Bought mine at Fry's Electronics here in Atlanta so there is at least one B&M you can pick it up at. Only criticism I can really throw at it is the lack of draft n.
I'm also running dd-wrt so I think I'll be updating it now.
Yep, that's definitely a bit cheaper than what I'm paying right now. 59 dollars a month for unlimited EVDO Rev. A data. I'm not sure what 3.5G I(couldn't find a Wikipedia article, unlike 3 and 4g) is but my mobile speed isn't too bad.
Fortunately, I got grandfathered in on an unlimited plan. I thought about getting one of the mifi adapters that you can share the connection with but fuck some 5GB limit. I'll just stick with what I have TYVM.
See, while I actually do find this useful for traveling, etc., it's actually a rather weak form of true AR.
For it to be the real deal, first of all, requires a heads up display be it a corneal implant, actual functional eyeglass display or whatever. It needs to have the ability to contextually figure out what I'm doing and respond appropriately. Say for instance I'm working on my car and I'm not sure exactly how a part is supposed to fit. A true AR setup would just overlay a holographic image of the part over what I'm doing. Or say I wanted to learn a musical instrument, same deal. It should be able to automatically block out billboards as I'm going down the road and replace them with pleasant scenery. If I want my house to look like a medieval castle, true AR would be able to provide the illusion for me.
While this app and others like it like Wikitude, are a start, we have a long way to go.
The issue is the massive amounts of writes Firefox makes to the sqlite database it keeps on the disk in cache. Pointing the cache to a RAM disk does significantly speed this up. Poo poo it all you want but it does work. Take it up with Mozilla.
Why go through all the trouble of creating a special RAM disk when you can just use the one that is already there and ready to go?
browser.cache.disk.parent_directory with a string value of/dev/shm
An added benefit is if you move your profile when you are reinstalling or whatever, you don't have to recreate the custom mountpoint or anything. Just fire Firefox up and go.
Yes kids, with Linux, the batteries are indeed included.
I'm having difficulty understanding where you're coming from regarding the media players in Linux. For audio, Amarok 1.4 is nothing short of amazing. Even the venerable Winamp and Foobar can't touch it for flexibility and keyboard friendliness. As for video players, mplayer is one of the programs I fire up to show Linux off to Windows using naysayers. It loads anything you throw at it and it's blazing fast at seeking, start-up, you name it. And if you just have to have a GUI, VLC is untouchable. Hell, Miro will play your local videos too and it has tons of features. I know that all of the video programs I mentioned run under Windows too but, to imply that media players on Linux suck is disingenuous at best.
However, this is good news in that despite the EULA containing info about the auto-renewal, that wasn't enough to justify the practise. Further proof that, in the eyes of the law, the EULA is anything but iron-clad.
A) Installation IS a pain in the ass for anyone who isn't a geek with a decent amount of experience.
I tried to resist... Installation is a pain in Linux versus Windows for the simple fact that unlike Windows, Linux goes very far out of its way not to run rough shod over what you already have on your hard drive. You actually have to make decisions like, do I completely format my whole drive, or do I let the installer repartition it for me so I can dual boot with what's already on there. With Windows you can forget dual booting with anything other than another Windows install. And, if I remember correctly, the Windows installer doesn't have a partitioner so you have to have the disk already set up before you even start. MBR? Windows just blows it away, bye bye GRUB until you fix it. So, I guess you could say that's easy. In the way that walking out into the street and getting run over by a bus is easy.
Driver support sucks.
The only way driver support sucks in Linux is if the manufacturers refuse to open the specs for their hardware or won't make the drivers themselves. No for the devices, and they exist in vast numbers, that do have free drivers, they tend to work much better in Linux. When I used to use Windows, and had to install hardware, the CD always insisted on installing some lame 100 MB's worth of crapware just to get a wireless card working. I'm looking at you, Belkin. Now, with Linux, when I plug in my cellular network card, it just works. No crapware, no driver hunting, nothing. So, though everything doesn't work in Linux, there is a flipside. When something does work, it tends to work much better.
Software selection leaves a lot to be desired.
Really, that depends on what you are doing. If I want to burn an iso in Linux, I just insert a blank CD. The software to do it is included out of the box. If I want to use a spreadsheet, it's included out of the box. If I want to download torrents, the software is there out of the box. You know one of the reasons the iphone is so popular? It's that little thing they call an app store. You know what? I have one of those. Except everything in it is free.
Games.
You say Wine is a band-aid or whatever. But, you know what? My games tend to work better in Wine than they do on Windows. My Wine games sit on an XFS partition so they load much faster than they used to on FAT32 and NTFS. Especially long load games like FarCry. And when the game hits the drive for something mid-level, it is much smoother. For example, when you shoot somebody in FarCry on Windows, they stutter just a bit as they fall. I didn't notice that until I started playing the game in Wine. In Wine, it's perfectly smooth. It's quite noticeable. Incidentally, I get the same effect with virtual machines and pretty much any disk intensive applications. I have a great time in Wine with Half-Life 2, Bioshock, Fallout 3, FarCry 1 and 2, Oblivion, Morrowind, and the list goes on and on. Oh, and, yes, there are native Linux games that play great too. Like Quake 4 and Doom 3. Great times.
I'll just leave it at that. But, to close, I will say that not only does Linux do everything Windows did for me, it makes installing new software via repositories immeasurably easier, has the robust GNU tools underneath, has rock solid stability (I use Debian Lenny), and is satisfyingly free in almost every way a piece of software can be. So there.
My experience with running games in Wine couldn't be more different than yours. Every game I try in it works more or less flawlessly. A few might take a little tweaking, usually involving downloading a particular dll but otherwise, no problems. Off the top of my head, I play:
Morrowind
Farcry
Half-Life 1 and 2 including both episodes
Fallout 3
Bioshock
Quake 1, 2, 3
Star Wars Jedi Academy
Star Trek Voyager Elite Force
I'm sure there are many more I am forgetting. My hardware isn't even all that. I'm running Arch on an AMD 3000+ with a Gig of RAM and a 6600GT graphics card. Framerates are quite good in everything except Fallout. But, it just completely overwhelms my hardware as it would were I running Windows on this and trying to play it.
Here's my 2 cents as an amateur programmer. I make little utilities for myself all the time to do various things. Like, I coded a python program recently to keep track of my prices on Amazon and adjust them up or down based on the market from time to time. Now this program is relatively simple and does exactly what it is designed to do. It is completely CLI based and since I am intimately familiar with it, I know how not to break it and I don't need or want it to do anything else.
Now, let's say, I wanted to sell this program. Firstly, I would need to put a pretty interface on it, then I would need to write in all of the error and exception handling required to make sure it didn't crash when the user starts randomly hitting keys on the keyboard. I would need to write in new features that, while I might not necessarily want them, to make the program commercially competitive, have to be there for other users. And on and on. That's how a 300 line script turns into a 10's of thousands of lines bloated nightmare. At least that's how I see it.
Take Nautilus, for example - I never actually use it, but Gnome wants it to be running all the time just in case.
I might as well throw my 2 cents in here too. In Gnome, by default, Nautilus doesn't just display your files, it also paints the picture on your desktop and gives your desktop its right click menu. So, if you use either of those things, you are using Nautilus. If you decide to use some other window manager like Fluxbox or whatever and decide to use Nautilus for whatever and don't want it to take over your desktop just open it like this: $ nautilus --no-desktop.
Yep, I just upgraded a couple of days ago. Went to Fry's and picked up an e7400 C2D, a Biostar motherboard with the nVidia chipset, 2 Gigs of RAM, a case and powersupply. Total cost: $244. And it's blazing fast for what I use it for which, incidentally, includes some virtualization for some Windows apps that I can't get to run in Wine. Needless to say, I'm pretty happy about it and was stunned at the performance I got for the price.
You have it all wrong. It's not the "Linux" developers' jobs to write Wizards and GUIs for everything. Linux is the kernel. If you want to see more GUI tools, you need to file bugs against KDE and Gnome. That is their forte. If they felt like it, they could sit around and a GUI for every little thing. A little motivation in the form of bug reports and money would probably go a long way towards getting them to do it. And it doesn't require any changes at all in the kernel itself, much less a billion dollar rewrite. That is just absurd. And since you are so familiar with Windows 3.1, I'm sure you recall it was in essence, just a shell over DOS. DOS being a thoroughly CLI based OS.
As others have made the point, a modern distro like Ubuntu can be ran CLI-free. I just set my girlfriend up on an Ubuntu 9.04 box and she is as happy as a clam. Everything works as she expects and she claims to actually enjoy learning this Linux thing. The thing is though, she's not really learning how to use Linux. She's learning how to use Gnome. And I'm fine with that. But, she, and you, shouldn't confuse the two.
And, furthermore, as far as Windows dominating netbooks, you can lay most of the blame squarely at the feet of the OEM's installing craptastic versions of Linux on them with the dumbed down interfaces and hardware that quite often isn't even fully supported. You couldn't have asked for a more botched job if Microsoft had done it themselves. I'm looking at you MSI.
Safari on the iPhone is indeed impressive. However, you obviously haven't tried Opera on the G1. It's blazing fast. At least 3 times faster at rendering pages as the built-in Webkit browser that comes with the phone. It browses in Edge faster than the stock browser does in 3G. It's even faster than Safari on the iPhone. Furthermore, it has all of the cool usability perks you get with Opera like keypad scrolling, etc. I'm very happy with it.
Much like you, I also was a long-time Verizon customer who switched over to T-Mobile specifically to get my hands on a G1. I can honestly say, I couldn't be happier. I travel a lot for a living and although I just had to have a G1, I was bracing myself for the shitty network I assumed I was going to be subjected to from T-Mobile. However, I realize now that I couldn't have been more wrong.
I live in Atlanta and have been over the northeast, the midwest through Ohio, Indiana, Missouri. I've been through Colorado, Utah, Nevada and am at this very moment sitting in the parking lot of an In and Out burger joing in Fresno, CA and thus far, I have had no signal a grand total of twice. Total time without network probably an hour going through the rocky mountains. Probably the only thing I can say sucks about T-Mobile in that regard is the lack of 3G coverage. Though, strangely enough, and you may agree with this or not, Opera Mobile on this phone is blazing fast in no matter if I'm on Edge or whatever. It's faster on Edge than the built-in Webkit based browser is on 3G. And that includes complex large sites like slashdot and digg.
And, the customer service for T-Mobile is phenomenal. I had one little hiccup with the phone and was on the line with a very nice and knowledgeable person within just a few minutes that fixed me right up.
And furthermore, having used Windows Mobile for several years with 2003 and version 5, Android is so far advanced from it, it's almost unbelievable. Android is always responsive and never lags. It's a joy to use. There are plenty of cool and useful apps in the Market like ssh clients, terminal emulators, there's a vnc client though I don't think you can get it in the Market yet, you have to download it straight from its homepage.
Basically, I honestly couldn't be happier with the phone, the OS, Google, or T-Mobile. And that's a hell of a change after dealing with Verizon and Windows Mobile for over 5 years.
How much does lead astroturfer pay these days? Or are you just that stupid, short-sighted or both to see that anti-consumer business practices don't pay off in the long-term?
Would it actually be better if you could only play DVDs in stand alone DVD players?
I see this point brought up here from time to time and I never have time to respond so I'm glad you made it today. The simple answer is, yes, it would be better if the OS did not have built in support for playback of restricted media and no easy way to add it in. If that were the case, the media industry would feel much more intense pressure from ordinary people who are pissed that they can't watch movies when and where they want on their computers. Eventually, because of economic pressure from lost sales, the industry would cave. The only thing necessary to get us there is Microsoft to put its foot down on the issue and a little bit of time.
Of course, and let me put my paranoid hat on for a minute here, Microsoft is never going to do that because, the DRM has nothing to do with them wanting you to be able to play media on your computers for its own sake. It has everything to do with Microsoft wanting to get its hand firmly into the content distribution pie. And the only way for them to do that is to go to the recording industry and say, hey, look at us, we can give you our customers on a silver platter and keep them buying multiple copies of the same media for every device they own since they can't break our Super Secure(TM) wma/wmv format.
You say the G1 phone "sucks big time". And I suppose for you, that's the case. However, I feel exactly the opposite about mine.
I don't mind the thickness, as I vastly prefer the tactile response of the slide-out keyboard vs. the on-screen only iPhone.
As far as the camera, I haven't taken the first picture, I have a real camera for that.
The headphone jack dongle doesn't particularly bother me though, I do admit, I'd like to be able to charge the phone and listen to tunes at the same time.
As far as the battery, you're right on. The phone should last at least twice as long per charge.
Though you didn't mention it, some people take issue with the little blackberry-esque trackball. Personally I love it. Again, it's the tactile response I like. It's great for browsing the web and I also think it works well for games.
For the overall design, it isn't the greatest but I've seen much worse on some Windows Mobile devices. It's just the bar was set so high by the iPhone, it's hard to come up with something to top it. As a side note, the bend in the bottom where the trackball and buttons are, is perfect for protecting the trackball when your phone is in a case so I think it was better to put it there than to just leave the phone straight, aesthetics be damned. Some may disagree.
Yeah, but the difference is Microsoft rakes in billions yearly from Windows and they pay their UI designers good money to come up with what in all honesty is quite reminiscent of KDE4.
On the other hand, it makes sense for the KDE devs to rely on the community for some of their ideas. As a matter of fact, if they didn't, I would think something was wrong.
With all the money Microsoft invests into their OS releases, I expect to walk up to a laptop in Best Buy (the only experience I get with Windows these days) and be utterly blown away by sublimely awesome interface zen. Instead, I'm left with a supremely underwhelmed feeling and asking myself, "Is this really the best they could come up with?"
Simple, with Linux, you don't have to just paste on a theme to what's already there. You can completely rip out the entire UI layer and replace it with whatever you want. Say you want a lighter, faster UI. Just replace whatever you have, be it KDE, Gnome, XFCE, or whatever with, *box, icewm, ion, fvwm, enlightenment or any one or more of the plethora of window managers out there. Don't like Xorg? There are alternatives. Hell, for that matter, you can just boot to a blinking cursor if that's your bag. This is a gross over simplification of what you can do but you get the point. With Windows on the other hand, for all intents and purposes, you are stuck with explorer.exe (sure there are ways around this but I've never seen someone in real life running anything else) and gluing something over the top of it. Even if you boot to "DOS", in the NT era, it's still a partially maximized window. After you change to the classic theme and turn off the animations, your box is as fast as it will ever get. It can only go slower from there. After adding Window Blinds or whatever theming engine you are using, you inevitably end up with something that is at best prettier but is still of lower performance than what you started with. So, sure you can possibly make it look like whatever you want but there are sacrifices to be made. Obviously, in the business space, there are ATMs and kiosks, that are running Windows with heavily customized interfaces that work fairly well and are responsive. But, that is a very narrow usage scenario. And you aren't going to put something like that on most people's desks and expect them to go for it.
And as far as implementing any logic I want. Cool, I have plenty of money, so when will you have that arm port of Windows 2000 ready that I can install on my N800? Thought not.
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Bought mine at Fry's Electronics here in Atlanta so there is at least one B&M you can pick it up at. Only criticism I can really throw at it is the lack of draft n.
I'm also running dd-wrt so I think I'll be updating it now.
Some people go nuts over these things .
The iPhone has a 480x320 resolution for a total of 153,600 pixels.
The N810 has 800x480 resolution for a total of 384,000 pixels.
So, yes, the N810 does indeed have more than double the resolution.
Yep, that's definitely a bit cheaper than what I'm paying right now. 59 dollars a month for unlimited EVDO Rev. A data. I'm not sure what 3.5G I(couldn't find a Wikipedia article, unlike 3 and 4g) is but my mobile speed isn't too bad.
Fortunately, I got grandfathered in on an unlimited plan. I thought about getting one of the mifi adapters that you can share the connection with but fuck some 5GB limit. I'll just stick with what I have TYVM.
See, while I actually do find this useful for traveling, etc., it's actually a rather weak form of true AR.
For it to be the real deal, first of all, requires a heads up display be it a corneal implant, actual functional eyeglass display or whatever. It needs to have the ability to contextually figure out what I'm doing and respond appropriately. Say for instance I'm working on my car and I'm not sure exactly how a part is supposed to fit. A true AR setup would just overlay a holographic image of the part over what I'm doing. Or say I wanted to learn a musical instrument, same deal. It should be able to automatically block out billboards as I'm going down the road and replace them with pleasant scenery. If I want my house to look like a medieval castle, true AR would be able to provide the illusion for me.
While this app and others like it like Wikitude, are a start, we have a long way to go.
Sorry I took so long to reply.
The issue is the massive amounts of writes Firefox makes to the sqlite database it keeps on the disk in cache. Pointing the cache to a RAM disk does significantly speed this up. Poo poo it all you want but it does work. Take it up with Mozilla.
Why go through all the trouble of creating a special RAM disk when you can just use the one that is already there and ready to go?
browser.cache.disk.parent_directory with a string value of /dev/shm
An added benefit is if you move your profile when you are reinstalling or whatever, you don't have to recreate the custom mountpoint or anything. Just fire Firefox up and go.
Yes kids, with Linux, the batteries are indeed included.
I'm having difficulty understanding where you're coming from regarding the media players in Linux. For audio, Amarok 1.4 is nothing short of amazing. Even the venerable Winamp and Foobar can't touch it for flexibility and keyboard friendliness. As for video players, mplayer is one of the programs I fire up to show Linux off to Windows using naysayers. It loads anything you throw at it and it's blazing fast at seeking, start-up, you name it. And if you just have to have a GUI, VLC is untouchable. Hell, Miro will play your local videos too and it has tons of features. I know that all of the video programs I mentioned run under Windows too but, to imply that media players on Linux suck is disingenuous at best.
However, this is good news in that despite the EULA containing info about the auto-renewal, that wasn't enough to justify the practise. Further proof that, in the eyes of the law, the EULA is anything but iron-clad.
A) Installation IS a pain in the ass for anyone who isn't a geek with a decent amount of experience.
I tried to resist... Installation is a pain in Linux versus Windows for the simple fact that unlike Windows, Linux goes very far out of its way not to run rough shod over what you already have on your hard drive. You actually have to make decisions like, do I completely format my whole drive, or do I let the installer repartition it for me so I can dual boot with what's already on there. With Windows you can forget dual booting with anything other than another Windows install. And, if I remember correctly, the Windows installer doesn't have a partitioner so you have to have the disk already set up before you even start. MBR? Windows just blows it away, bye bye GRUB until you fix it. So, I guess you could say that's easy. In the way that walking out into the street and getting run over by a bus is easy.
Driver support sucks.
The only way driver support sucks in Linux is if the manufacturers refuse to open the specs for their hardware or won't make the drivers themselves. No for the devices, and they exist in vast numbers, that do have free drivers, they tend to work much better in Linux. When I used to use Windows, and had to install hardware, the CD always insisted on installing some lame 100 MB's worth of crapware just to get a wireless card working. I'm looking at you, Belkin. Now, with Linux, when I plug in my cellular network card, it just works. No crapware, no driver hunting, nothing. So, though everything doesn't work in Linux, there is a flipside. When something does work, it tends to work much better.
Software selection leaves a lot to be desired.
Really, that depends on what you are doing. If I want to burn an iso in Linux, I just insert a blank CD. The software to do it is included out of the box. If I want to use a spreadsheet, it's included out of the box. If I want to download torrents, the software is there out of the box. You know one of the reasons the iphone is so popular? It's that little thing they call an app store. You know what? I have one of those. Except everything in it is free.
Games.
You say Wine is a band-aid or whatever. But, you know what? My games tend to work better in Wine than they do on Windows. My Wine games sit on an XFS partition so they load much faster than they used to on FAT32 and NTFS. Especially long load games like FarCry. And when the game hits the drive for something mid-level, it is much smoother. For example, when you shoot somebody in FarCry on Windows, they stutter just a bit as they fall. I didn't notice that until I started playing the game in Wine. In Wine, it's perfectly smooth. It's quite noticeable. Incidentally, I get the same effect with virtual machines and pretty much any disk intensive applications. I have a great time in Wine with Half-Life 2, Bioshock, Fallout 3, FarCry 1 and 2, Oblivion, Morrowind, and the list goes on and on. Oh, and, yes, there are native Linux games that play great too. Like Quake 4 and Doom 3. Great times.
I'll just leave it at that. But, to close, I will say that not only does Linux do everything Windows did for me, it makes installing new software via repositories immeasurably easier, has the robust GNU tools underneath, has rock solid stability (I use Debian Lenny), and is satisfyingly free in almost every way a piece of software can be. So there.
My experience with running games in Wine couldn't be more different than yours. Every game I try in it works more or less flawlessly. A few might take a little tweaking, usually involving downloading a particular dll but otherwise, no problems. Off the top of my head, I play:
Morrowind
Farcry
Half-Life 1 and 2 including both episodes
Fallout 3
Bioshock
Quake 1, 2, 3
Star Wars Jedi Academy
Star Trek Voyager Elite Force
I'm sure there are many more I am forgetting. My hardware isn't even all that. I'm running Arch on an AMD 3000+ with a Gig of RAM and a 6600GT graphics card. Framerates are quite good in everything except Fallout. But, it just completely overwhelms my hardware as it would were I running Windows on this and trying to play it.
So, maybe give Wine another look.
Now, let's say, I wanted to sell this program. Firstly, I would need to put a pretty interface on it, then I would need to write in all of the error and exception handling required to make sure it didn't crash when the user starts randomly hitting keys on the keyboard. I would need to write in new features that, while I might not necessarily want them, to make the program commercially competitive, have to be there for other users. And on and on. That's how a 300 line script turns into a 10's of thousands of lines bloated nightmare. At least that's how I see it.
Take Nautilus, for example - I never actually use it, but Gnome wants it to be running all the time just in case.
I might as well throw my 2 cents in here too. In Gnome, by default, Nautilus doesn't just display your files, it also paints the picture on your desktop and gives your desktop its right click menu. So, if you use either of those things, you are using Nautilus. If you decide to use some other window manager like Fluxbox or whatever and decide to use Nautilus for whatever and don't want it to take over your desktop just open it like this: $ nautilus --no-desktop.
Yep, I just upgraded a couple of days ago. Went to Fry's and picked up an e7400 C2D, a Biostar motherboard with the nVidia chipset, 2 Gigs of RAM, a case and powersupply. Total cost: $244. And it's blazing fast for what I use it for which, incidentally, includes some virtualization for some Windows apps that I can't get to run in Wine. Needless to say, I'm pretty happy about it and was stunned at the performance I got for the price.
As others have made the point, a modern distro like Ubuntu can be ran CLI-free. I just set my girlfriend up on an Ubuntu 9.04 box and she is as happy as a clam. Everything works as she expects and she claims to actually enjoy learning this Linux thing. The thing is though, she's not really learning how to use Linux. She's learning how to use Gnome. And I'm fine with that. But, she, and you, shouldn't confuse the two.
And, furthermore, as far as Windows dominating netbooks, you can lay most of the blame squarely at the feet of the OEM's installing craptastic versions of Linux on them with the dumbed down interfaces and hardware that quite often isn't even fully supported. You couldn't have asked for a more botched job if Microsoft had done it themselves. I'm looking at you MSI.
Safari on the iPhone is indeed impressive. However, you obviously haven't tried Opera on the G1. It's blazing fast. At least 3 times faster at rendering pages as the built-in Webkit browser that comes with the phone. It browses in Edge faster than the stock browser does in 3G. It's even faster than Safari on the iPhone. Furthermore, it has all of the cool usability perks you get with Opera like keypad scrolling, etc. I'm very happy with it.
I live in Atlanta and have been over the northeast, the midwest through Ohio, Indiana, Missouri. I've been through Colorado, Utah, Nevada and am at this very moment sitting in the parking lot of an In and Out burger joing in Fresno, CA and thus far, I have had no signal a grand total of twice. Total time without network probably an hour going through the rocky mountains. Probably the only thing I can say sucks about T-Mobile in that regard is the lack of 3G coverage. Though, strangely enough, and you may agree with this or not, Opera Mobile on this phone is blazing fast in no matter if I'm on Edge or whatever. It's faster on Edge than the built-in Webkit based browser is on 3G. And that includes complex large sites like slashdot and digg.
And, the customer service for T-Mobile is phenomenal. I had one little hiccup with the phone and was on the line with a very nice and knowledgeable person within just a few minutes that fixed me right up.
And furthermore, having used Windows Mobile for several years with 2003 and version 5, Android is so far advanced from it, it's almost unbelievable. Android is always responsive and never lags. It's a joy to use. There are plenty of cool and useful apps in the Market like ssh clients, terminal emulators, there's a vnc client though I don't think you can get it in the Market yet, you have to download it straight from its homepage.
Basically, I honestly couldn't be happier with the phone, the OS, Google, or T-Mobile. And that's a hell of a change after dealing with Verizon and Windows Mobile for over 5 years.
How much does lead astroturfer pay these days? Or are you just that stupid, short-sighted or both to see that anti-consumer business practices don't pay off in the long-term?
I see this point brought up here from time to time and I never have time to respond so I'm glad you made it today. The simple answer is, yes, it would be better if the OS did not have built in support for playback of restricted media and no easy way to add it in. If that were the case, the media industry would feel much more intense pressure from ordinary people who are pissed that they can't watch movies when and where they want on their computers. Eventually, because of economic pressure from lost sales, the industry would cave. The only thing necessary to get us there is Microsoft to put its foot down on the issue and a little bit of time.
Of course, and let me put my paranoid hat on for a minute here, Microsoft is never going to do that because, the DRM has nothing to do with them wanting you to be able to play media on your computers for its own sake. It has everything to do with Microsoft wanting to get its hand firmly into the content distribution pie. And the only way for them to do that is to go to the recording industry and say, hey, look at us, we can give you our customers on a silver platter and keep them buying multiple copies of the same media for every device they own since they can't break our Super Secure(TM) wma/wmv format.
I don't mind the thickness, as I vastly prefer the tactile response of the slide-out keyboard vs. the on-screen only iPhone.
As far as the camera, I haven't taken the first picture, I have a real camera for that.
The headphone jack dongle doesn't particularly bother me though, I do admit, I'd like to be able to charge the phone and listen to tunes at the same time.
As far as the battery, you're right on. The phone should last at least twice as long per charge.
Though you didn't mention it, some people take issue with the little blackberry-esque trackball. Personally I love it. Again, it's the tactile response I like. It's great for browsing the web and I also think it works well for games.
For the overall design, it isn't the greatest but I've seen much worse on some Windows Mobile devices. It's just the bar was set so high by the iPhone, it's hard to come up with something to top it. As a side note, the bend in the bottom where the trackball and buttons are, is perfect for protecting the trackball when your phone is in a case so I think it was better to put it there than to just leave the phone straight, aesthetics be damned. Some may disagree.
Yep, it'll run everything except the latest versions of certain Microsoft apps like IE7 and Streets and Trips 2009. Imagine that, right?
On the other hand, it makes sense for the KDE devs to rely on the community for some of their ideas. As a matter of fact, if they didn't, I would think something was wrong.
With all the money Microsoft invests into their OS releases, I expect to walk up to a laptop in Best Buy (the only experience I get with Windows these days) and be utterly blown away by sublimely awesome interface zen. Instead, I'm left with a supremely underwhelmed feeling and asking myself, "Is this really the best they could come up with?"
And as far as implementing any logic I want. Cool, I have plenty of money, so when will you have that arm port of Windows 2000 ready that I can install on my N800? Thought not.
Debian Lenny for one is still merrily using KDE 3.5.9.