Re: "Excels as an integrated organiser"?

Sadly, Nokia haven't had much input into Windows Phone yet. As MS spent the update to WP8 on boring but worthy OS stuff. Maybe they'll get some stuff into the next update?

The People Hub is excellent, and combines messages and contacts well. Even adding in loads of social networking, if you like that sort of thing...

But it seems almost divorced from the calendar. And there's nothing to link location to both, so you can't do all the fancy location aware profiles stuff.

It's amazing how much of recent smartphone development has been to just chuck more features in. Yet very little effort has gone into integrating them all.

Re: Now all we have to do...

[Battlestations! Brace for incoming downvotes, and don flameproof trousers...]

I quite like the ribbon.

When I was an Excel power user, ten years ago, it might have annoyed me. But now I only pootle around in Office using the basic stuff it's quite convenient. It's mostly no worse than knowing that you had to click on the insert menu to stick a graph in. I suppose it's easier for some people to search through a list than to look through a big pile of grouped icons, and it does take up screen space - but for the new user I strongly suspect it's easier, and for the general user it puts the stuff they use most in easy reach.

Again though what MS should have done was put a nice easy switch in. Then new users would get the more friendly ribbon, and power uses and people who hate change would get what they'd always had. It would have cost them very little to do. Just like having an optional Start menu in Win 8.

Re: One key difference between 8 and Vista

It is a big difference though.

There's nothing wrong with Win 8 that couldn't be fixed by bunging on a start menu. Well I guess there's also the confusion between Metro and non-Metro programs like IE, and where your emails open up. But it's basically all down to changing a few Register settings and bunging a start menu on. i.e. not being arses and giving your customers the choice they want.

I'd also suspect that had they had the thing set up exactly as now, but with a simple switch so techies could put it into Windows 7 mode/Classic mode and hide Metro, then it would have been very successful. It would have got good reviews, and not pissed off all the techies. But still, most users would have been perfectly happy to just use it how it came, and so MS would still have been able to follow their dream of getting the Metro UI familiar with loads of people. If Sinofsky wasn't wiling to play ball, then they should have realised the mess when they shuffled him out the door, and done something. It's not as if they didn't have 9 months of beta test data to tell them the geeks hated it. And that feeling has percolated to some normal users, who tell me that Win 8 is rubbish.

Vista was different. It wasn't all Microsoft's fault. Sure it was bloated and it took a service pack to fix some slowness. They never fixed the bulk file copying bug. Try to copy a few hundred small files, and it will take hours, do them in chunks of 20, and it'll be over in minutes.

But there were also problems with OEMs dumping shit hardware - partly MS fault for allowing Vista Capable stickers I suppose (like HD Ready in TV land). Also a lot of the problems were down to lazy manufacturers not producing drivers. I got a Vista PC nine months after it came out. With a Soundblaster card. They'd still not written their Vista driver, it came out a month later. So that's 10 months from launch, add in the 6 month beta and the 6 months between the beta program ending and MS actually launching. And as a partner, they'd have had early Alpha access too. So they'd taken over 2 years. I know MS changed the driver model, but it's not like they didn't warn people. And put loads more of them into the OS as well.

Vista was a cock-up, but MS copped a lot of unfair flack for other people being crap, and had the excuse that they were trying to be as compatible as possible and re-write everything. Windows 8 is a bullet in the foot. Entirely self-inflicted. Even after they saw the problem they've still taken over a year to admit they fucked up. Which is truly rubbish. And that's even after dumping the exec responsible into the corporate piranha tank. Ooops!

Just when I'd decided my gaming days were over, and my old PC needs drastic re-building to be able to play anything modern. Then would be the time that another TIE Fighter game would turn up, and I'd be forced to spend good money on an upgrade / new PC, to play it.

I wasted many, many hours of my life on that game. And a few more on X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter later on.

Also, isn't that 'for a given value of safe'...

Plus the minor issue with melting the decks of their aircraft carriers. Although an electric motor should sort that out easily enough.

Re: BITE

Sadly people seem to have stopped updating beerintheevening. I used to use it a lot, but the last few times I've looked, there haven't been many reviews younger than 2010. Given how fast pubs change, that's not really useful.

Suddenly lots of places seem to be on tripadvisor. And Apple have started using a US one on Apple Maps, so I've noticed they've now got quite a few reviews.

Re: Given the rectangular shape of phones

Don't be silly. The next iPhone will simply be round. Problem solved, and ground prepared for next Samsung lawsuit. And of course, the most rounded corners of any square ever made...

Re: Extrapolating...

There are two kinds of people in the world; those who can extrapolate from incomplete data...

...And ocelots.

Re: £20 or £400

That's certainly true. It's unlikely that dumb-phone holdouts are going to go straight to a top-of-the-range smartphone. And that's the bit of the market that Apple play in. Even though they sell their older models cheaper, the 2 year old iPhone 4 is still going at £300, which is the top of the mid-priced market and nowhere near the £100 phones.

I also wonder if people might start going for dumb-phone / small tablet combinations. I'm still yet to find a smartphone that's as good as a decent dumb-phone at doing calls.

Anyway surveys have consistently showed Apple owners to be more loyal than Android owners. However Android has been growing and taking market share off Apple, even though that's been growing as well. So, just because they're less loyal doesn't mean they won't stick with Android anyway, even if they shift manufacturers.

I seem to remember that Apple have been taking share off Android in the US for the last couple of quarters though, so it may be that the analysts have it right. But I suspect big sales of the Galaxy 4, so it may be that things shift back the 'Droid way for a couple of quarters until the iPhone 6. Who knows...

Re: It appears they are trying to lie their way out of it...

It shouldn't matter anyway. They can't sell you a 2 year fixed-price contract and hide a clause in the small print that allows them to increase the price. Particularly as it's unbalanced. i.e. if they had an inflation clause in there, and it said if it goes down the customer gets a discount, if it goes up, then we get more goodies. Then they could argue it's reasonable. But because it's a fixed price contract they'd have to have a bit about inflation in the big print, not the small print. Or tell you about it at point of sale. Of course that requires a court case if they continually and pig-headedly refuse to back down - and because it's small claims court territory no precedent is set by any case they lose. So it's not really worth the fight, as on year two of a £50 a month contract that's only £18, and the court fee starts at £20.

I don't know how the rules work out for contract disputes and credit ratings. I imagine they can screw up your credit rating even if you're in dispute, although they'd struggle to get a county court judgement, so it wouldn't be too bad.

Re: HTC One Black - no stock

I don't understand what's happened to HTC.

Sure they've been overtaken by Samsung, who make their own components and have a nice marketing budget. But HTC still seem to put out some nice handsets, and they do metal ones with rubber coating to Sammy's preferred plastic - so should have some shiny factor. I can understand them not making profits, as the competition has certainly hotted-up in the last few years, but I'm surprised by how few sales they seem to make.

Re: Lasers, check.

Why do the sharks need lasers? Surely they can just eat the debris. They'll eat anything. Just put them in orbit and job's a good'un.

Why do people have to make things so complicated...

Re: Iceland not wanting to join EU

Given what's happened to UK fish-stocks - and what's happening to the Euro - they'd be mad to join the EU.

Re: What exactly do they think they are going to change?

Well I wouldn't quite describe it like that. it's rather more complicated. I seem to recall the anti-terror legislation was used (or abused - depending on point of view) to stop cash being transferred out of the UK subsidiaries and back to Iceland. Which sort of made sense given that the Icelandic government broke its own loan guarantees on the banks regulated in Iceland to foreigners, but not to locals. Some banks operated here, but under Icelandic government guarantees, others were UK institutions owned by Icelandic parent companies, and thus regulated here and using the UK deposit protection scheme.

Iceland refused to pay the UK and Dutch government. Which is fair enough as they'd chosen to default. But the UK and Dutch can still ask for it. We could veto them joining the EU.

As happens, they'd be mad to join the EU, and get forced into the Euro. See Cyprus for details. Given the Troika deliberately decided to destroy the Cypriot economy - that bail-out was designed to fail even under its own terms - and didn't even last a month before unravelling. The correct thing for Cyprus to do to save it's economy is the same, default on all foreign debt and devalue the currency. Unfortunately they're in the Euro, so can't.

Iceland may be a 'financial basket case', but its economy is growing again, and unemployment and inflation have peaked, even though they've lost their banking industry. Cyprus on the other hand have also lost their banking system, but unemployment is set to rise for years to come, and they'll almost certainly get deflation. Meanwhile no-one knows how much their economy will collapse by, or how long it will last. But their next-door-neighbours Greece are 25% down on their economy and still going, with no end in sight.

Re: Short term doesn't count

Khaptain,

There's no reason we need to get poorer in order for the rest of the world to get richer. So long as we don't run out of natural resources anyway. So obviously we're going to need some better energy sources. If they get richer, then they'll buy more stuff, as well as selling us more stuff. That expansion of the world economy should allow everyone to do OK.

One of the reasons for the current problem is the speed of the growth of China. And that they held their currency down. Doing this allows them to avoid inflation and keep their workers pay lower. So it was probably more about out-competing India and Vietnam as us. But even this may not work, so that they'll still have got richer, but won't get to keep all the extra gains this gave them. That's because the money has to go somewhere. And about $4 trillion of it went into Western stock markets and government debt. Helping to inflate a massive bubble for the last 15 years that went pop. There was a similar amount from the big oil exporters and a bunch from other Asian exporters. Well now, we're going to either default on some of that debt, or inflate it away. That should hopefully allow Chinese workers to afford more stuff, and if their economy can take off then the next candidates can get going, without being out-competed by China.

Obviously though we currently have limits on resources to solve. But nuclear fission then fusion and maybe capturing a few asteroids could help with that. It's been a break-neck pace of developments since the Industrial revolution started in the 18th Century (economic historians debate the start date by over 100 years). Maybe that's unsustainable. But the pace of change seems to be getting quicker at the moment. So if we can avoid resource bottle-necks maybe the whole world can keep getting richer. Populations with more cash grow less quickly as mortality and birth rates drop. So in some ways it's environmentally sustainable to globalise as well. We may put more strain on oil supply and C02 levels, but probably take the strain off marginal agricultural land.

Re: It's in the ears of the beholder

My parents bought one of those Amstrad hi-fi things in the 80s. Sure it wasn't brilliant, but I'm pretty sure it was better than anything they could afford before that.

Similarly I remember when I bought my first CD player. It was pretty rubbish. I know that now. But the jump from tape to CD (live VHS to DVD) was so amazingly huge that I thought it was the bees knees. It was only when I could afford something a bit better, that I realised quite how poor it really was. I've never felt the need to spend on serious audio goodies, but have used professional gear, I don't think the leap in quality is quite worth the money.

I'm no audiophile, but I've mixed quite a bit of live music. And I'm therefore fully aware of how much less most people pick up.

Carphone Warehouse don't lock their PAYG phones, so they are effectively SIM free. Although you do have to buy a £10 top-up, which you'll probably end up wasting.

Re: Android Android Android

Well Android is the rival at this price point. And dominates the market. So it's what this phone's got to be measured against. If you're going to do a review, then the big question is 'do I buy this phone'. And to decide that - you have to refer to the alternatives.

Re: Now, this is more like it...

I've gone the other way. Cheap Nokia Lumia 710 (on WP7) to iPhone 5. This is for the work phone, and I bought the Nokia myself because the Android on the contract was too annoying. I like the OS, but the lag was pissing me off. I definitely think that the really cheap 'Droids are to be avoided. If you need a cheaper one, buy last year's (or 2 years ago) top of the range. Although if Android security starts to be a real problem, you could end up a bit sad and lonely with less likelihood of security patches. Lots of the mid-price 'Droids look pretty good, but I've not seen a £100 that I liked.

The biggest downside of Win Pho is the apps. Unless that's massively improved in the last 6 months. There weren't very many, and lots of them were poor quality. That also helps with the modest hardware. The OS seems to be pretty light on that, whereas I've seen lag just navigating round the home screen on cheap 'Droids. But if you care less about apps then you'll be less worried about low processor/RAM as you won't be doing much multi-tasking.

In my opinion the built-in email and contacts management are better on Win Pho than iOS or Android. Though with Android you can just install better ones. If you mostly use your phone for email and calls, then a cheaper one is a good plan and for that Nokia looks pretty good to me.

One big note of caution though. The lack of Gorilla Glass. I'd wonder about going up to the 720, if it's not too expensive, just for that. Although a decent case also solves that problem.

Re: Short term doesn't count

Khaptain,

Well I certainly agree that being more informed about the world around us is a good thing. And so listening to people from the poorer bits of the world would be a great idea.

But most people who live under the £1 a day line don't deal in a cash economy. So that figure of £1 a day is misleading. A lot of them won't be paying for services in the same way, or buying all the food that they eat. The lack of money really shows up when it comes to things like healthcare, because then cash is important and something they don't have.

It's pretty hard to get people to vote, or follow the news so they can make an informed decision when they do so. And that's for elections that directly affect them. So it's going to be even harder to get people to listen to voices from other countries. Therefore a bit of harmless publicity in the form of getting people to eat less food seems like a good thing. And perhaps puts into perspective that whole debate in the UK last week about living on £53 (which ignored housing benefit anyway). I do agree you can't pretend to be poor.

It would also be interesting to see whether we could get a debate going as to solutions. Getting the EU (and the US) to stop subsidising our farmers quite so much for example, or at least doing so in a different way. That alone would probably help more people in Africa out of poverty than any amount of aid we could plausibly give. This might also be a time to sing the praises of globalisation. Something that's not got a good press with the current economic crisis. But there's a lot of people in Asia who're a lot better off because of it. Even if it's made 'the West' a bit poorer, partly because finance and politics hasn't adjusted fast enough for the economic changes. But it's probably still a huge net gain to world happiness/wealthiness/less-dead-poor-people-iness.

Re: It's getting to be very apparent that ...

That only works so long as China get the balance right. If they decide to kick the big US corporates too much, or the Japanese for a particular example, then their economy might become a lot less shiny suddenly.

The reason big companies have power isn't because they're evil, greedy or politicians are stupid or corrupt. Though all of those things may or may not be true... The reason is that they have something that governments want. They create value, jobs and shinies that people want.

Russia has a powerful and rich government. But its economy is still massively biased towards mining and petrochemicals because the government have fleeced (or allowed to be fleeced) a few too many Western (and local) corporations - who now are wary of investing into their economy. It's an example China need to be wary of. There's nothing wrong with beating up on companies for breaking the law, as long as it's broadly done to foreign and domestic firms alike, and isn't too arbitrary.

Re: Short term doesn't count

It's an awareness exercise - which is a perfectly valid kind of stunt. If taken seriously then you'd have to look at purchasing power parity. People who live on £1 a day, but also live on farm land and don't have jobs, are going to spend some of their time growing stuff to eat, and their £1 is going to go a lot further than it does in Spain or the UK. Not that I recommend subsistence farming as a lifestyle, but it's not the same as trying to live in an industrial society on the same kind of money because you're in a different kind of society with barter and cooperation.

If you look at the industrial revolution you'll find an awful lot of nostalgia for the 'good old days' pre-enclosure where villages were very inefficient at growing crops and most people were still basically subsistence farmers, supporting a few specialist trades. It was a much more cooperative society, as it had to be. The village would share tools, labour, and expertise. As well as some big parties. All things that in a modern industrial society you might need to use money for. So they'd be massively financially poorer, but that wouldn't capture their actual standard of living.

The idea is that it's supposed to make you think. The world is complicated, and people are busy so this is a perfectly fine idea.

Re: Playing with new toys...

It could be an app for Google Glass I suppose. You're wearing them anyway, so it would naturally overlay extra content onto what you're seeing, and is in position to photograph it as well.

Not that I see this being anything other than a cumbersome idea. If you want this at breakfast, read your paper on a tablet.

Re: "Provides liquidity"

No. Say I bought £100m of BP stock a year ago. I'm now happy with my dividends and profit and want to sell on to invest in something else. Or just to spend the money on beer and hookers...

So I could put those shares up on the market and wait for other people who want to invest in them to buy them, a bit at a time. But that means my money is tied up, and I've seen a short term opportunity in shares in Acme Badger Culling Ltd. If I don't buy that now, the shares might rise before I can buy them - when other people realise the profits to be made.

So the market maker comes along. He knows that loads of people will want BP shares in the future. So he buys the lot off me, at a bit under market price. That's his profit. I get all my cash straight away and can invest it in what I want. I've made a tiny bit less profit, but that's made up for not having to wait to get my cash.

Other people will pick up the shares off our market maker, and so he gets rid of his stock at a slower pace. This is less of an issue with big companies, with stock that's frequently traded. But if you've got a smaller company it's very important, as you might wait weeks to shift a decent number of shares.

HFT does the same thing. It will buy up blocks of shares to sell off at tiny profits. The difference is, they probably won't trade in the unpopular stocks, because they're interested in constantly recycling trades at tiny profits. So one risk is they'll take the easy BP type money away from the market makers, who might not then be able to afford to hold stock in less frequently traded companies.

Another risk is that HFT programs will start interacting with each other in feedback loops, and break the market. Or if one trader's HFT model has a weakness and analysts for another see it, they can possibly use their HFT pooter to start siphoning money straight off the first companies by exploiting it.

Then you've got the flash crash. And that screw-up at Knight Capital to worry about... But anyway, by making it easier to trade quickly in stocks you're increasing liquidity in a market. Even while taking a small profit out of it. You are making the traded assets more liquid, i.e. easier to sell quickly.

Re: How dumb those Wall Street guys can be...

to swallow a tweet and wet their pants because of that ? It is sad to see such a bunch of idiot muppets being given the reins of the world finance!

It's not so much that. I think what happens is something odd happens, so the high frequency traders turn their boxes off. Don't use the complex computer program when you don't understand what's happening. They also make other errors, which is another issue.

The problem with this is that the HFT programs are providing a lot of the liquidity in the market. So I go to sell a share, and normally some HFT box would happily come along to snap it up to sell in a few minutes for a tiny profit. I don't mind this, as I wanted to sell for other reasons (I've already made my bigger profit from this stock over a year, and I want my money now). So everyone wins.

This is what market makers do. They don't take a position in particular shares, they just buy anything you have to sell with the plan that someone else will want it in the next few days. They make their profit from a small mark-up on each trade. By doing this I can sell my shares now, and get the money instantly to wander off and do my next trade. I don't have to hold the shares until I can find a buyer, or sell them slowly over a week. The market maker does that. One worry is that if HFE does this, but less reliably, then markets will be less liquid. If you can't reliably sell an asset then you'll have to be more cautious about buying it.

Remember that if all trade in Apple in the market stops and I sell a few Apple share at $100, the price of Apple stock has dropped from $400 - $100. Wiping out a few hundred billion. But this isn't really true if everyone else holding Apple stock sells theirs for $400 for the rest of the day. So you could argue that hundreds of billions have been wiped off the market for that few minutes, or just that I foolishly lost a few thousand, and everything carried on as normal. The same's true for the whole market. If prices drop for a few minutes then bounce back, the only people who lose are the ones that sold at that lower price. And they're matched by winners, who bought low.

Re: @TeeCee (was: This is a new one for us.)

jake,

I've noticed a lack of downvotes on some of your recent posts. Has your stalker finally abandoned you? Do you not feel all lonesome and sad, now that some nerd-in-a-basement no longer feels a compulsion to anonymously disapprove your every post?

I really hope they had a script to do that. It would be truly tragic if they were doing it by hand.

Re: Maybe HTC could focus on

Eadon,

I believe Nokia have got $10bn in their cash-pile. Or perhaps, given where they're from, hoard would be be the word... So they've got enough cash to dump MS and go the Android route, if they fancy a last throw of the dice.

One of their problems is that it's not just smartphones where they're failing. From the figures I saw a while back they only made half their phone profits from smarties, and the other half from the larger number of cheap dumb-phones. That's before Elop joined. The Chinese had finally caught up with their brilliant supply-chain and started beating them on price a few years ago, and I'd guess one of the reasons they went with Elop and Windows may have been that they wanted some higher profit smarphones to counter the loss of the dumb-phone market share, and they saw MS as the better chance to achieve that than Android or fixing Symbian / Meego.

As for their hardware being a generation behind, I think that's utter bollocks. They may be using lesser chips than the top 'Droids and iPhones, but most of that stuff is bought in anyway. They can always put in better ones and faster RAM if required. But Win Pho doesn't seem to need the top hardware, MS may actually have written some decently efficient code. Although it may equally be that there aren't enough demanding apps to make the multi-tasking in WP8 break sweat. I've not played much with WP8, so I've no idea how it handles heavy loads of simultaneous running apps.

Also, they've got some excellent camera hardware/software. Possibly some of the best amongst the mobile lot. That may even be a reason they dump Windows. If MS don't make OS changes that allow them to do their full Pureview goodness, I'd have though Android would be a more flexible option.

The phone is killing off the mp3 player, I don't see any reason why it shouldn't kill the cheap compact camera market as well, in a few years. Obviously if you want a big lens, then it's bridge cameras of SLRs you need - but if you can have a 3x zoom fold out lens on a tiny camera, why not on a phone? Or if the Pureview thing means you can get almost as good results without, then so much the better.

Hmmmm. Apple got a bunch of people to shift from slide-to-unlock due to lawyers, I believe one of the routes gone down was that you had a 'ball' on your lock screen that you dropped into a hole for the app you wanted the phone to launch into. With goatse as the lock image, I'd hate to think what gets launched when you drop it there...

Re: Android permissions design

Aoyagi Aichou,

Unless Android has changed recently, then it and WinPho are very similar. Both list the permissions required at the bottom of the app's description page on Play Store or Marketplace. You then install them. Unless you root Android you don't get to pick and mix with permissions either.

iOS allows a bit less leeway for apps. But leaves the user a lot more in the dark as to what's going on.

Re: Android permissions design

Windows Phone lets you set permissions. The app store has a little blurb on each app saying what permissions it wants (next to a link to an explanation of what those permissions are). They're no more granular than Android ones from memory.

Apps then have to ask for permission to do certain stuff when you launch them, like phone home with data or use location services.

As I recall iOS only has pop-ups for allowing access to your addressbook and location services. Although it may also have the same for accessing the phone function, I don't recall ever using an app that required this.