I'm evaluating phones now - I'm the owner of a 64G Touch 3G, am wielding a Pre+ on a 30-day trial and have used a number of Android phones.
Apple Pros:
navigating launcher is fast, quick, easy to use. One button. Consistent behavior in metaphors (delete, back, forward).
Bright, large screen.
Arguably accurate/responsive touch screen.
Incredible on-screen keyboard and editor.
Videos, integration with iTunes.
Most applications (productivity) seem well thought out and designed.
Software ecosystem.
Apple Cons:
Harder for me to write software for (as a non-dev, I don't care, or can move to Webapps).
Large phone.
Tied to AT&T.
Not expandable (sd card)
$10/m for access to VZ Navigator GPS
$30/m for Wifi hotspot. For $30 more I can get a separate MiFi, and be able to browse and talk at the same time.
Launcher is SLOOOOOW.
Keyboard editing is more difficult - it's harder to arbitrarily edit text in a paragraph.
Browser is nowhere near the ease of use of the Touch.
Screen is smaller.
Screen digitizer is not very accurate.
Synergy: synergy is about contact and communication integration. It should allow me to email a facebook user from the contact app. As it is, it just shows me contact data that exists in each source, it doesn't utilize native communication tools. It also only supports LinkedIn and Facebook. After 6 months (since the Sprint release) I'd have expected that they'd have added Facebook or Twitter.
Tied to Verizon.
Software ecosystem is an unknown at this time. It's growing, but I'm not at all sure about marketshare and uptake.
Not expandable (sd card)
Droid Pros:
Software ecosystem
Powerful interfaces to communications (SMS/Email)
Decent size for a phone
Bright display
Droid cons:
midsize display
Launcher is slow - navigating is noticably slower than the Touch.
Digitizer is less accurate.
Expandable with memory cards.
Interface is not standardized (this is arguably not a con).
My big fingers can't use the top row of the slider keyboard comfortably.
<rant>Why can't we have one communications standard (GMS/CDMA) in this country?</rant>
I'm pretty sure my Pre+ is going back to the store. It's cute, it's nice, but it's not my hoped-for Treo replacement. The Touch with it's onscreen keyboard is arguably better as a PDA than the Pre+ is with it's REAL keyboard. And I never thought I'd say that - I was vehemently against getting the iPhone or the Blackberry Storm for just this reason - I thought I couldn't live without a physical keyboard (I've had Treo's since the 600, and a Kyocera 6035 before that, and an original Pilot and a Visor before that). So before I ditch Verizon and go to the iPhone, I'm going to give the Blackberry Storm 2 a try.
How much malware EVER existed for Windows CE and Palm OS? Almost ZERO.
And look how big those software ecostructures were. Not 4000 useful apps and 130,000 games like the iphone, but the Palm OS had 30,000+ applications over it's lifespan, it and was constrained by not having WiFi for years, and a poor CPU driving it.
Safety was never an issue. It's about getting a piece of every $ made on their platform, that's it. Instead of big up-front licensing costs, they spread it out over every deployment.
Pa: "Honey, we don't got no insurance, and our house has a strange tendency to be extremely sensitive to fire and flooding, and if any of that happens while we're sitting down to dinner, we're dead. But the shed is less likely to burn or flood, so maybe we should have the kids sleep out there?"
I also dislike how retirement accounts are set up in this country.
IRA/SEP-IRA/401K... they suck.
Simply give me one big $25,000/y bucket for pre-tax, tax-deferred money, and a $5000/y bucket for after-tax/tax-free money, and get rid of the mess. When I was contracting, I wanted something similar to my 401K, but without the onerous requirements of the SEP-IRA if I ever decided to hire extra help (I'd have to make mandatory contributions for my employees). Ugh.
Employer benefits are nice, but they create pressure on individuals shopping alone - they cause higher prices for sole proprietors.
The biggest problem I have is that I can't develop for the iPhone without drinking the Apple kool-aid. I don't want a Mac. I want Eclipse on my Ubuntu VM, or at worst, Eclipse on my Windows VM.
Palm gives me the best of both worlds - an emulator in a VirtualBox image, and pretty much any choice of IDE/Platform I want. Android? Same deal.
I made the mistake of putting a patch panel in 18 of my 22 racks. All-in-all it was a waste of space. I lost an entire rack at to patch panels. I would have been FAR better off putting switches in each rack and backhauling via link-aggregated gigabit fiber. It would have cost me more over time (more switches), but would have required I spend less time doing cable management, and permanently losing 66U of rack space to patch panels and cable management. And I probably could have avoided spending $.3 million USD on a Catalyst 6500.
When my Dad had to set up a Paypal account to sell online, I showed him the paypalsucks.com site, and he set up a separate "clearing" bank account that he swept the money out of as soon as he could. He's never had any issues with Paypal, but better to lose $300 than $3000 or more.
You're right, they have. And it's multi-touch. Look, using a mouse is an anti-intuitive task. We're not trained/equipped to use remote tools to manipulate something, it feels alien.
Now grabbing something and manipulating it... that's what we've evolved hands for. That's why people are ga-ga over multitouch. For the first time, computing seems to make sense, is easy.
If you saw Avatar, there was a scene when they were first interface Jake to his avatar, and one of the scientists grabs a brain scan off of a monitor and transfers it to a portable tablet. That's something that's intuitive to us. Mice are great, I suppose, but completely alien to us as control inputs.
It's why fine digital work is often done with pen tablets - wielding pens is far more natural/intuitive to people.
As an aside, how exactly do studies determine "margin of error"? How do you know your margin computation algorithm is working right? What if it's 100% wrong?
I haven't used the Pre store since I brought mine back to the Sprint store on July 5th. The phone was fighting for signal, either a Spring cell, or roaming on a Verizon cell - I could never reliably make calls from my home (where I use it the most, it's my only phone).
But I find it better than the crap that is Android, and yes, between Synergy and the Card interface, I think Apple could be in for an upset if Palm can get decent market penetration. The whole iTunes issue underscores just how much Apple fears the Pre/WebOS, if you ask me.
Unfortunately, without those customers, there *IS* no revenue stream.
This meme of fiscal responsibility to the shareholders has to end. It's not true, never has been, never will be. Once a company IPOs, that money is effectively the companies. They are under no obligation to ever pay it back, except through bankruptcy litigation, and then actual creditors are given first whack at the money.
I think I agree with you. I'd be willing to give up 5% of my performance to the overhead of a microkernel if it means my systems become rock-stable and any userspace program can become a driver.
This is utter bullshit - people will write just to write.
Visit storiesonline.net sometime and see the many book-length stories created and posted there, for absolutely nothing more than the love of writing.
People aren't going to stop performing/creating artful works. The point of copyright was to get people to SHARE them rather than lock them up in a vault.
Regarding the Ribbon - Pretty does not mean functional. Microsoft chose to change a UI, and now I spend extra seconds looking for buttons and toolbars that I used to know reflexively.
The Ribbon is a pretty piece of shit. It doesn't save screen real estate, except when you turn it all off, so how is that better than the toolbars I used to use? And they're not even consistent - Outlook Main Pane doesn't have one, but Outlook Message Pane does, wtf?
You have hit the nail on the head. But don't think that user-friendly and task-friendly are mutually exclusive. With Windows and it's addition of WMI and powershell, Windows has become far far more task-friendly than ever before. Linux can be both - in fact it has become far easier to install and use. I'm a fair expert at Linux, but I'm growing older - I can't be bothered to do things like hunt down wireless chipsets or drivers for storage. Most mainstream distros are getting far better at making this all "just work." Does that mean that more can't be done? Not at all.
But Linux's major failure continues to be the one which has plagued it since 1993 - hardware drivers and vendors. People not standardizing on interfaces and selling their solutions on the value of their hardware alone - everyone has to make their driver a proprietary component. Mostly to fix issues/bugs in the hardware they don't want to publicize.
Fix the hardware driver issue, and you'll see adoption of Linux skyrocket. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a chicken/egg problem.
These clauses are so they can use facilities and services like Iron Mountain and it's ilk to secure store data offsite. Iron Mountain has been doing this for banks and hospitals for years with few issues - ideally your Cloud vendor encrypts their backups before the tapes get shipped offsite.
Have you actually run the numbers on a service like AWS? I did, for my hosting account (dedicated Linux hosting). What I pay $70/month for now would cost me nearly that much in just CPU costs alone.
EC2 (Small) * 720h == $61.2.
That's not even factoring in bandwidth or storage (I currently have 80GB of storage and 500GB of monthly bandwidth), which add another $16 bucks to the total based on my current actual usage.
Now add in IO request charges, and a high-traffic website could easily outpace dedicated hosting.
So called cloud services offer you an easy way to provision customized systems, that's about it, IMHO.
I'd rather contract with a decent server provisioner and have some easy way of getting my systems installed and running.
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I'm evaluating phones now - I'm the owner of a 64G Touch 3G, am wielding a Pre+ on a 30-day trial and have used a number of Android phones.
Apple Pros:
navigating launcher is fast, quick, easy to use. One button. Consistent behavior in metaphors (delete, back, forward).
Bright, large screen.
Arguably accurate/responsive touch screen.
Incredible on-screen keyboard and editor.
Videos, integration with iTunes.
Most applications (productivity) seem well thought out and designed.
Software ecosystem.
Apple Cons:
Harder for me to write software for (as a non-dev, I don't care, or can move to Webapps).
Large phone.
Tied to AT&T.
Not expandable (sd card)
Pre Pros:
Small, comfortable size.
Multitasking
Wifi Hotspot
Synergy
Pre Cons:
$10/m for access to VZ Navigator GPS
$30/m for Wifi hotspot. For $30 more I can get a separate MiFi, and be able to browse and talk at the same time.
Launcher is SLOOOOOW.
Keyboard editing is more difficult - it's harder to arbitrarily edit text in a paragraph.
Browser is nowhere near the ease of use of the Touch.
Screen is smaller.
Screen digitizer is not very accurate.
Synergy: synergy is about contact and communication integration. It should allow me to email a facebook user from the contact app. As it is, it just shows me contact data that exists in each source, it doesn't utilize native communication tools. It also only supports LinkedIn and Facebook. After 6 months (since the Sprint release) I'd have expected that they'd have added Facebook or Twitter.
Tied to Verizon.
Software ecosystem is an unknown at this time. It's growing, but I'm not at all sure about marketshare and uptake.
Not expandable (sd card)
Droid Pros:
Software ecosystem
Powerful interfaces to communications (SMS/Email)
Decent size for a phone
Bright display
Droid cons:
midsize display
Launcher is slow - navigating is noticably slower than the Touch.
Digitizer is less accurate.
Expandable with memory cards.
Interface is not standardized (this is arguably not a con).
My big fingers can't use the top row of the slider keyboard comfortably.
<rant>Why can't we have one communications standard (GMS/CDMA) in this country?</rant>
I'm pretty sure my Pre+ is going back to the store. It's cute, it's nice, but it's not my hoped-for Treo replacement. The Touch with it's onscreen keyboard is arguably better as a PDA than the Pre+ is with it's REAL keyboard. And I never thought I'd say that - I was vehemently against getting the iPhone or the Blackberry Storm for just this reason - I thought I couldn't live without a physical keyboard (I've had Treo's since the 600, and a Kyocera 6035 before that, and an original Pilot and a Visor before that). So before I ditch Verizon and go to the iPhone, I'm going to give the Blackberry Storm 2 a try.
Frankly, this idea of safety is a red herring.
How much malware EVER existed for Windows CE and Palm OS? Almost ZERO.
And look how big those software ecostructures were. Not 4000 useful apps and 130,000 games like the iphone, but the Palm OS had 30,000+ applications over it's lifespan, it and was constrained by not having WiFi for years, and a poor CPU driving it.
Safety was never an issue. It's about getting a piece of every $ made on their platform, that's it. Instead of big up-front licensing costs, they spread it out over every deployment.
Let me adjust your analogy a little bit better.
Pa: "Honey, we don't got no insurance, and our house has a strange tendency to be extremely sensitive to fire and flooding, and if any of that happens while we're sitting down to dinner, we're dead. But the shed is less likely to burn or flood, so maybe we should have the kids sleep out there?"
I also dislike how retirement accounts are set up in this country.
IRA/SEP-IRA/401K... they suck.
Simply give me one big $25,000/y bucket for pre-tax, tax-deferred money, and a $5000/y bucket for after-tax/tax-free money, and get rid of the mess. When I was contracting, I wanted something similar to my 401K, but without the onerous requirements of the SEP-IRA if I ever decided to hire extra help (I'd have to make mandatory contributions for my employees). Ugh.
Employer benefits are nice, but they create pressure on individuals shopping alone - they cause higher prices for sole proprietors.
The biggest problem I have is that I can't develop for the iPhone without drinking the Apple kool-aid. I don't want a Mac. I want Eclipse on my Ubuntu VM, or at worst, Eclipse on my Windows VM.
Palm gives me the best of both worlds - an emulator in a VirtualBox image, and pretty much any choice of IDE/Platform I want. Android? Same deal.
You should have moved across the valley then.
UPSes on the bottom. Those fsckers are heavy.
I made the mistake of putting a patch panel in 18 of my 22 racks. All-in-all it was a waste of space. I lost an entire rack at to patch panels. I would have been FAR better off putting switches in each rack and backhauling via link-aggregated gigabit fiber. It would have cost me more over time (more switches), but would have required I spend less time doing cable management, and permanently losing 66U of rack space to patch panels and cable management. And I probably could have avoided spending $.3 million USD on a Catalyst 6500.
When my Dad had to set up a Paypal account to sell online, I showed him the paypalsucks.com site, and he set up a separate "clearing" bank account that he swept the money out of as soon as he could. He's never had any issues with Paypal, but better to lose $300 than $3000 or more.
I haven't deployed an Exchange server since Exchange 2000. Do newer versions mine the Junk-Mail folder for email to improve it's spam filtering?
I'm continutally amazed at MUA that don't have a mechanism for reporting spam. Especially Outlook.
You're right, they have. And it's multi-touch. Look, using a mouse is an anti-intuitive task. We're not trained/equipped to use remote tools to manipulate something, it feels alien.
Now grabbing something and manipulating it... that's what we've evolved hands for. That's why people are ga-ga over multitouch. For the first time, computing seems to make sense, is easy.
If you saw Avatar, there was a scene when they were first interface Jake to his avatar, and one of the scientists grabs a brain scan off of a monitor and transfers it to a portable tablet. That's something that's intuitive to us. Mice are great, I suppose, but completely alien to us as control inputs.
It's why fine digital work is often done with pen tablets - wielding pens is far more natural/intuitive to people.
As an aside, how exactly do studies determine "margin of error"? How do you know your margin computation algorithm is working right? What if it's 100% wrong?
I haven't used the Pre store since I brought mine back to the Sprint store on July 5th. The phone was fighting for signal, either a Spring cell, or roaming on a Verizon cell - I could never reliably make calls from my home (where I use it the most, it's my only phone).
But I find it better than the crap that is Android, and yes, between Synergy and the Card interface, I think Apple could be in for an upset if Palm can get decent market penetration. The whole iTunes issue underscores just how much Apple fears the Pre/WebOS, if you ask me.
So does AT&T. AT&T is compromised now of at least two of the former Baby Bells, just like Verizon.
Unfortunately, without those customers, there *IS* no revenue stream.
This meme of fiscal responsibility to the shareholders has to end. It's not true, never has been, never will be. Once a company IPOs, that money is effectively the companies. They are under no obligation to ever pay it back, except through bankruptcy litigation, and then actual creditors are given first whack at the money.
I think I agree with you. I'd be willing to give up 5% of my performance to the overhead of a microkernel if it means my systems become rock-stable and any userspace program can become a driver.
http://www.jnode.org/
Something I'm actually trying to work with as part of larger unified/cloud computing infrastructure.
Remember, a single "patch" could change 10,000 lines of code.
This is utter bullshit - people will write just to write.
Visit storiesonline.net sometime and see the many book-length stories created and posted there, for absolutely nothing more than the love of writing.
People aren't going to stop performing/creating artful works. The point of copyright was to get people to SHARE them rather than lock them up in a vault.
Because we have these things called ratings boards, and that WalMart is very careful about, get this...
:-)
NOT SELLING PORN.
TYVM. HAND.
Regarding the Ribbon - Pretty does not mean functional. Microsoft chose to change a UI, and now I spend extra seconds looking for buttons and toolbars that I used to know reflexively.
The Ribbon is a pretty piece of shit. It doesn't save screen real estate, except when you turn it all off, so how is that better than the toolbars I used to use? And they're not even consistent - Outlook Main Pane doesn't have one, but Outlook Message Pane does, wtf?
I say it again: Pretty does not mean functional.
You have hit the nail on the head. But don't think that user-friendly and task-friendly are mutually exclusive. With Windows and it's addition of WMI and powershell, Windows has become far far more task-friendly than ever before. Linux can be both - in fact it has become far easier to install and use. I'm a fair expert at Linux, but I'm growing older - I can't be bothered to do things like hunt down wireless chipsets or drivers for storage. Most mainstream distros are getting far better at making this all "just work." Does that mean that more can't be done? Not at all.
But Linux's major failure continues to be the one which has plagued it since 1993 - hardware drivers and vendors. People not standardizing on interfaces and selling their solutions on the value of their hardware alone - everyone has to make their driver a proprietary component. Mostly to fix issues/bugs in the hardware they don't want to publicize.
Fix the hardware driver issue, and you'll see adoption of Linux skyrocket. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a chicken/egg problem.
I haven't been in a Library since 1997 or so studying law on starting up a business.
These clauses are so they can use facilities and services like Iron Mountain and it's ilk to secure store data offsite. Iron Mountain has been doing this for banks and hospitals for years with few issues - ideally your Cloud vendor encrypts their backups before the tapes get shipped offsite.
Have you actually run the numbers on a service like AWS? I did, for my hosting account (dedicated Linux hosting). What I pay $70/month for now would cost me nearly that much in just CPU costs alone.
EC2 (Small) * 720h == $61.2.
That's not even factoring in bandwidth or storage (I currently have 80GB of storage and 500GB of monthly bandwidth), which add another $16 bucks to the total based on my current actual usage.
Now add in IO request charges, and a high-traffic website could easily outpace dedicated hosting.
So called cloud services offer you an easy way to provision customized systems, that's about it, IMHO.
I'd rather contract with a decent server provisioner and have some easy way of getting my systems installed and running.