@Ralph 5

Read the damn article.

7 hours

Come on, you're describing that as reasonable? In my book (!) that's atrocious. Don't bother taking it on holiday, it'll be flat by the time you get on the plane after hanging around the airport for half the day!

I was expecting this to be a colour e-ink device, rather than a cheap tablet... correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that all this is... not an e-reader at all but a low-spec tablet? Are we ever going to _get_ colour e-ink?

I Like it

My PS3 is already my DVD/BR player so a console with a decent DVR sounds like serious sale point for those struggling to choose between MS/Sony.

How it would integrate with FreeView and FreeSat though, is my question. I've no idea how fiddly that is, but it would be nice if it worked.

Question about HD recording

Does 1080 recording really offer an improvement when recorded from a mobile phone with a (relatively) crappy camera... I never tried it so serious answers please. Do the extra pixels help?

re:Even chavs have smart phones these days

Only the young ones. Older ones are totally web-illiterate just as they are regular illiterate.

Question about WP's wasted space

We (my wife and I) recently tried the new Lumias in the flesh for the first time. She immediately pointed out that on the homescreen, you lose an entire column of valuable screen space beneath the "->" button. I've not seen anyone else complain about this but it does seem a waste of maybe 10% of the screen... what does anyone else thing about this?

re:The desktop barely matters...

That supposes everything is going to end up moving to a web-server based paradigm. While at the moment it's going that way, we have to be aware that this is very fashionable so while in many cases it's a great idea, many people are _only_ doing this because it's cool... porting desktop apps that work great, to web-versions which are not as rich and require constant web connectivity.

I wonder if things will end up balanced a bit further towards the desktop in a few years... instead of everything being forced onto the browser simply because the browser is now capable of doing so.

This isn't even ABOUT APIs

An API is nothing new, Windows has had it for decades. What is specifically being talked about are open _services_, not APIs.

Also @Brah, yes you may have been working this way but this way of working has been possible for the last 10 years using servlets/PHP/ASP, the _motivation_ to do so is all that's changed and I'm not sure how much of this is hype/fashion.

I've nothing against modularity, it's very cool... but doing it (using web-based service protocols) by default is not ideal IMHO.

What do Linux want?

It seems to me the Linux crowd need to decide if they want a desktop THEY can use, or one which will make Linux popular to regular PC users.

Linux users are often quite strong evangelists of Linux but they seem to fail to realise regular folk NEED an easy interface, along the lines of Win/Mac. However if they make an 'open source Windows/Mac' shell that _would_ actually attract those they evengelise to, they could end up with something they don't themselves like.

So do they want Linux to go mass-market, or do they want to keep it for those who understand computers? The former seems an obvious answer, but if they're not in it for the money then perhaps the latter is better.

All very well and good, but the article seems to imply the only thing worth creating is a web-based service these days. The reality is, the majority of us are still writing regular software or web-apps which aren't designed for use by millions.

It might be cool and 'in', but it's still better to find a problem that needs a solution than to try and find a problem that _needs_ Hadoop and an open API.

re:It's clear it's not free in the title

"The title says Kindle. It costs money to buy things from the Kindle store."

Kindle books can be free: http://www.amazon.co.uk/free-kindle-books-uk/lm/RFE5KI1NEVRAK

@Richard 12

Surely it's 5min from the accident being reported... meaning the band is already cleared by the time emergency services reach the scene?

Found one!

My Phones 4U had a couple, but they were simply placed in the lineup alongside the various Android phones... no splashy "look at Windows Phone" posters for brand awareness.

I got the impression MS would practically be paying people to stand outside the shops pushing the Lumia in peoples' faces to get awreness up!

re:do no evil

Please explain precisely why this is 'evil'?

I though MS were going to be pushing these phones super-hard in the shops... but walking down the highstreet past Orange, Phones4You and another big chain, none were prominently displaying "come try the new Lumia" posters - if they were I'd have gone in to take a look.

I also haven't seen a single TV ad for Windows Phone 7[.5] - where is the massive marketing campaign MS need to get the ball rolling?

re: what do we use it for

Games like Crysis, with brand new cutting-edge graphics engines, are the area where PCs still lead the way.

re:technohead95

Sounds like someone has neither used one of the phones, nor ever done any development work. But they did manage to get some pretty green thumbs-up by regurgitating what they read on the internet.

Don't see the problem

If I was a regular FB user, this seems a much more sensible way of making money from my membership (I see no problem with that) than regular boring ads.

@Richard Lloyd

+1 channels are great. We can record two things at once and watch a third and yet we STILL often watch +1 for two reasons:

1)We turn on and find something has already started which we would like to watch

2)Recording conflicts mean recording the +1 version can be really useful

Idiot AC.

They probably had a small stock to start with.

C5 in HD would be nice for CSI I suppose - and football.

Film4 in HD would certainly be nice however I reckon the BBC could make great use of it for the Olympics... they could even use it as a dedicated 3D channel.

Regardless of any of our personal opinions on the supernatural... this seems a bit harsh on anyone who is serious about such things, and is forced to say "this is just for fun".

Although I suppose giving up on your principles is par for the course if you want to be on TV.

Maybe they could just use proper databases

Plenty of people know how those work.

re: 2nd car for £30k

Indeed - this is not about saving the environment, but an expensive PR toy for those whose carbon footprint is probably 5X the average due to their giant house :)

Got to laugh at the solar panel, I would be interested if they made the entire roof (or even more) a solar panel though.

Quick question - do electric cars all use F1-style KERS, to recahrge the battery on braking?

I've no issue Reg advertising their stuff on their site, but I agree billing it as a regular news story is perhaps a bit too much. Perhaps restrict such things to the side panels?

Maroon 5?

Isn't that like making malware for Windows Phone 7?

re:G+ still requiring "real" name? If so, still as useless as ever...

Damn right. Look at FaceBook, they only have a ONE HUNDRED MILLION+ real names.

Mandatory "open format bitch"

Just to get it out of the way...

close to the theoretical "mass boundary" at which the formation of a black hole becomes possible.

Well maybe it was larger before and evaporated.

Homie

Nice of you to decide musical taste is now an exact science. You should write to all those deluded people who think otherwise.

50:50

I like Amy but will be glad to see the back of Rory, who makes the whole thing more clownish.

for the 90% of the world that doesn't use Facebook

Most of them probably don't use the internet so posting here might not be helpful. If Facebook is at 1Bn users, that could easily be half of those in the West who use the internet.

If you don't use FB, why do you care what the feature is - you wouldn't understand it anyway if you don't know what FB does/is to begin with.

I've never _heard_ of Pulse. Should I?

I have heard Google's hangouts are pretty decent for video though, especially since you can add moustaches.

used his lightsabre to snap one of the wires

Must be pretty tough if he was still abel to control his limbs once hit.

ostensibly all about "sharing", really about harvesting data for advertisers

I'm not a fan of FB but I don't know that's entirely fair. I don't believe FB was created with this in mind, Zuzky is a proper nerd and made it because it was cool... only later did the money-grubbing activities come in, as evidenced by how long it took for them to figure ads out properly.

Google are under no obligation to give to charity...

I tithe (literally) but I see no reason Google have a responsibility to do the same, or any company for that matter. I think it's more a personal decision.

Back-end

Is the back-end infrastructure PCs, or consoles like 360/PS3... they could in theory do either I suppose. Or do they run multiple VMS on a single PC - I imagine that would be quite tricky for resource hogging games so I imagine they need one box for each current player?

I'd love to be able to hire their setup for my own games/software - being able to do rendering & complex logic on a proper PC then pipe the results to an iPad would be great for the scientific/medical training software I work on.

re: Bandwidth

Isn't it simply going to be comparable with watching online video (iPalyer/4OD/NetFlix) and therefore you know what it's going to do to your usage?

Also

All the people whinging about how 1080 is a step down from 1200 lines... fine, and 900 or even 768 line resolutions are sucky. But the solution isn't to DOUBLE it... is it? Rather a kind of overkill?

What?

People have been managing at 1280x1024 on their 4:3 22" monitors for years. Why do you need double that on a small laptop screen for editing documents?

re:Anyone can edit, but only Jimbo can grant access... wtf?

Sorry but did you think you own the part of wikipedia you wrote? Just like the Reg forums, wikipedia is owned by someone and thy can do what they like with it.

It's very British that when a big company or rich person gives something away, journalists find a way to portray it in a negative way.

However I thought the Reg was a bit above such negativism as we see in the tabloids.

New Physics?

If Higgs exists, validating the Standard Model, then that cuts out lots of more exotic models doesn't it? So maybe "old physics" is more appropriate ;)

Why?

Is this simply to match mobile resolutions or for a real reason? It puts quite a large extra load on CPU/GPU?

I suppose at least you'll be able to run it at 1440x900 (half-res) if you prefer, without pixel jaggies?

re:iPad 2 is obsolete !!

No it isn't, no it won't be. Apple still support even the iPhone 3GS in iOS5 so while iPad1/2 will lose support one day, it won't be when the iPad3 comes out.

The same Jimbo who is begging for my money?

Every wiki page has big fat begging ads right now... so their plan is to take donations and then take the site down fora bit? I hope all those who donated will be allowed special access.

The idea is sound for businesses - they don't want to sell old handsets - but it seems hugely expensive for the package offered. If I ran a business which gave employees phones, I would like to rent but only if it saved me money... otherwise I'd give the employees the old phones as a perk.

@Ed Vim

You do make a good point about WinXP... maybe I should have said "3 most popular _current_ browsers".

I definitely would like to see the study extended to Mac/Linux versions of Chrome/FF, and Safari on Win/Mac... but I still think Google are fine not to pay for testing every combination, since they let us do this.

I'd still so much rather they kept the screen as-is and updated the other hardware... we'd be able to do so much better 3D graphics, or have a really good battery life.

Oh well a project I'm on wants iPad support so hopefully iPad3 comes out soon so I can get one for work :)

re: clean install

1. Some nasties can survive this

2. Some of your documents or needed files can get infected