re: They're joking

"If trhey should have learned anything from Apple, it is that closed app sores turn people off. At least they turn me off."

A couple of days past Apple's App Store's first birthday (June of last year), 1.5 BILLION apps had been downloaded - in January, 2010 the figure was over 3 billion.

I'm not saying Apple's policy is a good one, but on these figures I wouldn't say that many punters are being put off.

re: Ah

Re: Ah

Sure, I could readily appreciate the reasons (after all there are a few) why you might find the Apple’s Store unappealing – and I felt you made your reasoning clearly - but why I included those figures is that I really feel for a lot of people this simply isn’t an issue.

The history of commercial tech. products is strewn by examples of consumers going for something that won a marketing war or is just pretty hip, over something that’s superior.

In terms of the apps on Apple’s store and what might have been, most research points that people will install software on their iPhone, play around for it and then pretty much stop using it, regardless if it was a few app or not – anecdotally, I’d say this is pretty much true. I don’t see Apple as having a more open store policy would have dramatically increased sales:

a) Because punters have plenty to download and are downloading already; for the average consumer, there aren’t really any killer apps they’re crying out for.

b) The type of consumer who is put off by Apple’s Store policy and/or the kind of apps that are being prevented from being on the store are put off by the locked-in hardware.

I think it’s nice to think that if the hardware/software was less restrictive, there would be lots more sales… but let’s face it, the vast majority of punters know little about this and if they do, don’t really care.

I agree...

I agree, many people aren't going to use many of the apps they download beyond an initial tittilation.

However, Apple got away with these figures because they were the first at it. I can't see Samsung achieving anywhere near Apples figures because most of the people who would do this, have likely already got the iPhone and had their fill of app titilation.

I believe that some of the developers have been badly bitten, however. I can't believe the Apple dev community aren't aware of Apple's fickle nature and I can't see them wanting to enter another market place with Samsung where the exact same rules may or may not apply, depending on how the company feels at the time. The company should be as bound to the rules they create as the devs are who sign up. Even if the customers are blind to what is going on, the devs certainly aren't so I can't see teh Samsung store being as bold and creating the same throughput.

I've had ... oh, my last seven or eight phones have been Samsung and although for the most part the phones themselves have served me well, (one clamshell survived being run over by a building site fork truck; the big wheeled jobbies) the supporting software has been lousy; in the case of Linux non existant and further when it comes to porting data from one phone to the other, I have usually had to manually type things in. The D600 software wouldn't recognise the i8510, and the i8510 software wouldn't recognise the D600. I could use the D600 software to back up the D600 phone data, but I couldn't import it in to the i8510 software to blow it down to the I8510. What a pain.

This is how it has been from phone to phone; except in the days when everthing was kept in the SIM ... so after what must be a decade of using Samsung equipment, software and their customer support, my faith in them actually producing a good product is fairly high, but in producing a service behind that product ... I'm not so sure.

Last phones

Apologies, the last few phones were a single screen mono -> dual screen colour -> S300 -> D500 -> D600 -> U700 -> i8510 and the upgrade between them all was an unnecessary pain, as was the support.

The U700 even came with a demo game that I wasn't able to actually buy for months, and even when I did it had a critical bug and the developer didn't come back to me and Samsung didn't care. You try and get an e-mail address for those people; it is either a phone number which I'm almost sure is a 50p per min support number, (it doesn't clearly state anywhere what the charges are) or suffer.

However, I am considering the S5600 against the Nokia X6 for my choice of upgrade next week. I stuck with Samsung for so long because of the handsets; the company is lousy and I suspect the rest of the handset manufacturers are equally deaf/unreachable.

As for if the hardware/software was more restrictive ... yeh, Apple would have had another sale right here. I'd have gone for Chase Jarvis' photography app as well; I use my camera phone quite heavily 'cause it is the one I've always got with me. I'd have loved to have gone for the iPhone if it wasn't for the uncertainty of what they might do to it.

I can't tell how many others feel like me about it, though. That is a number we might never learn.

@MichelleKnight fixable, @BillRay you sly dog

Re documentsandsettings\username\applicationdata (with one or more spaces I suppose): I like your system, my current thinking is to have a separate partition -first- for pagefile.sys since the guy who does MyDefrag (4.2.9) reckons that the start of the disk is fastest. Is 4000 MB too large, it's not as though disk is expensive nowadays but there are penalties... light dawns, have 2 or more pagefiles on the volume, pf1.sys, pf2.sys, pf3.sys, pf4.sys - the last one is physically closest to C, and you make Windows use that one first by... I dunno.

You -could- also make space there for your compressed image of C, unless you blast that straight to a Flash stick or removable media.

Anyway, on XP and presumably later you can mount a partition onto one or more empty folders on an NTFS partition. Specifically my C:\Progra~1\Hauppauge\DEC\record (for an ageing digital TV device) is actually the root of D: Not what you want to have to do for a bloody phone though...

And, Bill Ray! Sometimes reading the newspapers I have thought that exposing journalists' own private lives and pedalos would be fair play given what they reveal about others, but I hadn't thought of starting with you. Just in today's "Metro" there's a story about a quarry who has been seen adding friends on Facebook. They're watching!

@Robert

Thank you for the explanation; I knew something like that was possible, but didn't delve in to it. I have to admit, to my technical shame, that I keep my OS partifion on FAT as it is easier to get to and fix if something goes West and won't boot.

I'm not sure if Linux has a writable NTFS driver yet ... someone probably does by now.

Although I've switched to Open Solaris for my servers (for ZFS) and Kubuntu for my desktops, I'll certainly remember that gem of mounting information.

Thank you once again!

Nokia maybe?

" If only more companies would have the stones to forge their own path"

Consider Nokia and the "Ovi" store that is doing a whole App store and more. Not only can you download apps, music, video etc.. but they offer online storage as well and other future possibilities.

I haven't used it so can't really comment, but it sounds like it should blow Apple and Android away.

And yet it's not even well known by most nokia users, probably because you don't have to have it to run the phone (unlike Apple and iTunes) and their marketing are focused on the phone hardware rather than the surrounding fluffy clod of software (and yes I do mean clod not cloud)