Re: Now we might have a comparison

Different chips, different motherboards, different configuration. It'll be the battery and case that's similar. Unless you're talking about Windows RT which runs on ARM.

Re: Nice resolution.....

I'd imagine it's because they're building down to a cost. You've got to pay MS for Windows of course, and then you've got to have an Atom and motherboard, as opposed to an ARM SOC on the 'Droid one.

So going for a nicer panel will cost more, but also might mean needing a beefier graphics card/chip. You can get Win 8 tablets/convertibles with nicer displays, but they're going to have Core chips, rather than atoms, and cost more.

Re: Hmmm

It's Android. Does that mean it can run apps from the Play Store? Or would you have to side load that on first, and then perform various bits of hackery to get anything working?

David 164,

The posts were removed for the very obvious reason that they were put up there illegally.

As to the rest of your comment, you're completely wrong. There has been heavy coverage of the rebels' crimes in the UK press. I can't speak for the FT, because I don't think I've read a single piece from them on Syria. But there's been extensive coverage on the BBC (both domestic and World Service), the Telegraph, the Independent and the Guardian - which are the only places I can remember going to get news about Syria. There was a story covered by everyone 2 days ago of some Jihadist loony putting up a video of him cutting out the heart of one soldier they'd killed and eating a bit.

The reason that the West haven't decided to arm the rebels is because of the fact that some of them are jihadis. Although others would argue that not many of them were jihadis at the beginning, and perhaps if we'd armed the more sensible rebels, they wouldn't have needed to accept help from the jihadis - who already had guns. The Gulf states are arming the rebels (possibly with help from the CIA / SIS so the rumours say), and I don't know which groups they're arming.

However the regime are also partly responsible for the jihadis in their midst. It was they who welcomed Al Qaeda in - when they were fighting the sectarian war in Iraq. They were smuggling arms, fighters and suicide bombers into the Sunni area, over the Syrian border. I'm sure the Assad regime thought this was very convenient.

Unfortunately as the Iraqi Sunnis found, along with many before and since (including Assad), you can't trust Al Qaeda. They may offer help, but they're don't give a fuck about the people they claim to support, they're only interested in whatever it is their ideology actually seems to call for. Something they're never all that clear about. Other than the Caliphate, the end of Israel, and death to everyone who they don't like the look of with particular emphasis on death to the West of course.

They killed more Sunnis in Iraq than they managed to kill Americans and Shia, and the Sunnis ended up having to kick them out. They turned against the Syrian regime who'd sheltered them, which is probably why the Syrian government lost control of the whole area round the Iraqi border pretty early on in the conflict.

Anyway, as always, it's complicated. The West aren't giving the rebels 100% backing without criticism. As even a cursory following of the news for the last 2 years would tell you.

They forgot the vodka. Which I understand to be an important component of any successful sauna...

The ads in YouTube are massively intrusive. You click on a video, and you don't get the content you wanted, but an incredibly loud ad. Some don't let you skip for 20 seconds, on a 30 second clip! That would be like an hour long TV show lasting only 30 minutes and half an hour of adverts!

Plus they also sometimes have pop-up ads inside the videos that you have to close to get out of the way of the screen. Mostly I've seen those on videos that also had intro ads.

I've no problem with a bit of advertising, but I'm getting to hate YouTube now. I don't mind if they show stuff around the edges (which they do) and I've no objection to a short ad embedded in the video, but it's got well past taking the piss proportions now.

Of course some of this may be the content providers and not Google. But then seeing as YouTube was built on Google profiting from other people's copyrighted stuff without paying for it, you can't totally blame them either. 'Tis a bit of a mess really. And has a pretty shitty UI as well.

...And breathe... Don't know what launched me into that rant... Oh well, I feel better now.

Re: Not so nice when the shoe's on the other foot is it Microsoft?

The answer as to who to root for is, the customers. MS have been particularly evil in the past, but they've been slapped down a few times, and had to learn a few humbling lessons from the market. I'd argue they're no longer evil, they've improved in quite a lot of ways and they're just like any other corporation. Which doesn't mean nice, but profits in themselves aren't evil.

I worry that Google could turn evil, and they've got an awful lot of people's personal data with which to do it. But now, equally, I think they're just another big corp out to make a buck. Of course they did publicly say 'do no evil' so they can't complain if they're held to high standards.

However it's ironic to see Google making these points. Funny how they're so concerned about other people's revenue now. As opposed to when they're using their search monopoly to cross-subsidise free products into other areas, or turning off Exchange Active Sync and CalDav in Gmail to inconvenience non-Android users. Or scanning author's books without permission, or maybe most relevantly taking advertising revenue from news websites by pushing people through Google news so breaking the media companies revenue - even though they pay the money to provide the content. Which is also similar to YouTube., where Google get the cash, and other people do the work.

Again nothing particularly evil or unique here, it's just weird to see the occasionally rabid defence that Google gets from techies on these forums. The downvotes you get for even mild criticism of Google, Android, or worse, being nice about Windows Phone... Come on guys, they're just another company! They do some wonderful stuff, they do some pretty shitty stuff, and everywhere in between.

***Obviously for the purposes of this comment 'evil' is a nice piece of shorthand. In reality neither MS or Google have done anything evil. You need to consider them against Hitler, Stalin, or even the more tin-pot end of the Dictator scale like the Kim family in Korea or the Assads in Syria. In that perspective they're all just cuddly fluffy bunnykins really...

Re: Fragmentation?

Remember Samsung don't completely own the market. They just hoover up all the profits. It's safe to assume that the users of all the non-Samsung handsets still buy apps, and I think Samsung have less than half of Android sales. Although you could save testing time buy just concentrating on them, and still hit a large chunk of the market. I guess that depends on how much profit you make from each installed app.

Re: Nokia

It would be interesting to see what all the Elop-haters think of this story. Had Nokia gone Android, then they might be in the same boat as all the other manufacturers of 'Droids who don't live in Korea. A sad boat with no profits - and therefore no champagne, cocaine and hookers. Boo hoo...

Of course, I'm sure they'd just say that Nokia would be able to do better. And ignore the fact that no-one else seems to be managing it. After all, HTC seem to have some very nice phones, some look nicer to me than the Samsungs, but it doesn't seem to be doing them any good.

However the bit at the end of the article may be the most interesting. Maybe it's just down to marketing spend. Well Nokia would struggle with that, without the huge Microsoft marketing kick-backs they've been getting.

I also wonder how much is down to the channel? One of the criticisms of Elop that I've read is that he's been bad at getting Nokia into prominent places in the phone shops, and also at getting the staff to push Nokia's shinies. Now maybe that's just the staff being nice to their customers and pushing them away from Windows Phone. Or maybe it's unfair criticism, I don't know the industry well enough. But I've read a few other things about store staff pushing customers to Samsung away from HTC as well. So I wonder if part of it is that Samsung are paying the highest commission? Or just their regional sales bods are motivating/communicating with the store staff better? I had a brief bit of contact with this in my last job, working for a UK retailer. The incentives on just the Pay-as-you-Go phones we sold were horrifically complicated. We also made a small loss on most handsets until we got our rebates a few months later. With the actual mobile phone stores, I think there are programs to reward the sales guys directly - but even if not, management will push the one that makes most for them.

Re: To the author

Whatever the case may be, I can't see Google transforming Android into the kind of sick experience you get on Windows Phone today.

No I'm not an Android fan, I'm not even a Microsoft hater. but having played with both Android and Windows phone I'd rather have the "mess" than all the restrictiveness.

Aren't those 2 comments a bit mutually exclusive? It's certainly sounding a bit fanboyish.

Not that either OS is perfect. It's horses for course. Sure Windows is locked down. As is iOS. And if you want something that Apple/MS don't approve of then tough luck. Not sure I'd call that sick though. Just you pays your money and you takes your choice. Android is much more free, and therefore can be a bit of a mess. If you know what you're doing, then that's no problem.

I wouldn't recommend Android to my Mum, if she ever wanted a smartphone. But anyone with a small amount of confidence in computers will be perfectly fine. Then it's just a matter of which you prefer.

Re: round objects

You didn't like it. Fair enough. Others might. I don't think there's anything much wrong with the OS, it just makes different design choices to Android. It's horses for courses. A lack of ecosystem is no problem to people who don't want apps.

I have to say though that I find it hard to justify the top-end Lumia's because of that. If you're shelling out £500 anyway, get an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy 4. With decent app stores. I upgraded from my Lumia 710 a few months ago, and the MS Marketplace was still pretty crap then. But the cheap handsets are nice, as long as you don't want to do anything that WP can't.

Re: 16GB?

It's got a sealed battery, so I suspect no SD card. It was the Lumia 820 that had the SD slot wasn't it? Seems pretty stupid in my opinion.

At least when Apple make this decision it's so they can make you pay £200 to upgrade from 16GB to 64GB for yummy profits. I suppose deliberate evil is better than incompetent crapness...

Most other manufacturers don't seem to want to give you more than 32GB. My music collection is 20GB, plus I like to listen to podcasts on the way to work. Storage is cheap, I'd love to stop carrying a separate mp3 player, but so far I've not found a phone that does it, at sensible cost.

Re: Android capturing the spoils?

But Google aren't in it for the money. At least not directly. They're capturing the data, which is what they wanted. Although as you say, other than Samsung no-one else seems to be doing too well with Android.

I find Google's data gathering rather worrying. But you have to be impressed with the long-term planning that they've put in place. Even assuming only some of their moves were thought out long in advance. The sheer power of the massive network of mobile data recorders that they now control (or customers' Android handsets as everyone else calls them) is astonishing.

They won't need to go WiFi sniffing again, because they've got a network of phones with WiFi and GPS chips that upload all that data to their servers. The same thing helps them with mapping, traffic data for sat-nav, plus usage/location/search data that could give them a hugely valuable mobile marketing resource.

It better be worth it, because it hasn't come cheap. When you think they've bought patents as well as Motorola (possibly to get more), plus Android itself and spend a fortune on R&D and marketing. And yet they don't make a huge amount selling their add-ons to the OEMs, and I don't think they make a huge amount through the Play store either (at least so far).

Re: Torn between them all

I went Windows Phone for a while. Because the Lumia 710 was cheap. The upside was the big text, big buttons and lack of options. I decided that the tablet was for apps, the phone was for sat-nav and communication. My previous 'Droid was much better customised, and had more apps, but harder to use as a phone.

Now I've got a work iPhone, and I miss the flexibility of my old Android and the ease-of-use-but-inflexibility of my Win Phone. I think there must be something wrong with me...

In all seriousness they've all got strengths and weaknesses. I played with the new Berry and that looked OK too. But in my opinion Android needs the most tinkering to make it work well. For which trouble you get a UI more customised to what you like. My conclusion was that I don't want to tinker with my phone, I want it to mostly right out of the box.

Re: I don't care it's a mess

I don't think anyone would dispute that Android is brilliant for techies. The sheer level of customisation available is amazing. Especially if you're willing to go all the way and root the device. That's obviously an important market, because people who aren't techies will often ask mates who are what to get.

That's why I've had several non-techy people tell me that Windows 8 is crap and as bad as Vista. Not because they know anything about it, or have ever used it, but because MS pissed off the geeks by not letting them turn Metro off. Ooops! PR screw-up ahoy!

When I had an Android 2.3 handset there were quite a lot of major deficiencies with it. The stock text messaging, email, and address book clients were a bit pants. And being an HTC there were also (confusingly for some) a second set of all of these from Sense, filling up the limited app space in storage - and I didn't like them much better. For me it was no problem, and I got better ones, and was very pleased with how I eventually got the thing set up. The flexibility was lovely, and I even had a WiFi scanner so I could do surveys and set up wireless networks for friends. Totally pointless on a phone of course, but also incredibly useful. But the non-techies struggle with that level of complexity.

My sister-in-law had the same phone. She had only one app, which was the crappy Android Facebook one. Now she's got an iPhone and loads of apps. Partly because she finds it easier to use, and partly because my brother has one and can help. Whereas he couldn't do much with her 'Droid either.

For someone like her I''d say Windows Phone is better at the cheap end of the market, and iPhone at the top end. Not because they're better, but I think they're both easier to use. The penalty being much less flexibility. But all she wants is email, texts calls, camera and Facebook. For anyone like that all the 4 major phone OSes can handle it easily, and it's just down to ease of use / least confusion.

Re: MS Office 365 Security / Legal / FAIL

Sod the enterprise. Enterprise sized customers have the resources to do all this internally. Office and Google's cloudy offering are just a choice as to who you pay to keep the mice inside the servers fed.

Obviously if there are problems with IP or data protection, then you'll be more likely to stay in-house. And with large numbers of users the costs are probably so close that it makes little difference. The extra costs of making changes to, and the lack of flexibility of, out-sourcing probably make things pretty even.

Where it matters is small business. I do most of the IT for a company of under 10 people. I also do the accounts, some of the engineering design and a bit of the sales. We have 3 people working from home, and 3 road-warriors. Out-sourcing is the way for us. The first cost of getting a server would be somewhere to put it, we rent cheap offices because we barely need them. The next cost would be learning to make it work. I can do all our desktop maintenance, but no way in hell am I setting up servers (I don't have the time or the training), and double-no-way-in-hell are our users moving to Linux. They can barely use Windows...

We use a cloudy accounts package, and pay a local IT vendor to run an Exchange server for us with our CRM on it too. Exchange is so complex that they don't know all the options on it, because they're generalists. What we lose in expertise, we gain in cost and the fact that we can talk to them and change things any time.

A few thousand in software licensing costs is bugger-all in the great scheme of things. The costs come in managing the server. Locating, powering, maintaining and backing-up the server and paying the person who knows how to keep the mice happy.

The other objection to Linux would be Outlook. Personally I dislike it, and have since I first had to use it in the 90s. Although I've never had to use Lotus... But we've got at least 2 users who'd cry if we took it away from them. What's the Linux state of affairs on an alternatives to Exchange/Outlook nowadays? There doesn't seem to be much in the Windows world to do calendaring/contacts/email unless it's online only. What do Linux peeps have on their desktops?

If Lync (or whatever) can do all the fancy integrated internal communications stuff for us, that's currently out of easy reach to a small company, then that's just gravy.

Re: Competition...

It wasn't Ofcom. It was a challenge in the European Court of Justice. Can't remember who brought it now. To comply the Premier League were forced to split the rights into 'equal' packages, and no broadcaster was allowed to own all of them.

Re: Could someone please explain me this British anti-ID obsession?

I think the short answer is grumpiness, general distrust of government, cost, the fact that it's not a pressing need. Other European countries having ID cards is not necessarily a selling point either. In general we tend to concentrate on being different to the rest of the EU...

To address one point, as the UK aren't members of the Schengen agreement, our ID cards would not be acceptable for travel around Europe. In practise they probably would be. Also, as I recall the rules from when I lived in Belgium, you could cross the borders with a Belgian ID card, but with the foreigner ID cards issued to non-citizens you still technically required your passport. Also in Belgium they have something called administrative arrest. This gives the police up to 48 hours to detain you, while they prove who you are - if you don't produce an ID card or passport on request. I remember the Belgian police once used this to lock up most of a train of football fans, who'd left their passports in their hotel safes on the way to an international match. Kept them just long enough to miss the match, then sent them back to their hotels.

The government put rules in place in the past to stop them from merging the various government databases into one big, all-knowing, super database. Although partly this was probably agreed to because it wasn't yet practical. The ID card database would have eroded those distinctions quite a lot, and I guess people are already worried enough about the government telling them what to do. We've had a few quite authoritarian governments recently, in the Thatcher (economically liberal but not socially) and Blair administrations.

However, I'm not sure how unpopular ID cards really are. Labour had become unpopular, and the policy was incredibly expensive. But for the first few years, the polls were in favour, and by large numbers as I recall. There's still quite a majority for being 'tough on crime', and it wouldn't surprise me if a majority were still in favour of capital punishment. The policy was going to cost at least £10 billion, and the government is still running £100 bn plus deficits. If money wasn't so tight, I wonder if Labour might have pushed it through. Say they'd started in 97, and been ready to go in around 2005 when they could still get over 40% in the polls.

Re: Well

In the UK at least, the sport on Sky was never the cheap bit. The Sport was the lure, and the fact you weren't allowed to buy that package until you'd shelled out for films as well was the extra gravy.

Whatever you might say about Murdoch, he was certainly willing to spend big, think long-term and take big risks, in order to build Sky and make it profitable.

As well as cross-subsidising from other bits of the empire to kill off rivals (BSB), and huge cross-advertising from his newspapers...

Re: Yay!

That nasty Mr Edison also electrocuted an elephant. He used this to 'demonstrate' just how dangerous that alternating current was, as advocated by Tesla. He even filmed it, which I hadn't realised: YouTube linky

I seem to recall he did the same trick with dogs at a few public displays as well.

Re: Politics and science

I must say I was in 2 minds about the Grand Prix in Bahrain going ahead. Surely a good opportunity to boycott. I'm still undecided about boycotts and sanctions in general.

However it was good that the Bahrain GP did go ahead, as both years it was a complete propaganda screw-up for the government and gave some excellent international publicity for the protesters.

I particularly don't like the boycotting of Israel, as the issue is so much more complicated. It's pretty universal agreed that Apartheid was wrong and had no justification. I'd say the Israeli / Palestinian issue is far more complicated. There's plenty of right (and plenty of wrong) on both sides of the argument. And boycotting Israel alone is pointless. There can be no peace unless both sides agree to it. So only pressuring one side of the conflict is guaranteed to fail.

Re: @Matt Bryant "Israel... has the right to self-defence"

Tom Welsh,

There's a difference. Hitler said that Poland had attacked, I seem to recall it was an SS unit who popped across the border to attack back into Germany. However, that was an obvious lie. Also there's no debate that Stalin would have attacked Germany a few weeks after Barbarossa. He certainly wouldn't have. Although neither side trusted the non-aggression pact, with good reason. So he might have a few years down the line.

On the other hand Israel have been attacked by (and have attacked) Hezbollah and Hamas several times in recent years. Who ultimately started it being irrelevant. So Israel has perfectly legitimate reasons not to want even more missiles getting through Syria. Hezbollah only admitted last week that they'd got thousands of fighters supporting the Syrian government, and I'm sure they want to get paid.

Whether Israel has a legitimate right to use pre-emptive strikes (and whether their intel is correct), well that's another matter entirely. But Israel has been pretty consistent in its policy of pre-emption, and that's mostly been successful for them in military terms. Diplomatically it's more complicated.