Posts by Peter 48 354 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2009
Both of these platforms were selling high-end expensive phones in pretty considerable numbers. Don't forget, the iPhone came along at the same time that Mobile Data became a viable, affordable option for the mainstream along with suitably powerful processors and displays. These two factors had much more to do with bringing smartphones to the masses than apple ever did.
in this case the choice of publishers isn't a problem. The problems lie in the restrictions applied to the use of the software - you want to use it for free? then you can only sell the end product via apple. Anybody in their right mind and even remotely commercially minded would have to be seriously retarded (and exceptionally cheap) to insist on using the free version.
Moral of the story - don't be such a cheap tight-wad, pay at least $20 for Pages for Mac and you will be free to do what you want with your book and have it published by whomever you desire
Decent specs and a slim chassis at a reasonable price are all very nice, but this tablet is going to sell less than the Notion Ink Adam because
a.) Toshiba are going to do bugger-all promotion as they fail to do with any of their products and therefore aside from a few people reading these articles and the odd enthusiastic CPWH sales rep nobody will know that these even exist
b.) By limiting them to one retailer they are simply compounding problem A.
The end result will be miserable sales results measured in the hundreds at best. And Toshiba will wonder why they just aren't selling. Sometimes I wonder if these tablet releases are just intended as a token gesture to stay relevant and act as a tax write-off.
The cheapest iphone 3GS contract where the phone is free is still £15 a month, for which you can get a dozen android phones that compare very favourably to the 3GS (Galaxy Ace, Desire S or xperia mini). On PAYG it still costs £300 and that is where android shoots ahead, as the galaxy Ace can be had for as little as £120. This is what people mean when they say cheaper.
in the tech market there is no such thing as too late if you have the right product, and the balls to back it. Sure apps to increase the risk of lock-in but there is no reason why you couldn't offer a system that allows for migration for example (at least from android). Give incentives to Devs to offer transferable licenses for example or promote discounts to transfer your app library. There are plenty of ways to lure people to the Redmond side (this btw applies to google and apple as well)
By far the biggest element they are missing is decent marketing - get the damn phones into stores, displays, promote them on TV and radio, in news papers & magazines. Get them into movies and TV shows etc etc. Everything else is little more than finetuning. Look at apple, their fist attempt at iOS was severely limited, being little more than an app launching platform, but the combination of embracing apps and marketing the hell out of it followed by continuous refinement with each generation has put apple on the course to being top dog today. MS need to learn from this and start spreading the word and the gospel if they ever want to compete against the church of Job or the android collective.
Personally I would have to see the following before I ever contemplate switching
1. add support for microSD cards
2. Either get bing maps up to google maps standards or bring in more devs to develop some decent navigation apps for WP7
3. add support for higher screen res and bring in dual core support. In fact start relaxing the hardware spec control a little to allow for some more variety.
that would be a guarantee for failure. At least with MS as a partner they have some chance. In this market where virtually all phones are highly capable devices, marketing is by far the BIGGEST factor in a phone's success. The only people to see that until recently have been apple and as a result they are reaping the benefits of such vast exposure. Over the last year Samsung seem to have finally cottoned on and are heavily promoting the Galaxy s2. The result, stellar sales at iphone levels in the UK for example. Now lets look at the level of promotion that MS and Nokia are doing . . . . . . . . . . . tumble weed . . . . . . . And they wonder why they are not selling? The same applies to tablet sales. When was the last time you have seen an ad for a tablet outside of specialist media that wasn't for the ipad?
We live in such a media heavy world where we are constantly bombarded by levels of information and data that mankind has never experienced before. To stay relevant you have to be pervasive and Apple are the masters in that field. Just being good (or even the best) and relying on the point of sales forces to push your product is sadly no longer enough.
You couldn't be more wrong and deluded if you tried and your comment shows how little you understand of the financial markets. Buying a share entitles you to part ownership in the company and a say in how it is run. Morons like you are the very problem with the current system, treating it like an oversized casino. Buying a share shouldn't be a gamble at all. If a company does well you should benefit through a share of their profits and an increase in stock value as more people want a part of the company. If the company does badly you loose by not receiving any income and a drop in share value as less people want to own the company. Without dividends you aren't sharing in the success of the company but in the success of the company's stock. This is how companies become hugely overvalued or undervalued regardless of their true performance. Apple certainly deserves a high stock value as they have done exceptionally well over the last few years, and yet Google stocks were penalised for not returning even more profit that they had forecast simply because speculators gambled that they would do even better.
I fully understand how the current system works, that doesn't mean that I agree with it and that it doesn't desperately needs to change.
you sir are the one who needs to do some major growing up and clue getting.
Seriously, muppets like you would happily support Apple even if they announced that from now on they would be cladding all their new phones in baby seal skin. There may be no legal requirement, but there is most certainly a moral one. You do realise that the whole point of a share is to claim part ownership of the company, which should also entitles you to sharing in the profits. Having to rely on stock trading only to reap any reward in your investment is one of the biggest ills of our current economy. This sort of behaviour encourages unrealistic and unethical trading habits, punishing and rewarding companies not for doing a good job and earning a good profit but for their ability to hype their stock and promote their worth. The end result are financial calamities such as the dotcom bubble and the current banking collapse (to some degree). This sort of behaviour by Apple and other companies should be severely punished through punitive taxation to discourage it in the first place an encourage more sensible investment in productive and progressive companies.
You forgot to add to point 2 - massage the numbers in your favour, then flood the market with "opinion polls" and "statistics" that all favour you over your competitor.
(not to say that apple invented this or are the only ones to do so, but they are the true masters of spin, leagues ahead of anyone else in that matter)
Funny, I found that on my android tablet (transformer) and phone (GS2) I get exactly this:
"it has an app failure and it ends the task seemlessly and takes you back to the main screen where you can quickly restart the app and carry on working" Not that it happens very often (except for the rather pants stock Browser). I have only ever had the tablet lock up on me once and that was playing a game, for which a bug fix was released a couple of days later to stop that. My experience with iOS however was the exact opposite. My iPod Touch constantly locked up requiring regular reboots and frustrating the hell out of me.
That is utter tosh, the quality of android apps is no different than the vast number of samey rubbish available on iOS. Look at the vast number of poker related apps for the iphone alone. You can't tell me that each and every one of those is a highly polished piece of coding and not knocked up in an hour by a stackoverflow copy paste monkey. If anything I would say the polish for paid android apps has to be higher due to having to stand out amongst the free or ad supported apps.
I don't buy that statistic. For one it seems to be merely based on the assumptions of a few developers and secondly it seems to show very little understanding of the ownership of android devices. Whilst there may be more Android devices available on the market and increasing I suspect the number of people actually interested in apps is significantly lower than with iOS. I wouldn't be surprised if less than 50% of people who have acquired an android based have actually accessed the internet in one form or another on their phone, let alone thought of installing an app, instead treating it more as a "dumb" phone than a smart phone. This generally applies to the huge numbers of cheap and budget android devices out there, and in particular Pay & Go customers who usually have to pay through the nose for any data plans. This already removes a huge chunk of potential app purchasers, who are unlikely to install anything more than a free copy of angry birds. Of those that are left, a large number are savy enough to access the market place or app store offered by their network or phone manufacturer and download the free version of an app, but few of them are actually aware you can download apps from the internet directly. This leaves a very thin layer of tech savy android users who are aware of pirated apps and where to get them and even less of which are willing to risk their device to do so. I suspect the number of people willing and able to use pirated android apps is probably as large as the number of iOS jailbreakers who are just as likely to pirate.
Sure piracy is a problem, and should be challenged and eradicated, but to blame it on the current lack of sales is utter nonsense.
What are you talking about? I have a whole Windows desktop full of software and there isn't a single item that struggles with different display resolutions. The only limitations I have ever come across is with some websites where all the graphics had been designed for 800x600 displays about 10 years ago. If anything laptops and desktops are infinitely more flexible at running such high resolutions compared to the iOS eco system. Even android is designed to scale to some degree (see the high res transformer prime for example)
I would have thought one simple way of improving password security is limiting the number of false entries you can make when trying to enter a password and in the simplest cases require a captcha or similar system to reset the count or require separate verification over the phone or in person (with banks). Also stop requesting the entire password, instead only ask for extracts of it (my bank does that for example). Use onscreen keyboards where you have to click with the cursor to enter the password / pin would reduce the risk of keystroke captures. Where pin numbers or passwords are entered on touch screens they should randomize the position of the entry keypad to reduce the risk of reading your fingerprint smudges. There are numerous methods you could easily use to make passwords & pins more secure without increasing their complexity.
I am rather happy with the broadcast quality on on VM setup (TIVO 500GB box). Picture quality is outstanding, as good as anything friends of mine get with Sky. You must have had a really duff connection. What did virgin say when you complained to them about the quality?
Apple has tried to sue Samsung, but so far no court case has been ruled in their favour in this where design copying was an issue. And from the few photos I have seen the S5 is suitably different from the MB Air that Apple would have even less of a leg to stand on if they tried to sue.
does it work between devices for different manufacturers? Without being device agnostic it is about as useful as facetime vs skype and a big step backwards for the consumer, back to when SMS only worked within individual networks and call rates varied between carriers.
It does however show the principles of apple's initial idea to develop a phone network without using carriers when they first developed the iPhone. IT will be interesting to see how much love carriers will continue to show Apple if they start affecting their cash cows.
before i started using Steam i actually had to download dodgy cracks for some games i had purchased just to get them to work properly.
as for movies, i have given up with the often included digital copies on dvds and blurays i buy and rip a copy instead as the drm is just too cumbersome and restrictive to work.
this patent is utterly useless, just like any attempt to patent the principle of interacting with a computer via touch, recharging a battery within a portable device or for that matter using electricity to power your gadget would be, as it fails the basic test of patentability: lack of obviousness or innovative step. Sure they may be able to patent a specific way of integrating a fuel cell or a specific method of refuelling but they will never be able to patent the use of a fuel cell.
Despite Rockstar insisting they had no plans whatsoever to enable this on the Samsung Galaxy S2 as little as a week ago it appears that something has changed as I have just downloaded and am playing on that very same phone. Although I am no sure why I paid £3.23 and not £2.99 as everyone is reporting. Is this a VAT thing?
If you end up scaling your whole desktop to 200%, why would you bother in the first place? You will still have the same amount of info displayed on the screen whilst the things that aren't scalable like no vector graphics won't look any sharper or smoother, just smaller or blockier. In the meantime your graphics adapter will have to do 4x the work in 2D and 8x the work in 3D just to maintain the status quo, whilst sapping your battery. And all so that the 0.0001% of the population that delude themselves into thinking they can see the difference can pat themselves on the back? what a total waste of resources.
I have no problem with increasing the resolution on current displays to some degree, but a 200% boost is way over the top. 2048x1280 would be more than enough for any portable device (16:10 ratio) anything above that and you are looking at some drastically diminishing returns.
I do hope that these increases don't also mean an increase in actual desktop resolution but instead are used as a way of improving colour fidelity and as a form of anti-aliasing. The thought of a desktop running at quadruple resolution fills me with dread - minuscule, illegible icons, overworked graphics card that sap battery power just to be able to run at max resolution in 2D let alone 3D and websites with postage stamp size images to name a few of the problems.
congratulation, you have just saved Apple another few hundred grand in advertising costs by adding further fuel to the product hype without actually saying anything news worthy. But at least you managed to get some nice click counts to boost your own online stats.
Let me save you the hassle of finding "moles" for the next few weeks. Further insider information will reveal:
- the screen ration will stay at 4:3 instead of 16:9/10 of most android alternatives
- the ipad 3 will be available in Black & White at launch
- it will have an improved camera (probably that from the iphone 4)
- it will support SIRI
- it will have an improved processor
- it will have the same apple connector as all mobile apple devices (except the shuffle)
right that should give you at least 6 weeks worth of "incredible" "insider" "leaks"
Love or hate flash it still doesn't change the fact that there is still a vast amount of websites that rely on flash for media and interactive displays, without it you will only ever experience part of online life. Even if flash is a massive resource hog and crashes every 5 seconds, if you want to access all of the web and not just some of the web you will have to forgo iOS based products. Buying an iOS device to surf the web is like buying a car that isn't allowed on motorways, a pointless compromise. Hopefully, in a few years time flash alternatives will finally offer the same features that flash has and we can finally retire flash completely and purge it from the system (yay!!!), but until then you will have to live with it.
I suspect this will have been designed with a whole building environment management system which controls lights, temperature and fresh air supply, like you will find in most modern high-rise office buildings. In cases like that, being able to open a window is actually highly counter-productive.
I don't actually get why i would need to root my transformer, but a quick google search shows there are still plenty of ways to root it, even with the latest ROM.
"Android vendors and app writers are too fucking thick to work out that the average non-techie user doesn't want to have to load and discard several apps that nominally do the same job.... at least once a week I wish I'd bought an iPad instead. "
what are you expecting from your tablet that you think you would get from from an ipad. Some magical process that tells you that from the 200 different shopping list apps available for iOS and Android you will pick the perfect one first time on apple but not on google? you are severely deluded if that is the case. Do you really think those hundreds of thousands iOS apps are all unique and wonderful individual programs? if anything you will find even more duplication on iOS than on android. Using android isn't any more technical than iOS, infact many things are easier as you don;t have to string together a series of apps just to make an email attachment or save a download from the internet for example as android does this out of the box.
This myth that iOS is so easy and magical it can practically read your mind whereas you need a doctorate in computing science just to figure out how to turn an android device on needs to be stopped once and for all.
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