Posts by dirk_diggler

Slightly Pointless Story About Apple

Surely no-one still uses this shit?

3d

Is the obvious hook here. twin cameras taking 3d photos and video, with the twin lenses playing it back. Full 3d overlay for augmented reality and this is the start of the endpoint where smartphones have been heading since conception.

The easy theft is a bit of a problem where they could be snatched off your head, but perhaps things like retina recognition etc. can make them almost useless to thieves.

Nokia and Microsoft

Absolutely, 100%, completely the wrong decision.

They had Symbian with well-designed phones and were doing well. Popular smartphones beginning with the iPhone came out and they failed to react. They released a few rubbish attempts at smartphones still based on Symbian which failed due to having no ecosystem. At the same time they kept Maemo and Meego on the back burner, doing not very much at all, hoping either would stir themselves into life.

Then the iPhone and Android handsets started duking it out, with Android very quickly catching up. Nokia then finds itself in a position of rapidly declining market share with nothing in the pipeline for rescue.

If Nokia had put a good chunk of their R&D into Maemo and really pushed it, it would have been what Android is today. They're both Linux-based mobile OS's but Android has had a lot more R&D from Google refining how it works so now any handset maker can use it to push out a nice smartphone. Meego never really got started.

So what Nokia should have done was announce they were going to be heavy players in the Android ecosystem. They have a massive team of Linux developers who could have pulled Android in their own direction. Code submitted by Nokia would be taken into the Android source tree and could have effectively made it their own OS with their own closed implementations alongside the open-source stuff. Then they would be competing with Motorola, LG, Samsung, HTC etc with the same OS, customised and made to work better by their talented developers, but riding on the still big Nokia name. Nokia could never have completely shut Google out, but they could have used it as a lifeline until they were on the up again and then been in a better position to dictate to Google, in a position to fork Android if they so wished.

It would actually be really easy to make a massively selling smartphone that could have saved Nokia. Look what Samsung did by accident with the Galaxy S.

Instead they go and team up with Microsoft to get an OS no-one wants anyway (apart from a few Microsoft devotees) to save their business. Wow. No matter how cheap licences for WP7 are, they're still not free. Nokia have snatched defeat from the jaws of easy victory here. What utter fucktards.

It's like someone on Twitter said, when you're drowning in the toilet bowl, you'll jump on the first turd you see to avoid going down.

Well Done T-Mobile

You've succeeded in pissing off your customers AND having to go back on your plans. Truly a fuck up of the highest order.

I know this isn't going to unpopular..

And perhaps I trust Google too much but I've been trying for ages to get Chromium on my EEE PC as it's the perfect combination - a small, light, ACPI-compliant netbook with a very lightweight OS running the Chrome browser. The CR-48 is a better version of that.

I currently have this EEE PC running Ubuntu Netbook. All I ever run is Chrome on it to access GMail and random web sites so why wouldn't I want to remove any cruft slowing it down in the form of Ubuntu?

I've got a fairly powerful desktop to edit videos, compile stuff, keep my local version of photos etc. so why wouldn't I be desperate to get as much as I can backed up in the cloud? I know I'm giving Google access to knowing anything they want about me, but I'm not really that interesting, and Google haven't exactly been shown to be misusing this data have they? (have they?)

Pricing...

I don't get it. It's apparently $529.99 in the US but £549.99 here.

I'm going to be buying one of these, but there's no way I'm paying £200 more than I should.

Reg - Android icon please?

It's not the size really..

but the performance is terrible. It takes forever to load compared to the bundled browser and isn't at all smooth or responsive.

Yawn

Root it and uninstall whatever you want.

Smooth

This will really help me. I'm in the GUI on my Linux desktops all of the time, sometimes with a terminal open because it's the most efficient way of getting a lot of things done. Try doing `find /var/log -mtime +30 -delete` in a GUI

But anyway, thanks for taking the piss out of me.

- text-interface obsessive.

(Oh and it's Calendar not Calender)

Shame you chose Ubuntu

and not Kubuntu. The default Gnome apps are pretty good but nowhere near their KDE counterparts in many ways. Again it's a shame that Ubuntu defaults to Gnome, I know Kubuntu is the KDE flavour but that's not really the point - people will use whatever the default Ubuntu environment is and Kubuntu gets 2nd class treatment for everything. Although it's still the best KDE based distro.

Amarok is awesome, way ahead of Rhythmbox. Digikam is the best photo management software anywhere. Even supporting apps like Kget, Konsole, Dolphin etc. are way ahead of Transmission, Gnome-terminal and Nautilus.

But again, because you're comparing the default DE of the default Linux distro then you get the apps that ship with the Gnome implementation - Great start with Rhythmbox as it's actually very good but I'm going to cringe once you start comparing F-Spot and Pitivi with iPhoto and iMovie.

At least Ubuntu is the only social-by-default OS so if you compare that it's a nailed on win ;)

Wha.?

"the interface is (only) a step or two behind the iPhone."

Surely that's a typo. The Android interface even without SenseUI has been better than iPhone since Donut. The iPhone interface isn't really all that good in my opinion, but the animations are at least smooth.

Google Apologist

I don't want to be seen as a Gapologist but it does seem they did wrong and are now taking entirely the correct steps to put it right. After the initial booboo I'm not sure what else they can do.

Good Review

But as someone who's been running this for months through the dev process, I'm quite surprised you didn't make more about the social networking integration, it truly sets it apart from other OS's. OS X and Windows 7 haven't cottoned on to how people really use their computers these days, Canonical have.