The only thing I worry about is that Samsung is attached to it. They are absolutely horrible at keeping their products up-to-date and fixing long-standing issues (look at the Galaxy S phones, Samsung Moment, and Instinct). They are trigger happy and will send a product to market with glaring issues that should have been fixed during the QA phase of development.
I really wish that tablet makers, especially ones with Android, would stop trying to completely rip off the iPad's look. I don't know about anyone else but I really don't like the 1in+ bezel because it looks tacky. And the location of the capacitive buttons is ALL WRONG for a tablet. They need to be designing tablets more like the Kindle. Buttons on the side is much more ergonomic for tablets. They also need to adjust the price. If any of the tablets are over the price of the iPad then no one will buy it. I really wish some of the sub-$500 tablets would have actually surfaced and weren't complete junk.
Actually, PhysX only runs on NVidia cards natively as it's their runtime now (purchased from Aegia a couple years ago). ATI cards don't process PhysX at all, it's all off-loaded to the CPU. You would need a dedicated PhysX card to get accelerated PhysX while using an ATI GPU. That can be accomplished with something as simple as an 8800GT or equally cheap Nvidia card that can process PhysX (but won't be used for graphics) in a second PCI-e slot or getting an actual PhysX card.
What a lot of people don't realize about the web app thing is that most companies don't develop their web apps in-house. Most often they go through expensive vendors and licensing hoops that cost a lot of money to update the code to work as it should on newer browsers. I work in a multi-billion dollar industry (casino gaming) and all of the web apps require IE6 and that is the corporate standard. In fact, we're to uninstall Firefox or IE7/8 if they're on any computers we work on. Simply put, it isn't the IT department that runs things. Far from it. To purchasing, finance, audit, and accounting the IT department is a solid waste of money and anything to stifle that spending is a good thing. Spending hundreds or thousands of dollars just to update the code of something that already works with what we already have is a waste of money. They don't quite think in the long term where it comes to work efficiency vs support hours vs lost work hours.
IE6 isn't really a huge security problem on corporate networks. Most users don't have admin privileges, the settings are locked down, most computers have a modified HOSTS file to block nasties, all computers have anti-virus, all computers have three ways in (RAdmin, RDC, CA), all computers have a unique identifier, and all computer receive updates through a WSUS server. Combine that with a hefty dose of GPOs and IE6 is locked down fairly tight. If there is a malware outbreak, it's easily contained and cleaned relatively quickly. And if not, you just re-image the machine(s) since users are storing their data on a very large network storage drive. Re-imaging takes, usually, a maximum of 20 minutes.
It's not always pretty but it does work and accounting won't allow fixing things as they should. You can't be an idealist about keeping programs and code updated in a stifling corporate environment where the accounting 'tards run everything.
You can blame that on pre-packaged apps that the carriers put on. Not to mention putting high-end UIs on two year old hardware (HTC Hero). Go over to the SDX forums or Android Forums and read up on how to root your Android and kill those pieces of crap apps that run in the background slowing everything down. Get Advanced Task Killer too. I've put the latest SDX kernel and recovery onto my Samsung Moment and it runs blazingly fast and is free of a lot of cruft thanks to a handy shell script written by Joey at SDX that removes the pre-packaged apps that take up space as well as make themselves run in the background. It's also still fully functional with no problems. Remember, with the proper help and setup Android is still a Linux machine and has tons of flexibility built-in. Besides jail-breaking your iPhone, you don't get much more flexibility out of it.
http://www.sdx-developers.com/http://www.androidforums.com/
"Fully functional" is pretty subjective. However, for "most" people a Windows PC loaded with AOL and a whole number of programs they may or may not use. "Most" people don't want to go through the learning curve of switching to Linux or OS X (if they even know what those are). They simply want to use a computer and have it work how they're used to, crashes and all. I mean, have you ever worked in a corporate IT department? People from top to bottom can barely manage to turn on their computer much less do simple tasks like tell you what isn't working. It's great to be idealistic about how computers should work, what they should come with, etc. But that's not what the larger population wants. The OEMs and big software devs give people what they want and expect while trying to push innovation and such without breaking users' experience. That's a very hard limitation to overcome and you zealots tend to not understand the reality but sit in your idealism, ignorant and unaware.
There's a pretty damn good reason there wasn't an upgrade to Vista from XP - there was a huge redesign of the kernel and system level changes (hence a version umber change!). Enabling users to upgrade from the, most often times, insecure Windows XP Home setup to a more-secure-by-default Vista Home would completely undermine every single year of development time they did on Vista and 7. And why are you complaining about who had to buy a license just to get XP? The costs are roughly equivalent so it's a non-issue since the XP license is free. It's a frivolous suit.
P.S. Windows 7 is heads and tales above Windows XP and anyone who disagrees is a stubborn retard that has no idea wtf they're talking about.
The current prices have more to do with supply and demand over price gouging by ATI. The same thing happened when the 4770 came - you saw 4850 price drops because supply couldn't meet demand. As the 4000-series phases out you'll definitely see the 5000-series come down. Remember when the 4000-series were around the same prices as the 5000-series and the 3000-series were around where 4000-series is now? It's how it works. I won't be buying soon since it's not in my budget and, yeah, my 4870 1GB is adequate for my gaming needs. I probably won't be upgrading until DX11 games are prevalent and I want to play them.
FWIW I have a DX10 ATI 4890 card, it's summer here in Australia and it's underclocked and still runs 99.9% of games flawlessly, I pretty much intend to completely skip the ATI 5xxx series and wait for the next ones, performance bumps aren't what they used to be.
Except that at the 5850 and 5870 cards are literally twice as powerful as the 4850 and 4870. Two 4850/4870 cards in CrossfireX are equal in performance as one 5850/5870 card. That doesn't seem to be the case on the lower end models, from what reviews are showing. I don't know why ATI decided to make the top end cards be twice as powerful as the previous generation but not the mid and low end cards. The low end cards seem to be slower, equal or just barely better. It certainly shoots their efforts of appealing to that market segment right in the foot. People interested in that market will snap up the cheaper but equally as powerful previous generation cards until they're out of circulation and unavailable.
I love anti-MS circle jerks on slashdot articles and zealots saying how Linux is so superior yet Linux lacks even a modicum of finesse that Windows has.
Windows 7 hands down beats any OS I've used including the several large distros of Linux I've used (RedHat, Fedora, Slackware, Ubuntu, Mandriva). It works, has almost no driver problems so things Just Work (TM), and is god damn stable. It's better than any Windows OS ever released. The new UI while played down as "nothing major" by you FOSS zealots makes the workflow of Win7 much faster and more intuitive than OS X or Linux is currently capable of. Not only that, the potential that software devs have is enormous with being able to integrate jumplists and stuff right into their taskbar icons and start menu. Have any of you anti-MS zealots even used Windows since 3.1? Live in the now, man.
I don't get where people are getting this "didn't ask for it to be installed" and other such nonsense. Every single installer for the.NET framework since 1.0 (and subsequent service packs to the versions) have a EULA that you have to accept. In that EULA it no doubt mentions the plug-in since they legally have to and where else to put mention of it but in the EULA? Yeah, no one reads those but that's no one's fault but their own. You, technically, have awareness of the install by clicking the accept button.
Why would you prefer Java over, well, anything? I have not run into any well-programmed business-class Java program that doesn't either: crash, runs slow as hell, or will not run without a specific version of the Java runtimes installed. Anything is better than Java, imo. Don't get me started on some of the Avaya Java apps. Ugh the nightmares.
You know, I always laugh when anti-Microsoft zealots mention that Microsoft is "evil" when in fact they are just doing smart business. I bet you're a card carrying FOSS zealot that loves to use crippled, unpolished FOSS out of sheer principle since MS (or M$?) is so "evil."
I also laugh especially at the anti-Microsoft zealots that call Windows 7 "Vista SP3" or a "small update" to Vista when in fact it is anything but that (was XP Win2k SP5?). But I guess you wouldn't really know just how good Win7 is since you can't be bothered to actually give it a whirl since MS is so "evil." I've been using Win7 since the first public beta and it's the best OS I've ever used and I'm not new to the OS landscape (Gentoo, Slackware, Red Hat/Fedora, Ubuntu, random small linux distros like SourceMage, OS/2, Mac OS 9-X.5, DOS, Win3.1-Win7). It's definitely a large step up from Vista in terms of performance, stability, bloatiness, and general user-friendliness.
You've also apparently missed the very large campaign that MS has done in recent months of "Buy Vista now and get Windows 7 FREE." So you don't even have to buy Windows twice, only once. It even works for older Vista license keys. You'd get the corresponding upgrade version of Win7 that you got of Vista. But I guess you can't be bothered to check your facts since MS is so "evil."
Yeah, Vista wasn't that great at first. But as soon as SP1 dropped it got much, much better and wasn't riddled with half the problems it had at launch (most of which weren't MS's fault but software and hardware manufacturers being lazy). Vista fundamentally changed the Windows programming scape and software and hardware manufacturers sat around with their thumbs up their asses not wanting to change their broken code when there were tons of betas and release clients for Vista floating around on MSDN for a long time. Vista's launch was anything but rushed.
There also comes a point when backwards compatibility becomes a system security liability and it just has to go. So upgrading to Win7 from XP makes sense not only in the fact that it's a completely different kernel design but an entire OS version behind (5.1 to 6.1). Upgrading in the typical sense just wouldn't work at all. However, the emulation options under Vista and 7 for WinXP actually work most of the time.
You can disagree with Microsoft's business tactics all you like but please at least get your facts straight and have a little bit of an objective perspective.
Because that's what makes the Memory Stick proprietary, the fact that it is usable in _only_ Sony devices.
The reason why MemStick/Duo is "proprietary" isn't because it's only available in Sony devices but because it's a shitty flash product. It isn't as fast, compact, or cheaper to make than SD. I remember first seeing and it was complete garbage compared to CF and SD. Took up more space, less useful devices that used it (more than just Sony ones), and the devices that did use it were more expensive. Much like most of Sony's efforts to push new media into the field (BetaMax, MiniDisc), it failed yet they keep it on life support with their products.
I generally don't slipstream very often, I admit. But I don't really have a need to. I've only had to do it for specific server installs that required RAID drivers and specific sets of drivers across several servers. Most of the time I just use the tried and true Norton Ghost. Also, when did it become uncommon to unpack cabs? I mean, I generally check them for DLLs if there is a lack of the usual DLLs in the unpack folder. I'm not unhappy about a simple extra step, honestly. That's just unneeded nitpicking and "OH GOD THEY CHANGED SOMETHING WITHOUT DOCUMENTING IT OH GOD!"
Cards don't really cost $500 anymore unless you really need the most expensive card out there with meager gains over the $200 cards. The 4800-series ATI cards are all under $200 with 1GB of memory on-board. The 5000-series aren't even up that high and they just hit the market and are quite literally double what the 4800-series had to offer. But you really won't see much use out of those since nothing is really using DX11. At most you'd see higher frames in games.
Nvidia's top end cards barely out-perform their lower priced brethren. Nothing a simple bit of overclocking can't fix, though If their drivers don't break, that is. Which has been all the more common these days. For the last few months Nvidia's drivers have been breaking on random things, have bugs that go unfixed for several driver revisions, and you see a new driver set almost once a week.
ATI's cards will outperform every Nvidia card at almost any price point. And their drivers do not crash nearly as often. Nvidia's drivers crashing, features not working (AA and AF bug), and seeing "beta" drivers and WHQL drivers very often but making very little progress made me switch from my 8800GT to a nice 4870 1GB. If I could change my laptop's chip, I would because the laptop drivers from Nvidia are worse than their desktop drivers.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card,2404.htmlhttp://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5870,2422.html
Once you launch the installer it unpacks EVERYTHING to C:\NVIDIA\\\\. You can delete the PhysX installer, 3D stereoscopic service installer, HD Audio installer, NV control panel installer, etc. It's all there and it stays there since it isn't deleted once installation is done. You can just cancel the installer when it comes up and use that folder however you want. I thought everyone knew that. My laptop currently has 190.38 and 191.03 there. Might want to go check it out before posting false info.
The thing about cellphone batteries and the price being very high is kind of misleading. If you check the retail prices of current generation smartphones and other cellphones, you're going to be looking at nearly the same price range. Be glad you get parts AND labor for the cost of $79+s&h. I know not every joe schmo can solder a battery in and out of the iPhone. If you REALLY think about the cost, it's pretty par for the course of retail cellphone batteries with as long a life as the iPhone's battery is reported to have.
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The only thing I worry about is that Samsung is attached to it. They are absolutely horrible at keeping their products up-to-date and fixing long-standing issues (look at the Galaxy S phones, Samsung Moment, and Instinct). They are trigger happy and will send a product to market with glaring issues that should have been fixed during the QA phase of development.
I really wish that tablet makers, especially ones with Android, would stop trying to completely rip off the iPad's look. I don't know about anyone else but I really don't like the 1in+ bezel because it looks tacky. And the location of the capacitive buttons is ALL WRONG for a tablet. They need to be designing tablets more like the Kindle. Buttons on the side is much more ergonomic for tablets. They also need to adjust the price. If any of the tablets are over the price of the iPad then no one will buy it. I really wish some of the sub-$500 tablets would have actually surfaced and weren't complete junk.
Actually, PhysX only runs on NVidia cards natively as it's their runtime now (purchased from Aegia a couple years ago). ATI cards don't process PhysX at all, it's all off-loaded to the CPU. You would need a dedicated PhysX card to get accelerated PhysX while using an ATI GPU. That can be accomplished with something as simple as an 8800GT or equally cheap Nvidia card that can process PhysX (but won't be used for graphics) in a second PCI-e slot or getting an actual PhysX card.
What a lot of people don't realize about the web app thing is that most companies don't develop their web apps in-house. Most often they go through expensive vendors and licensing hoops that cost a lot of money to update the code to work as it should on newer browsers. I work in a multi-billion dollar industry (casino gaming) and all of the web apps require IE6 and that is the corporate standard. In fact, we're to uninstall Firefox or IE7/8 if they're on any computers we work on. Simply put, it isn't the IT department that runs things. Far from it. To purchasing, finance, audit, and accounting the IT department is a solid waste of money and anything to stifle that spending is a good thing. Spending hundreds or thousands of dollars just to update the code of something that already works with what we already have is a waste of money. They don't quite think in the long term where it comes to work efficiency vs support hours vs lost work hours.
IE6 isn't really a huge security problem on corporate networks. Most users don't have admin privileges, the settings are locked down, most computers have a modified HOSTS file to block nasties, all computers have anti-virus, all computers have three ways in (RAdmin, RDC, CA), all computers have a unique identifier, and all computer receive updates through a WSUS server. Combine that with a hefty dose of GPOs and IE6 is locked down fairly tight. If there is a malware outbreak, it's easily contained and cleaned relatively quickly. And if not, you just re-image the machine(s) since users are storing their data on a very large network storage drive. Re-imaging takes, usually, a maximum of 20 minutes.
It's not always pretty but it does work and accounting won't allow fixing things as they should. You can't be an idealist about keeping programs and code updated in a stifling corporate environment where the accounting 'tards run everything.
You can blame that on pre-packaged apps that the carriers put on. Not to mention putting high-end UIs on two year old hardware (HTC Hero). Go over to the SDX forums or Android Forums and read up on how to root your Android and kill those pieces of crap apps that run in the background slowing everything down. Get Advanced Task Killer too. I've put the latest SDX kernel and recovery onto my Samsung Moment and it runs blazingly fast and is free of a lot of cruft thanks to a handy shell script written by Joey at SDX that removes the pre-packaged apps that take up space as well as make themselves run in the background. It's also still fully functional with no problems. Remember, with the proper help and setup Android is still a Linux machine and has tons of flexibility built-in. Besides jail-breaking your iPhone, you don't get much more flexibility out of it. http://www.sdx-developers.com/ http://www.androidforums.com/
"Fully functional" is pretty subjective. However, for "most" people a Windows PC loaded with AOL and a whole number of programs they may or may not use. "Most" people don't want to go through the learning curve of switching to Linux or OS X (if they even know what those are). They simply want to use a computer and have it work how they're used to, crashes and all. I mean, have you ever worked in a corporate IT department? People from top to bottom can barely manage to turn on their computer much less do simple tasks like tell you what isn't working. It's great to be idealistic about how computers should work, what they should come with, etc. But that's not what the larger population wants. The OEMs and big software devs give people what they want and expect while trying to push innovation and such without breaking users' experience. That's a very hard limitation to overcome and you zealots tend to not understand the reality but sit in your idealism, ignorant and unaware.
There's a pretty damn good reason there wasn't an upgrade to Vista from XP - there was a huge redesign of the kernel and system level changes (hence a version umber change!). Enabling users to upgrade from the, most often times, insecure Windows XP Home setup to a more-secure-by-default Vista Home would completely undermine every single year of development time they did on Vista and 7. And why are you complaining about who had to buy a license just to get XP? The costs are roughly equivalent so it's a non-issue since the XP license is free. It's a frivolous suit. P.S. Windows 7 is heads and tales above Windows XP and anyone who disagrees is a stubborn retard that has no idea wtf they're talking about.
The current prices have more to do with supply and demand over price gouging by ATI. The same thing happened when the 4770 came - you saw 4850 price drops because supply couldn't meet demand. As the 4000-series phases out you'll definitely see the 5000-series come down. Remember when the 4000-series were around the same prices as the 5000-series and the 3000-series were around where 4000-series is now? It's how it works. I won't be buying soon since it's not in my budget and, yeah, my 4870 1GB is adequate for my gaming needs. I probably won't be upgrading until DX11 games are prevalent and I want to play them.
FWIW I have a DX10 ATI 4890 card, it's summer here in Australia and it's underclocked and still runs 99.9% of games flawlessly, I pretty much intend to completely skip the ATI 5xxx series and wait for the next ones, performance bumps aren't what they used to be.
Except that at the 5850 and 5870 cards are literally twice as powerful as the 4850 and 4870. Two 4850/4870 cards in CrossfireX are equal in performance as one 5850/5870 card. That doesn't seem to be the case on the lower end models, from what reviews are showing. I don't know why ATI decided to make the top end cards be twice as powerful as the previous generation but not the mid and low end cards. The low end cards seem to be slower, equal or just barely better. It certainly shoots their efforts of appealing to that market segment right in the foot. People interested in that market will snap up the cheaper but equally as powerful previous generation cards until they're out of circulation and unavailable.
That works. However, would all cargo be subject to a 6ft drop?
I love anti-MS circle jerks on slashdot articles and zealots saying how Linux is so superior yet Linux lacks even a modicum of finesse that Windows has. Windows 7 hands down beats any OS I've used including the several large distros of Linux I've used (RedHat, Fedora, Slackware, Ubuntu, Mandriva). It works, has almost no driver problems so things Just Work (TM), and is god damn stable. It's better than any Windows OS ever released. The new UI while played down as "nothing major" by you FOSS zealots makes the workflow of Win7 much faster and more intuitive than OS X or Linux is currently capable of. Not only that, the potential that software devs have is enormous with being able to integrate jumplists and stuff right into their taskbar icons and start menu. Have any of you anti-MS zealots even used Windows since 3.1? Live in the now, man.
I don't get where people are getting this "didn't ask for it to be installed" and other such nonsense. Every single installer for the .NET framework since 1.0 (and subsequent service packs to the versions) have a EULA that you have to accept. In that EULA it no doubt mentions the plug-in since they legally have to and where else to put mention of it but in the EULA? Yeah, no one reads those but that's no one's fault but their own. You, technically, have awareness of the install by clicking the accept button.
Why would you prefer Java over, well, anything? I have not run into any well-programmed business-class Java program that doesn't either: crash, runs slow as hell, or will not run without a specific version of the Java runtimes installed. Anything is better than Java, imo. Don't get me started on some of the Avaya Java apps. Ugh the nightmares.
You know, I always laugh when anti-Microsoft zealots mention that Microsoft is "evil" when in fact they are just doing smart business. I bet you're a card carrying FOSS zealot that loves to use crippled, unpolished FOSS out of sheer principle since MS (or M$?) is so "evil."
I also laugh especially at the anti-Microsoft zealots that call Windows 7 "Vista SP3" or a "small update" to Vista when in fact it is anything but that (was XP Win2k SP5?). But I guess you wouldn't really know just how good Win7 is since you can't be bothered to actually give it a whirl since MS is so "evil." I've been using Win7 since the first public beta and it's the best OS I've ever used and I'm not new to the OS landscape (Gentoo, Slackware, Red Hat/Fedora, Ubuntu, random small linux distros like SourceMage, OS/2, Mac OS 9-X.5, DOS, Win3.1-Win7). It's definitely a large step up from Vista in terms of performance, stability, bloatiness, and general user-friendliness.
You've also apparently missed the very large campaign that MS has done in recent months of "Buy Vista now and get Windows 7 FREE." So you don't even have to buy Windows twice, only once. It even works for older Vista license keys. You'd get the corresponding upgrade version of Win7 that you got of Vista. But I guess you can't be bothered to check your facts since MS is so "evil."
Yeah, Vista wasn't that great at first. But as soon as SP1 dropped it got much, much better and wasn't riddled with half the problems it had at launch (most of which weren't MS's fault but software and hardware manufacturers being lazy). Vista fundamentally changed the Windows programming scape and software and hardware manufacturers sat around with their thumbs up their asses not wanting to change their broken code when there were tons of betas and release clients for Vista floating around on MSDN for a long time. Vista's launch was anything but rushed.
There also comes a point when backwards compatibility becomes a system security liability and it just has to go. So upgrading to Win7 from XP makes sense not only in the fact that it's a completely different kernel design but an entire OS version behind (5.1 to 6.1). Upgrading in the typical sense just wouldn't work at all. However, the emulation options under Vista and 7 for WinXP actually work most of the time.
You can disagree with Microsoft's business tactics all you like but please at least get your facts straight and have a little bit of an objective perspective.
Because that's what makes the Memory Stick proprietary, the fact that it is usable in _only_ Sony devices.
The reason why MemStick/Duo is "proprietary" isn't because it's only available in Sony devices but because it's a shitty flash product. It isn't as fast, compact, or cheaper to make than SD. I remember first seeing and it was complete garbage compared to CF and SD. Took up more space, less useful devices that used it (more than just Sony ones), and the devices that did use it were more expensive. Much like most of Sony's efforts to push new media into the field (BetaMax, MiniDisc), it failed yet they keep it on life support with their products.
I generally don't slipstream very often, I admit. But I don't really have a need to. I've only had to do it for specific server installs that required RAID drivers and specific sets of drivers across several servers. Most of the time I just use the tried and true Norton Ghost. Also, when did it become uncommon to unpack cabs? I mean, I generally check them for DLLs if there is a lack of the usual DLLs in the unpack folder. I'm not unhappy about a simple extra step, honestly. That's just unneeded nitpicking and "OH GOD THEY CHANGED SOMETHING WITHOUT DOCUMENTING IT OH GOD!"
Cards don't really cost $500 anymore unless you really need the most expensive card out there with meager gains over the $200 cards. The 4800-series ATI cards are all under $200 with 1GB of memory on-board. The 5000-series aren't even up that high and they just hit the market and are quite literally double what the 4800-series had to offer. But you really won't see much use out of those since nothing is really using DX11. At most you'd see higher frames in games. Nvidia's top end cards barely out-perform their lower priced brethren. Nothing a simple bit of overclocking can't fix, though If their drivers don't break, that is. Which has been all the more common these days. For the last few months Nvidia's drivers have been breaking on random things, have bugs that go unfixed for several driver revisions, and you see a new driver set almost once a week. ATI's cards will outperform every Nvidia card at almost any price point. And their drivers do not crash nearly as often. Nvidia's drivers crashing, features not working (AA and AF bug), and seeing "beta" drivers and WHQL drivers very often but making very little progress made me switch from my 8800GT to a nice 4870 1GB. If I could change my laptop's chip, I would because the laptop drivers from Nvidia are worse than their desktop drivers. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card,2404.html http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5870,2422.html
Once you launch the installer it unpacks EVERYTHING to C:\NVIDIA\\\\. You can delete the PhysX installer, 3D stereoscopic service installer, HD Audio installer, NV control panel installer, etc. It's all there and it stays there since it isn't deleted once installation is done. You can just cancel the installer when it comes up and use that folder however you want. I thought everyone knew that. My laptop currently has 190.38 and 191.03 there. Might want to go check it out before posting false info.
The thing about cellphone batteries and the price being very high is kind of misleading. If you check the retail prices of current generation smartphones and other cellphones, you're going to be looking at nearly the same price range. Be glad you get parts AND labor for the cost of $79+s&h. I know not every joe schmo can solder a battery in and out of the iPhone. If you REALLY think about the cost, it's pretty par for the course of retail cellphone batteries with as long a life as the iPhone's battery is reported to have.