Posts by moylan

hope they fix the biggest problem.

my nephew got a first gen device and it didn't play flash. i'm still waiting for an email from their update service to let me know when the player is released. even though it has been released, we only got a copy of it when my brother went to return the device. they're hanging onto it now that it does flash which is one of the main things that the kid wanted.

but the biggest problem was the toshiba version of the market place. it's tiny. it needs the google market place. the lack of apps is not forgiveable. they cannot expect app developers to target multiple stores. it will always be a sub set of the google market place.

you can seemingly install generic android on it and gain access to the google market place but that is a little much for the average user.

hmmmm keyboards

nice to see budget models with keyboards.

smarter ships?

the danes faced the problem of not having the cash for all the missions their navy needed to be capable of.

they invented stanflex

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StanFlex

won't help with the carriers. but would help with the current destroyers which don't have functional weapons yet. the british are an inventive creative people and could make this a very profitable exportable system.

so closer ties to microsoft?

so will there be closer ties to microsoft? that wouldn't be a good thing for nokia. most of the power users for mobiles that i know use mac or linux. i haven't used nokia since the start of 2009. one of the things that really annoyed me then was that i needed a winxp system to download firmware or maps.

nokia do seem disorganised at the moment. a friend was trying to convince me to attend the meego conference in dublin and when i went to the site it had the wrong flag in the banner at the bottom. :-) ivory coast here i come!

http://conference2010.meego.com/

typical vodafone

my first few symbian devices were preloaded with crap links and software when i got them from vodafone ireland on prepay. so i switched to sim free phones.

i stayed with vodafone till last year when they changed their prepay plan so that every fecking page had a vodafone banner and crappy links at the top.

so i threw away all my vodafone sims. now using 3, o2 and meteor. no problems from them so far.

will never deal with them again. their loss. coupla hundred euros on prepay credit a year till that time.

and they say that microsoft doesn't keep up

just a new version of 'dos isn't done till lotus won't run'

fact imitating fiction?

ds9, season 1 episode 17, 'the forsaken'

a computer worm infects the stations computers and they cannot remove it and ultimately have to live with it.

never thought it possible and then i read this article.

maybe organisations will stop using windows for embedded and control systems? don't forget they use windows on iss and on military hardware these days.

wifi v 3g

i have been using mobile broadband since 2004 on a nokia 3650 here in ireland on prepay. it was very expensive back then. as tech improved the mobiles added wifi and 3g got cheaper and faster.

now on my iphone 3g or htc hero i can get prepay at 99c for 50mb for a day. fairly cheap. i do use it but 99% of the time i am in known locations. home, work, various meeting spots, pubs etc. i have free wifi in those locations so so not use the 3g data. the only time i really need it is while on the move on public transport and i can usually wait an hour or so till i'm in wifi coverage to do what i want.

i'm not going to pay a monthly contract for a service i use 2-3 times a month on average. result is that i use less 3g data on my iphone or htc hero than i did on my nokia e61 4 years ago.

one bad thing about the iphone still not fixed in os4 is that i can't tell the device to use only wifi and not to try 3g. in bad wifi areas this means the device grabs data on 3g and costs me money with no warning. worse some apps grab data when you use them for high score tables in games for example. so i have pretty much given up on iphone. i can put it in airplane mode but then i can't send/receive texts or calls.

the htc hero has a great toggle icon that switches on/off 3g data. perfect! 3g data only used when i say so.

oh and os4 was a bugger to install. best way was to wipe the device with no backup and start again restoring then from the backup after the os was installed. no probs syncing afterwards.

rfid

what if the patient has been in a fire? the password would not be readable. rfid as bad as it is would be the only option. surely by now we can make a rfid chip that can only be read within less than a inch or two that can't be intercepted.

interesting

i dial into 3-4 users computers a day to fix things. i'd say about 25%-33% pop up that message when i start to use ie on those systems. there are no other browsers installed on those systems. they just cancel that dialog as it doesn't mean anything to them.

easy solution

use the knife attached to the usb drive to hack off the finger or thumb that has the key. if you're in a rush just take both hands.

every time somebody shows me biometrics i ask them to google

malaysia machete mercedes

which leads to a grisly story of a man who can only count to nine after robbers took his 'key'.

or if you want hi tech then the german chaos computer club who copied and published Wolfgang Schauble's fingerprint. so if he ever uses his fingerprint for security again it can be accessed by anybody with a little knowhow.

what about...

> you can transmit data without giving everyone in the room a headache.

what about photo sensitive epileptics?

i we had all this working years ago when we beamed from pda to pda with ir. so the speed is super fast.

much preferred ir over bt/email/im for sharing info. fast simple and reliable. now to transfer 2-3k of text can take 5-10 minutes using bluetooth as you both turn on bt and search for the others device. using data costs unless you can find free wifi.

mumble mumble get off my lawn...

vodafone?

i had a prepay vodafone sim here in ireland and used it happily for a few years until recently. they changed the data plan without notice to alter all downloaded pages to having a vodafone banner and links at the top of every page downloaded. barring google ones, i suspect because they were too complex to easily alter.

rang to ask how to turn that crap off and it was told it was impossible so binned the sim that day.

maybe they could learn from google and make their ads unobtrusive. not wasting my 50mb data allowance with crappy links i will never use.

one question

at what point has windows mobile passed quality tests?

the os is flaky, unstable and power hungry. the development tools are awful.

i've yet to see a winmobile device that is useable as a day to day mobile phone.

they've been peddling this crap for how many years and they have not yet produced a viable system.

so roll on android.

no numbers for bit torrent?

at work the first show downloaded every week is top gear. none of us watch it when it is shown on bbc2. we just download it later. handier that way as on more than one occasion a few episodes have been stuck on an ipod/netbook for somebody going on holiday. considering it's an entertainment show aimed at technical people you would have to assume that a lot of people are downloading it rather than watch chained to a bbc schedule or desktop pc.

pdf handling

while most of the ebook readers i have seen have claimed to handle pdfs, the hnadling of pdfs has been useless. it would be nice if the reviews put large pdfs on these devices to see how well they display them. get a pdf manual for a rpg game. these are often 50mb+ and are just jpegs stuck inside a pdf. i have yet to see a pdf reader display these useably.

reading etexts

i have a small list of needs when i look for an ereader

1) how well it handles pdfs. text only pdfs are simple but some of the rpg manuals that i have are just jpegs inside a pdf file. how the ereader handles these 70mb+ files is paramount as to wether it is useable to me. the limited processor and memory means that none of the ereaders i have tried does these satisfactorily. to date i have tried nokia 770, nokia 810. sony 500, 505, 705. cooler and an olpc. the olpc is closest but the speed and controls are just not there. will probably need a faster processor and a touchscreen to be useable.

2) battery life and charging. the longer the battery life the more likely i am to carry it. also i don't want to have to carry another power brick so the ability to charge of a _standard_ usb cable is important.

3) screen. bw screens are great. please don't feel that you have to include a colour screen just to compete with a competitor. i want battery life and to be able to read outdoors in sunlight. colour screens that i have used to date impact greatly on these 2 abilities.

4) search. i'm constantly astonished by how many of the current ereaders don't have a search facility or a good search facility. it's all well and good to read a book from start to finish but i like to have a stack of books on my ereaders and be able to search for a phrase or a piece of info in the reference books i carry.

dumb move

all they are doing is creating an underclass. many of these people will not register. it's not worth the hassle.

i have no id, passport or driving licence. i don't travel and i don't drive. here in ireland you need 1 of these documents to create a bank account. in the 80's the government brought in similar laws to prevent terrorist groups like the ira from money laundering activities. did it stop the ira? not a chance.

however about 10% of the adult population in ireland don't have access to banking facilities. no credit cards, loans or savings.

all they are doing is punishing the innocent for the sake of catching a few bad guys.

bought one, gave it away.

it was a good device and i had turned off the autoshutdown so that the book was left on screen so i didn't need to find and open it again.

the thing that i missed most was the lack of find. i've been reading etexts since i had a psion. on using palm, nokias and now stanza on an iphone. it needs a find. that drove me nuts so i gave it to my brother who just wants to read a few books. will have to see how he gets on with it.

currently 2

i had4 at the start of the year. old phones as i upgraded. now down to just 2.

but i carry 2. currently a nokia e61 and an iphone. its handy to have very differently capable phones for different tech situations. the bluetooth and ir on the e61 are more usable than the connection abilities of the iphone. the iphone is great at video/media/browsing web. love the keyboard on the e61 while not keen on inputting lots of text on the iphone. wish i could connect a bt keyboard.

also handy to have 2 phones on different networks so that were one network is crap the other is fine. happens quite a bit in parts of dublin. and been able to be on a call on one phone while digging information out of the other is invaluable.

problem is not with symbian...

the problem is not with symbian the problem lies with nokia. till the start of this year i was a big nokia/symbian fan. not perfect but better than anything else on offer. at work the 7 people had nokias.

now 3 of us have iphones. 1 windows mobile device and 3 nokias. what happened?

for me (i can only answer why i changed for myself) it was the stupid camera click noise they kept making more and more difficult to remove. it first appeared in the n70, was harder to eliminate in the e61i and before i bought the e71 i checked to see that i could turn off that damn noise. then a firmware turned it back on at the start of the year. i could use 3rd party software ccam to take pictures silently but that limits the macro mode, flash and also when you take a picture there is no noise but the flash does light up whether you want it or not. not very useful when taking screenshots to have a light blocking some of the image :-(

i understand why they added the camera click but their reason is ultimately bollox. a pervert could as easily turn on the video recording and take an up skirt picture silently. there are already laws to prosecute people who do such dumb things. we didn't need a dumb law to make all cameras make noise. would we pass a law to add bells to every knife as some people use them for illegal purposes?

at the start of the year i had 4 nokias. n70, e61, e61i and e71. i loaned these out to various folks who wanted to borrow a high end nokia to see what it could do and if it suited them. i was tech support for a lot of people who had trouble or just wanted to make their phone do something new. i have given away all but the e61. as it has no camera it doesn't piss me of. so i used to convince dozens of people a year to go nokia providing the tech support that nokia seem incapable of doing. their loss. i know other people are annoyed with the support they gave the iranian govenrment and also the lex nokia debacle.

should mention i was going to buy the iphone 3gs 32gb on prepay this month but the google voice app (an app i would never even use) removal pissed me off with apple too. looks like i'll have to get my hands on an android phone. won't be perfect but i'm not going to reward a company that does evil by buying new hardware from them.

one thing i really want besides a quiet camera is a programming language on the device. i could program on my psion 3a back in 1994. python was available if hard to learn on the nokias (pdf documentation that won't display on the phone itself, really?) at least android has ase.

and no i won't switch to winmobile. have yet to see one that's remotely useable though samsung omnia 900? looked a lot better than most. mind you when i mentioned getting a new iphone a few weeks back that person jumped at the chance of getting a cheap iphone. :-)

so goodbye nokia. hope apple cops on before too long. hello android.

upgrade went well

the download of the update went ahead instantly and took about 10 minutes to download on my slow broadband.

took about 7 attempts at 10min intervals to get past the cannot connect to authtentication server error which i reckon was purely caused by high demand.

installed upgrade after that ok.

when it rebooted it took 5 minutes for it to find o2 provider here so that i could unlock sim. probably demand on o2 as all the iphones in ireland were reconnecting at once. :-)

after that just a quick test to see that i could take a picture silently, that works ok (i hate at meetings when i take a picture of a projected image that my nokia e71 now has a mandatory very loud click). that and its crappy global search put me off symbian completely.

best new feature for me is the global search. seems fast but only have 30 notes on it. will have to see how it behaves when there are more than 300. of course the notes won't sync with mail on macosx as i'm still using 10.4. not really an issue as like the nokia i've crashed it loads and never lost a single record. hello winmobile! i'm talking to you.

one small glitch is that the game epic pet wars has a known glitch were spells can't be cast in combat. there is a fix on the way but will have to wait for apple to approve that.

on the whole. one more reason to get rid of my nokia e71. only things left that i use on it are shooting video of system errors to email to the necessary support desks. was trying to learn python on symbian but have gone off symbian in a big way since i got the e71. was going to get the n97 but not now.

however would i buy the 3gs to shoot video? more likely i would get android if they ever release it here in ireland. miss a keyboard. pity apple didn't allow for bluetooth keyboards. that and android would be cheaper on prepay i reckon. €600 v €400. and would love to play with androids new Android Scriping Environment.

my 2c

looks nice...

but it's sony. who buys sony these days? drm and other such nonsense put me off them a long time ago.

apple has the app store. will we be able to create apps for this? thought not. will stick with my drm laden ipod ironically.

ironically

if they a made a movie of this farce i'd buy a copy

@Herer

you are right about well made. the hardware is second to none. the battery life is above and beyond anything else on the planet.

however the software is now getting worse rather than better. the warning tones i knew about but does not work on my unlocked version of the e71. now i could get techy and start changing the regional code in the firmware and try to find one that gives me a phone that is silent when i use the camera but it's not a productive use of my time. i could open the bugger and desolder the speaker. (i rarely make voice calls. 1-2 a month and could use a bluetooth headset). so they can't stop a determined person who wants a silent camera. its just not worth wasting my time on this. i feel that nokia has stolen this phone from me, i use to use it 2 hours a day minimum. now its averaging less than 5 minutes a week.

i bought an iphone at christmas to see what they were like. i hated it. but i now hate it less than my nokia. it's about the tech level as my first symbian device. a nokia 3650. crap camera. no global search and crappy at inputting text.

os3 should add some global search facility. a newer version may add a better camera (only buying if it can be silent!). still crappy at entering text though. oh and a sucky battery life though it lasts all day for me. its a crap media player as well as it only syncs with one itunes account (yes there is a hack to cirumvent that but again i'm not wasting my time on it.)

really waiting for somebody to see a palm pre or android here in ireland.

wrong solution

wouldn't it be better to have a laptop that doesn't have excess heat. a more power frugal one. instead we have hot pieces of metal that lose their portability when you have to drag along a laptop stand. have seen a neat one made out of chop sticks and string.

liked the allsop cool channel. that at least seemed to not add to much weight/volume to the laptop and also seems to add extra protection when the device is been carried.

to quote blackadder

viscious little bastards!

beautiful

it's beautiful right up to the point were you see its running windows.

after that forget it.

if it had of been

symbian, i'd be interested

android, i'd be interested

macosx, i and apples legal department would be interested

other than that nope.

netbook

i thought the definition of net book was small cheap computer?

small? yes

cheap? no

computer? it is sony but i'll allow it. hated my sony laptop with a passion.

vista? ouch!

and a propietry port? wtf are they smoking these days? can't they just make usb peripherals?

so they expect to sell only a few of these?

a ms app that's crap?

unhead off!

buggy software from ms. it speaks volumes that they didn't release it for their own platform first.

what format should they have used?

as word 97-2000 files are almost universaly readable. my phone opens them no worries. what format should they have used? or did they use new docx 2007 files?

sony?

tried the original sony reader. it was terrible! half the pdfs i tried failed to display.

these days i use a nokia e71 and qreader for reading txt and pdb files. i download the books from irc. only of books i have in paper form. very handy when i was in hospital for a few weeks this year as i had over 100 books on the device.

for handling pdfs i use a asus 701 which does the job nicely. it needs a screen that can display at least the width of the document and the 7 inch asus is just up to the job,

can't we all get along?

EuroEnglish

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase-in plan that would be known as "EuroEnglish": --

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c".. Sertainly, this will make the sivil sevants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favor of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with the "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"'s in the language is disgraceful, and they should go away.

By the 4th yar, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaning "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.

ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!!

congrats!

now that the news is out we can expect this stupidity in new locations.

mil spec version

mil spec fly wheel backups? how would the military version be different? would it have cutting blades?

location of microphone

> Nearby is the microphone, as before.

sorry? my 701 has the microphone underneath the keyboard at the front of the unit. not up beside the webcam.

why would people buy this when the atom version is coming out in a few months. also the smaller battery and higher price?

@andrew mulcock

http://www.bioeddie.co.uk/models/psion600MC.htm

the psion mc200, mc400, mc500 and mc600 were laptops that ran a proprietry os. think of them as a big primitive psion 5. always wanted to buy one but never had the cash.

the cheap one mc200 was £600 up to the £1300 mc600 version.

the psions were so far ahead of their time that only now is nokias symbian starting to catch up.

if i could bring only one feature of psion it would be the opl programming language.