Posts by JDX 6848 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2010
This year, yes - a couple of years ago the current trend would have seen silly and we were laughing at the monstrous sized Trigger Happy TV-esque phones.
No reason a new trend won't happen - in fact it certainly will, we just don't know what it will be.
Tablets existed before iPad, but nobody bought them because the implementation sucked. Just because nobody has cracked the form factor doesn't mean it's not worth investing in.
Current technology is rather marginal for such a small device to be practical, rather like pre-iPad tablets were before their time, so we're in new territory really.
Live tiles might actually be the best option for a watch though, provided you limit to specific configurations i.e one big tile, 4 small ones or some full-width/full-height combinations. WP8 UI would actually work well here and you could easily see the time, fitness stats, email/SMS notifications and calendar notifications.
I doubt it but WP8 is probably the mobile OS best suited to the tiny screen right now.
G+ is technologically as good as FaceBook. OSXLinux are at least as capable as Windows. WinPhone8 and Lumia devices are on a par with their competitors... yet in all cases it is hard even for multi-billion dollar behemoths to carve a decent place in the market. Brand is very important.
Does the author not realise Google have been trialling self-driving cars other than on empty highways for some time?
As for "driving in CA is easy", has the author never driven in downtown LA? California may mostly be quite empty and organised but it has busy towns and cities just like everywhere else.
This is just "I can't accept a robot can do this" thinking based on out-dated facts rather than reality. It used to be a dream to make a computer that could beat the best chess players, or a robot that could walk on irregular terrain, etc.
Yeah, gamers are a bit of a special case. There are a massive number of PC gamers but they're still only a minority of PC users.
PCs aren't going anywhere, the "PC in every home" vision is still real but the thing was before tablets it was more like 2-4 PCs in each home. Now tablets and phones are cutting back, a household still probably needs a PC but only one.
>>Even for "secretary terminal" work, there is a noticeable difference between using cheap underpowered hardware and decent kit.
You struggle to buy anything "underpowered" these days. The bottom-end laptop these days is comparable to a mid-range laptop when W7 came out. Since W7 doesn't need more resources now than it did then, a cheap laptop is quite adequate these days.
We've finally escaped the days when business laptops had the Intel 940 graphics chipset, now even cheap laptops with integrated GPUs support DX10 properly... I work developing 3D software for business clients so this is something I am sadly rather well acquainted with :) Low-end tech these days is not only powerful, but far more consistent than it was even 5 years ago.
Hardly anybody, even in enterprise, needs a high-end laptop. Windows7 and Office will run OK on a laptop costing £400 when W7 came out, they'll run well on one costing £600 at that time.
Most people using a PC even for work, are not running a compiler or PhotoShop etc. I totally agree that tablets/phones will not replace PCs because you need a decent screen and input method for writing documents or doing spreadsheets, but in terms of sheer power we're there already.
No they're not. Certainly lots of plugins could be written in this way, and likely many plugins never needed to be plugins in the first place, but there are very real valid use cases for plugins. However, most of them are not mass-market but niche plugins for a specific application or range of hardware, so Chrome can get away with squashing them.
My point was the nano (or is it shuffle) kept a touch screen but didn't try to cram the normal OS and apps into a tiny screen. Rather they designed a special UI for tiny screens. It is not hard to envisage a touch UI on a watch screen usable for entering phone numbers, and it is certainly not hard to imagine being able to swipe through your contacts or otherwise select who to call. OTOH, SMS maybe not. But a device which is a combination phone-fitness gadget could do OK, given the success of FitBit et al.
You mean like Casio had on those nerdy calculator watches?
Maybe a watch would be better as a feature/dumbphone rather than simply trying to squash a smartphone into a different form factor. Sort of like how Apple didn't try to make the iPod Nano/shuffle use the same UI as larger versions.
My understanding is the 625 only has 256Mb RAM instead of 512 on the 530 (and on higher-end previous-gen Lumias). This can be a big deal as many apps may not run... on my cheap WP7.5 phone Skype wouldn't run for this reason.
So if this is the case, RAM might be the clear thing you need to inform a decision.
I had WP7.5 and then upgraded to 7.8 on a cheap 610 which is sort of the predecessor to the 520. I just traded up to a 1020 running WP8 and the UI is essentially the same, which is a good thing as I really like it.
I was looking forward to upgrading to 8.1 when it gets a general release but it just sounds... bad. Easy muting and the people hub are the things I use most!
I really don't see the need for anyone to defend GPS as being as good as any human driver. That isn't the point. GPS exists to get you from A to B with confidence, not to send you through secret short-cuts which only work between 6.30am and 8.30am on weekdays.
Specialist knowledge is often cheaper NOT automated but left in the hands of squishies.
Turning up and a mob and screaming in your face and doing damage to your presence may not be the same as kneecapping but vandalism is violent and the rest is a clear threat of violence. If they refused to leave the business premises that is also violence of a sort.
At least, the police thought so or they wouldn't have bothered coming out.
It's not really a tablet though, it's a tablet/ultrabook and as such is in the ultrabook price bracket. This is total overkill for watching Netflix, checking Facebook and playing Angry Birds.
Maybe MS are not interested in the consumer tablet market since RT seems to be on the way out. Or maybe WP8 will expand to fill that gap the way iOS moved to support iPad. Phones and tablets are becoming blurred somewhat already.
Since when is a laptop the best tool for "proper computing work" either? This is designed for being portable - meetings and presentations and travelling. Of course, you can no doubt plug it into a proper monitor and keyboard/mouse like you can any other laptop... anyone know if there are fancy-ass docking stations for Surface Pro?
Someone I know who does MS stuff got the same model for testing stuff out and was similarly impressed.
Technically it sounds pretty slick - especially getting the weight and thickness down - and at 12" I think is a viable ultrabook in its own right. But it's clearly not going to be a mass-market product like the iPad because it's way over-powered and overpriced for the mass-market (not overpriced for what it is, but overpriced for what people want to spend). Ultrabooks are not mass-market as they are so pricey but I could certainly see this being the go-to executive toy. However as the article says that's at the expense of other ultrabooks, MS are stealing existing Windows customers.
There doesn't appear to be a gap to fill, unless wearables are going to take off - but I get the impression that isn't quite ready to happen yet (if ever). Both an iWatch and an iGlass could be upcoming but I don't think just yet.
iPhone and iPad might not be amazingly exciting now tablets are commonplace but they are still premium devices in phone/tablet categories and selling hand over fist. Apple is with iOS devices where MS was with Windows and Office in 2007... people were unhappy with Vista and the Ribbon but the revenue stream was as healthy as ever. I reckon Apple have easily 2-3 years before they NEED a new Big Thing, as long as they don't screw up the existing product lines but continue to refine them. Boring, but profitable.
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