no issues noticed on mine

i've got a 4G 3G + Wifi model here in the uk and haven't noticed any problem with the wifi signal.

so i guess perhaps it's just a bad batch in the production line?

something like FRAND but for medical or assistive inventions?

There should be something like FRAND then, whereby an invention that is so obviously of benefit to unfortunate, disabled and kids, should be forced to be licensed at very reasonable rates. Something like this is for the greater good of the species*, surely, not just to line some one's wallet with cash. Instead of being able to shut down the company making the iPad software, they should at least be able to license it at a reasonable level.

Am sure they'll sell 50 of these apps for every one of the hardware that gets sold. So a 5% license fee would provide them the same income.

*Darwinian views of survival of the fittest and most eloquent aside....

correlation?

does it really correlate with the predictions from February? or is it not more likely that he's gotten the June date from those analysts' random guesses predictions

suddenly struck by a desire to nip out and buy a couple of Creme Eggs

I'm sorry to say, Lester, but you are obviously something of an amateur when it comes to cream egg eating.

Some of us have been eating the 2012 batch of cream eggs since they appeared in shops, at the start of the year. And during the last 30 days or so my consumption has only increased. If there's less than 6 eggs in the fridge, then I need to go and stock up - you can never tell when you might need to accompany a cuppa tea with a cream egg, and it's a terrible thing to be caught short unexpectedly.

Cream eggs are for life, not just for Easter.....

"Naturally some aspects will need to be refreshed"

I guess that is where the fear that this won't do well comes from.

Instead of re-envisaging the characters to fit today's political world, it'll just be the same but using modern terms and events.

But equally, is the current way of politics that interesting or funny?

The enjoyment of the original shows is the clever language and arguments, the intellectual mind-games that went on between Sir Humphrey and Jim Hacker. My worry is that, as politics these days seems less high-brow, so too will the new version of the show be dumbed down. And with that, it will loose its appeal.

got to follow the rules

Rule #1 - Cardio

Rule #2 - The Double Tap

Rul3 #3 - Beware of Bathrooms

Rule #4 - Wear Seat Belts

Evidently they didn't follow Rule 2 the first time around...

dpi?

so, can we look forward to a 50" Retina Display(TM) telly then?

bows and arrows against the lightning"

This is awesome! Those Martian feckers in their tripodal fighting machines don't stand a chance now that we have thermal cloaking tech. Come on then, you red planet smegheads, if you think you're hard enough!!!!

Batteries?

What's the battery life like in the touch?

The 4 has half the battery life on the Keyboard. Amazon says it should last a month on the 4, but that's only based on 30 minutes of reading per day. My other half reads for hours a day and has noticed she's charging it nearly all the time compared to the Keyboard.

If the Touch has more memory, does it also have better batteries?

too late....

shame this wasn't around when CDs and DVDs were all the rage

hardware compression

That's weird that files that incorporate a compression in their format, will copy slower. Is it trying to double compress them? You'd think they could detect already compressed data and so skip the compression process, speeding up the transfer speeds.

east bound and down

woohoo Jerry Reed!! oh wait, wrong Snowman....

it's the ease of access.

i'm switching my subscription over to download only this month.

that said, most of what we've been watching has been via Netflix. Lovefilm just doesn't have the right kind of stuff and the interface on the playstation and the samsung smart tv is much much easier to use on Netflix than Lovefilm

uh oh

now that El Reg is an official forum website as well as a news site, i wonder how long before it gets blocked entirely by our office websense filtering :(

i really hope not

i think 4 inches is the max for a phone. if you want a bigger screen, get a frikken tablet

i quite like the 3.5 screen on the iphone - the phone looks neat and compact these days compared to the oversized ugly Androids. I remember when the first iPhone came out and it looked huge against the skinny candybar feature phones everyone had back then.

who can benefit?

Do you have to be registered then as working for a games development company, in order to qualify? Is it just the companies that qualify? Does it apply to one-man-band type companies?

Or can I get a tax break just for programming some basic and/or rubbish game and punting it on the mobile app stores?

If so, suddenly anyone who knows a bit of javascript can cobble together a game using something like Appcelerator's Titanium, and tap into easy tax breaks :)

friend of mine also agrees that it's a fake:

"On the 13/14 video of his you can see around 1.30 there is a sun design on the right hand wing, then the camera looks down, then looks up again. The sun design has a large dot that wasn't there before. Very clear and obvious evidence of digital manipulation on at least one of the videos for sure."

so...

"internet sites could no longer shirk their responsibilities and achieve illicit financial gain"

so what about if you're hosting the files for zero profit? charges to users are adjusted constantly to ensure they only cover monthly costs, and once done.

yes, a major headache to do, because the cheaper the site is, the more popular it will be, so the higher the bandwidth costs required, but i don't think it's impossible.

and then, there are no financial gain, illicit or not. would that be acceptable to the court?

simple solution

Digital distribution. Just like mobile gaming, you buy the game online, download it, then you can't sell it on to anyone else, because there's no physical media to re-sell.

That said, I don't look forward to having to download a blu-ray's worth of data on the next games like GTA5 and Max Payne 3. But possibly the solution is you open the games up to pre-ordering, and users can download them over a couple of weeks, and then on the release day, the copies are unlocked when connecting to their servers.

Or, commit more to DLC. So you can buy the physical game, but you'll need to keep the disc around if you want to play the full game, as 70% of the single-player gameplay, and the multiplayer, all gets downloaded from online. The disc can hold all the music and the high-def textures, but the gameplay content gets downloaded and only works keyed to your account, or something.

I know the 2nd hand market is a problem for the game developers. But I don't think many of them have done much about it other than whine "it's so unfair!!!"

There are definitely ways around it, they just need to get us players into the habit of downloading more of our content in a means that makes it very complicated to then re-sell on.

Just what sort of party is this room intended for?

that scene out of Boondock Saints when they come in through the air con vent in the ceiling, twisted up in the rope, and spin round firing the 9mm's and waste all the russian mafia types that were sitting in there

always been a big fan

there's something about the genre of cars-with-guns that i really enjoy, and Twisted Metal's always been the most enjoyable of them. can't wait to play this!!

i agree with the review though - seems a shame they switched it to being a full blown game, i guess they wanted the money, but the game is perfect as a PSN download.

nevermine, Wrecked: Revenge Revisited is rumoured to be (finally!!) getting released on the 28th, and that's going to be more fun than anything, ever!

even as a kid....

i preferred my Apple ][e to my bbc micro

but i can't for the life of me tell you why - it's not like it was more shiny or anything. and it's hard to argue that, both being command line driven devices, the user experience was better on the Apple than the BBC, but i definitely preferred it

Mark Hamill

glad to see Mark Hamill got the award. Batman AC was an terrific game, but his performance in that and the previous game was absolutely spot on. Really quite sad at the thought that he's not going to do that character any more.

more detail please

can you expand on how "the iPad continues to 'cut across' different market sectors" leads to "iPad bludgeons to death two UK Apple reseller shops"?

are you saying that they based their business model on being able to sell iPads? and that all iPad purchases were online and so they failed?

Or that so many people have iPads now that they don't go out to the shops any more looking at new kit or to buy support, instead they stay at home and surf web shops and look up how to fix their problems themselves?

fans wise up?

Speaking from what we've seen in the UK - looks like a lot less people queued up, but i think that's because the majority pre-ordered instead, not that there were significantly less people ordering the new one.

From what I can tell, in the UK Apple were using three courier companies to deliver. and all of them still had undelivered orders outstanding at 7pm tonight. That's got to be a lot of deliveries to overload the likes of TNT and UPS. UkMail is the 3rd one, but I dunno if they're a 'big' courier company like the other two.

quality - i needed something amusing to cheer me up today and this hit the spot nicely

Trouble is, I see TDK and I just think of the old cassettes and VHS tapes that we used to have in our house in the 80s and I have to put some real effort in not to dismiss them out of hand.

But the review does sound very good. Am sorely tempted as the last earphones I bought (Reid and Heath MA-350s following their favourable review by El Reg quite a while ago) have just stopped working in one ear (the nifty braided cord that did not get tangled unfortunately frayed at the connector end eventually and so broken the wires inside).

PAYG?

How about a comparison of PAYG prices?

From what i could see when i looked, Three was also wiping out the competiton for value (10gb of data for £10 i think it was, whereas all the others were offering 2gb for the same price) but I don't know how good their network signal in my areas.

For a data only device like an ipad, i'm thinking PAYG might be a better option than being tied to a two year contract.

soylent green....

<Charlton Heston>Duracells are snails! damn you, you maniacs!!!!</Charlton Heston>

artist impression

Doesn't this look an awful lot like that ship in Event Horizon?

And we all know how that story ended happily ever after...

three weeks?

three weeks warning doesn't sound like much good

what will they do with three weeks? is that enough time to mount a way to blast the rock out the sky? is it even enough time to find out where its going to hit and arrange for evacuation of the impact site?

where's the OMGWEREALLGONNADIE icon?

it's a digital signal??

"obtain perfect image transmission"

HDMI - it's a digital signal, with redundancy and error correction built into the standard. There's no need to pay over the odds for extra shielding. Although, that's not to say you should go with the absolute cheapest available. The very cheap cables might be affected over long distances enough to introduce enough bad data to disrupt the signal, but the thinking you'd still only see if on a 1080p image, 720p should still be able to recover the lost data before you see it.

You SHALL NOT SUE!!!!!!

yesterday's news

This report from Bloomberg is old news.

TODAY's news has Reuters refuting the claim that Samsung is the sole supplier:

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/14/claim-of-samsung-as-sole-display-supplier-for-new-ipad-disputed-lg-reportedly-on-board/

the real trick would have been to get John Lewis to price match it before Tesco corrected their mistake

US entrants only?

damnit

Quote: THE CONTEST IS OPEN ONLY TO LEGAL RESIDENTS OF THE FIFTY (50) UNITED STATES AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (THE “ELIGIBILITY AREA”),

Plus, you have to have successfully submitted a game already to the iOS Store.

And i had such a good idea for rebooting Pong in the mould of Zork.... :)