I'm not a frequent slashdotter. Should I reply to every post which needs to be corrected? (sigh.)
This is not a network restriction. The apps are blocked on the handset side. You could have the God & The Angels Direct Link $9,000 Super Everything plan and you STILL wouldn't be able to run Opera Mini.
I feel like I now have to post this same comment 25 times. But hey. Maybe it'll get me a tiny bit of karma.
The plague is affecting a growing number (not all) of new, locked, branded T-Mobile US phones. First it was just Samsung phones. Now it's Nokia phones and some Motorola phones, too. The problem is firmware edits that T-Mobile does before you buy the phone, so if your phone worked before, it will still work - this isn't a network restriction thing, it's a handset firmware thing.
Are you in the US? In any case, if you're using a Sony Ericsson M600i, you wouldn't encounter this problem, as it isn't a T-Mobile US branded phone.
This problem only applies to T-Mobile branded phones, sold through T-Mobile stores, in the US. In fact, the relatively liberal policies of T-Mobile Europe only make the restrictive policies of the US subsidiary more annoying.
By the way, I posted the post. I'm the lead analyst for cell phones and PDAs at PC Magazine, and the post was a bit of original journalism that I got confirmed by my corporate contacts at T-Mobile. The fact that T-Mobile isn't shouting out loud about this policy only makes it more shady, but they don't deny it if asked point blank.
We (Ziff Davis) are a member of Bapco, and Joel (who is our Bapco participant) got the info in an email from Bapco to all members. You can e-mail him if you want to check, or post a comment on Gearlog.
The conclusion we came to was that Apple makes fast Windows machines, that compete well in several tests with a range of other consumer purchaseable, recently released PCs.
That's very interesting, because it tells folks that they have a good chance of buying machines that will dual-boot the two OSes, getting market-competitive performance in both.
That's never been the case before, and even once Apple went to Intel there were murmurings that either Apple or Microsoft would do something to hurt Windows performance on the new Macs. Our results go some distance towards disproving that.
The very good point in your final paragraph is the point we were actually trying to make in our original Gearlog post. Apple makes fast Windows machines, which should be good news for anyone who wants to dual-boot in the future.
But our rather measured Gearlog post didn't get picked up on Slashdot or Digg. The Reg's headline did. Alas, that says a lot for the value of sexing up your headlines, because a lot more people are looking at our work now that the Reg has 'enhanced' it.
No, the test is quite conclusive: the Intel Macs run XP well (or as well as you could expect given no graphics drivers.) That was our conclusion, and I think it's a useful one. It shows that people will, hopefully, be able to run dual-boot systems without making compromises.
All of this OMGWTF!!!??? about whether machine X or machine Y is one.second.faster on one of our benchmarks is pointless. The point is that the MacBook competes well with other currently available Intel laptops.
Sorry if that doesn't help people get their OS/manufacturer/fanboy flamewars up.
No, if you read the Gearlog story we did three benchmarks: Photoshop, Cinebench and Windows Media encode. We couldn't do Sysmark or 3DMark because of the lack of graphics card drivers.
Apple has a tendency to heavily customize their machines, and one of their selling points is a tight coupling between hardware and software (namely, OS X.) So we wanted to make sure there was nothing in the Macs that would have prevented XP from running to the limits of the performance of the hardware, and to prove that a dual-boot solution could be both viable and desirable. I'll personally wait for the video drivers to call it "desirable," but we're safely within the realm of viable.
Running these benchmarks also allowed a direct comparison between Apple hardware and other manufacturers' that always used to be cloaked a little by the difference in OSes. Now of course you can argue that the driver situation may have affected our results, but I hope this will be only the first of many data points. It's a start.
Just wanted to preemptively strike out and mention that the Reg "sexed up our dossier" a little, to use a British reference.
Over here at PC Mag/Gearlog (it's the same thing - Gearlog is the blog of PC Mag) we like to say that our tests show Apple makes a "fast" Windows machine, not "the fastest." As somebody else pointed out, while the MacBook squeaked out a win on the Photoshop test, it came in behind other Core Duo laptops on the Windows Media Encoder test. But the news in my mind isn't a one-second difference in this or that. It's that Apple's machines run Windows comparably to the best designed-for-Windows machines. That bodes very well for folks who want to have the best of both worlds by running both OSes natively.
We couldn't run 3DMark, Sysmark, etc. because of the missing video drivers - wouldn't have been fair. The Photoshop and Windows Media tests were the only ones of our standard benchmark suite we thought would generate results that made any proper sense, because they hit processor/disk/RAM rather than video.
Also, for the AMD fanboys, we haven't tested any AMD dual core notebooks yet, so we didn't have the data to compare those.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a frequent slashdotter. Should I reply to every post which needs to be corrected? (sigh.)
This is not a network restriction. The apps are blocked on the handset side. You could have the God & The Angels Direct Link $9,000 Super Everything plan and you STILL wouldn't be able to run Opera Mini.
I feel like I now have to post this same comment 25 times. But hey. Maybe it'll get me a tiny bit of karma.
The plague is affecting a growing number (not all) of new, locked, branded T-Mobile US phones. First it was just Samsung phones. Now it's Nokia phones and some Motorola phones, too. The problem is firmware edits that T-Mobile does before you buy the phone, so if your phone worked before, it will still work - this isn't a network restriction thing, it's a handset firmware thing.
Are you in the US? In any case, if you're using a Sony Ericsson M600i, you wouldn't encounter this problem, as it isn't a T-Mobile US branded phone. This problem only applies to T-Mobile branded phones, sold through T-Mobile stores, in the US. In fact, the relatively liberal policies of T-Mobile Europe only make the restrictive policies of the US subsidiary more annoying. By the way, I posted the post. I'm the lead analyst for cell phones and PDAs at PC Magazine, and the post was a bit of original journalism that I got confirmed by my corporate contacts at T-Mobile. The fact that T-Mobile isn't shouting out loud about this policy only makes it more shady, but they don't deny it if asked point blank.
We (Ziff Davis) are a member of Bapco, and Joel (who is our Bapco participant) got the info in an email from Bapco to all members. You can e-mail him if you want to check, or post a comment on Gearlog.
The conclusion we came to was that Apple makes fast Windows machines, that compete well in several tests with a range of other consumer purchaseable, recently released PCs.
That's very interesting, because it tells folks that they have a good chance of buying machines that will dual-boot the two OSes, getting market-competitive performance in both.
That's never been the case before, and even once Apple went to Intel there were murmurings that either Apple or Microsoft would do something to hurt Windows performance on the new Macs. Our results go some distance towards disproving that.
How is that conclusion invalid?
The very good point in your final paragraph is the point we were actually trying to make in our original Gearlog post. Apple makes fast Windows machines, which should be good news for anyone who wants to dual-boot in the future.
But our rather measured Gearlog post didn't get picked up on Slashdot or Digg. The Reg's headline did. Alas, that says a lot for the value of sexing up your headlines, because a lot more people are looking at our work now that the Reg has 'enhanced' it.
No, the test is quite conclusive: the Intel Macs run XP well (or as well as you could expect given no graphics drivers.) That was our conclusion, and I think it's a useful one. It shows that people will, hopefully, be able to run dual-boot systems without making compromises.
All of this OMGWTF!!!??? about whether machine X or machine Y is one.second.faster on one of our benchmarks is pointless. The point is that the MacBook competes well with other currently available Intel laptops.
Sorry if that doesn't help people get their OS/manufacturer/fanboy flamewars up.
No, if you read the Gearlog story we did three benchmarks: Photoshop, Cinebench and Windows Media encode. We couldn't do Sysmark or 3DMark because of the lack of graphics card drivers.
Running these benchmarks also allowed a direct comparison between Apple hardware and other manufacturers' that always used to be cloaked a little by the difference in OSes. Now of course you can argue that the driver situation may have affected our results, but I hope this will be only the first of many data points. It's a start.
Over here at PC Mag/Gearlog (it's the same thing - Gearlog is the blog of PC Mag) we like to say that our tests show Apple makes a "fast" Windows machine, not "the fastest." As somebody else pointed out, while the MacBook squeaked out a win on the Photoshop test, it came in behind other Core Duo laptops on the Windows Media Encoder test. But the news in my mind isn't a one-second difference in this or that. It's that Apple's machines run Windows comparably to the best designed-for-Windows machines. That bodes very well for folks who want to have the best of both worlds by running both OSes natively.
We couldn't run 3DMark, Sysmark, etc. because of the missing video drivers - wouldn't have been fair. The Photoshop and Windows Media tests were the only ones of our standard benchmark suite we thought would generate results that made any proper sense, because they hit processor/disk/RAM rather than video.
Also, for the AMD fanboys, we haven't tested any AMD dual core notebooks yet, so we didn't have the data to compare those.
If you haven't already, read our original story: http://gearlog.com/blogs/gearlog/archive/2006/03/2 1/8212.aspx