Re: BE

I would go so far as to suggest that Sky don't *want* Be's customers. They're generally clued up and have expectations of the service that Sky would rather not have to live up to. The want O2's customers. If the Be users all fuck off somewhere else, it'll be fine by them.

Re: Who else has left already?

As a long-time Be customer, I was on such a sweet grandfather deal that they couldn't offer me anything better to stay on. That's one thing I'm going to miss; not having price rises every year.

On the other hand, there was a large portion of the Be customer base waiting for a FttC offering from Be. Almost all of whom (myself included) have fled to BT Infinity or the BT-owned Plusnet offering. I can hold back my sorrow for the 75/18 Mbit uncapped service I now get. Just be sure to throw BT's Home Hub out a window and use a proper router. But then Be's customers were generally tech-savvy and the Be*Box was a pile of crap so most of us had something better anyhow. (The Billion 7800N is a nice piece of kit, and their support is superb.)

Re: carry space

It's the Micra-sized version of the Renault-Nissan small car platform, so it is pretty small.

(It comes in Small - Micra-sized, Medium - Clio-sized, and Large - Note-sized)

Re: Pretentious brands or not..

As I understand it, Sunderland produces cars that are just as good as the ones made in Nippon.

Re: Top Gear

It's a petrol engine. Renault mostly uses Nissan-designed powerplants for their petrol offerings. In return, almost all of Nissan's diesel engines are from Renault.

Re: What exactly is good about it?

No, Samsung support is noticeably WORSE than HTC's.

I know very few people who aren't techies who give a damn about SD card support. None of the recent Nexus devices have it and The Goog is deprecating support for them in future releases anyhow.

But then I've had good luck with these things. My Desire is still going (albeit with CM7.2 on it now) and I'm quite liking my One S.

Re: Price

In some ways, the 830 is better than the plain 840. (840 Pro being on another level altogether). The 830 has better write speeds and doesn't use the new TLC flash that may or may not be as reliable as we'd like. I actually nabbed a couple last week before they go out of stock everywhere.

Re: Engine

Ah you're right, it's not the nifty little thing from the Micra. It is still a Nissan HR engine at least. Renault, petrol, and head gaskets still give me the willies. Personally, I think letting Renault design the diesels, Nissan design the petrols, and letting both of them make their own minor customizations is the most genius thing about their unholy alliance. That and when they sent a load of senior management over from Japan to tell Renault how to run a factory - the defect rate nosedived after that.

Re: HTC's own fault actually

Google wants the SD slot gone. I can guarantee the S4 or whatever Samsung wants to call it won't have an SD card slot either.

The HTC Wildfire is no worse (indeed, in some ways better) than the Samsung Galaxy Ace it competes with. Cheap phones are shit shocker.

Re: Modern Cars

I think, given that throughout the downturn corporate new car purchases have outnumbered consumer ones, most people have been taking the middle option of buying a car that's just a couple years old with low mileage. You miss the biggest depreciation hit and you get a car that still has some manufacturer's warranty on it.

We wanted a Nissan Note. New they're something like £13k for the way ours is equipped. A one year old one with 8000 miles was just over £9k. It may as well be new. You have to factor in that most people don't want to switch cars all the time. It may be economical, but it's also a pain in the arse. Plus you get used to things, and so on. We only swapped the 05 Micra because we had another kid and needed the space - we're normally the sort to drive a car until it's no longer economical. A modern car easily puts in 10 years service if you look after it well, so it'll be a helluva long time before I have to bother with this nonsense again.

If you love cars and can fix them yourself, it's an entirely different story. But that's not exactly a huge portion of the populace, is it? And I stress the "love cars" part, because while I'm perfectly capable of performing basic repairs, I seriously can't be arsed to on an economy miniMPV that's our daily driver. Back when I had an E24 635CSi that only saw sunny weekends, different story. :)

Certainly the QNAP does (I own one), and I'd be very surprised if the Synology didn't as well. The QNAP and Synology ones are the most polished, but also quite expensive for what you get.

That being said, the new 2GHz Marvells are fast enough to run quite a lot of things. I run Logitech's Squeezebox Server and Serviio for streaming music and video, respectively, with nary a hiccough. (Runs the printer, too. But I don't think that takes much oomph.) The only time I've seen the little ARM chip choke was on a live HD stream in a format that needed to be transcoded. But even the Atom-based ones can choke on transcoding live HD streams.

By the way, I'm quite technically competent. But what I don't have is tons of spare time and a lot of room. The QNAP makes perfect sense and sips a fraction of the juice a home-made solution would anyhow. It'll even do a quasi-transactional database for writes, somewhat like ZFS. But unlike ZFS there's quite a write speed penalty for it (it roughly halves write speed). But since I have a toddler who thinks power switches are fun, it's worth it to have the disks re-sync in 30s instead of a few hours.

I was thinking that the specs were a bit stingy compared to the QNAP I have sitting here (2GHz ARM, 512MB of RAM). But then it's just over half the price of it so I can't complain too loudly. The problem is that 256MB of RAM precludes running a lot of things - I run a Serviio DLNA server on mine, but there's no way it would run in 256.

My Samsung has no problem playing anything I stream to it. I don't even use my PC for streaming, just a lowly ARM-powered NAS running Serviio. I'd highly recommend giving Serviio a try if your TV isn't playing everything you want it to. Usual caveats apply - You need a Samsung B-class or newer (C and D are best), you don't get embedded subs in MKVs and you can't play a straight ISO. This applies to pretty much everything over DLNA though.

Personally, I'd been waiting years for a telly to do all this and I embrace it with open arms. iPlayer built in was just a bonus. The problem is that people need to consider the whole picture - it's not just buying a telly now. Have you got a NAS? Is there a wired network nearby? If you're on Sky or Virigin it's easier to use their streaming services (I'm Freeview only), etc, etc...

Cyanogen, the most popular Android ROM, ships the stock dialer. Some excuse about how notifications from the stock dialler can't be supressed. Which is fair - I noticed some oddness with call notifications on my Desire before I rooted it - but I feel the advantages outweigh the cons. And as you say, most things ship with a smart dialler.

Network recording

Most of these devices will only record HD content locally due to DRM issues. You can't be certified for Freeview HD or Freesat HD without implementing some fairly draconian DRM. Even if they allowed you to record to the network, you wouldn't be able to play the file back on anything else. I've tried taking the disk off my C-class Samsung TV and reading it, but the file is nonsense to any of the players I tried.

That said, my 2010 TV seems a bit better at DLNA playback than this 2011 BD player. Maybe a step back for Samsung there? I've yet to have any compatibility problems, but then I am streaming from a PC and the software I use (serviio) has Samsung as its primary target platform.

Not yet....

I don't believe the firmware's been completely reverse-engineered the way the A and B models have been. Yet. If you've got a 600-series, there is a hack to enable PVR functionality but that's about it thus far. That said, someone is working on it - it's only Linux, for heaven's sake!

I only bought the app-enabled one for iPlayer, but with a little one in the house the Youtube app has proven pretty useful as well.

For what it's worth, DNLA playback on my C650 has been great. It doesn't see embedded content in matroska containers (you need to rip out your subs to a .srt file), but it's been otherwise flawless over the network.

Not a fair comparison

A second drive bay is worth a whole lot more than Synology's utilities. Granted, an empty DS210j is about the same as the 500GB myDitto so that would make an interesting comparison. I want to performance statistics on this thing. If it's fast (and the Synology j models are a bit pokey), it could be of interest.