Even if the borders you cross are usually only delimited with a road sign. Often included is also a low speed limit for a couple of hundreds of meters. The only "Europeans" that are used to border controls as a way of life seems to be Brits nowadays.
Yeah, that works great, if you have only a tiny number of devices (one phone, one tablet, and half a dozen or so older devices "still sold" at best), but it breaks down if you have hordes of different devices. Now if you assume that you alone know what everyone wants in a phone, than you can get crazy enough to go this way.
Btw, starting with phone size, it's personal, and it's partially biological, you know hand size => I've got persons around here that swear never again smaller than 5", and others that complain that they cannot hold a 5" device.
Anyway, a local price compare site shows me slightly over 100 different Android 4 models (Android 4 kind of equals to reasonably new), even if divide it by three to account for different colors/different storage sizes, you end up to over 3 dozen different Androids versus one iPhone.
Basically, Apple's setup of tiny number of devices, hand crafted displays, runs against an eco system that can deliver atypical devices, e.g. Dual-SIM support.
Well, actually this applies to all "appliance"-style devices, that DOES include Androids, just because I can root it, I don't need to. The difference is, that for many devices rooting is not actively discouraged, while Apple continues the battle on each iteration for control of my device.
And while the walled garden might big, it's still calibrated mostly on "what does not cause trouble in the bible belt", which for an European is only slightly better the Saudi definition of acceptable. Wonder if Apple censors would allow an app that explains evolution into iTunes?
Didn't Samsung have a design patent somewhere for 4" rectangles? I mean Apple monopolizes the 3.5"/9.7" rectangle space, but all the other sizes have been introduced before by somebody else?
Well, in 3G might have sucked in the US, but it worked perfectly well here around.
Well, my Nexus does have 4.1.1, no problems. It's a little bit on the small side (with only 4.65" and a little bit more pixel than the brand new iPhone 5), it works surprisingly well, I had the second battery pack and external charger picked up the same day I got it,...
And yes, personally the non-changeable (by the user) battery is a show stopper. I don't need it often, but I do manage to run the battery dry (especially if I was sloppy about keeping it charged up before leaving home), and fixed battery devices (that includes all iDevices but also many Android tablets) don't offer an answer to that.
Having just run on such a fixed-battery device as primary device, I really felt myself getting paranoid about always having it hooked up to the charger, be it in the car, at home, in the train, and so on. (And despite progress in this relation, there are quite a bit of trains that still have no power outlets, now explain me how you plan to use your iPhone for entertainment on your next 18 hours trip across Europe, I mean you'll be sleeping perhaps 6-8 hours of this, but 10-12 hours usage is still hard). And yes, I've been reading ebooks on my mobile devices years before ebooks become mainstream.
Well, a smartphone != phone => if you want a phone, buy a phone, and yes for 12 keys and a 2 line display, you don't need 3".
OTOH, for a smartphone, which nowadays come 99% without a hardware keyboard, >4" is a minimum size. With smaller screens, the virtual keyboard hides most of the app plus is not very nice to use => One can live with a slow CPU, tiny RAM, tiny flash, but a 3.5" display is just not very useful for text input.
Well, my Samsung P6200 (GSM/UMTS + Wifi) works perfectly as a phone, interestingly, while it looks weird, the sound quality is quite good if you just hold the 7" monster to you year.
But yes, I usually use it with BT headset for phoning, or via the builtin loudspeaker in the car.
AFAIK, most if not all GSM/UMTS based Android tablets seem to have no problem with phone calls/SMS, the P1000 (original Galaxy Tab) worked for that also.
OTOH, 7" is probably slightly to big for me, if I had to be heavily mobile, but 5" is a sensible size for a smartphone.
Well, without a monopoly you need a partner/partners in crime.;)
And Apple in the only area they had market dominance (digital music distribution, iTunes + iDevices, at least for some years in the past), very nearly managed to get into legal troubles in Europe. Lucky for them, before this could boil over, iTunes started to go DRM-less, and competition (Amazon,...) in the download market started to appear.
Well, Apple's version of webkit I'd guess. And for me as a techie the big difference between say Firefox and Chrome is not the slightly different UI, it's the engine under the hood, so I stand by my comment:
Chrome/Chromium on other platforms makes one think about performance, architecture (security), and so on, and one of the less important things would be Google Account integration.
Chrome on iOS: well, if you think Chrome on iOS is like Chrome on anything else, because it basically means the Apple Webview characteristics with Google Account integration.
Well, considering that more and more things contain software in some form to fulfill functions that have been pure physical before, I think fines for software bugs, at least some are more than fine.
In this case MS showed contempt against a legal ruling, by not making sure that it followed the ruling, so a fine makes sense.
Actually, they enforce rules against anti competitive behavior quite strongly against local cartels. Intel & MS just happen to be reported about in the US because they are US companies, AND they have not been able to contribute to a PAC to get the rulings defanged.
Hint: These are differently packaged Safari Webviews, not browsers. Opera Mini just passes below the iTunes Gestapo radar screen, because the web browsing part is in the cloud, hence Opera Mini is formally not a web browser.
Apple is just one of many manufacturers => hence they are rather free to do what they want (mostly, in the early itunes days they did have a near monopoly in the digital music market, and a number of regulations was about to kick in forcing Apple to make their DRM available to competing manufacturers, at least in some European countries, but Apple decided to go DRM-less on their own before any legal rulings happened)
MS is in a market controlling position when it comes to desktop OSes, has been and still is. (On a local price comparison site, I checked laptops, and there are 2600 devices listed with some form of Windows preinstalled, 170 devices that come with something Linux/FreeDOS/no OS, and 114 devices that come with MacOSX [that includes different country versions], that means roughly 90% of laptops come with Windows preinstalled.) => that means that a number of regulations kick in, e.g. they are not allowed to use their control of OSes to leverage themselves in different products => e.g. browsers.
Because to be convicted of monopoly abuse, you need to have a monopoly first.
MS abused it's monopoly (and monopoly does not need to 100% market share, the term is market dominating position, at least here around) in desktop OSes to force IE on users => e.g. it punished OEMs that preinstalled anything not approved by MS. => they basically managed to get that many normal users associated the IE logo as "the Internet",... => on a standard Win box you need usually IE at least once to fetch an alternative browser,...
In the browser case where MS was fined, one of parts of the settlements was that MS agreed to offer a selection screen where users can select during the PCs setup what browser they want to use, first to educate users that there are alternatives, and second to help diversity in the browser market.
MS in Win7SP1 just managed to forget that selection screen. It was just a mistake. Well if you are on probation, which MS is, you should really make sure that you follow the imposed sanctions, or you need to pay for your mistakes.
So if it was just a mistake, than obviously MS has not communicated strongly enough to their employees that their are a convicted company on probation, management error by MS, so accept responsibility, pay a 2-3 digit million euro fine, and everything is fine, that should make you remember not to forget the browser selection screen on your next release,...
The problem is that the US likes to prosecute non-US citizens located outside the US, with no connection to the US, for doing things that are completely legal at the place where they have been doing them, by extradition to the US. For an additional example, in most countries you can change over at an airport without entering the country legally, not so in the US, for changing planes you need to officially enter the US, so they can arrest anyone they don't like;)
Furthermore, by local standards US punishments are all cruel and inhumane, which works locally usually quite well, despite some extreme examples like Mr. Breveik that could be sentenced only to 21 years. Despite these mild punishments, we have all over way less problems with crime, so something must be done better here. Anyway, so even if something is illegal here and there the punishments can vary quite a bit, e.g. something that a Brit would be sentenced to say 6 months on probation might result in multiple life sentences in the US. (Hint: in most European countries, all sentences are always running concurrently, so no adding up like in the US, "He did steal 100 credit card numbers, so it's 100 times 1 year = 100 years in jail")
Now this might sound funny, till you realize that someone might play the game the other way, e.g. there are some places where homosexuality is a capital crime (Must been funny for the German foreign minister to decide if he should bring his partner for the state visit to Saudi Arabia,....),...
Well, so I guess having an TCP connection controlled by an app in the background is no problem for iOS? As in being able to communicate in any way without a special server translating it into proprietary push messages? (Basically an IM app, or even an email app that does IMAP IDLE does need that level of socket programming)
And sorry, considering that my Android devices traditionally always have shown the display to be the biggest battery user, I don't think that a less feature-full multitasking implementation would help that. (Actually, arguably, it helps battery usage, as you can multitask while you wait for some thing to download)
In old days, I've always fixed the battery running out issue (which is an issue, but it's less an issue of apps running amok, it's more a question of to intense use) by just switching batteries (and that's been long before Android, I've got old Nokias lying around with 2 or 3 batteries and external chargers for these), but currently, this seems less and less an issue, the only use case being dumb user (that would be me) forgetting to connect the charger overnight.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the borders you cross are usually only delimited with a road sign. Often included is also a low speed limit for a couple of hundreds of meters. The only "Europeans" that are used to border controls as a way of life seems to be Brits nowadays.
Well it's GSM/UMTS, and yes, European do have contracts and SIM/NET LOCKs, but one can usually remove the locks easily enough.
Enough people travel, and in Europe, if you want to avoid painful roaming costs, that means swapping the SIM to something prepaid and local.
Yeah, that works great, if you have only a tiny number of devices (one phone, one tablet, and half a dozen or so older devices "still sold" at best), but it breaks down if you have hordes of different devices. Now if you assume that you alone know what everyone wants in a phone, than you can get crazy enough to go this way.
Btw, starting with phone size, it's personal, and it's partially biological, you know hand size => I've got persons around here that swear never again smaller than 5", and others that complain that they cannot hold a 5" device.
Anyway, a local price compare site shows me slightly over 100 different Android 4 models (Android 4 kind of equals to reasonably new), even if divide it by three to account for different colors/different storage sizes, you end up to over 3 dozen different Androids versus one iPhone.
Basically, Apple's setup of tiny number of devices, hand crafted displays, runs against an eco system that can deliver atypical devices, e.g. Dual-SIM support.
Well, actually this applies to all "appliance"-style devices, that DOES include Androids, just because I can root it, I don't need to. The difference is, that for many devices rooting is not actively discouraged, while Apple continues the battle on each iteration for control of my device.
And while the walled garden might big, it's still calibrated mostly on "what does not cause trouble in the bible belt", which for an European is only slightly better the Saudi definition of acceptable. Wonder if Apple censors would allow an app that explains evolution into iTunes?
Didn't Samsung have a design patent somewhere for 4" rectangles? I mean Apple monopolizes the 3.5"/9.7" rectangle space, but all the other sizes have been introduced before by somebody else?
Well, in 3G might have sucked in the US, but it worked perfectly well here around.
Well, my Nexus does have 4.1.1, no problems. It's a little bit on the small side (with only 4.65" and a little bit more pixel than the brand new iPhone 5), it works surprisingly well, I had the second battery pack and external charger picked up the same day I got it, ...
And yes, personally the non-changeable (by the user) battery is a show stopper. I don't need it often, but I do manage to run the battery dry (especially if I was sloppy about keeping it charged up before leaving home), and fixed battery devices (that includes all iDevices but also many Android tablets) don't offer an answer to that.
Having just run on such a fixed-battery device as primary device, I really felt myself getting paranoid about always having it hooked up to the charger, be it in the car, at home, in the train, and so on. (And despite progress in this relation, there are quite a bit of trains that still have no power outlets, now explain me how you plan to use your iPhone for entertainment on your next 18 hours trip across Europe, I mean you'll be sleeping perhaps 6-8 hours of this, but 10-12 hours usage is still hard). And yes, I've been reading ebooks on my mobile devices years before ebooks become mainstream.
Or Apple, Google, Samsung, HTC, ...
Well, a smartphone != phone => if you want a phone, buy a phone, and yes for 12 keys and a 2 line display, you don't need 3".
OTOH, for a smartphone, which nowadays come 99% without a hardware keyboard, >4" is a minimum size. With smaller screens, the virtual keyboard hides most of the app plus is not very nice to use => One can live with a slow CPU, tiny RAM, tiny flash, but a 3.5" display is just not very useful for text input.
Well, my Samsung P6200 (GSM/UMTS + Wifi) works perfectly as a phone, interestingly, while it looks weird, the sound quality is quite good if you just hold the 7" monster to you year.
But yes, I usually use it with BT headset for phoning, or via the builtin loudspeaker in the car.
AFAIK, most if not all GSM/UMTS based Android tablets seem to have no problem with phone calls/SMS, the P1000 (original Galaxy Tab) worked for that also.
OTOH, 7" is probably slightly to big for me, if I had to be heavily mobile, but 5" is a sensible size for a smartphone.
Well, actually, I'd consider €30 being raped, but then I don't put a high value on that iIdiot thing.
Well, without a monopoly you need a partner/partners in crime. ;)
And Apple in the only area they had market dominance (digital music distribution, iTunes + iDevices, at least for some years in the past), very nearly managed to get into legal troubles in Europe. Lucky for them, before this could boil over, iTunes started to go DRM-less, and competition (Amazon, ...) in the download market started to appear.
Well, Apple's version of webkit I'd guess. And for me as a techie the big difference between say Firefox and Chrome is not the slightly different UI, it's the engine under the hood, so I stand by my comment:
Chrome/Chromium on other platforms makes one think about performance, architecture (security), and so on, and one of the less important things would be Google Account integration.
Chrome on iOS: well, if you think Chrome on iOS is like Chrome on anything else, because it basically means the Apple Webview characteristics with Google Account integration.
See something here?
Well, considering that more and more things contain software in some form to fulfill functions that have been pure physical before, I think fines for software bugs, at least some are more than fine.
In this case MS showed contempt against a legal ruling, by not making sure that it followed the ruling, so a fine makes sense.
Actually, they enforce rules against anti competitive behavior quite strongly against local cartels.
Intel & MS just happen to be reported about in the US because they are US companies, AND they have not been able to contribute to a PAC to get the rulings defanged.
Chrome/iOS is a Chrome UI on top of the Safari Webview, Opera Mini has the web rendering part in the cloud.
Hint: These are differently packaged Safari Webviews, not browsers. Opera Mini just passes below the iTunes Gestapo radar screen, because the web browsing part is in the cloud, hence Opera Mini is formally not a web browser.
Apple is just one of many manufacturers => hence they are rather free to do what they want (mostly, in the early itunes days they did have a near monopoly in the digital music market, and a number of regulations was about to kick in forcing Apple to make their DRM available to competing manufacturers, at least in some European countries, but Apple decided to go DRM-less on their own before any legal rulings happened)
MS is in a market controlling position when it comes to desktop OSes, has been and still is. (On a local price comparison site, I checked laptops, and there are 2600 devices listed with some form of Windows preinstalled, 170 devices that come with something Linux/FreeDOS/no OS, and 114 devices that come with MacOSX [that includes different country versions], that means roughly 90% of laptops come with Windows preinstalled.) => that means that a number of regulations kick in, e.g. they are not allowed to use their control of OSes to leverage themselves in different products => e.g. browsers.
Because to be convicted of monopoly abuse, you need to have a monopoly first.
MS abused it's monopoly (and monopoly does not need to 100% market share, the term is market dominating position, at least here around) in desktop OSes to force IE on users => e.g. it punished OEMs that preinstalled anything not approved by MS. => they basically managed to get that many normal users associated the IE logo as "the Internet", ... => on a standard Win box you need usually IE at least once to fetch an alternative browser, ...
In the browser case where MS was fined, one of parts of the settlements was that MS agreed to offer a selection screen where users can select during the PCs setup what browser they want to use, first to educate users that there are alternatives, and second to help diversity in the browser market.
MS in Win7SP1 just managed to forget that selection screen. It was just a mistake. Well if you are on probation, which MS is, you should really make sure that you follow the imposed sanctions, or you need to pay for your mistakes.
So if it was just a mistake, than obviously MS has not communicated strongly enough to their employees that their are a convicted company on probation, management error by MS, so accept responsibility, pay a 2-3 digit million euro fine, and everything is fine, that should make you remember not to forget the browser selection screen on your next release, ...
He commited it in the UK. So why not try him in the UK?
The problem is that the US likes to prosecute non-US citizens located outside the US, with no connection to the US, for doing things that are completely legal at the place where they have been doing them, by extradition to the US. For an additional example, in most countries you can change over at an airport without entering the country legally, not so in the US, for changing planes you need to officially enter the US, so they can arrest anyone they don't like ;)
Furthermore, by local standards US punishments are all cruel and inhumane, which works locally usually quite well, despite some extreme examples like Mr. Breveik that could be sentenced only to 21 years. Despite these mild punishments, we have all over way less problems with crime, so something must be done better here. Anyway, so even if something is illegal here and there the punishments can vary quite a bit, e.g. something that a Brit would be sentenced to say 6 months on probation might result in multiple life sentences in the US. (Hint: in most European countries, all sentences are always running concurrently, so no adding up like in the US, "He did steal 100 credit card numbers, so it's 100 times 1 year = 100 years in jail")
Now this might sound funny, till you realize that someone might play the game the other way, e.g. there are some places where homosexuality is a capital crime (Must been funny for the German foreign minister to decide if he should bring his partner for the state visit to Saudi Arabia, ....), ...
Basically, jurisdiction is there for a reason.
Well, so I guess having an TCP connection controlled by an app in the background is no problem for iOS? As in being able to communicate in any way without a special server translating it into proprietary push messages? (Basically an IM app, or even an email app that does IMAP IDLE does need that level of socket programming)
And sorry, considering that my Android devices traditionally always have shown the display to be the biggest battery user, I don't think that a less feature-full multitasking implementation would help that. (Actually, arguably, it helps battery usage, as you can multitask while you wait for some thing to download)
In old days, I've always fixed the battery running out issue (which is an issue, but it's less an issue of apps running amok, it's more a question of to intense use) by just switching batteries (and that's been long before Android, I've got old Nokias lying around with 2 or 3 batteries and external chargers for these), but currently, this seems less and less an issue, the only use case being dumb user (that would be me) forgetting to connect the charger overnight.
Well, it's still nothing compared to the US conjuration program, e.g. I think the Feds call it Quantitative Easing, right?
Well, guess it's 10.1N for the US too.
Starting from the fact that the iPad is a legacy 4:3 device, while Samsung tablets tend to be 16:9 devices.
Furthermore the whole software stack is more advanced (again, single tasking is so DOS-ish), ...
Well, actually they are, so they can stop their crimes from being continued, and throw these guys into prison for a couple of years.
Well, in most civilized places citizenship implies protection from extradition.
And you cannot really commit a crime in country X if you are not there.