Posts by Paul Shirley

unfixable due to Microsoft lockin attempts

Yes, it's a Windows problem that Win8 hasn't solved. iOS and to a lesser extent Android take a desktop (capable) OS and streamline it for different hardware. It's not a full PC OS only because it's not running on full PC hardware, rather than any artificial constraints.

The base OSes both are built on are modular enough that shrinking the OS is both easy and actually shrinks the OS footprint.

The Windows problem is the OS is so infested with dependencies that they dont know how to remove any component safely, Microsoft recently admitted spending months just trying to map them. They can remove function but can't actually remove much footprint and still trust the OS to work. This is more than just poor design, Microsoft policy of binding user space programs (Internet Explorer is the classic one) into the system layers just came back to bite them. A policy designed to encourage user lock in has just locked Microsoft into it's own messy past!

Indeed. They tried desperately hard to suggest Nokia would have some special advantage over other WP7 licensees (while Microsoft simultaneously tried not to spook them).

Now they've launched it's hard to see any insider advantage in the product, just another WP7 phone with the same software stack, the same battery life, the same everything. Mostly just a different casing you love or loath and a logo few still respect. Even the Nokia map app that was supposed to bring them huge licence fees is never even commented on!

Meanwhile all the others can throw out essentially the same phone in a different case and see how it sells, with Android and proprietary OS builds to fall back on. Even the ones doing 'contractual obligation' releases to keep the Microsoft attack dogs at bay aren't dependent on take up.

Nokia has no independent future.

Sony Ericsson appears to honour the opt-out

Haven't worked out who supplied the QC monitor on my SE Android phone but it does seem to be honouring my 'send anonymous usage stats' opt-out. No sign it's running at all. I don't normally trust anything with Sony in the name but the Ericsson guys seem to actually have a clue about doing things right.

Might just go ahead and delete it anyway, a bit more free space to move apps into ;)

Copyright covers expression. Patent covers ideas.

You can copyright your photograph. You cant copyright the idea of taking a photograph. You're way too late to patent the idea.

Novatech good

Ummm.... some melons in there as well.

Scan: their ordering system makes no effort to reserve stock at any time and seems to be inaccurate in any case. Dropped them after the 3rd consecutive order got stuck in a deadlock, with different parts taking turns being out of stock holding the entire order up. In one case they discontinued a part, permanently stalling the delivery but never noticed, even after 2 sessions with customer support! Can't say I've ever been impressed by their customer service.

Aria: RMA'd a mboard to them and eventually received back a considerably lower spec version, covered in shit with a randomly chosen set of accessories, some rusty. Took weeks to get that far. 3 years on I'm still waiting for a real replacement or refund. Or even acknowledgement of the return.

...I trust ebay more than some of the others... ;)

Novatech became my automatic choice for most things, after the sad loss of Komplett. They just seem to get the job done without all the gimmicks, haven't let me down yet.

Yep, looks identical in spec, just a new case and a different crapware infestation. Not too surprising though, Orange are the other half of Everything Everywhere.

I believe that means an 800MHz ARM6. The OSF was good value a year ago but the markets moved on and this is poor, ARM6 is just far too slow. ZTE have lost the plot. Unfortunately these will probably fly off the shelfs and give a lot of punters a very bad impression of Android.

giffgaff too close to O2 to stand up for users

1: O2 is shite. Not just for having these frequent outages but their general service (coverage and service quality) is trailing the pack and in too many places completely missing or unusable. It's something giffgaff and their fans ought to remember when crowing about using O2's network as a positive thing. Being an O2 execs plaything and that O2 ownership means they cant move to a better network however bad things get.

2: Despite being an O2 sister company and (ex?) O2 execs giffgaff appear to have close to zero ability to get O2 to do anything quickly. When O2 screw up, giffgaff users wait and suffer. When O2 screwup Tesco (also on their network), O2 jumps. O2 screw up a lot.

which recent smartphone has better? lots of them?

Most of the recent SE Androids are claiming 6-7hours talk time ;)

I'm more impressed with the 4-5 hours game time on my Play. Even with some serious battery drain issues (experimental kernel) I was seeing 2 days between charges before I installed the HD games - impressive since the drain problem was causing 3-4 days standby, down from 9-10 days on stock firmware!

I think its fair to say Nokia have managed to reach the same battery life as everyone else, but dismally failed to beat it.

So much for the famed Nokia tech skills then. This is not looking good for the brand, no obvious technical superiority, no unique OS.

touchscreen has it's place and its not on a PC

Touchscreen on a tablet sitting under my fingers, works.

On a phone sitting in my hand, works.

On a laptop, better than the woeful touchpads most have - worse than the mouse I actually use on mine.

Touching a monitor sitting an arms length in front of me, hello RSI, muscle fatigue and buggered up eyes because I can't sit further away and still use it.

I'd also like to know how well touchscreen monitors deal with my multi-monitor setup. Dragging from 1 screen to the next would seem to be a challenge...

Touchscreen has it's place but that's not on the machines I actually do work or play games on. A UI that compromises my PC experience is a UI I won't use on it.

"turn it on from cold and you're away within 10 seconds"

That's the core of the problem: how much is losing 30-60sec of start up time worth?

For most of us, *much less* than the value lost through reduced hardware functionality and limited software capability. I might be prepared for a modest premium to add quick cloud start up to a laptop/tablet/PC, not interested in paying full price to get the speed and not much else.

More accurately the judge has decided this time to "go directly to appeal, do not even pretend to have a real trial". Lazy and in no way excusable by the certainty this will go to appeal whatever happens.

...worth pointing out that they're in court because the same judge pulled the same stunt at the original trial. Something the Novell lawyers seem happy to remind him off in open court. Suicidal, insane or corrupt? Can't even begin to guess.

The one that definitely escaped corruption charges through conveniently timed ill-health (strange how often this happens to politicians isn't it?) was not involved with Activision. I forget which local companies it actually was... very easily searchable though ;)

The best improvement most people can make to their CV is not having a recruiters mark anywhere on or near it. After sitting on both sides of the hiring process, direct write ins go straight to the top of the heap unless the CV is hopelessly bad. Keeping track of the few reliable recruiters isn't viable for small shops with low turnover.

Saw far too many CVs professionally massaged to the point they were fiction and we preferred applicants with the balls to take control of their own career and just apply direct.

Or maybe they'll remember no-one actually knows if there is more matter than anti-matter in the entire universe and the current question is 'why can we see more matter'.

The Sega Gamegear should have trounced the Gameboy but 3 hours battery life vs 15 and thtat horrid mono screen and rsi inducing controls seemed more acceptable.

The amount of effort put into stretching battery life on mobiles tells the same story. Battery life is vital to know.

discontinued != stops working

This 'fandroid' is pretty happy that lazy web designers just got another shove towards dumping Flash and looks forward to the day the web stops being infested by the steaming pile of merde.

Meanwhile, while I wait for that to happen, I'll remain able to allow it to run on the few sites that just aren't usable with it disabled. It won't magically stop running just because Adobe stop piling on the pain with ever fatter updates. You'll presumably just wait impatiently till Flash dies... about 10 years after Adobe drop desktop support ;)

Tiles, just widgets with a Microsoft trademarked name

There's some traditional Microsoft sleight of hand going on, in a move they have form for, widgets were renamed Tiles to make them uniquely Windows. In reality the big differences are: WP7's home only contains widgets, no mixing with dumb(ish) icons and their home is a 'vertical' layout.

Some like the vertical thing enough to implement it on Android. Personally I prefer grouping related views by screen but only Android allows users to swap launcher and some phones even ship with multiple homes to choose from.

A mystery is why he didn't notice almost all recent Android's seem to ship with the news&weather widget making it essentially a stock item. Probably too busy gawking at the Sense version to notice ;)

Simples. We didn't *all* laugh at the streak, many of us lusted after it. Nearly grabbed one a couple of weeks ago when they dropped to a more appealing price.

probably won't be a Sony phone

Sony will certainly see an advantage in ramming their content onto Sony phones. As a user I'm used to carriers infesting their handsets with crapware designed to sell content and hate it. The manufacturer doing it is more annoying, taking away the option of buying an unbranded phone to avoid the crap.

...there was a lot of content pushing crap on my Xperia Play, most unable to be removed before I rooted.

It's a real pity, SE had embraced unlocking the devices so it was easy to clean the phone up. That's the exact opposite of Sony's ethos. It's really hard to believe they'll resist the chance to insert even more sales channels on their hardware and try much harder to stop users removing them.

Probably irrelevant though. My gut feeling is Sony won't make another phone, just add the phone support into their other products. The Play was a total sales disaster till they effectively remaindered it - now flying off the shelves at £150-200 but hardly a high profit margin. Nice phones but no-one wants to pay the premium the Sony brand used to get. The competition is too sexy.

if you steal enough a good product becomes possible

Microsoft have demonstrated that spending decades stealing from others can eventually lead to a half decent product. However inept or outright evil your company is.

What it can't do is make them more honest about that or stop them trying to harass or kill competition by fair means or foul, mostly foul ;)

my SE phone decided I was AC for me

[my AC post above was from an SE phone, which was playing hard to get and hit the AC button for me. DOH!]

Linux? Already got it on my Play ;)

No, I want to feel comfortable that I can carry on updating Android after Sony drop support for my phone. That I can rely on rooting it if needed. That there's no bloatware Sony can add that I can't remove. That the promised ICS update won't be boobytrapped by some control hungry Sony suit or if it is it can be defanged.

On a more 'what if' basis: that I can carry on just dropping media onto the phone without some Sony DRM/piracy detection scheme interfering and without having to use a Sony app to do it. Remember, this is the company that though rootkits are an appropriate thing to put on audio CDs.

Right now SE are happily unlocking bootloaders for most of their Android phones and helping 3rd party OS devs, Sony could kill that overnight. A locked bootloader is the kiss of death to 3rd party support.

high end phones was the "burning platform" Elop abandoned

1: probably a safer gamble going budget/midrange right now. WP7 hasn't set the world alight and simply putting Nokia's badge on the devices won't magically turn that around overnight. Highly profitable high end phones would risk chasing a small share of a tiny market, a market Apple already own. Easier and safer to smuggle WP7 into many more peoples pockets with cheaper phones.

2: after so many engineers walked and with so short a deadline Nokia had little choice but to take last years high end hardware and hack WP onto them. Last years high end == this years budget. The lost talent aren't likely to return and Nokia are likely to be out of the high end for a long time.

3: Microsoft need volume more than trailblazing phones. What Microsoft wants, Elop delivers. Microsoft actually have to fight for sales, unlike the PC with its 'Microsoft tax' and default Windows installs. The bulk of the market don't care what the OS is, just that it works and the price is right and that means competing with increasing numbers of cheap, powerful Android devices.

high price for marginal improvement

My Xperia Play has the same core hardware and so far I've only seen it struggle with excessively Flash heavy web pages. Spending more cash on a better CPU and draining the battery faster really isn't worth it just to speed up Adobes piss poor software. Software that might (ho ho) get faster with a free software upgrade ;)

I've even lowered my Play's min clock to 122Mhz and had no obvious speed or responsiveness problems. Noticeable battery life boost though.

Faster is always nice but most of us are a long way from *needing* that much power in our phones and it's hard to imagine that changing before our phone's get replaced anyway.

8 apps per screen is more than anyone will ever need

Why not have 'tiles' small enough to fit 16 or 20 on each screen, so all the apps you use every day are just a click or 2 away? Oh, just realised, Apple,Android,Symbian and even featurephones already do that and Microsoft cant be seen copying the old ways ;)

A UI where every app icon is really a supersized widget 'tile' shows Microsofts tradition of telling users how to do things instead of supporting what users want. No-one can possibly need more than 8 apps on their home screen after all. Think I'll stick to having the choice to mix&match tiny launcher icons with larger widgets scattered across multiple selectable screens.

BTW: I had single key shortcuts available for 2 years on my old Android phone. Didn't use it once. Didn't need it.