Beautiful, and stupidly expensive

If the camera takes decent snaps and video (cos lets face it, the fact it isn't an 8MP device like top-end smartphones is a shame, but it's irrelevant to the actual quality) then the whole Apple lock-in thing is the only real downer remaining. If only they'd half the price, I'd snap one up in an instant.

How many?

@D@v3 - I think the clue is hidden in the story itself, the bit where it says "tattooed across her heaving jubs".

As for 50-100 films per annum, I wonder if a huge great ugly tattoo over her assets might adversely affect her marketability?

Lost the Impact

Strange how it's just not funny with the wrong font. I'll make an exception for "Invisible Policy Document" though. Genius.

Nice effort

To be fair, the gains might not all be temporary. Bing is the first search engine I've tried since Google which actually works. I'm no fan of Microsoft, and I'll be sticking to Google personally since I marginally prefer their results, but I wouldn't be surprised if Bing picks up some regular traffic. Being the default search engine in IE doesn't hurt any either.

BTW Cade, in Britain "tossed out" means "got rid of", making your final paragraph a touch confusing. The phrase you're looking for is "tossed off". :)

@ Nate

Judging by how expertly you spell icanhazcheezburger, I can only assume you spend a fair amount of time there yourself. I've never heard of it myself, of course.

@ Seanmon

Sure, if by "purified and regulated" you mean pumped full of so much damn chlorine that it tastes like drinking a swimming pool.

@ Haku

You can tell when you've moved your scroll-wheel by whether the window has scrolled. Give me a scroll-wheel without notches any day, but only if it has the same granularity of movement as the mouse's movement sensor itself.

I've never understood why we can have ultra-sensitive 3000 DPI sensors for moving the cursor around, but when it comes to scrolling we're only allowed about 10 DPI (i.e. 10 notches per inch of revolution, if you're lucky).

And the advantage is...

I've read through the whole review, and I'm struggling to work out where they've improved this over the original AA1. The accessibility of the HD and RAM could come in handy for some I guess. They've shaved a whole 0.14 inches off the height, so it's hardly supermodel skinny.

The best?

One mouse and eleven gimmicks? Shame, I could do with a new mouse, and a nice roundup comparing offerings from Logitech, Microsoft, Razer et al would have been very welcome. It's so hard to find a mouse with decent ergonomics, a click wheel that works properly and a good selection of well-placed extra buttons.

What next, genius?

So, what does Twitter need to start doing to combat fake accounts, Mr. Anonymous-Spector-Impersonator? Visit every new sign up in person, to check they are who they claim to be? What if my name happened to be Gordon Brown (hardly an uncommon moniker) and I signed up before my less fortunate namesake had the chance? Am I then also an imposter, for daring to share a name with the most tediously-appellated politician this century?

It's a shame, I thought Wilson the cockroach was a real nice touch, but I guess this guy isn't quite as clever as he seemed.

Microsoft worried?

I guess Microsoft must be more worried about Google's AppEngine than might have been expected. Admittedly Google beat them to market, and AppEngine is potentially a really nice product, but it is somewhat esoteric and immature at this stage. If Azure delivers even a fraction of what it claims to offer in a stable fashion (which I'm not claiming it will) it's pretty clear that the majority of people will flock to that over AppEngine.

Headphone socket

"performed sterling work in developing sound quality and user friendliness in media playing mobile phones"

If they'd done such sterling work, they might have noticed the invention of something called a "headphone socket". It's an exceedingly useful thing to have on any device that claims to play music. It's annoying enough that the other phone manufacturers miss it out, but for a so-called "Walkman phone" to suffer from this defect is laughably poor.

Still, they wouldn't want to make their phones any real use for music, or they wouldn't stand a chance of selling devices like this one.

Headphones

"All the standard music features..."

Oh, that would include a standard 3.5mm headphone socket then? You really can't get much more of a standard music feature than the ability to plug in a pair of headphones

It's a start

I can't imagine that little thing "filling a room with sound". Why don't they sell a cheaper version without the toy speakers? Also, unless the "L/R stereo analogue phono input sockets" which the review mentions are actually output sockets, I can't see how the device "covers most users' connectivity needs".

It's nice to see more devices like this starting to appear though. There's been a woeful lack of choice in this area, which is odd since I'd imagine a huge number of music fans would jump at a device like this, if they only knew they needed it.

Been around for ages

Lionel is quite right, I too have been using BitDefender free version for years. Just recently it decided to stop working and insisted I download this newer version. Now I get a nice annoying splash screen every time I boot up my PC, telling me how unsafe I am unless I hand over the dosh for the full version. Perhaps this "news story" (i.e. press release) would have been better titled "BitDefender makes their free anti-virus scanner more annoying"?

@ greg

"The right to free speech is forfeit when whatever you're talking about is clearly a blatant lie"

Ah, but you're wrong. That means what you are saying is a lie. Therefore you've forfeited your right to say it. Do you see the problem yet?

13 years of playing with the king, baby

"many more one-time Duke players have long since moved on to other titles, other platforms"

No shit. It would be kind of odd if anyone had been playing nothing but Duke exclusively for the past 13 years.

@ Rock Lobster

Imagine the entire comments section buried in such a mire of postmodern meta-irony that no-one can tell what's going on, or indeed even recall what the original article was about.

@ A J Stiles

That seems like an odd idea for a law to me. How can I fail to act upon something once I know it, and how can the prosecution ever prove that I wouldn't have acted in that way regardless?

It's like your speed trap example. If I'm nicked for speeding, can I use this in my defence? "Sorry m'lud, it would have been illegal for me to act upon the information I had received, so I had no choice but to continue travelling at 90MPH for the remainder of the journey."

How did it come to this?

Moronic hatemonger banned by lunatic witch - it would all be vaguely amusing had these two clowns not somehow become a prominent celebrity and home secretary of the UK respectively. Much though the world would be a better place without the likes of Savage, it seems he's right for once. Trust our very own Wacky Jacqui to outdo such a worthless specimen of humanity in the idiocy stakes.

Depressing

It seems Google are the only people with the money, the knowledge and the will to carry this out. If a sufficient proportion of the world's population cared about such projects, we'd happily pay for them to be carried out in an open manner, with the end result freely available to all.

Sadly we seem to have better things to do with our money, like giving it to the bankers so they can burn it. Best of luck to Google, we'll just have to cross our fingers and hope that they don't do anything too evil with their monopoly.

Airports

Airports auction off lost memory sticks with the data intact? I suppose you could argue that people shouldn't lose their stuff in the first place, and we all know that airports aren't famed for safeguarding people's property, but this seems beyond the pale.

Astonishing

I think you've hit the nail on the head there david. If only the researchers had presented their findings in a table, they might have been easier to understand.

Features

"However, you’ll also be able to record videos... and listen to several audio formats"

Implying that these features are somehow out of the ordinary for any handset produced in the last few years?

In short...

"In short, it's a great little do-it-all handset"

Excuse me? The camera sounds utterly useless. 7 seconds to take a photo? That's worse than a Samsung! It doesn't have a headphone socket, so it sure as hell isn't a music player. In all, that's not what I'd call a "do-it-all handset". I should know, I've been waiting for someone to build one for five years now.

New name

I'm going for "Kiewty".

@ Blasmeme

You have the wrong end of the stick. Gmail can be accessed via IMAP or POP3, just like your Virgin email account. Set up Outlook / Thunderbird / your email client of choice to access it and you'll not even notice the difference. You don't even have to put up with any advertising.

Having said that, how much longer can Google continue to provide this service for free? I'm sure it doesn't cost them much per customer, but with world & dog using Gmail these days there must be a huge amount of server resources dedicated to it. The people accessing it solely through a proper email client avoid any advertising, thus removing Google's main revenue source. I'd be surprised if Virgin were paying Google much for the privilege of using their free email service.