(This really isn't a reply to your post... it started off that way but I'm just enjoying ranting about HP right now... please forgive me.)
I got mine on the second batch, and it's okay. I have an iPad and a Galaxy Tab also and I think it's the weakest of the three. That said, I'm reasonably happy with it. I just wanted it as a always-by-the-couch tablet. So hopefully you'll see what I mean when I say 'instant gratification' wasn't the problem.
I was probably a little too brief in my last post, there was an important detail I missed. While placing the order the servers were overloaded, a bit like you'd expect on Black Friday. I submitted mine on a Sunday morning. A few days later (after trying to inquire a few times...) I finally got a mass-email saying "All orders placed before Monday will get theirs by the end of the week." Two weeks went by, silence. I had to prod them about that and I was told it'd be six to eight weeks. Apparently "you will get it if you ordered before a certain date" really meant "you might get it if you ordered by a certain date." I wouldn't have minded except I had to ask them that instead of being told.
If I were to sum up my complaint about the process into as brief of statement as possible, I'd say that HP's customer communication was terrible. Maybe I'm spoiled by Amazon, but throughout my professional life I've found it's better to be up front about delays than to play the 'we hope they don't notice!" game.
My mother-in-law ordered one from HP and was met with silence. For the entire month she put up with it, they'd charge her account $150 every friday and then return it. Effectively this meant she was missing $150 even though she didn't have the item. Additionally, she had typo'd her address when she submitted it. When she called to correct it, surprise surprise, they couldn't. All she could do was cancel and resubmit the order... which would have meant no Touchpad for her. While technically her fault, why the call center she talked to couldn't modify her order is beyond me.
My experience was a little better. I didn't mind the $150 disappearing and the address was correct when I submitted it, but HP was TERRIBLE about telling me wtf was going on. On their web page the order status was set to something bizarre like "ORDER COMPLETE" or something that made it sound like my Touchpad was right here. It wasn't. When I tried to email them I was given a generic answer about how I'd get my order within a few weeks and they're very sorry and it took three paragraphs to explain these two simple concepts. It was definitely a source of frustration.
I wouldn't say it "doesn't hurt". It may not hurt enough, but unless they've dramatically improved their customer service, it likely will hurt some.
The point I'm trying to make is that Slashdot loves Nintendo and hates Sony...
You are half right, and it was well earned.
The fact that the Wii U will "apparently" support USB HDs isn't very encouraging given that the Wii already had a USB port and did nothing with it.
They used it for the wifi adapter. Wii Content isn't exactly straining the 512 meg SD card that it comes with. It's not that surprising that USB support for external hard drives wasn't Nintendo's highest priority. Oh, incidentally, the whole thing about using the SD card really kinda sinks your argument.
There is nothing new in this story at all except that it serves as another opportunity for Slashdotters to bitch about Sony.
I'll be the first to admit I love bitching about Sony. You got me to confess, that's great! Only... it didn't make any of the points made about Sony go away. Sony isn't selling you anything better than standard flash memory at double the price. They're not selling something that's physically smaller, or has a bfd faster transfer rate, or SOMETHING that at least attempts to thinly justify the price. They're literally just saying "We want more money from you."
If you're a fan-boy, it just glides right in. If you're somebody without any particular biases, but somebody who buys memory cards because you have a cell phone or mp3 player or camera or whatever, it really is an obvious attempt at nickel-and-diming. Since it isn't something only a fanboy or haterade addict would complain about, it is a valid point.
The NES, SNES, GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, and the DS stored the save data right on the media. The DSi, 3DS, and the Wii use a standard SD card for game saves and download of software. The N64 and GameCube used proprietary memory cards like the Playstation and Playstation 2 did.
I don't know why you're fixated on the media the games come on. The original Playstation used black CDs as an anti-counterfeit measure. I don't remember if they ever tried to prevent the PS1 from playing burned games, but the PS2 certainly did. You were never going to use 'standard media' in anything labeled Playstation with the exception of playing movies or music CDs.
Comically, though, you completely left out the PSP and its over-price Memory Stick and 'Unviersal Media Disc'. Heh.
There really is cause for complaint, here. Sorry. .
Only if he carries the dock around. Otherwise, we could make the argument that a laptop is really more like a desktop just because somebody hooks up a monitor etc to it.
When youd add a physical keyboard to it, it's just not a tablet any more, functionally. It's either a two-piece notepad, or if the keyboard is attached, even with just a cover, it's a notepad period.
Not strictly true. I have a bluetooth kb that stays on my desk that's paired to my iPad. When I get up and go to a meeting or something, I just carry my iPad over without the kb. When I come back, I just start typing and the KB's already ready to go.
However, there is one little glitch with this problem that is a little annoying. Once you start typing on the KB the on-screen KB disappears. It takes a while for it to return and I haven't found a magical way to bring it back from the touch screen. Apple's being a little too helpful here, but it's not a deal breaker.
But if you're in the business of raping women and torching villages, you just throw the documents into a building that you are going to burn to the ground
Just for clarification... are you suggesting that a warlord leave his sensitive documents with a henchman to leave in a building that they must then burn to the ground. then leave without verifying that it succeeded?
Heh. That reminds me of the Onion article where the US offered to donate Al-Qaeda 600 million dollars so they could build a fancy HQ building.
One of the things I liked about Napster was you paid them $60 for unlimited access to any of their music, on-demand. Then you got 60 MP3 downloads. Mp3s are usually a dollar a song anyway so the year of streaming was pure icing.
Apple IS winning. No one except Fanbois is interested in combined market share of some random companies.
I'm sorry, but that's disingenuous. It makes for an interesting info-graphic, but the reason the overall numbers are important is that these phones need continual application support to thrive. If you use an iPhone, you want the numbers on that to be high so that application developers will make sure you get the latest apps and games. If you use Android... same story. Remember when Netflix was on iOS, but not on Android? What a booger. This has nothing to do with the profits of the manufacturers. Even though it's good to know Apple has an incentive to keep supporting these devices, not one person has ever bought an iPhone going "Wooo! Apple's making 50% profit on this!"
With that said, however, the Netflix example did illustrate one problem with Android's SPAM approach to gaining marketshare. Granted, this is an extreme example, but originally Netflix only ran on certain phones. (Note: I am unaware of this was universally fixed or not.) They cover such a broad range of phones that there are bound to be some phones that cannot run certain applications. I'm not talking about fragmentation necessarily, either, it could simply be obsolescence. If consumers lose faith that their Android device will run all the apps they'll be interested in, then Apple's simplified product line certainly has some extra appeal. Google really does need to make sure that they maintain some level of elegance to their platform.
Anyway, back on topic, don't cherry pick numbers to measure success. Its not a simple topic. There isn't one lone statistic that proves on platform is superior to the other. Frankly, you don't want that anyway. The competition is making your preferred phone better.
If Apple's user experience was that much better, and specs didn't matter anymore, then why isn't Apple winning the phone race too?
The metric for Android 'winning' is based on the.. what is it, a hundred or so phones (?), at a variety of price ranges on a much broader range of carriers. Probably not the best metric to predict the success of Android tablets.
Heh. One time I mentioned liking my iPad... I don't even really remember the context. But some guy posted "You know what's funny? The fact that you paid Steve for that device." He got modded as funny. I told him that wasn't a fact, it was an assumption.
He then quoted my blob of text that said I had an iPad. I told him that I didn't say I paid for one. We seriously went back and forth on this a couple of times. All he had to do was ask me what I meant, but he couldn't. He just kept saying the same thing over and over again, declaring that I had said something I hadn't. I think he gave up when somebody chimed in and suggested that I had gotten it as a gift.
It'd be easy enough to call that an isolated incident, but honestly, I see that all the time here. I will, however, admit that I was also being an asshole and contributed to that situation. It's easy to freely admit that after years of dealing with people like that.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt the three people who own one of these devices reads slashdot.
Well, there was one..... but I think he was banned.
(This really isn't a reply to your post... it started off that way but I'm just enjoying ranting about HP right now... please forgive me.)
I got mine on the second batch, and it's okay. I have an iPad and a Galaxy Tab also and I think it's the weakest of the three. That said, I'm reasonably happy with it. I just wanted it as a always-by-the-couch tablet. So hopefully you'll see what I mean when I say 'instant gratification' wasn't the problem.
I was probably a little too brief in my last post, there was an important detail I missed. While placing the order the servers were overloaded, a bit like you'd expect on Black Friday. I submitted mine on a Sunday morning. A few days later (after trying to inquire a few times...) I finally got a mass-email saying "All orders placed before Monday will get theirs by the end of the week." Two weeks went by, silence. I had to prod them about that and I was told it'd be six to eight weeks. Apparently "you will get it if you ordered before a certain date" really meant "you might get it if you ordered by a certain date." I wouldn't have minded except I had to ask them that instead of being told.
If I were to sum up my complaint about the process into as brief of statement as possible, I'd say that HP's customer communication was terrible. Maybe I'm spoiled by Amazon, but throughout my professional life I've found it's better to be up front about delays than to play the 'we hope they don't notice!" game.
It's a form factor, whose only purpose is to be a giant e-penis for the hipster and PHB crowd.
Remember two years ago when everybody was saying this and suddenly stopped?
P.S.: How in the world would "selling" software ever be a "loss".
It costs money to produce. If it's never recouped then it's a loss. Look up the phrase 'no free lunch'.
My mother-in-law ordered one from HP and was met with silence. For the entire month she put up with it, they'd charge her account $150 every friday and then return it. Effectively this meant she was missing $150 even though she didn't have the item. Additionally, she had typo'd her address when she submitted it. When she called to correct it, surprise surprise, they couldn't. All she could do was cancel and resubmit the order... which would have meant no Touchpad for her. While technically her fault, why the call center she talked to couldn't modify her order is beyond me.
My experience was a little better. I didn't mind the $150 disappearing and the address was correct when I submitted it, but HP was TERRIBLE about telling me wtf was going on. On their web page the order status was set to something bizarre like "ORDER COMPLETE" or something that made it sound like my Touchpad was right here. It wasn't. When I tried to email them I was given a generic answer about how I'd get my order within a few weeks and they're very sorry and it took three paragraphs to explain these two simple concepts. It was definitely a source of frustration.
I wouldn't say it "doesn't hurt". It may not hurt enough, but unless they've dramatically improved their customer service, it likely will hurt some.
I thought that one of the big advances at the time was the computer controlled camera mechanisms, to _do_ the multiple passes.
The cameras themselves also have to spool the film accurately. Slippage means a bad composite.
Actually that brings up a point.. this camera DID witness Han Solo shooting first....
Depends on what your definition of safe is.
Okay, I'll rephrase his question: Will we be irradiated by a plant run by PHBs?
And? The KB is connected wirelessly. Think about it.
The point I'm trying to make is that Slashdot loves Nintendo and hates Sony...
You are half right, and it was well earned.
The fact that the Wii U will "apparently" support USB HDs isn't very encouraging given that the Wii already had a USB port and did nothing with it.
They used it for the wifi adapter. Wii Content isn't exactly straining the 512 meg SD card that it comes with. It's not that surprising that USB support for external hard drives wasn't Nintendo's highest priority. Oh, incidentally, the whole thing about using the SD card really kinda sinks your argument.
There is nothing new in this story at all except that it serves as another opportunity for Slashdotters to bitch about Sony.
I'll be the first to admit I love bitching about Sony. You got me to confess, that's great! Only... it didn't make any of the points made about Sony go away. Sony isn't selling you anything better than standard flash memory at double the price. They're not selling something that's physically smaller, or has a bfd faster transfer rate, or SOMETHING that at least attempts to thinly justify the price. They're literally just saying "We want more money from you."
If you're a fan-boy, it just glides right in. If you're somebody without any particular biases, but somebody who buys memory cards because you have a cell phone or mp3 player or camera or whatever, it really is an obvious attempt at nickel-and-diming. Since it isn't something only a fanboy or haterade addict would complain about, it is a valid point.
The NES, SNES, GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, and the DS stored the save data right on the media. The DSi, 3DS, and the Wii use a standard SD card for game saves and download of software. The N64 and GameCube used proprietary memory cards like the Playstation and Playstation 2 did.
I don't know why you're fixated on the media the games come on. The original Playstation used black CDs as an anti-counterfeit measure. I don't remember if they ever tried to prevent the PS1 from playing burned games, but the PS2 certainly did. You were never going to use 'standard media' in anything labeled Playstation with the exception of playing movies or music CDs.
Comically, though, you completely left out the PSP and its over-price Memory Stick and 'Unviersal Media Disc'. Heh.
There really is cause for complaint, here. Sorry. .
Oo good point, thank you!
Only if he carries the dock around. Otherwise, we could make the argument that a laptop is really more like a desktop just because somebody hooks up a monitor etc to it.
When youd add a physical keyboard to it, it's just not a tablet any more, functionally. It's either a two-piece notepad, or if the keyboard is attached, even with just a cover, it's a notepad period.
Not strictly true. I have a bluetooth kb that stays on my desk that's paired to my iPad. When I get up and go to a meeting or something, I just carry my iPad over without the kb. When I come back, I just start typing and the KB's already ready to go.
However, there is one little glitch with this problem that is a little annoying. Once you start typing on the KB the on-screen KB disappears. It takes a while for it to return and I haven't found a magical way to bring it back from the touch screen. Apple's being a little too helpful here, but it's not a deal breaker.
Show us the missing money.
But if you're in the business of raping women and torching villages, you just throw the documents into a building that you are going to burn to the ground
Just for clarification... are you suggesting that a warlord leave his sensitive documents with a henchman to leave in a building that they must then burn to the ground. then leave without verifying that it succeeded?
Heh. That reminds me of the Onion article where the US offered to donate Al-Qaeda 600 million dollars so they could build a fancy HQ building.
One of the things I liked about Napster was you paid them $60 for unlimited access to any of their music, on-demand. Then you got 60 MP3 downloads. Mp3s are usually a dollar a song anyway so the year of streaming was pure icing.
I suppose. I guess that depends on how you want to look at it. I mean, look what it took to eclipse Apple's premium product line.
Apple IS winning. No one except Fanbois is interested in combined market share of some random companies.
I'm sorry, but that's disingenuous. It makes for an interesting info-graphic, but the reason the overall numbers are important is that these phones need continual application support to thrive. If you use an iPhone, you want the numbers on that to be high so that application developers will make sure you get the latest apps and games. If you use Android... same story. Remember when Netflix was on iOS, but not on Android? What a booger. This has nothing to do with the profits of the manufacturers. Even though it's good to know Apple has an incentive to keep supporting these devices, not one person has ever bought an iPhone going "Wooo! Apple's making 50% profit on this!"
With that said, however, the Netflix example did illustrate one problem with Android's SPAM approach to gaining marketshare. Granted, this is an extreme example, but originally Netflix only ran on certain phones. (Note: I am unaware of this was universally fixed or not.) They cover such a broad range of phones that there are bound to be some phones that cannot run certain applications. I'm not talking about fragmentation necessarily, either, it could simply be obsolescence. If consumers lose faith that their Android device will run all the apps they'll be interested in, then Apple's simplified product line certainly has some extra appeal. Google really does need to make sure that they maintain some level of elegance to their platform.
Anyway, back on topic, don't cherry pick numbers to measure success. Its not a simple topic. There isn't one lone statistic that proves on platform is superior to the other. Frankly, you don't want that anyway. The competition is making your preferred phone better.
If Apple's user experience was that much better, and specs didn't matter anymore, then why isn't Apple winning the phone race too?
The metric for Android 'winning' is based on the .. what is it, a hundred or so phones (?), at a variety of price ranges on a much broader range of carriers. Probably not the best metric to predict the success of Android tablets.
Car, no. But it does have Airplane Mode!
Check out the air quality in picture 2 vs picture 3.
Yeah.... in retrospect, having Taco Bell provide the catering was a bad idea.
Heh. One time I mentioned liking my iPad... I don't even really remember the context. But some guy posted "You know what's funny? The fact that you paid Steve for that device." He got modded as funny. I told him that wasn't a fact, it was an assumption.
He then quoted my blob of text that said I had an iPad. I told him that I didn't say I paid for one. We seriously went back and forth on this a couple of times. All he had to do was ask me what I meant, but he couldn't. He just kept saying the same thing over and over again, declaring that I had said something I hadn't. I think he gave up when somebody chimed in and suggested that I had gotten it as a gift.
It'd be easy enough to call that an isolated incident, but honestly, I see that all the time here. I will, however, admit that I was also being an asshole and contributed to that situation. It's easy to freely admit that after years of dealing with people like that.
You are just on your knees (a very comfortable position for a fanboi though). ... And to the serial downmodding assholes...
*Smirk*
You remind me of a friend I had that wrote me a three page email about how carpal tunnel was killing him.
Your post was related to fanboys and marketing..
Denial is another symptom.
One of the symptoms of being a haterade addict is that you bring it up in unrelated threads.