and Caprica both just stopped half way through their first seasons. I watched SGU thinking that it was just slow to get going, but being told that the next episode is six months away, without any sort of season finale type episode to prepare me for it, really killed my interest in the show. Same for Caprica.
This has nothing to do with the usage of their data being 'commercial' or otherwise (despite their rather bizarre assertion that a free Android app constitutes commercial usage). It has everything to do with National Rail maintaining a monopoly over data pertaining to a public service, so that they can make money out of it.
This isn't the first time that National Rail have killed apps like this. The Apple App Store used to be full of them, until National Rail had them pulled because they competed with their own app. At £4.99, it's one of the most overpriced apps in the store, but they get away with it because they had the competition removed from the store.
No, because that would imply that women are first class citizens.
True for me. Java is my first language, but I hadn't used it for a while as my recent work has been in Python and the Qt for Symbian brand of C++. However, I recently started working on a BlackBerry app (which uses an extension of J2ME) and I was astounded by how quickly I actually got things done, and how few time-consuming mistakes I made along the way.
That's not to say that it doesn't infuriate the hell out of me sometimes (I especially miss Qt's slots and signals), especially as J2ME is still stuck at Java's 1.4 source level.
Resolution independence has been 'coming soon' in OS X for years now. I'm pretty sure it was meant to be one of the features of Leopard, which was quietly dropped and still hasn't made it into Snow Leopard.
Apple are previewing the next version of OS X next week, and I won't be at all surprised if resolution independence is mentioned. I'll be very surprised, however, if it makes it into the final product.
I like the idea that you think a church in a tiny village in rural England a) has security, and b) has armed security.
It's all about the platform though, and the mobile phone market is only half the picture given that iOS also ships on iPods and iPads; both markets where Apple's competition is still playing catch-up.
iOS, with version 4, is finally at the stage where it's 'complete' (which is more than can be said for Windows Phone 7 at least until next year). What Apple need to do now is actually start to think, can we make this better? Otherwise, improvements in newer Android and Windows Phone 7 will eclipse iOS which will be stuck in a user interface rut that Apple are too reticent to fiddle with.
By the way, congratulations on your use of the word 'lose' instead of 'loose', even if it still wasn't the word you were looking for.
The N-Gage was beset by compromises. As a gaming device, it was underpowered and overcomplicated (twelve button controller anyone?). The screen was too small and the memory card slot on the first revision was underneath the battery. As a phone... well, it invented a new verb, 'to sidetalk'. And it was chasing a non-existent market. Java games existed on phones but they certainly weren't a selling point.
Today, the biggest selling category on Apple's App Store is the Games section. The only thing holding back games on iOS is the lack of physical controls that make some games frustrating. Sony can't compete with Nintendo in the dedicated portable gaming section, but they sure could compete with Apple if they wanted to.
Sony already has all the tools it needs to make a great crossover device. Its joint venture with Ericsson makes smartphones, and its Computer Entertainment section makes dedicated portable gaming devices. They even use a similar form factor - replacing the physical keyboard on the likes of the Xperia X2 with PlayStation controls should be trivial, and the result looks just like a PSP Go. Sony also has its own games developers and publishers, and good relations with third parties, which Nokia lacked.
The technology is there, the know-how is there, the relationships are there and the market is there to make this device good and make it work. All that Sony lacks, I suspect, is the will and the vision. Heads will have to be knocked together within Sony itself in order to get this out the door.
The Sony/Google thing is pretty much moot because Sony Ericsson already make Android phones.
The real question is, can Sony Ericsson (a joint venture) work with Sony Computer Entertainment (a separate Sony department) in order to make such a product work? I seriously doubt it. It involves merging the work of two completely separate streams of product development and discarding a lot of work where the two overlap, and everybody involved is going to get their knickers in a twist about it.
Oh the irony.
phantomcircuit pointed out that it was the US and not the UK that did this.
The UK tried something along the same lines - they tried to train seagulls on the Firth of Forth to recognise u-boat periscopes. The principle was that u-boats trying to sneak into the firth would be surrounded by a flock of seagulls, just like a fishing boat, and would be easier to spot.
It didn't work.
Obligatory.
That doesn't mean that Android sales in the UK didn't get a helping hand from the US networks. Smartphone platforms have a chicken-and-egg problem; customers need to know that there is a viable ecosystem of applications, and the people developing those applications need to know that there is a market for them.
What has happened, in my opinion, AT&T's iPhone exclusivity in the US has given Android a leg-up, which has provided a customer base for the Android Marketplace, which has made Android a more attractive proposition to customers worldwide.
I've got no idea how well Android phones sell in the UK either. I know a large number of people with iPhones and only three (maybe four) with Android phones, but again, this is nowhere near representative.
Why would Sweden call for help?
My single biggest complaint about my Sony Reader is that they've put exactly zero effort into this. Sony officially moved away from their proprietary BBeB ebook format a while ago and adopted EPUB, but their EPUB implementation doesn't even support justified text. I've found myself using Calibre to convert EPUBs to BBeB format because, although lacking all the things you mention, it at least displays justified text.
Of course, this is only possible because I can strip the Adobe DRM that comes with most EPUB ebooks relatively easily.
What I've started doing now is buying Kindle ebooks, stripping the DRM and converting them straight to BBeB, simply because they're so much cheaper. It's rather ridiculous and I'm considering just getting rid of the Sony and buying one of the new Kindles.
I didn't want to say earlier because the person I was replying to hadn't seen the film, but it was this scene (spoilers) that Miyazaki disliked. It plays out differently in the manga, probably more true to the way he intended.
In my opinion, yes, far better (although you have to account for the fact that it was made in 1984 so it's not as slickly made as Spirited Away).
The Nausicaä anime still only covers a small part of the full story that you get with all 7 manga books though, and it does give the impression of not quite being finished. And there's *that* scene at the end that Miyazaki was never happy with.
It's worth putting up with the English dub for at least one viewing though, because Yupa is voiced by Patrick Stewart.
In my opinion Princess Mononoke is still the best Miyazaki film. It stands on its own two feet better than Nausicaä does.
Decent storage capacity now, but if a larger optical format comes along, then you have just built the successor to the N64.
That's assuming, of course, that games will continue to become more complex and require larger amounts of storage, which I'm not convinced about. I think we're already reaching a point where the return on some games doesn't justify the massive amounts of investment required to make it look good, so we might see an increase in less graphically demanding games that will fit into that kind of space.
I apologise for any confusion caused... I'm arguing for both sides here.