Luckily, without metal body. I really don't get the concept. Metal is cold, to the subjective touch at least; especially problematic with something portable.
Had a mostly metal mobile phone for some time, it was unbearable for at least half of the year.
But that's again trying a bit to define what we're looking at in a way which results in a very narrow view.
How many years do we hear "symbian is dying" while it consistently ships most units and gains most sales, in number of handsets, year after year? ("percentage of growth" might be deceiving when one player is much closer to the absolute limit of "number of all mobile phones sold" than the rest) Oh, "but they aren't used how I say they should be!"? What?...
It won't matter much anyway when the smarthphones will settle again on some common functionality (on which "feature phones" are settling too, BTW, being used in a smart way; blurring the lines even more). Look what happened with desktop. Browser (covers games, too...), audio/video/photo management, IM, maybe some social networking app in the tray, office; people don't use custom UI for every webpage, custom UI for every radio station, custom UI for every audiobook, custom UI for every e-book - things which dominate some appstores...
(and seriously, Symbian phones seem very locked, out of all other choices? Claims of incompatibility also seem overstated to me, in comparison; not to mention how many segments Nokia continuously covers)
Don't forget to mention the projections from, IIRC, around 2007 telling how they were supposed to be at around 35% right about now. The growth is quite gradual, and like that for many years (might look slightly different from the perspective of few atypical markets which were previously mostly deprived of smartphones by carriers and fed with very locked down handsets)
Of course, it would help if we had any sensible definition - given how SE A200 "feature phones" have even full multitasking for several years, or how latest S40 also gives a lot...
Seems the news is just that the Foundation might not continue operating in its current legal framework (which depended on few other entities apart from Nokia, and now that they are gone...). But that doesn't lead to S^3 effort ending, as TFS claims (S^4 apparently is, somewhat - only in the sense that, instead of one big future release, its features will be pushed gradually to existing devices; a change for the better IMHO)
Symbian isn't going anywhere - it has greater share of sales than the next two players combined; when taking number 2 player out of the equation, greater share than all what's rest combined. Might very well be the first smartphone platform to break the barrier of 100 million devices shipped annually, this year.
All this ignoring the modus operandi of Nokia. Is S40 dead? (checking...) No, it's the most widespread mobile phone platform in the world. Heck, even S30 sells quite a few units. Symbian will be around for a long time, just in price segments where S40 was for large part of the last decade.
Those segments aren't going away. If anything, the market seems to be getting more diverse than the simplistic "everybody will want either 'true' (for the current definition of 'true') smartphone or something ultra low cost" - but it's probably hard for pundits in few atypical (but highly visible) markets to notice some crucial segments; most of those people have smartphones...
Smartphones which still sit at around 20% of total shipments. Have been sitting close to that for a few years. People are generally happy with slick UI, touch screen, good web browsing (heck, Chinese makers are starting to integrate even full Opera Mobile), few widgets - "smartphone" doesn't need to enter the equation, as fabulously popular "feature phone" touchscreen mobiles from Samsung and LG have shown recently (those phones from Samsung are why they might be level in marketshare with Nokia by the end of the year, not smartphones)
As for Android...heck, who knows. Though probably "MeeGo-fied/Qt-fied", to share at least their custom apps with Symbian, to have the same widget engine available (the W3C one, iirc). But they are profitable, in Q3 their revenue has risen, at #1 marketshare it doesn't make sense to willingly get relegated to the status of PC makers (vs. MS/provider of OS). Why Samsung pushes also bada OS (indeed almost a direct continuation of their wildly successful TouchWiz handsets). BTW, funny how MediaTek was apparently almost blocked for some time from participating in Android, by Qualcomm; funny times ahead, now that MT releases their solution for Android soon.
And amplifier. And some microcontroller checking reliably for long stretches of silence (I remember there were quite a few on this one cassette) to fast-forward over (which at the end of each one always ended up being "whoa, a bit too far, gotta reverse slightly"). And reversing the direction of playback every 30 minutes or so.
These days, a lot of decoding goes on the DSP... (S1 mp3 players have z80 as their cpu) And many old wearable cassette players were also pathetic, even with two AAs. No, at least in the times of the late Walkman in question, Sony really cared about great battery life; and managed to pull it off. These days...yeah.
(but BTW, check the battery life of, say, Nokia C1-00;) )
That's beside the point of it being a large source of income...
Plus - I'm not sure if "irrelevant" accurately describes the most ubiquitous mobile app platform(s?...yeah, not nice enough to be strictly single one) on the planet; one which, for example, powers the #1 mobile web browser (on the side of the phones at least) - #1 by site hits, despite many of its users being rather frugal about number of sites visited / data costs (but then, many of them don't even have access to anything else, and won't have for some time to come; so perhaps it's best for j2me to not be forgotten just yet)
Yeah, this irrelevant IMT-2000, "only" establishing, in the end, what everybody calls 3G... Similarly with IMT-Advanced, generally; except for few telcos.
On the plus side it might mean that the "more money into marketing/lobbying" of grandparent is even more irrelevant, thanks to E part of ETSI? (and even more thanks to F...)
And apparently used also by some of the more popular Android "community" firmware releases (*). Makes sense on such machines / one might think Google would want to push now also improvements of performance which aren't mainly about servers?
(*)BTW,/. should know this one - what would be the best central hub of such activities, helping to determine which phones have the best chance of remaining well supported into the future?
iPod nano where the volume of battery is of course not that much different; nvm how the battery tech / energy densities supposedly improved greatly.
Everything settled on 20-30 hours. And, somehow, mp3 players using AAA (yes, smaller - but with ratings easily compared, ~2.5x smaller) are fairly pathetic (much worse than iPod nano, less than 10h - so with AA one would expect at most 30, still far from my Walkman)
...CDs which came out of cooperation of only two companies, one of them being Sony (the other Philips; "S" and "P" in S/PDIF, too). Which is also exclusively responsible for the most widespread FDD standard, DAT, Hi8; cooperating on MSX, DVD, miniDV or HDV.
And yet Sweden, the country which gave us The Pirate Bay, is the only place in the world with sustained physical sales.
But execs don't want to hear that much, preferring to think in the categories of their "superstars" (while in Sweden it is simply a case of many great indy acts)
Also still have such late one...somewhere. One of the best things about it - battery life.
I estimate around 90 hours. Once I popped in a new AA battery on Thursday, listened a bit that day; also during Friday, in the evening - on a train trip to home city, then a walk through it; and...I forgot to turn the thing off, when putting it into a wardrobe together with my coat. A trip back was Tuesday noon; it was still working. In fact, the battery was good for normal listening, around two hours each day, almost till the end of that week.
I really miss that on the current crop of "wearable" electronics.
I even recall one bug report we tried to submit about this and one developer said he couldn't reproduce the problem on his quad-CPU 4GB RAM machine with 4 striped RAID array disks... think about the sort of hardware the average user would have had four years ago. Is it any wonder the desktop sucked so much?
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Some Thinkpads might be roughly there.
Luckily, without metal body. I really don't get the concept. Metal is cold, to the subjective touch at least; especially problematic with something portable.
Had a mostly metal mobile phone for some time, it was unbearable for at least half of the year.
Why not? Large part of medicine is patented, too...
But that's again trying a bit to define what we're looking at in a way which results in a very narrow view.
How many years do we hear "symbian is dying" while it consistently ships most units and gains most sales, in number of handsets, year after year? ("percentage of growth" might be deceiving when one player is much closer to the absolute limit of "number of all mobile phones sold" than the rest) Oh, "but they aren't used how I say they should be!"? What?...
It won't matter much anyway when the smarthphones will settle again on some common functionality (on which "feature phones" are settling too, BTW, being used in a smart way; blurring the lines even more). Look what happened with desktop. Browser (covers games, too...), audio/video/photo management, IM, maybe some social networking app in the tray, office; people don't use custom UI for every webpage, custom UI for every radio station, custom UI for every audiobook, custom UI for every e-book - things which dominate some appstores...
(and seriously, Symbian phones seem very locked, out of all other choices? Claims of incompatibility also seem overstated to me, in comparison; not to mention how many segments Nokia continuously covers)
Well, it seems to suggest switching to WinMob7 it one place...
With some recent changes on Ovi Store, the certificates thing can be now done for free and speedier.
Or C1-00; only a slight change to 1616, but seems to come with much bigger battery. Suffice to say, standby times are insane.
Don't forget to mention the projections from, IIRC, around 2007 telling how they were supposed to be at around 35% right about now. The growth is quite gradual, and like that for many years (might look slightly different from the perspective of few atypical markets which were previously mostly deprived of smartphones by carriers and fed with very locked down handsets)
Of course, it would help if we had any sensible definition - given how SE A200 "feature phones" have even full multitasking for several years, or how latest S40 also gives a lot...
Seems the news is just that the Foundation might not continue operating in its current legal framework (which depended on few other entities apart from Nokia, and now that they are gone...). But that doesn't lead to S^3 effort ending, as TFS claims (S^4 apparently is, somewhat - only in the sense that, instead of one big future release, its features will be pushed gradually to existing devices; a change for the better IMHO)
Symbian isn't going anywhere - it has greater share of sales than the next two players combined; when taking number 2 player out of the equation, greater share than all what's rest combined. Might very well be the first smartphone platform to break the barrier of 100 million devices shipped annually, this year.
All this ignoring the modus operandi of Nokia. Is S40 dead? (checking...) No, it's the most widespread mobile phone platform in the world. Heck, even S30 sells quite a few units. Symbian will be around for a long time, just in price segments where S40 was for large part of the last decade.
Those segments aren't going away. If anything, the market seems to be getting more diverse than the simplistic "everybody will want either 'true' (for the current definition of 'true') smartphone or something ultra low cost" - but it's probably hard for pundits in few atypical (but highly visible) markets to notice some crucial segments; most of those people have smartphones...
Smartphones which still sit at around 20% of total shipments. Have been sitting close to that for a few years. People are generally happy with slick UI, touch screen, good web browsing (heck, Chinese makers are starting to integrate even full Opera Mobile), few widgets - "smartphone" doesn't need to enter the equation, as fabulously popular "feature phone" touchscreen mobiles from Samsung and LG have shown recently (those phones from Samsung are why they might be level in marketshare with Nokia by the end of the year, not smartphones)
As for Android...heck, who knows. Though probably "MeeGo-fied/Qt-fied", to share at least their custom apps with Symbian, to have the same widget engine available (the W3C one, iirc). But they are profitable, in Q3 their revenue has risen, at #1 marketshare it doesn't make sense to willingly get relegated to the status of PC makers (vs. MS/provider of OS). Why Samsung pushes also bada OS (indeed almost a direct continuation of their wildly successful TouchWiz handsets). BTW, funny how MediaTek was apparently almost blocked for some time from participating in Android, by Qualcomm; funny times ahead, now that MT releases their solution for Android soon.
And amplifier. And some microcontroller checking reliably for long stretches of silence (I remember there were quite a few on this one cassette) to fast-forward over (which at the end of each one always ended up being "whoa, a bit too far, gotta reverse slightly"). And reversing the direction of playback every 30 minutes or so.
These days, a lot of decoding goes on the DSP... (S1 mp3 players have z80 as their cpu) And many old wearable cassette players were also pathetic, even with two AAs. No, at least in the times of the late Walkman in question, Sony really cared about great battery life; and managed to pull it off. These days...yeah.
(but BTW, check the battery life of, say, Nokia C1-00 ;) )
Did you even read the short 3 sentences I wrote? Here, I'll help you out: "...with other major metropolitan areas and large airports following."
Still nothing in comparison to what many people bought.
That's beside the point of it being a large source of income...
Plus - I'm not sure if "irrelevant" accurately describes the most ubiquitous mobile app platform(s?...yeah, not nice enough to be strictly single one) on the planet; one which, for example, powers the #1 mobile web browser (on the side of the phones at least) - #1 by site hits, despite many of its users being rather frugal about number of sites visited / data costs (but then, many of them don't even have access to anything else, and won't have for some time to come; so perhaps it's best for j2me to not be forgotten just yet)
Yeah, this irrelevant IMT-2000, "only" establishing, in the end, what everybody calls 3G... Similarly with IMT-Advanced, generally; except for few telcos.
Oh, ITU is only the body defining what is 3G, 4G, etc. ...
Wasn't j2me one of the few solid sources of income for Sun?
On the plus side it might mean that the "more money into marketing/lobbying" of grandparent is even more irrelevant, thanks to E part of ETSI? (and even more thanks to F...)
And apparently used also by some of the more popular Android "community" firmware releases (*). Makes sense on such machines / one might think Google would want to push now also improvements of performance which aren't mainly about servers?
(*)BTW, /. should know this one - what would be the best central hub of such activities, helping to determine which phones have the best chance of remaining well supported into the future?
iPod nano where the volume of battery is of course not that much different; nvm how the battery tech / energy densities supposedly improved greatly.
Everything settled on 20-30 hours. And, somehow, mp3 players using AAA (yes, smaller - but with ratings easily compared, ~2.5x smaller) are fairly pathetic (much worse than iPod nano, less than 10h - so with AA one would expect at most 30, still far from my Walkman)
You might always protect her from some intrusive perverts, for example.
...CDs which came out of cooperation of only two companies, one of them being Sony (the other Philips; "S" and "P" in S/PDIF, too). Which is also exclusively responsible for the most widespread FDD standard, DAT, Hi8; cooperating on MSX, DVD, miniDV or HDV.
So many of those horrible Sony formats.
You're behind the times, their flash Walkmans are quite open. Likewise SE phones with music player functionality.
And yet Sweden, the country which gave us The Pirate Bay, is the only place in the world with sustained physical sales.
But execs don't want to hear that much, preferring to think in the categories of their "superstars" (while in Sweden it is simply a case of many great indy acts)
Also still have such late one...somewhere. One of the best things about it - battery life.
I estimate around 90 hours. Once I popped in a new AA battery on Thursday, listened a bit that day; also during Friday, in the evening - on a train trip to home city, then a walk through it; and...I forgot to turn the thing off, when putting it into a wardrobe together with my coat. A trip back was Tuesday noon; it was still working. In fact, the battery was good for normal listening, around two hours each day, almost till the end of that week.
I really miss that on the current crop of "wearable" electronics.
I even recall one bug report we tried to submit about this and one developer said he couldn't reproduce the problem on his quad-CPU 4GB RAM machine with 4 striped RAID array disks... think about the sort of hardware the average user would have had four years ago. Is it any wonder the desktop sucked so much?
( http://apcmag.com/interview_with_con_kolivas_part_1_computing_is_boring.htm )
It's you!
And cassette Walkman wasn't the only portable cassette audio player...so? (though it seems its trademark became more universally genericized)
It might happen faster to iPod... (which itself is widespread only in few places)