Probably running some variation of the NSA's SE Android. Pure SE Android only links to your company's secure server via VPN, using the strong hardware crypo, regular key rotation, etc. You have way bigger things to hack before you can even get to hacking Android itself.
The article didn't say what kind of security they're offering in this phone. But any serious secure device is going to have tamper evidence and tamper detection, which will permanently brick the crypto engine if triggered. This is required for certain levels of FIPS, as well as Suite B or anything higher.
Yup... Android owners only upgrade every two years. We're not crazy like iOS users, breaking contracts, buying $900 phones, because we can't stand not having the very latest. Sure, I'm typing this on brand new 12" tablet, but in general, I do keep these things 2 years. My PC gets upgraded more on a 3-4 year cycle all told, but that's also not necessarily a one - shot deal. For example, I upgraded the main system last summer, but kept the GPU from the previous incarnation. That'll get upgraded when I'm certain the upgrade will do me enough good to justify the price. I'm about 3-4 years on cameras, too.
Once the phone/tablet market slows down, and, well, makes indestructible devices, I expect the upgrade pace to slow significantly.
2560x1600... a bit higher than my dual monitors on my high-end-ish PC (2560x1440, along with one 1920x1200). But of course, less actually usable space. Even as a big tablet, a 12.2" screen has its limits.
This is a good tablet. I bought one a few weeks ago at Best Buy in Delaware. The last one at a Best Buy in Delaware -- they had sold out of the 64GB version, as well as all of the 32GB 10" Notes. The pen is a big advantage in using the tablet for real work... I had it on a loaner Note 8, and I can't really go without. I'm pretty good wiht the 12.2" size, but I can see smaller people getting tired with one this big, used for reading or note taking.
> Apple *DOES NOT BUILD ANYTHING* - they pay one of your white-label chinese manufacturers to build it for them as they are too incompetent to build it themselves.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, aka Foxconn. Of course, Foxconn makes about 40% of all of the consumer electronics on the planet. They also made some of Amazon's Kindle tablets.
> While Samsung, ASUS, Lenovo all build their own.
Samsung and Lenovo also make a large percentage of the components that go into their in-house manufacturered products; it's about 70% on the average Samsung tablet.
ASUSTeK Computer started out as a contract manufacturer for PCs, but they sold off some of their manufacturing business in 2008. The spinoff companies are Pegatron (PCs and components) and Unihan (casework and other mechanicals). They still do in-house manufacturing in several countries.
Of course, most of the other tablet makers also outsource their manufacturing or, like Google, the whole schmeggie.
Apple doesn't care that much about market share. And that's not a new thing.
Look at the Mac PC. I mean, just face it, there are only so many people who are willing to pay twice as much cash to buy a laptop-for-the-desktop (iMac) or overpriced laptop. And yeah, I mean feature for feature... I bought one for my daughter, for college, a year-and-a-half ago. I actually got less laptop (less RAM, fewer ports, lower screen resolution, older Intel i7 chipset) for not-quite-twice the money. It would have been more than twice, but I bought a refurb, from Apple themselves.
So Apple's got about 5% of the PC market, but over 80% of the $1000+ PC market. That's a very good example of how they work. They're making 30%+ margins on Mac PCs, versus say HP, at about 5%. If Apple really cared that much about numbers, they'd have to drop their margins significantly to increase sales. In the short term, sure, they'd sell lots of Macs. But the cachet of that as an exclusive platform would fail, once it were just as cheap as everyone else. They'd need to sell about 30% of all the PCs on the planet, just to break even selling at HP's margins. And HP actually has high margins, compared to the ubercheap Chinese PCs at the very bottom of the market.
They've done basically the same thing with iPhones and tablets. The iPhone's market share is kept artificially high by the US sales model -- the average consumer doesn't see what they're paying, so they don't see the iPhone as being more expensive than other smartphones. Of course, it's a different market, but still changing... I don't think we're anywhere near the point of stability that the Mac vs. PC hit. You'll know it, of course, when smartphone news is as boring as PC news.
There is only one thing that would really bother Apple: a significant drop in iTunes revenue. That could lead to diminished support for iOS applications, and that's not the way you sell a premium priced product.
As of late last year, iTunes was still bringing in nearly twice as much of the green stuff as Google Play, despite Play having eclipsed iTunes in terms of total downloads. Now, sure, Google Play isn't open in as many countries as iTunes, but it's still an accepted meme that iPhone buyers spend more money on apps and media than Android users. So developers are going to support iOS, and they're going to support Android. Even if Android keeps improving, there's no reason to expect iOS to become a problem, even at lower market shares.
About the only real thing that could be a problem would be the emergence of a really strong other platform, something strong enough to replace Apple as #2. Does anyone really see Windows Phone, now essentially a Nokia proprietary OS, doing that anytime soon? No one else in sight even has a change... most of the other mobile platforms (FirefoxOS, Sailfish, Tizen, Ubuntu for Phones) are pretty much expecting HTML5 apps to be the norm, not much OS-specific development beyond embedded applications.
So Apple's optimizing profit, not market share, for the near to medium future. As long as that formula works, I don't think they're going to do much about their installed base. That's different than their worrying about not being a player at all in major markets. They want to be popular in China and India, not an also-ran.
Samsung isn't making their own OS. Tizen is a Linux Foundation project. Yes, it's supported by Samsung and Intel. Samsung and Intel are also the two largest contributors to Android, aside from Google. Samsung's using Tizen as a replacement for BadaOS. In fact, there are two official Tizen APIs: the BadaOS API (the official NDK), which was ported last year, and HTML5/Javascript/JQuery. Samsung sold about 10 million low-end smartphones running BadaOS. Sometime this year, they're expected to release Tizen phones into that same market, but so far, they only have a developer unit available. They're also using it in the next generation smart watch, and a digital camera. Other companies are looking at Tizen as kind of a competitor to QNX in auto entertainment systems.
The point of Tizen is the same as the point of FirefoxOS: sub-Android smart devices.It's also not entirely open source: the SDK, for example, is published under a non-open-source license from Samsung. Some other non-GNU-compatible licenses cover other parts of the finished OS.
The Android API/Java classes are properly termed "middleware", or alternately, an application framework (that's the term Google uses). And yes, it's a fairly portable application framework, which has been ported to run over QNX (Blackberry) and Windows (Bluestacks). You need Linux for anything written under the NDK, which is apparently less than 20% of the Android applications released.
The Android kernel was originally a fork of Linux, but it was merged back officially in Linux 3.3 I believe. Just that has made Linux a better platform for mobile devices. No to mention other mobile environments, like FirefoxOS, helping themselves to bits and pieces of Android as they see fit.
A 16GB system is hardly a "massive PC" by today's standards. Ok, maybe I'm weird, but the three-year-old PC I retired last summer was a 16GB system -- I have four times that in my new box. Even Microsoft considers 16GB a "home user" quantity of RAM.
Any company doing serious development is going to run a build server anyway. There's no reason to believe that Android -- or any other serious OS project -- would not be optimized for the people most likely to be using it, rather than scaled down for the occasional hobby user. Thing is, doing modern cross platform software, even as an Android developer, I'd consider 16GB a minimum.
Don't know about audio on a Microsoft tablet, but it's broken on Android, too. They really need to adopt ALSA (better still, ALSA + Jack) or something modern in the underlying Linux layers. Latency today is unpredictable.
I've heard that said before, but that's not how Android actually works. Nothing happens at install time to fix the screen resolution, and in fact your app doesn't know the screen resolution until runtime. Android also supports a screen resize message, not the same as change of orientation. Apps don't have to handle screen resize. If you doesn't, Android will take down its UI, then restart with the new screen size.
In any case, Samsung isn't using a white list per se... inclusion in the multi window menu is base on your app being tagged (in the XML) for multiwindow ow support. Anyone can use this.
The Samsung home shell for Android, these days, has a window manager. Works pretty well, for launching either paneled apps (side by side, or quadrants on the 12" tablets).
Does it allow all apps? Nope. Only those chosen by Samsung? Not that either. It works with any app that sets a few Android XML variables that indicate the app is multi window safe, and that specify minimum and default window sizes. Android apps get the screen size handed to them on open, and can either respond to a resize message or let Android handle it... similar to going from landscape to portrait. But an unexpectedly small screen could confuse some apps. Hopefully, Google and Samsung get together on making this a standard. Given that it's a two minute process (well, plus testing of course), it should be well supported.
Yeah, that whole Sync thing is kind of funny. It was only a few months back that Google was showing off their Android for Cars tech, and a bunch of big names were apparently very interested. And one big reason cited was Ford. Ford had been working for years with Microsoft, and apparently, doing things the other guys just can't touch.
I'll admit being very skeptical. And since I'm in the market for a new car, I checked out Ford at the Philly auto show last month. I saw pretty much what I would have expected from Microsoft... nothing much. So I'm still thinking, maybe there's really something here, but you have to live with it to appreciate it.
And then, a couple of weeks ago, Ford announces they're dumping sync, while still selling all kinds of cars running sync, no replacement in the market, no real notion of what they do for 2015 models. And yet, somwhow, the world made sense again after that. And I'm pretty sure that, if car makers are looking to Google or Apple for help here, it's because they don't even really know what they want here, only that tech features are important. A recent study suggests Gen-Y buyers weigh the tech features really highly in their buying choice decisions. And these are not folks used to putting up with Microsoft quirks as much as we old farts.
The other question here: really, Apple? Cars? Apple sells more iThings in a good week or two than GM sells cars in a year. And they're showing this off as a premium feature, so that's 5-10% of cars from the fraction of automakers who want this option. Is that really big enough for Apple?
An article on Mashable late last year put the number of Google Maps users on iOS at 6-10 million, and the number of users of Apple Maps at 35 million. Which tells us one thing: most iOS users don't navigate with their phones, at least not anymore. No real proof of this being Apple Maps judged as better, versus the "Internet Explorer" factor (average users only replace included software with something better when that included software is absymal).
Actually, the dust up over maps wasn't Google Maps per se, but the bundled - with - iPhone version on Google Maps. Google wanted Google branding on it before they would offer full functionality (primarily turn by turn). Apple didn't want a core application branded by a competitor.
So Google will just have to suffer with those 10 million iOS users... In addition to a billion or so Android users.
Well, if it's wired via a Lightning connector, that sure helps keep it Apple proprietary.
That's the wrong approach, at least for any automaker that doesn't expect this to be an option among several infotainment systems. But that's not the real problem.
The fact that they're hosting at least some stand alone apps on this (at lea s t it looks that way) is the real problem. I rarely have a tablet or smartphone older than two years. My car, due for replacement probably this spring, is 11 years old. Do I really want to run an applications platform that spends most of its existence being obsolete?
Mirrorlink is the right idea, a standards based system that lets the smartphone extend to the infotainment system, via wires or wireless, upgraded with the phone. Not the car.
Invention (in the sense of any independent creative work) is what a company does. Innovation is a judgment of that invention's significance, from a few years out, or the lack thereof.
Unless you're in marketing. In that case, innovation is what WE do (even when ripping off the competition). Copying is what the competition does (even if we have not done that thing yet).
Sony wasn't typical. I was an early Minidisc user, and their interface software was some of the worst. They kept using that we'll into the MP3 era. In fact, early Sony "MP3" players only played ATRAC audio... their interface software did the conversion when you downloaded...one reason you still needed it.
Here's the thing: we're geeks, and so dragging over files we rip seemed a piece of cake. But there are a huge number of computer users who basically use a PC by rote. They know a few recipes for successful computer use, and they fail if any step along the way yields a different result. They fundamentally don't understand files, CDs, or "ripping" as we here do. So to a huge percentage of users, an MP3 player was impossible to use.
Like it not, the iPod was the MP3 player that solved that, by requiring all interactions gated through iTunes. A big headache if you knew what you were doing.. but hey, we all had an MP3 player or two by the time the iPod came along. And Apple's real coup was selling individual tracks directly, then locking you into Apple via their DRM. A regular iTunes buyer could never even consider another device. And yes, DRM also a form of geek repellent. Plus, these days, I just have Google Music automatically sync MP3 between PCs, tablet, and phone. Plugging is so 20th century. But it's handy to have real files for other stuff.
Th I s patent was filed under the old system. That was first-to-invent, patent is dated from the submission, but it's good for 17 years from the date of grant, and applications are held confidential. Contrast that with the new system, which is first-to-file, expires 20 years from the submission date, regardless of when it was granted. And applications are published.
The new system was designed to prevent working the system to get a legal "submarine" patent. Long ago, some patent holders would hold back on enforcing their patent, wait until it was in common use, then surface it and go after violators. This was eventually made to be grounds for losing the patent. You have to enforce it or lose it.
So clever legal minds started working the system. One could file a known to be faulty patent, and have it kicked back multiple times for clarification, improvement, removal of overly broad claims, etc. You technically can't add new features that way, but you can clarify things. And, of course, stretch out the review process for years. So it's not really a patent year in its submarine years. The new system was designed to prevent this. Work fast, and you get bonus years on the patent, drag, and you lose them.
This guy, Gilbert, was already famous for a fundamental submarine microprocessor patent that wasn't granted until 1990. Some of it was later tossed out, but he's made many millions on that one. Kinda odd that this thing keeps happening to the same guy. Impossible to believe it's happening to him without at least some foot dragging on his part. Though he's claiming it's the PTO out to get him. There's no indication of just why this has taken so long. Was he rejected many times? Is it a final rejection being appealed? Or did the PTO really just disappear the application?
Apple doesn't care about market share, at least up to a point. They never have. They understand that only a certain percentage of the population (about 5%) is willing to spend twice as much for a commodity PC with fewer ports in a pretty case. But as long as they're making 5-8x the per unit profit versus most any other PC company, that's ok. Similarly in mobile... Samsung sells about one in every four cellular devices of any kind, they make the SOC, the flash, the RAM, the display, etc... and it was only last year that they came close to making Apple level profits in the mobile sector.
Apple does have to worry about volume in absolute terms. One unloved model of iPhone or iPad could put a serious hurting on their bottom line. Even that's not a significant risk, given all their cash in the bank. And if they dropped enough in market share to significantly affect software sales, that would be very bad for them. But even with Android hovering around the 80% mark in hardware sales, iTunes still did not quite twice the money of Play in 2013. It would take a very significant other mobile platform, and Apple getting knocked to third place, for any real threat here.
And after all, shareholders are looking for profits. You can't spend installed base alone.
And I do wonder, is this officially to be a scientific debate? So "The Bible", being a religious document and in every way possible not a scientific document, is off limits? Or is the great Mr. Nye getting into an explicit contest of dogma? Suppose I'll have to catch the inevitable YouTube just to see how Nye handles this situation... very weird, to be debating science against a person who rejects any science that doesn't fit his personal mythology.
I don't have any problem with 4K. It looks fantastic. And after I upgrade a camcorder or two to 4K, after the industry speaks on the delivery formats, etc. I will probably buy a 4K television. I upgraded from a 71" DLP to a 70" LCD/LED last Spring, with "passive" stereoscopic display (aka "3D"). It's a great TV... and this kind of illustrates why 4K might not win. After all, I'm one of the few customers who understands this (as are many here, I'm sure) and knows it's something I want and can use. Though I'd probably want 80-85" in my current media room. That'll fit just dandy, but the only 4K model I saw at 85" ran about $25,000.
As in many things, "good enough" is the enemy of excellent. It's been pretty well established that most consumers don't give a damn about better-then-CD quality audio. Both DVD-Audio and SACD failed to deliver anything but niche products and media. No, the format war didn't help. Blu-ray Audio could eventually do better, but mostly by not being anything fundamentally different than regular Blu-ray.. both earlier formats required new players to really deliver the promised improvements. And the simple fact was that most consumers didn't have good enough audio systems for CD. Meanwhile, the lower-than-CD-quality MP3 player took off like nothing else before.
Here's the problem with the TV industry... television had one major change from its introduction until HDTV... it went to color. That didn't force anyone to upgrade, though eventually folks did; tube TVs didn't last forever. And sure, there were tweaks to the technology, but regular consumers didn't know they now had active comb filters or whatever... SDTV was still just SDTV.
Then HDTV came along. Many didn't buy a first generation HDTV, but I did. A big, expensive, 3-CRT back projection model, $4K+ and 600lbs, analog inputs only. Of course, HDTV came along at the same time everyone realized the CRT was leaving us but not settled on the successor. Most of the early-adopter types upgraded from their analog HDTVs to all-digital HDTVs at more or less the same time the general population was upgrading. That's when I got my 71" DLP... it was the winner in a price-performance shootout with a Pioneer Plasma and a Sony LCOS display... your main choices for large screens in 2005-2006. So this second round did great things for the TV makers... rather than get upgrades as the old devices failed, they had people upgrading after 5-7 years. Pretty sweet.
So naturally, they sought to keep that momentum going. What could do that? Stereo! Or as they dubbed it, 3D. Blame "Avatar", maybe, but they model from Samsung one year after my DLP came with a 3D sync output, the idea being support of 3D games, much as folks like nVidia were already playing around with on PCs. Why? That output cost them all of $0.50 to implement (eg, routing a known signal to the outside world, and that price is assuming a buffer). Mature 3DTV was nearly as cheap. The active systems added virtually no cost to the display, some LED or Bluetooth circuit for frame sync, rather than the RCA jack, but not substantial, under $2.00. The glasses were certainly more, but they're getting $100 retail for replacements, and at one point got substantially more for the television. The passive system needs an accurately registered alternate-line circular polarizer, but that's just replacing the usual LCD polarizer, so maybe a little more expensive, but not even an extra part. And the glasses are much the same as the "throw away" RealD glasses you get at the movies... essentially, they're sunglasses. These all commanded a higher profit margin in a very competitive industry (Samsung's sales in CE is about half of their sales in Mobile; the profits in CE are tiny compared to Mobile, and Samsung's the world's largest TV maker). For awhile.. today, the price is settled where CE prices always settle... cheap. 3D is just another expected feature on higher-end TVs, just as Blu-ray has become an expected feature of any DVD player over $50.
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Probably running some variation of the NSA's SE Android. Pure SE Android only links to your company's secure server via VPN, using the strong hardware crypo, regular key rotation, etc. You have way bigger things to hack before you can even get to hacking Android itself.
The article didn't say what kind of security they're offering in this phone. But any serious secure device is going to have tamper evidence and tamper detection, which will permanently brick the crypto engine if triggered. This is required for certain levels of FIPS, as well as Suite B or anything higher.
Yup... Android owners only upgrade every two years. We're not crazy like iOS users, breaking contracts, buying $900 phones, because we can't stand not having the very latest. Sure, I'm typing this on brand new 12" tablet, but in general, I do keep these things 2 years. My PC gets upgraded more on a 3-4 year cycle all told, but that's also not necessarily a one - shot deal. For example, I upgraded the main system last summer, but kept the GPU from the previous incarnation. That'll get upgraded when I'm certain the upgrade will do me enough good to justify the price. I'm about 3-4 years on cameras, too.
Once the phone/tablet market slows down, and, well, makes indestructible devices, I expect the upgrade pace to slow significantly.
2560x1600... a bit higher than my dual monitors on my high-end-ish PC (2560x1440, along with one 1920x1200). But of course, less actually usable space. Even as a big tablet, a 12.2" screen has its limits.
This is a good tablet. I bought one a few weeks ago at Best Buy in Delaware. The last one at a Best Buy in Delaware -- they had sold out of the 64GB version, as well as all of the 32GB 10" Notes. The pen is a big advantage in using the tablet for real work... I had it on a loaner Note 8, and I can't really go without. I'm pretty good wiht the 12.2" size, but I can see smaller people getting tired with one this big, used for reading or note taking.
> Apple *DOES NOT BUILD ANYTHING* - they pay one of your white-label chinese manufacturers to build it for them as they are too incompetent to build it themselves.
Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, aka Foxconn. Of course, Foxconn makes about 40% of all of the consumer electronics on the planet. They also made some of Amazon's Kindle tablets.
> While Samsung, ASUS, Lenovo all build their own.
Samsung and Lenovo also make a large percentage of the components that go into their in-house manufacturered products; it's about 70% on the average Samsung tablet.
ASUSTeK Computer started out as a contract manufacturer for PCs, but they sold off some of their manufacturing business in 2008. The spinoff companies are Pegatron (PCs and components) and Unihan (casework and other mechanicals). They still do in-house manufacturing in several countries.
Of course, most of the other tablet makers also outsource their manufacturing or, like Google, the whole schmeggie.
Apple doesn't care that much about market share. And that's not a new thing.
Look at the Mac PC. I mean, just face it, there are only so many people who are willing to pay twice as much cash to buy a laptop-for-the-desktop (iMac) or overpriced laptop. And yeah, I mean feature for feature... I bought one for my daughter, for college, a year-and-a-half ago. I actually got less laptop (less RAM, fewer ports, lower screen resolution, older Intel i7 chipset) for not-quite-twice the money. It would have been more than twice, but I bought a refurb, from Apple themselves.
So Apple's got about 5% of the PC market, but over 80% of the $1000+ PC market. That's a very good example of how they work. They're making 30%+ margins on Mac PCs, versus say HP, at about 5%. If Apple really cared that much about numbers, they'd have to drop their margins significantly to increase sales. In the short term, sure, they'd sell lots of Macs. But the cachet of that as an exclusive platform would fail, once it were just as cheap as everyone else. They'd need to sell about 30% of all the PCs on the planet, just to break even selling at HP's margins. And HP actually has high margins, compared to the ubercheap Chinese PCs at the very bottom of the market.
They've done basically the same thing with iPhones and tablets. The iPhone's market share is kept artificially high by the US sales model -- the average consumer doesn't see what they're paying, so they don't see the iPhone as being more expensive than other smartphones. Of course, it's a different market, but still changing... I don't think we're anywhere near the point of stability that the Mac vs. PC hit. You'll know it, of course, when smartphone news is as boring as PC news.
There is only one thing that would really bother Apple: a significant drop in iTunes revenue. That could lead to diminished support for iOS applications, and that's not the way you sell a premium priced product.
As of late last year, iTunes was still bringing in nearly twice as much of the green stuff as Google Play, despite Play having eclipsed iTunes in terms of total downloads. Now, sure, Google Play isn't open in as many countries as iTunes, but it's still an accepted meme that iPhone buyers spend more money on apps and media than Android users. So developers are going to support iOS, and they're going to support Android. Even if Android keeps improving, there's no reason to expect iOS to become a problem, even at lower market shares.
About the only real thing that could be a problem would be the emergence of a really strong other platform, something strong enough to replace Apple as #2. Does anyone really see Windows Phone, now essentially a Nokia proprietary OS, doing that anytime soon? No one else in sight even has a change... most of the other mobile platforms (FirefoxOS, Sailfish, Tizen, Ubuntu for Phones) are pretty much expecting HTML5 apps to be the norm, not much OS-specific development beyond embedded applications.
So Apple's optimizing profit, not market share, for the near to medium future. As long as that formula works, I don't think they're going to do much about their installed base. That's different than their worrying about not being a player at all in major markets. They want to be popular in China and India, not an also-ran.
Samsung isn't making their own OS. Tizen is a Linux Foundation project. Yes, it's supported by Samsung and Intel. Samsung and Intel are also the two largest contributors to Android, aside from Google. Samsung's using Tizen as a replacement for BadaOS. In fact, there are two official Tizen APIs: the BadaOS API (the official NDK), which was ported last year, and HTML5/Javascript/JQuery. Samsung sold about 10 million low-end smartphones running BadaOS. Sometime this year, they're expected to release Tizen phones into that same market, but so far, they only have a developer unit available. They're also using it in the next generation smart watch, and a digital camera. Other companies are looking at Tizen as kind of a competitor to QNX in auto entertainment systems.
The point of Tizen is the same as the point of FirefoxOS: sub-Android smart devices.It's also not entirely open source: the SDK, for example, is published under a non-open-source license from Samsung. Some other non-GNU-compatible licenses cover other parts of the finished OS.
The Android API/Java classes are properly termed "middleware", or alternately, an application framework (that's the term Google uses). And yes, it's a fairly portable application framework, which has been ported to run over QNX (Blackberry) and Windows (Bluestacks). You need Linux for anything written under the NDK, which is apparently less than 20% of the Android applications released.
The Android kernel was originally a fork of Linux, but it was merged back officially in Linux 3.3 I believe. Just that has made Linux a better platform for mobile devices. No to mention other mobile environments, like FirefoxOS, helping themselves to bits and pieces of Android as they see fit.
Except that DarwinOS isn't MacOS. You can't run MacOS applications on it.
AOSP is actually Android -- it runs Android applications. Yes, you will need to install the Google Play Library stuff to run many applications.
A 16GB system is hardly a "massive PC" by today's standards. Ok, maybe I'm weird, but the three-year-old PC I retired last summer was a 16GB system -- I have four times that in my new box. Even Microsoft considers 16GB a "home user" quantity of RAM.
Any company doing serious development is going to run a build server anyway. There's no reason to believe that Android -- or any other serious OS project -- would not be optimized for the people most likely to be using it, rather than scaled down for the occasional hobby user. Thing is, doing modern cross platform software, even as an Android developer, I'd consider 16GB a minimum.
> There is one manufacturer of iOS tablets
Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn)
> butt loads of android tablet makers.
Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn)
Compal
Quanta
Wistron
Pegatron
Inventec
Flextronics
Elitegroup
etc.
Don't know about audio on a Microsoft tablet, but it's broken on Android, too. They really need to adopt ALSA (better still, ALSA + Jack) or something modern in the underlying Linux layers. Latency today is unpredictable.
I've heard that said before, but that's not how Android actually works. Nothing happens at install time to fix the screen resolution, and in fact your app doesn't know the screen resolution until runtime. Android also supports a screen resize message, not the same as change of orientation. Apps don't have to handle screen resize. If you doesn't, Android will take down its UI, then restart with the new screen size.
In any case, Samsung isn't using a white list per se... inclusion in the multi window menu is base on your app being tagged (in the XML) for multiwindow ow support. Anyone can use this.
The Samsung home shell for Android, these days, has a window manager. Works pretty well, for launching either paneled apps (side by side, or quadrants on the 12" tablets).
Does it allow all apps? Nope. Only those chosen by Samsung? Not that either. It works with any app that sets a few Android XML variables that indicate the app is multi window safe, and that specify minimum and default window sizes. Android apps get the screen size handed to them on open, and can either respond to a resize message or let Android handle it... similar to going from landscape to portrait. But an unexpectedly small screen could confuse some apps. Hopefully, Google and Samsung get together on making this a standard. Given that it's a two minute process (well, plus testing of course), it should be well supported.
Yeah, that whole Sync thing is kind of funny. It was only a few months back that Google was showing off their Android for Cars tech, and a bunch of big names were apparently very interested. And one big reason cited was Ford. Ford had been working for years with Microsoft, and apparently, doing things the other guys just can't touch.
I'll admit being very skeptical. And since I'm in the market for a new car, I checked out Ford at the Philly auto show last month. I saw pretty much what I would have expected from Microsoft. .. nothing much. So I'm still thinking, maybe there's really something here, but you have to live with it to appreciate it.
And then, a couple of weeks ago, Ford announces they're dumping sync, while still selling all kinds of cars running sync, no replacement in the market, no real notion of what they do for 2015 models. And yet, somwhow, the world made sense again after that. And I'm pretty sure that, if car makers are looking to Google or Apple for help here, it's because they don't even really know what they want here, only that tech features are important. A recent study suggests Gen-Y buyers weigh the tech features really highly in their buying choice decisions. And these are not folks used to putting up with Microsoft quirks as much as we old farts.
The other question here: really, Apple? Cars? Apple sells more iThings in a good week or two than GM sells cars in a year. And they're showing this off as a premium feature, so that's 5-10% of cars from the fraction of automakers who want this option. Is that really big enough for Apple?
An article on Mashable late last year put the number of Google Maps users on iOS at 6-10 million, and the number of users of Apple Maps at 35 million. Which tells us one thing: most iOS users don't navigate with their phones, at least not anymore. No real proof of this being Apple Maps judged as better, versus the "Internet Explorer" factor (average users only replace included software with something better when that included software is absymal).
Actually, the dust up over maps wasn't Google Maps per se, but the bundled - with - iPhone version on Google Maps. Google wanted Google branding on it before they would offer full functionality (primarily turn by turn). Apple didn't want a core application branded by a competitor.
So Google will just have to suffer with those 10 million iOS users... In addition to a billion or so Android users.
Well, if it's wired via a Lightning connector, that sure helps keep it Apple proprietary.
That's the wrong approach, at least for any automaker that doesn't expect this to be an option among several infotainment systems. But that's not the real problem.
The fact that they're hosting at least some stand alone apps on this (at lea s t it looks that way) is the real problem. I rarely have a tablet or smartphone older than two years. My car, due for replacement probably this spring, is 11 years old. Do I really want to run an applications platform that spends most of its existence being obsolete?
Mirrorlink is the right idea, a standards based system that lets the smartphone extend to the infotainment system, via wires or wireless, upgraded with the phone. Not the car.
Invention (in the sense of any independent creative work) is what a company does. Innovation is a judgment of that invention's significance, from a few years out, or the lack thereof.
Unless you're in marketing. In that case, innovation is what WE do (even when ripping off the competition). Copying is what the competition does (even if we have not done that thing yet).
Sony wasn't typical. I was an early Minidisc user, and their interface software was some of the worst. They kept using that we'll into the MP3 era. In fact, early Sony "MP3" players only played ATRAC audio... their interface software did the conversion when you downloaded...one reason you still needed it.
Here's the thing: we're geeks, and so dragging over files we rip seemed a piece of cake. But there are a huge number of computer users who basically use a PC by rote. They know a few recipes for successful computer use, and they fail if any step along the way yields a different result. They fundamentally don't understand files, CDs, or "ripping" as we here do. So to a huge percentage of users, an MP3 player was impossible to use.
Like it not, the iPod was the MP3 player that solved that, by requiring all interactions gated through iTunes. A big headache if you knew what you were doing.. but hey, we all had an MP3 player or two by the time the iPod came along. And Apple's real coup was selling individual tracks directly, then locking you into Apple via their DRM. A regular iTunes buyer could never even consider another device. And yes, DRM also a form of geek repellent. Plus, these days, I just have Google Music automatically sync MP3 between PCs, tablet, and phone. Plugging is so 20th century. But it's handy to have real files for other stuff.
It absolutely can be retroactive.
Th I s patent was filed under the old system. That was first-to-invent, patent is dated from the submission, but it's good for 17 years from the date of grant, and applications are held confidential. Contrast that with the new system, which is first-to-file, expires 20 years from the submission date, regardless of when it was granted. And applications are published.
The new system was designed to prevent working the system to get a legal "submarine" patent. Long ago, some patent holders would hold back on enforcing their patent, wait until it was in common use, then surface it and go after violators. This was eventually made to be grounds for losing the patent. You have to enforce it or lose it.
So clever legal minds started working the system. One could file a known to be faulty patent, and have it kicked back multiple times for clarification, improvement, removal of overly broad claims, etc. You technically can't add new features that way, but you can clarify things. And, of course, stretch out the review process for years. So it's not really a patent year in its submarine years. The new system was designed to prevent this. Work fast, and you get bonus years on the patent, drag, and you lose them.
This guy, Gilbert, was already famous for a fundamental submarine microprocessor patent that wasn't granted until 1990. Some of it was later tossed out, but he's made many millions on that one. Kinda odd that this thing keeps happening to the same guy. Impossible to believe it's happening to him without at least some foot dragging on his part. Though he's claiming it's the PTO out to get him. There's no indication of just why this has taken so long. Was he rejected many times? Is it a final rejection being appealed? Or did the PTO really just disappear the application?
Apple doesn't care about market share, at least up to a point. They never have. They understand that only a certain percentage of the population (about 5%) is willing to spend twice as much for a commodity PC with fewer ports in a pretty case. But as long as they're making 5-8x the per unit profit versus most any other PC company, that's ok. Similarly in mobile... Samsung sells about one in every four cellular devices of any kind, they make the SOC, the flash, the RAM, the display, etc... and it was only last year that they came close to making Apple level profits in the mobile sector.
Apple does have to worry about volume in absolute terms. One unloved model of iPhone or iPad could put a serious hurting on their bottom line. Even that's not a significant risk, given all their cash in the bank. And if they dropped enough in market share to significantly affect software sales, that would be very bad for them. But even with Android hovering around the 80% mark in hardware sales, iTunes still did not quite twice the money of Play in 2013. It would take a very significant other mobile platform, and Apple getting knocked to third place, for any real threat here.
And after all, shareholders are looking for profits. You can't spend installed base alone.
A battle of wits against an unarmed man?
And I do wonder, is this officially to be a scientific debate? So "The Bible", being a religious document and in every way possible not a scientific document, is off limits? Or is the great Mr. Nye getting into an explicit contest of dogma? Suppose I'll have to catch the inevitable YouTube just to see how Nye handles this situation... very weird, to be debating science against a person who rejects any science that doesn't fit his personal mythology.
I don't have any problem with 4K. It looks fantastic. And after I upgrade a camcorder or two to 4K, after the industry speaks on the delivery formats, etc. I will probably buy a 4K television. I upgraded from a 71" DLP to a 70" LCD/LED last Spring, with "passive" stereoscopic display (aka "3D"). It's a great TV... and this kind of illustrates why 4K might not win. After all, I'm one of the few customers who understands this (as are many here, I'm sure) and knows it's something I want and can use. Though I'd probably want 80-85" in my current media room. That'll fit just dandy, but the only 4K model I saw at 85" ran about $25,000.
As in many things, "good enough" is the enemy of excellent. It's been pretty well established that most consumers don't give a damn about better-then-CD quality audio. Both DVD-Audio and SACD failed to deliver anything but niche products and media. No, the format war didn't help. Blu-ray Audio could eventually do better, but mostly by not being anything fundamentally different than regular Blu-ray.. both earlier formats required new players to really deliver the promised improvements. And the simple fact was that most consumers didn't have good enough audio systems for CD. Meanwhile, the lower-than-CD-quality MP3 player took off like nothing else before.
Here's the problem with the TV industry... television had one major change from its introduction until HDTV... it went to color. That didn't force anyone to upgrade, though eventually folks did; tube TVs didn't last forever. And sure, there were tweaks to the technology, but regular consumers didn't know they now had active comb filters or whatever... SDTV was still just SDTV.
Then HDTV came along. Many didn't buy a first generation HDTV, but I did. A big, expensive, 3-CRT back projection model, $4K+ and 600lbs, analog inputs only. Of course, HDTV came along at the same time everyone realized the CRT was leaving us but not settled on the successor. Most of the early-adopter types upgraded from their analog HDTVs to all-digital HDTVs at more or less the same time the general population was upgrading. That's when I got my 71" DLP... it was the winner in a price-performance shootout with a Pioneer Plasma and a Sony LCOS display... your main choices for large screens in 2005-2006. So this second round did great things for the TV makers... rather than get upgrades as the old devices failed, they had people upgrading after 5-7 years. Pretty sweet.
So naturally, they sought to keep that momentum going. What could do that? Stereo! Or as they dubbed it, 3D. Blame "Avatar", maybe, but they model from Samsung one year after my DLP came with a 3D sync output, the idea being support of 3D games, much as folks like nVidia were already playing around with on PCs. Why? That output cost them all of $0.50 to implement (eg, routing a known signal to the outside world, and that price is assuming a buffer). Mature 3DTV was nearly as cheap. The active systems added virtually no cost to the display, some LED or Bluetooth circuit for frame sync, rather than the RCA jack, but not substantial, under $2.00. The glasses were certainly more, but they're getting $100 retail for replacements, and at one point got substantially more for the television. The passive system needs an accurately registered alternate-line circular polarizer, but that's just replacing the usual LCD polarizer, so maybe a little more expensive, but not even an extra part. And the glasses are much the same as the "throw away" RealD glasses you get at the movies... essentially, they're sunglasses. These all commanded a higher profit margin in a very competitive industry (Samsung's sales in CE is about half of their sales in Mobile; the profits in CE are tiny compared to Mobile, and Samsung's the world's largest TV maker). For awhile.. today, the price is settled where CE prices always settle... cheap. 3D is just another expected feature on higher-end TVs, just as Blu-ray has become an expected feature of any DVD player over $50.
So now everyone who might even consider 4K