And there are existing third-party devices that can sync in iTunes, but they licensed the ability from Apple.
According to Wikipedia and this only some ancient Nomad-era devices from before the iPod was king. External software that accesses playlists via.xml or DAAP streaming is another matter.
Why Palm didn't go that route, I'll never know....
Even if the option does exist, I doubt that Apple would license such a direct iPhone competitor. And why should they?
Apple: you want this shiny little music player? Huh? You want it? Huh? Well then you have to change everything you own to Apples version
Reality check:
The only "lock in" with iPod/iTunes is if you choose to buy DRMd content from the iTunes store.
iTunes/iPod works fine with MP3 and unprotected AAC files from any source (video files, too) - legal or otherwise. It will rip your CDs to MP3 if you don't like AAC. The only things you have to get from the iTunes store are firmware updates and iPhone Apps.
iTunes stores all its music files as regular disk files. It will sort them into artist/album folders and number the files for you, if you choose. Copying files to a vanilla MP3 player that works like a USB drive is a cinch.
Although the main iTunes metadata file is a proprietary binary, iTunes maintains a mirror of all the metadata you are likely to need, including your playlists, as an XML file with a fairly obvious structure. Its easy to write scripts to parse this and sync playlists, generate m3u files etc. 3rd Party Applications like Missing Sync will let you choose iTunes playlists and sync them to your phone. Games such as Oolite will look for specific iTunes playlists and use them for in-game music.
Buy MP3s from Amazon and their download app happily stuffs them into your iTunes libfrary for you.
OS X has a "Sync Services" framework, with a published API, to let third parties sync contact and calendar data with their devices.
No, Linux isn't supported - pity but join the queue. Guess what: my HTC Hero Android phone doesn't fully support Mac* or Linux either.
All Apple is refusing to do for Palm is let them integrate Pre into the main iTunes application. That would require Apple to publish and maintain a plug-in API for iTunes which would cost Apple money. Why should they?
Well, maybe someday a court will decide that Apple have a dominant position in the media player market, and further deiced that the "openness" described above is not sufficient to satisfy anti-trust laws. Then, and only then, will Apple be obliged to help others compete with their products.
Also bear in mind that what anti-trust regulators are really concerned about is using a dominant position in one market to strong arm your way into another. Apple has built the iPod/iTunes/iTMS tripod up from scratch, popularising the pocket MP3 player and virtually inventing the legal music download market, not by leveraging an existing monopoly. The only aspect that's even worth debating in that context is whether they're using iPod/iTunes/iTMS to strongarm their way in to the Phone market. Looks to me like the main reason for the iPhone's success is that previous smartphones (esp. WM) were pants - and if you think their harming the market ask yourself what the Palm Pre, Android or the various 3rd party WM skins would have looked like - or whether they would exist - without the iPhone shaking things up.
(*I should qualify that: HTC provide a calendar/contacts sync application for windows only - same story with firmware updates. Android is fairly hardware-agnostic, provided you're happy to use Google for calendar/contacts).
Furthermore, even "gray area" can be part of law, thanks to an amazing technology called "courts."
Trouble is with courts, they are an extremely expensive game to play, even if you win, with no guarantee that they won't enforce a silly decision.
Consequently, any publisher in their right mind will probably just play it safe and spam the "manipulated image" warning across everything that has been so much as gamma-corrected and sharpened. It will lose all meaning except as a joke on the cover of rap CDs.
I have a counter proposal: put image manipulation on the school curriculum. Have some glamour photographers go into schools, ask the teenagers to nominate the most pug-ugly kid in the class, take a photo and photoshop him/her into a supermodel. Then take an unmanipulated photo of the fittest kid in the school and show the two side-by-side. Maybe, just maybe the little darlings will get the clue. (There are high-street stores that do this - except they don't provide the comparison. I even remember some woman on a consumer program complaining that they made her wash off her "makeover" before leaving - obviously didn't realise that they'd trowelled on so much theatrical slap that she'd have frightened small kids if seen in daylight).
Straw man? Care to explain? How did I set up his argument differently?
Well, I did say gigs and t-shirts - the former still counts as being a musician, in a way that being an IP lawyer doesn't count as being a programmer. For one thing, there'd be the small matter of having to go to law school for a few years.
(...thinks...)
...but then I suppose some bands would have to go to music school before they could play live:-)
The problem is the industry conceit that every illegal download is a "lost sale" and every downloader has "stolen" something from them. Money from software sales paid for my house - and I'm perfectly aware that if I'd been paid for every illegal copy, I could have had a much bigger house: but that is a fantasy. Back in reality, the "intangible" nature of software that makes it so easy to copy also means that the marginal cost of production is negligible so you get to keep nearly all of the money from people who choose to pay. If I'd built a better mousetrap, my house would have been mortgaged to pay for the huge loan I needed to set up production to make them in commercial quantities.
But it's not really fair to say that musicians should just give their work away and make money through another (although related) avenue.
IANAM, but I suspect that apart from the big artists who can swing nice deals with the record companies, that's pretty much what a lot of musicians do anyway...
No. The concept of "theft" is really old, and regarded as Wrong in most civilized societies (and probably quite a few uncivilized ones, too). The concept of "copyright infringement" is relatively modern, and has nothing to do with theft.
What is it that you did? You took something without permission...
If I take something of yours, you don't have it any more.
If I copy something of yours, you still have it.
I would suggest that its the "not having it any more" bit that makes most people upset when they have something stolen.
"Ms. Whoever, Billy STOLE my idea."
Well, yes, if Billy copied your idea and took credit for it in your place then maybe you could call that "stealing" (but only if you couldn't spell "plagiarism") - but that's not what most copyright infringement is about. People who download music don't normally claim that they wrote it.
I have no time for people who copy something and then sell it or people who knowingly pay money for ripped-off stuff: that money belongs to the author. Maybe you could call that theft. But casual file sharing is not theft, and may even help the industry (look at your legit music collections: how many of those bands did you first hear of when someone gave you a tape or MP3? Would you ever have bought their music otherwise?)
No it isn't: Illegal downloading is copyright infringement - it may be against the law, but it has nothing to do with theft. In other news, dropping litter is not assault with a deadly weapon, and shoplifting is not murder.
Dropping gum on the sidewalk is reprehensible behaviour, but we don't call it "attempted shoe homicide" and send people to the Big Chair for it.
Last time I looked, the only religion which included "Thou shalt not infringe copyright" in its commandments was Scientology.
That's the problem: there's nothing wrong with teaching kids the facts about copyright. The problem is with teaching kids industry propaganda about copyright which exagerates its seriousness, and is really about vested interests trying to maintain control of the industry in an age when most musicians would do better by givimng away music and making their money from gigs and t-shirts.
So basically anything with USB or FireWire can't get in as well?
You're mistakenly trying to apply logic to "security theatre".
With modern technology, anybody who seriously wants to smuggle a camera or data storage device in for neferious purposes will find a way. Possibly an icky one. If the risk of covert recording/photography is that serious, they need to ban all personal effects, strip search everybody on entry and get them to change into their regulation disposable paper jumpsuits.
Of course, that would be expensive and inconvenient - much better to make a big song and dance about canning the occasional poor sod who forgets to take their camera camera phone out of their briefcase.
I must say that having developed for Android and iPhone, iPhone was much more enjoyable of an experience.
And as a user of both an iPod Touch and an Android phone - it shows. Android is good, but the Touch is more coherent and logical (although the larger screen helps, too).
Your next challenge with Android development will be coping with different phones, as each manufacture makes their own customisations (as with the HTC Hero and the new Motorola). E.g. none of the terminal/ssh apps I tried worked proerly with the Hero's soft keyboard.
That's the dilemma between open and proprietary systems.
Tethering is not currently offered in the U.S. and some other countries. See your carrier for availability.
...and if you read TFA, and get as far as the post from Digital Kurtz, you'll see that all that is required is an updated profile file from the carrier, and the people having problems are with carriers who don't actively support the iPhone.
No - "it just works", but in order to ensure that, Apple reserve the right to define what "it" is. The alternative policy is "do what you like - if you break it you get to keep both pieces".
That's always been Apple's policy with the iPhone/iPod. If you don't like it, other smartphones are available. If you like to tinker, get an Android or Openmoko.
Surely that alone invalidates a simulated moon landing? (as would any cross winds)
That and the 6x stronger gravity...
I'd think doing the same thing on the Moon would be a lot easier - getting it there, and ensuring it works 100% of the time without the intervention of a man with a screwdriver... not so much.
Personally, I see no reason why these multifunction devices can't be improved to the point where they completely supplant "deck of cards"-size point-and-shoot cameras.
That's probably why such cameras are now, increasingly, packing 12x zoom lenses - to distinguish them from phones. Those lenses are pretty amazing, but still too heavy and delicate to carry around in your shirt pocket every work day. OTOH, the typical phone is too thin and light to hold steady.
Don't get me wrong - having a camera in a phone is a great idea, for those times when you don't have a proper camera. However, even "proper" cameras are going overboard on the megapixels these days. No point having 10MP if you have to downsample to 2MP just to get rid of the artefacts...
No, I just forgot to proof-read my own post - please accept a pedant point:-) Actually, although I'd accept PPI as the better term, in reality, the terms are used inconsistently and, anyway, the distinction depends entirely on the display or printing technology being discussed.
A 6x4" JPEG* will be 72 DPI (and 72 PPI)
Now you're getting mixed up: PPI/DPI isn't defined until you choose the physical size of a print. A JPEG* will be x pixels wide and y pixels high. If you display it or print it out at a physical size of W" x H" the PPI will be x/W - assuming the display/printer is capable of reproducing that. Only if the image came from, e.g. a scanner, and had a well-defined "original size" will the PPI value in the file mean anything. Otherwise, either the camera or the software will omit insert the customary default of 72ppi.
72 PPI is an arbitrary value for the "resolution***" of a computer screen, so that 1 pixel = 1 Postscript** point. Once upon a time, all Apple Mac screens were calibrated to 72 actual pixels per physical inch of screen. These days, its rather higher and depends on the size of the screen (duh!).
I chose 6"x4" because that was the traditional print size for old fangled chemical snapshots. I chose 150ppi because, in my experience, that's just enough to satisfy non-photographers, and about the point at which you should start worrying about the quality of your lens. A 6"x4" image at 150ppi is 900x600 pixels = 0.54 megapixels. 2 megapixels is enough for 300dpi, which matches the resolution of most cheap dedicated photo printers.
Of course, you can print/display any image at any size you like - whether its acceptable depends on the subject matter (oh, and little things like focus, exposure, camera shake and composition which have nothing to do with megapixels).
(*while we're stickling, JPEG is not an image file format, its a compression standard: ".jpg" files are either in JFIF or EXIF format).
(** which is not the same as a printers point - and you wonder why people use imprecise language?)
(*** don't even start on what "resolution" actually means in optics as opposed to computer specs!)
Option A: don't claim the right to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" tweets. Problem: publishing material on a website involves using, copying, transmitting, displaying, adapting, modifying and distributing it, so they would be infringing copyright and, sooner or later, get sued by some troll (in other news: Twitter operates in countries outside the US which don't have the same "fair use" clauses in their copyright laws).
Option B: claim ownership of everything. They could do this if they wanted to - nobody forces you to post your 120 character masterwork on Twitter.
Option C: lock out the public and pay professional twitterers to produce pithy and erudite tweets on a "work for hire" basis. Tempting, but I don't see the business model.
You forgot to mention one big feature all these camera phones are still missing: optical zoom!
While you're at it, why not a flash shoe, filter ring, tripod mount, cable release, SLR viewfinder and a massive phallus-substitute telephoto? And a slave to carry it all for you.
Alternatively, use a camera for any half-serious photography (its not as if you can't get a camera the size of a deck of cards with a 12x optical zoom these days) and reserve your phonecam for capturing blurry photos of drunken friends and insurance snaps of the ensuing car wreck, as nature intended.
(Android's stunt with scanning barcodes and looking them up on Google is quite fun, too...)
With Android you'll have the choice of installing a proprietary sync app (e.g. HTC Sync - only Windows/Outlook users need apply) or opening a Google account instead. OK, you can use USB disk mode to transfer music and photos, but not sync contacts and calendars.
To be fair, Google is a good solution, but then iTunes is a good media player, too.
In other words, every Blackberry made in the last three years, at least. A unified messages folder - what a novel idea.
Its not even new on Android: My HTC Hero does all that (Facebook integration in the contacts app, upload photos to Facebook/Flickr direct from the camera app). Bad news is that I got a facebook account mainly to try it out. I already feel dirty...
Still, the point is valid. A 1.2 MP camera is really useless. 5 MP is pretty reasonable.
Er, no. Any camera with a lens the size of a pinhead, no flash (or a feeble LED flash) and lousy ergonomics that make it hard to hold the camera steady while pressing the shutter is useless. Adding pixels doesn't help - smaller pixels = less photons hitting each pixel = lower sensitivity = more noise and slow shutter speed = blurry and/or underexposed photos. Plus, the resulting photos are getting too big to send quickly over the mobile network.
The megapixel wars on camera phones is just dumb: much better to stick at 1-2 megapixels and crank up the sensitivity so people can take shake-free snapshots indoors.
A standard 6"x4" snapshot at 150dpi is about 0.5 megapixels.
Sigh! - kids today! Late last century I paid over £1000 for one of these and back then we were pretty happy with the 1.4 megapixel results. Of course, it had a half-decent lens.
The Linux desktop as it is today didn't exist in 1997. It hadn't even been started yet.
Last time I looked, the Linux desktop was still built on the X Window System, which dates back to the 1980s.
Of course, X is a network-enabled graphics library, not a desktop. Which is probably part of the problem...
On the other hand, Windows and MacOS had over 10 years of product releases
Except that both Apple and MS completely junked their original desktop operating systems circa 2000. Win2k is not a development of Win95, Mac OS X is not a development of Mac OS 9.
Despite the fact that MacOS was VASTLY SUPERIOR in by any metric except for "price" and "compatability" it continued to have it's ass handed to it time and time again in the market by MS-DOS of all things.
That didn't have anything to do with even price or compatibility, let alone any technical considerations. MS-DOS simply managed to inherit the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" meme and ensure that no manager worth his pointy-hair would contemplate buying anything else (I remember trying to argue for solutions which were cheaper and more compatible than PC/DOS and finding myself pissing in the wind). The reality distortion field must have been rated at least 37.5 kiloJobs - even respectable journalists were writing glowing reviews of the "meh" piece of mediocre crap that was the original IBM PC. There were better MS-DOS (non-PC compatible) machines for crying-out loud. Apple survived by creating a niche in Graphics/DTP in which DOS couldn't even pretend to compete.
As per the other poster: I hardly touch the trackball on my HTC Hero.
Only serious criticisms are that the current Android UI lacks the responsiveness of the iPhone, the screen is noticably cramped c.f. the iPhone and the lack of support for proxy servers over wifi (yup, if your workplace has a firewall, hope that there's a good 3G signal there, 'cos you won't be using WiFi).
I'd say that only the last one is a potential dealbreaker.
On the design side, though, Apple's advantage is that they've made a clear decision that the touchscreen is the primary interface which all applications must support: Strategically, it was disasterous that the G1 had a slide-out keyboard (however much you may love it) because now you have apps that don't play nicely with on-screen keys on the Magic/Hero. The various physical keys are dumb too (again, I've found games whih are unplayable because the keys have changed place on the Hero) - Apple's strategy of everything but "home" and "power" being on the touch screen is much cleaner.
Pity - my previous WM phone (HTC TyTn) was a glorious example of how apparently good hardware was rendered barely usable because of a "if some is good, more is better" design philosophy: It had a keyboard, soft keyboard, handwriting recoghnition, touch screen, stylus, scroll wheel, joypad, and so many other buttons that it was practically impossible to take the fracking thing out of your pocket to answer a call without pressing something, and none of the apps worked particularly well with all of the input methods... You'd think people would look and learn.
An interpreter is not 'arbitrary code' by any stretch of the imagination. It's not running arbitrary *machine code*.
Well, C64 BASIC would allow you unfettered access to every byte of the C64 virtual machine's address space. (Aaahh, POKE...) and would certainly let you exploit any buffer overrun or DoS opportunities in the emulator.
And yes, every app with a macro or scripting facility that runs on any computer, anywhere, MUST be adequately sandboxed.
...and the security policies to do that magically design, implement and test themselves for free, and never have any flaws, right? Nope - Apple are smart enough to know that you still have to test individual apps, and any sort of scripting/macro facility drives the complexity of that through the roof.
Java managed to do this.
And has never, ever, ever had any critical security vulnerabilities? I don't think so.
What's so hard about the concept for Apple?
A major design goal of Java was specifically to produce a secure, sandboxed virtual machine to allow running arbitrary code. Sun spent a penny or two achieving and maintaining that. Apple's priority with the iPhone is to deliver robust phone, iPod and organiser functionality using their own apps. The restrictions on the public API reflect this priority.
The major failing of previous smartphones (particularly WM ones) was that although they were pretty good pocket computers, they were fscking useless as phones and organisers.
Of course, if you want to write your own code for your iPhone you can always code in AJAX and deploy over the web... Apple jave no choice but to keep Safari well sandboxed - but that burden is shared with desktop Safari and the WebKit project (and Android!).
Pretty sad for humanity in general, though.
Why? If you want a general purpose computer, buy a Mac: desktop MacOS comes with a full-blown Objective C SDK as standard, plus Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Applescript, bash etc. which puts it second only to Linux/BSD in terms of programmer friendliness. If you want a programmable phone buy an Android dev kit or something.
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And there are existing third-party devices that can sync in iTunes, but they licensed the ability from Apple.
According to Wikipedia and this only some ancient Nomad-era devices from before the iPod was king. External software that accesses playlists via .xml or DAAP streaming is another matter.
Why Palm didn't go that route, I'll never know....
Even if the option does exist, I doubt that Apple would license such a direct iPhone competitor. And why should they?
Apple: you want this shiny little music player? Huh? You want it? Huh? Well then you have to change everything you own to Apples version
Reality check:
All Apple is refusing to do for Palm is let them integrate Pre into the main iTunes application. That would require Apple to publish and maintain a plug-in API for iTunes which would cost Apple money. Why should they?
Well, maybe someday a court will decide that Apple have a dominant position in the media player market, and further deiced that the "openness" described above is not sufficient to satisfy anti-trust laws. Then, and only then, will Apple be obliged to help others compete with their products.
Also bear in mind that what anti-trust regulators are really concerned about is using a dominant position in one market to strong arm your way into another. Apple has built the iPod/iTunes/iTMS tripod up from scratch, popularising the pocket MP3 player and virtually inventing the legal music download market, not by leveraging an existing monopoly. The only aspect that's even worth debating in that context is whether they're using iPod/iTunes/iTMS to strongarm their way in to the Phone market. Looks to me like the main reason for the iPhone's success is that previous smartphones (esp. WM) were pants - and if you think their harming the market ask yourself what the Palm Pre, Android or the various 3rd party WM skins would have looked like - or whether they would exist - without the iPhone shaking things up.
(*I should qualify that: HTC provide a calendar/contacts sync application for windows only - same story with firmware updates. Android is fairly hardware-agnostic, provided you're happy to use Google for calendar/contacts).
Furthermore, even "gray area" can be part of law, thanks to an amazing technology called "courts."
Trouble is with courts, they are an extremely expensive game to play, even if you win, with no guarantee that they won't enforce a silly decision.
Consequently, any publisher in their right mind will probably just play it safe and spam the "manipulated image" warning across everything that has been so much as gamma-corrected and sharpened. It will lose all meaning except as a joke on the cover of rap CDs.
I have a counter proposal: put image manipulation on the school curriculum. Have some glamour photographers go into schools, ask the teenagers to nominate the most pug-ugly kid in the class, take a photo and photoshop him/her into a supermodel. Then take an unmanipulated photo of the fittest kid in the school and show the two side-by-side. Maybe, just maybe the little darlings will get the clue. (There are high-street stores that do this - except they don't provide the comparison. I even remember some woman on a consumer program complaining that they made her wash off her "makeover" before leaving - obviously didn't realise that they'd trowelled on so much theatrical slap that she'd have frightened small kids if seen in daylight).
Straw man? Care to explain? How did I set up his argument differently?
Well, I did say gigs and t-shirts - the former still counts as being a musician, in a way that being an IP lawyer doesn't count as being a programmer. For one thing, there'd be the small matter of having to go to law school for a few years.
(...thinks...)
...but then I suppose some bands would have to go to music school before they could play live :-)
The problem is the industry conceit that every illegal download is a "lost sale" and every downloader has "stolen" something from them. Money from software sales paid for my house - and I'm perfectly aware that if I'd been paid for every illegal copy, I could have had a much bigger house: but that is a fantasy. Back in reality, the "intangible" nature of software that makes it so easy to copy also means that the marginal cost of production is negligible so you get to keep nearly all of the money from people who choose to pay. If I'd built a better mousetrap, my house would have been mortgaged to pay for the huge loan I needed to set up production to make them in commercial quantities.
Seriously? That's hilarious!
No, not seriously.
But it's not really fair to say that musicians should just give their work away and make money through another (although related) avenue.
IANAM, but I suspect that apart from the big artists who can swing nice deals with the record companies, that's pretty much what a lot of musicians do anyway...
This arguement is getting really old...
No. The concept of "theft" is really old, and regarded as Wrong in most civilized societies (and probably quite a few uncivilized ones, too). The concept of "copyright infringement" is relatively modern, and has nothing to do with theft.
What is it that you did? You took something without permission...
If I take something of yours, you don't have it any more.
If I copy something of yours, you still have it.
I would suggest that its the "not having it any more" bit that makes most people upset when they have something stolen.
"Ms. Whoever, Billy STOLE my idea."
Well, yes, if Billy copied your idea and took credit for it in your place then maybe you could call that "stealing" (but only if you couldn't spell "plagiarism") - but that's not what most copyright infringement is about. People who download music don't normally claim that they wrote it.
I have no time for people who copy something and then sell it or people who knowingly pay money for ripped-off stuff: that money belongs to the author. Maybe you could call that theft. But casual file sharing is not theft, and may even help the industry (look at your legit music collections: how many of those bands did you first hear of when someone gave you a tape or MP3? Would you ever have bought their music otherwise?)
But illegal downloading really IS stealing.
No it isn't: Illegal downloading is copyright infringement - it may be against the law, but it has nothing to do with theft. In other news, dropping litter is not assault with a deadly weapon, and shoplifting is not murder.
Dropping gum on the sidewalk is reprehensible behaviour, but we don't call it "attempted shoe homicide" and send people to the Big Chair for it.
Last time I looked, the only religion which included "Thou shalt not infringe copyright" in its commandments was Scientology.
That's the problem: there's nothing wrong with teaching kids the facts about copyright. The problem is with teaching kids industry propaganda about copyright which exagerates its seriousness, and is really about vested interests trying to maintain control of the industry in an age when most musicians would do better by givimng away music and making their money from gigs and t-shirts.
So basically anything with USB or FireWire can't get in as well?
You're mistakenly trying to apply logic to "security theatre".
With modern technology, anybody who seriously wants to smuggle a camera or data storage device in for neferious purposes will find a way. Possibly an icky one. If the risk of covert recording/photography is that serious, they need to ban all personal effects, strip search everybody on entry and get them to change into their regulation disposable paper jumpsuits.
Of course, that would be expensive and inconvenient - much better to make a big song and dance about canning the occasional poor sod who forgets to take their camera camera phone out of their briefcase.
I must say that having developed for Android and iPhone, iPhone was much more enjoyable of an experience.
And as a user of both an iPod Touch and an Android phone - it shows. Android is good, but the Touch is more coherent and logical (although the larger screen helps, too).
Your next challenge with Android development will be coping with different phones, as each manufacture makes their own customisations (as with the HTC Hero and the new Motorola). E.g. none of the terminal/ssh apps I tried worked proerly with the Hero's soft keyboard.
That's the dilemma between open and proprietary systems.
Especially since they are now effectively committing fraud: http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-3gs/tethering.html [apple.com]
Where they say:
Tethering is not currently offered in the U.S. and some other countries. See your carrier for availability.
...and if you read TFA, and get as far as the post from Digital Kurtz, you'll see that all that is required is an updated profile file from the carrier, and the people having problems are with carriers who don't actively support the iPhone.
Except when they don't want it to.
No - "it just works", but in order to ensure that, Apple reserve the right to define what "it" is. The alternative policy is "do what you like - if you break it you get to keep both pieces".
That's always been Apple's policy with the iPhone/iPod. If you don't like it, other smartphones are available. If you like to tinker, get an Android or Openmoko.
Surely that alone invalidates a simulated moon landing? (as would any cross winds)
That and the 6x stronger gravity...
I'd think doing the same thing on the Moon would be a lot easier - getting it there, and ensuring it works 100% of the time without the intervention of a man with a screwdriver... not so much.
GP is probably reporting Australian Dollars or something similar
Nah. GP was mentally converting £6 to dollars and negligently used the actual exchange rate rather than Apple's fantasy £1=$1 rate.
just as they won't activate the bluetooth chip inside older Ipod Touches.
Er, they did...
If you pay Apple 10 bucks for the 3.0 OS upgrade, that unused bluetooth chip in the second-gen iPod Touch will spring into action...
Personally, I see no reason why these multifunction devices can't be improved to the point where they completely supplant "deck of cards"-size point-and-shoot cameras.
That's probably why such cameras are now, increasingly, packing 12x zoom lenses - to distinguish them from phones. Those lenses are pretty amazing, but still too heavy and delicate to carry around in your shirt pocket every work day. OTOH, the typical phone is too thin and light to hold steady.
Don't get me wrong - having a camera in a phone is a great idea, for those times when you don't have a proper camera. However, even "proper" cameras are going overboard on the megapixels these days. No point having 10MP if you have to downsample to 2MP just to get rid of the artefacts...
I believe you are mixing up "DPI" with PPI.
No, I just forgot to proof-read my own post - please accept a pedant point :-) Actually, although I'd accept PPI as the better term, in reality, the terms are used inconsistently and, anyway, the distinction depends entirely on the display or printing technology being discussed.
A 6x4" JPEG* will be 72 DPI (and 72 PPI)
Now you're getting mixed up: PPI/DPI isn't defined until you choose the physical size of a print. A JPEG* will be x pixels wide and y pixels high. If you display it or print it out at a physical size of W" x H" the PPI will be x/W - assuming the display/printer is capable of reproducing that. Only if the image came from, e.g. a scanner, and had a well-defined "original size" will the PPI value in the file mean anything. Otherwise, either the camera or the software will omit insert the customary default of 72ppi.
72 PPI is an arbitrary value for the "resolution***" of a computer screen, so that 1 pixel = 1 Postscript** point. Once upon a time, all Apple Mac screens were calibrated to 72 actual pixels per physical inch of screen. These days, its rather higher and depends on the size of the screen (duh!).
I chose 6"x4" because that was the traditional print size for old fangled chemical snapshots. I chose 150ppi because, in my experience, that's just enough to satisfy non-photographers, and about the point at which you should start worrying about the quality of your lens. A 6"x4" image at 150ppi is 900x600 pixels = 0.54 megapixels. 2 megapixels is enough for 300dpi, which matches the resolution of most cheap dedicated photo printers.
Of course, you can print/display any image at any size you like - whether its acceptable depends on the subject matter (oh, and little things like focus, exposure, camera shake and composition which have nothing to do with megapixels). (*while we're stickling, JPEG is not an image file format, its a compression standard: ".jpg" files are either in JFIF or EXIF format). (** which is not the same as a printers point - and you wonder why people use imprecise language?) (*** don't even start on what "resolution" actually means in optics as opposed to computer specs!)
Sorry, missing option D:
Option D: insist that all Tweets were submitted under a copyleft license. Trouble is, every single tweet would then read:
This tweet is released under the reallyfree copyleft modified attrribute-alike noncommercial license variant 7b which pe
Again, maybe an improvement.
we can do whatever we want with them....
What alternative do you suggest?
Option A: don't claim the right to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" tweets. Problem: publishing material on a website involves using, copying, transmitting, displaying, adapting, modifying and distributing it, so they would be infringing copyright and, sooner or later, get sued by some troll (in other news: Twitter operates in countries outside the US which don't have the same "fair use" clauses in their copyright laws).
Option B: claim ownership of everything. They could do this if they wanted to - nobody forces you to post your 120 character masterwork on Twitter.
Option C: lock out the public and pay professional twitterers to produce pithy and erudite tweets on a "work for hire" basis. Tempting, but I don't see the business model.
Your call.
You forgot to mention one big feature all these camera phones are still missing: optical zoom!
While you're at it, why not a flash shoe, filter ring, tripod mount, cable release, SLR viewfinder and a massive phallus-substitute telephoto? And a slave to carry it all for you.
Alternatively, use a camera for any half-serious photography (its not as if you can't get a camera the size of a deck of cards with a 12x optical zoom these days) and reserve your phonecam for capturing blurry photos of drunken friends and insurance snaps of the ensuing car wreck, as nature intended.
(Android's stunt with scanning barcodes and looking them up on Google is quite fun, too...)
don't like the idea of having to install iTunes
With Android you'll have the choice of installing a proprietary sync app (e.g. HTC Sync - only Windows/Outlook users need apply) or opening a Google account instead. OK, you can use USB disk mode to transfer music and photos, but not sync contacts and calendars.
To be fair, Google is a good solution, but then iTunes is a good media player, too.
In other words, every Blackberry made in the last three years, at least. A unified messages folder - what a novel idea.
Its not even new on Android: My HTC Hero does all that (Facebook integration in the contacts app, upload photos to Facebook/Flickr direct from the camera app). Bad news is that I got a facebook account mainly to try it out. I already feel dirty...
Still, the point is valid. A 1.2 MP camera is really useless. 5 MP is pretty reasonable.
Er, no. Any camera with a lens the size of a pinhead, no flash (or a feeble LED flash) and lousy ergonomics that make it hard to hold the camera steady while pressing the shutter is useless. Adding pixels doesn't help - smaller pixels = less photons hitting each pixel = lower sensitivity = more noise and slow shutter speed = blurry and/or underexposed photos. Plus, the resulting photos are getting too big to send quickly over the mobile network.
The megapixel wars on camera phones is just dumb: much better to stick at 1-2 megapixels and crank up the sensitivity so people can take shake-free snapshots indoors.
A standard 6"x4" snapshot at 150dpi is about 0.5 megapixels.
Sigh! - kids today! Late last century I paid over £1000 for one of these and back then we were pretty happy with the 1.4 megapixel results. Of course, it had a half-decent lens.
The Linux desktop as it is today didn't exist in 1997. It hadn't even been started yet.
Last time I looked, the Linux desktop was still built on the X Window System, which dates back to the 1980s.
Of course, X is a network-enabled graphics library, not a desktop. Which is probably part of the problem...
On the other hand, Windows and MacOS had over 10 years of product releases
Except that both Apple and MS completely junked their original desktop operating systems circa 2000. Win2k is not a development of Win95, Mac OS X is not a development of Mac OS 9.
Despite the fact that MacOS was VASTLY SUPERIOR in by any metric except for "price" and "compatability" it continued to have it's ass handed to it time and time again in the market by MS-DOS of all things.
That didn't have anything to do with even price or compatibility, let alone any technical considerations. MS-DOS simply managed to inherit the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" meme and ensure that no manager worth his pointy-hair would contemplate buying anything else (I remember trying to argue for solutions which were cheaper and more compatible than PC/DOS and finding myself pissing in the wind). The reality distortion field must have been rated at least 37.5 kiloJobs - even respectable journalists were writing glowing reviews of the "meh" piece of mediocre crap that was the original IBM PC. There were better MS-DOS (non-PC compatible) machines for crying-out loud. Apple survived by creating a niche in Graphics/DTP in which DOS couldn't even pretend to compete.
The final straw was the scrollball.
As per the other poster: I hardly touch the trackball on my HTC Hero.
Only serious criticisms are that the current Android UI lacks the responsiveness of the iPhone, the screen is noticably cramped c.f. the iPhone and the lack of support for proxy servers over wifi (yup, if your workplace has a firewall, hope that there's a good 3G signal there, 'cos you won't be using WiFi).
I'd say that only the last one is a potential dealbreaker.
On the design side, though, Apple's advantage is that they've made a clear decision that the touchscreen is the primary interface which all applications must support: Strategically, it was disasterous that the G1 had a slide-out keyboard (however much you may love it) because now you have apps that don't play nicely with on-screen keys on the Magic/Hero. The various physical keys are dumb too (again, I've found games whih are unplayable because the keys have changed place on the Hero) - Apple's strategy of everything but "home" and "power" being on the touch screen is much cleaner.
Pity - my previous WM phone (HTC TyTn) was a glorious example of how apparently good hardware was rendered barely usable because of a "if some is good, more is better" design philosophy: It had a keyboard, soft keyboard, handwriting recoghnition, touch screen, stylus, scroll wheel, joypad, and so many other buttons that it was practically impossible to take the fracking thing out of your pocket to answer a call without pressing something, and none of the apps worked particularly well with all of the input methods... You'd think people would look and learn.
An interpreter is not 'arbitrary code' by any stretch of the imagination. It's not running arbitrary *machine code*.
Well, C64 BASIC would allow you unfettered access to every byte of the C64 virtual machine's address space. (Aaahh, POKE...) and would certainly let you exploit any buffer overrun or DoS opportunities in the emulator.
And yes, every app with a macro or scripting facility that runs on any computer, anywhere, MUST be adequately sandboxed.
...and the security policies to do that magically design, implement and test themselves for free, and never have any flaws, right? Nope - Apple are smart enough to know that you still have to test individual apps, and any sort of scripting/macro facility drives the complexity of that through the roof.
Java managed to do this.
And has never, ever, ever had any critical security vulnerabilities? I don't think so.
What's so hard about the concept for Apple?
A major design goal of Java was specifically to produce a secure, sandboxed virtual machine to allow running arbitrary code. Sun spent a penny or two achieving and maintaining that. Apple's priority with the iPhone is to deliver robust phone, iPod and organiser functionality using their own apps. The restrictions on the public API reflect this priority.
The major failing of previous smartphones (particularly WM ones) was that although they were pretty good pocket computers, they were fscking useless as phones and organisers.
Of course, if you want to write your own code for your iPhone you can always code in AJAX and deploy over the web... Apple jave no choice but to keep Safari well sandboxed - but that burden is shared with desktop Safari and the WebKit project (and Android!).
Pretty sad for humanity in general, though.
Why? If you want a general purpose computer, buy a Mac: desktop MacOS comes with a full-blown Objective C SDK as standard, plus Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Applescript, bash etc. which puts it second only to Linux/BSD in terms of programmer friendliness. If you want a programmable phone buy an Android dev kit or something.