Posts by uhuznaa

To achieve that thinness Moto obviously had to make the thing rather large -- there is a really enormous bezel around the screen. If you want to use that thing with one hand you'll need large hands.

Integrated battery: Has it a real, hardware reset button? Because if not, what do you do in these situations where you have to pull the battery to reset the thing? This happens occasionally after all.

Anyway, Motorola should offer this phone with a golden frame and call it BLNG.

Get real

Problems are problems, but a few thousands of several million users are just background noise. 0.05% of users complaining is nothing. I would expect it's awfully hard to get a yield of fully working batteries of 99.9% or so -- if you had and still have problems go to Apple and change your phone for a working one. Problem solved.

(My iPhone 4 had no problems with 5.0 and still has none with 5.01. 75% battery after 11 hours standby and 2 hours active usage is totally fine in my book.)

Hmm

At least the panorama feature is just not ready -- it totally sucks, in fact. I'd guess that these are features that didn't get finished in time and were inactivated for the release.

Why all these pre-announcements?

Nothing against HTC or quad-core smartphones, really -- but why do companies pre-announce phones half a year before they may or may not sell them finally? They will have a reason for that, but which reason?

Nested folders...

Is here anyone who can recommend an Android mail client that works nicely with hundreds of deeply nested IMAP folders? Nicely means that you can actually read all folder names down to the n-th level, can browse them quickly and move emails around between them after selecting several somewhere (as in *not* one at a time)? And is still straightforward and easy enough to use for a CEO-type user?

Easy enough

Apple could easily take the iPod touch and scale it up from 3.5" to 7". Larger battery, larger screen, same innards, same resolution, same software. 960x640 on 7" is still a higher pixel density than the 10" iPad with 1024x768. There're plenty of apps running on that "retina" resolution and even if the UI elements would appear much larger than on the iPhone or iPod touch it would be perfectly usable. And cheap, because just a larger screen with the same amount of pixels and a larger battery with a new case aren't that expensive. With the iPod touch at $199 you could sell this with a similar margin for $249 or less.

On the other hand scaling the 10" iPad down with a smaller screen and battery wouldn't make it much cheaper and all the UI elements in the apps would shrink to nearly unusable absolute sizes. Idiotic idea, actually.

But Apple is between a rock and a hard place here. An iPad mini would be easy and would sell not too bad, but it would very much look like the start of what nearly doomed Apple the last time: Sprawling products to cover a market at all angles.

I'm sure they have production-quality prototypes of both approaches, but I'm also sure they will wait this out for a while.

Fun with numbers

"We can't wait to feature your software right here, in every single one of our stores. So, go write some more for us, and we'll build more shelves for as much as you can write."

If all of the apps currently in the iOS App Store would come in a shrinkwrapped package 4 cm wide and you'd install an aisle five shelves high to hold all of them, it would need to be 4 km long to display them all.

Hmm

Apple NOT going for the yearly (or half-yearly) "all new phone" has at least the advantage that people with older phones don't feel that much left behind. I mean, these things are expensive enough and if (as with certain other phones) you're guaranteed to find your phone a few months down the road for half the price at Amazon, people aren't happy with their purchase usually.

I don't know how important this is in the big picture, but Apple has a quite evolutionary product philosophy and many people spending money on these products usually like that. How long do the MacBooks look the same now? My late 2008 MacBook looks and feels very much the same as the most current MBP and there's nothing wrong with that.

I just hear too many people saying "this and that seems to be a nice phone, but I'll wait half a year longer, there are some interesting pre-announcements...". And then they buy the latest and greatest and again half a year later it's just outdated again.

The iPhone 4 has a good reputation among normal people and the 4S being the same in faster and with a better camera surely won't change anything here.

Large screens

are better for browsing but I'm fairly sure that most normal people like to be able to use their phone one-handed and with 4" and more this gets really tough. You need to balance the thing on three fingers to reach everywhere with a larger screen. Ok, some people have really huge hands but this is not the rule.

That being said, I would have liked a 3.7" display or so, but with a screen reaching to the very ege it becomes hard to avoid accidental touches when holding it around the edges.

Hmm

Would be nice if the text would be saved to Dropbox or synced with SimpleNote or whatever.

Good timing

With the next iPhone in the coming and at least the next iPad in the works this was a better moment than in half a year or so.

Well, I can't imagine he would do that if he didn't have to and this is not a good sign. All the best, Steve!

Hmm

It's not the OS itself that sucks power, it's the various subsystems. And saving power comes not from chosing the right OS, it comes from having decent power-management, which means integration of OS and hardware down to a level where you can throttle down or switch off every little bit of hardware that is not needed at a given moment. In phones and tablets that can mean running the radios independently from the actual CPU and waking up the system from low-power states only if the network buffers have filled up and there's actually a chunk of data to process.

All this is really hard to achieve, you need tight and deep integration of soft- and hardware development and you need engineers knowing about all the thousands of little tricks and strategies to save a microampere here and another there. This is nothing you put on its feet in a few months. "Porting to QNX" is the easiest part here.

Some cheese with all that whine?

Switch off all the multitouch-gestures, install BetterTouchTool (free) and define your own as you like. Animations can be disabled from within the terminal (google for the right commands). iCal and AB can be re-themed (google for it) and apart from the looks iCal is lightyears ahead of the SL version. Terminal is *much* better, too (and it was good to begin with).

Come on, there are lots of positive changes and the few you may don't like are easily fixed. I assure you, use Lion for a month, go back to SL and it will feel incredible old and limited.

Small wonder...

Really. First, Google (as well as most Android handset makers) is somewhat ignoring business needs. There's no kind of FS encryption of any sort, support for things like Cisco SecureIP VPN is missing, managing business email accounts with deep hierarchies of folders with the Android email clients is a bad joke, the Android market is a crapfest, there're hundreds of devices to evaluate and every single one of them might be replaced with a totally different model three months later with no updates anymore for the one you bought in large numbers...

Apple at least has device management software, Enterprise solutions for app distribution (yes, without Apple controlling what you install), iOS offers ways of locking down, locating and wiping devices, the included email client works nicely with accounts with lots of folders, VPN of any kind is fully supported out of the box, you can rely on updates for years, you have just two models to chose from...

Face it, Google cares only for one thing: Eyeballs looking at the ads Google sells. Yes, Android is somewhat "open" and as a geek you can have lots of fun with it. But basically Android is a vehicle to beam ads at consumers and Google has everything revolving around that.

To employ iOS in the business you just need to look at things in a sober way. To employ Android you need to be a fanboi.

Things may (and probably will) change later on, but right now you need to be a kind of Android fanatic to coerce Android devices into corporate/business settings. And as usual with "everything is possible but hardly anything you need works out of the box" you need to take full responsibility and lots of time. With iOS you evaluate some products, look at the costs, make a decision and you're done with it. In any professional setting the latter is just the thing you want to do. It's work, not a hobby.

Sorry for injecting some realism into the discussion.

Somewhat phenomenal

About fanbois: Again about 50% of Mac sales was to people who never bought a Mac before.

It's not free...

And that's the problem. For free I would take one.

With Google things are always a bit creepy and they actually suck quite a bit, but hey -- what Google offers basically works and it doesn't cost you anything, so it feels like a good deal after all.

Paying a hilarious amount of money for what basically is a low-end but very expensive netbook... no.

Not cheap enough

Basically a really nice Android smartphone, but a bit expensive for what it hasn't got. There's certainly room for somewhat bland looking, no nonsense smartphones which even don't need the latest and greatest multicore CPUs and whatnot, but the price just isn't right. The SGS2 isn't that much more expensive and offers quite a bit more.

Well done, HTC!

This thing is indeed going to fly like a pig.