Profitable because it's made in China?

Not because of the outrageous price tag, then?

Moron thieves

My step-dad's BMW 635 Csi had its window broken to steal a stereo that probably got the moron who stole it 20 quid for a fix. Fucking idiots, the lot of them.

Wish it was the same in Thailand

I took a 75% pay cut in the last year. It would be seriously nice if salaries here shot up too.

The problem with China is that I'm not sure I could learn to read and write, which would drive me batty. At least Thai has an alphabet (44 consonants and 32 vowels enough for you?), so you've got a chance.

That, and my wife is Thai.

Living here is WAY better than living in the UK, though (I've been here over 9 years already). Being an ex-pat is an interesting life, to be honest :)

The Internet in Myanmar was always a bit shaky

The "government" always censored everything, and the only way to browse the web was to use a VPN. When I went there regularly in 2006/2007, I used to use Your Freedom (a tunnel service).

All web access had to go through "government" proxies, so the tunnel was the only way to go.

The biggest problems we had was actually with the power constantly going down. I can only hope that things have improved over the intervening years.

"Don't have these figures to hand"

This is absolutely correct. DO NOT believe a vendor that says they don't have these numbers. Of course they have the numbers.

If they say they don't have the numbers then they are OBVIOUSLY lying somewhere - because how can you claim to provide a certain measurable uptime figure, but not have the actual numbers to hand? It's ridiculous.

Vendors in "lying in order to win a sale" shocker ...

"Confusing software and expensive hardware doesn't sell" shocker

Confusing software is confusing, so nobody bought the expensive hardware that runs it properly.

Three meters?

What did they measure?

You think that's bad?

The boxed version of Windows 1.03 (or 1.04, I forget. It was 1987 when I experienced the wonder) had a sealed envelope inside it, containing the installation floppies and some paperwork. It was sealed with a thick white sticker upon which were written words to the effect of "by opening this envelope you agree to be bound by the terms contained within it".

For some reason, this was later deemed to be not legally enforceable. No idea why.

They briefly protested outside the Bangkok office recently, too

I work in the same building as Google's Bangkok office, and there were protesters outside for an hour or two on the afternoon of the 27th September. They came to this area after bothering the US embassy in the morning.

Whatever. If they want to stand outside for a day in Bangkok's notoriously hot and humid monsoon season, that's up to them.

This is not about religion - this is about people *choosing* to be offended to push forward their own agenda.

If you think it's bad in the UK ...

Try it in Thailand, where it's truly awful.

They don't even claim to offer turn-by-turn here either. Although if it's as bad as it sounds, perhaps that's not an altogether bad thing?

Lotus Notes might not be quite dead just yet, but it's smelled pretty nasty for some time now

I started using Lotus Notes over twenty years ago, and have always hated it with a passion. Anything that kills it can only be a good thing,

99.9% of users fired up Flash?

Saying that 99.9% of users "fired up Flash" is disingenuous. What it means is that 99.9% of users did one of two things:

1. Went to a site that uses Flash as the default, and falls-back to something else (e.g. HTML 5 video) if it's not there. It would not surprise me if YouTube (for example) did that.

2. Visited a site that had ads on it. Again, these sites will try to push Flash ads on you if they can, because they can get more useful info out of a Flash ad, as well as showing you an annoying moving ad and possibly sound or even one of those horrible expanding ads.

How many of those users would have not even noticed that Flash was not there, if they had not had the Flash plugin installed?

4G?

And will it work on frequency bands other than the ones used only in North America? Or when they do start selling it in Europe, Africa or Asia/Pacific, will they have to stop calling it a 4G device like Apple had to do with the "new iPad"?

Electricity is free now?

Here's the other thing … after you have calculated how many mpg it does, how about calculating how much it costs to charge the thing up with electrons?

Add to that the cost of the car (*HOW* much?), and that's an awful lot of very short journeys you'd have to do to justify buying one of these. Sounds like you'd be better off with one of the 80mpg diesels, or even a Prius or similar hybrid that simply saves energy from regenerative braking …

(Also - a 1.4L Otto-cycle engine? Why not Atkinson-cycle - too hard for the Chevy engineers?)

Urban legend?

You mean this one? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/901723.stm

I think that was "something that happened". Slightly different thing. It's like an urban legend, only is based on fact.

So ...

Is amateur hour over yet?

They have to get £1.7M before they then qualify for the big payout?

Was that the Nigerian national lottery fund, perchance?

Volt x Ampera = What?

Sorry.

Oh great - more meaningless speculation

So just weeks after the 'press' was thoroughly disappointed because Apple released an iPhone with the 'wrong name', they are setting themselves up for another fall by guessing the name of the next iPad.

And when it doesn't happen (even though nothing was announced), everyone will bleat about how it's "late".

Idiots.

Amazing

This thing's doomed, isn't it?

Only available in the UK and US stores

As an expat Brit, I would love to be able to subscribe to this, but can not because it is only available in the UK and US stores. Lots of expats read Teh Grauniad, but if we have a 'local' iTunes account then we simply can't buy it.

Bit of an odd restriction, that.

(And yes, I know it's now possible to 'fool' the Store into allowing an account to be opened in another country, but it was not possible when I started buying apps. Back then you needed a credit card whose billing address was in the country of the Store)

Eric?

They could have at least said Patrick :)

And if RIM have to pay a royalty of $5 per unit sold, does this mean they now owe Dolby labs $5?

"I am just going outside"

Surely Oates' last words should have been that he "may be some time", no?

Gorgeous laptop - really fast, but hot

I bought one of these a couple of months ago, and it's FAST. I get 6 hours of light usage from a full battery, or a couple of hours of Handbrake - which tears through files like they weren't there.

One other thing apart from the weight (which I was expecting), is how HOT it gets when it's working hard.

The screen is gorgeous, the trackpad a joy to use. Fantastic machine. Just be aware that if you're doing anything CPU-intensive that your legs will get uncomfortably (almost painfully) hot if you use it on your lap.

Delayed?

How can an unannounced product be delayed?

What he said

In this particular case, it looks like VAT might be making the difference.

That is not to say Apple's prices have not assumed some mythical currency in the UK that is at parity with the USD in the past.

But if the price 'should be' 1.25 GBP and is actually quoted as being 1.50 GBP, that is exactly the kind of 20% increase that you might expect to see if for example VAT were set to 20%.

In the US people are used to seeing prices advertised before any sales tax is added, and since these taxes are local to the State, County and even City in come cases, I suppose this makes sense. But in the UK, prices are always quoted inclusive of all applicable tax (by law, no less).

So in the US you see something on sale as 1.99 USD, but you might pay anywhere between 1.99 USD and 2.25 USD or so for it. In the UK you see something advertised as 1.49 GBP and you will pay 1.49 GBP.

And long may it continue to be so.

Rip-off? Not in this case, I think.

Free market?

First off, this is in theory a free market, and they can charge what they want for their Lanthanides.

Secondly, read a little history to see how Hong Kong came to be British in the 1800s, before you talk about 'unfair practices' ...

Finally, all countries have import/export restrictions to help their local economies.

Apple might not allow spyware on the iPhone (or iPad), but ...

Apple's rules might not allow "spyware" on the iPhone (or iPad), but ... it would not be much use even if it existed, since any app that was downloaded onto an iOS device from the App Store onto the (non-jailbroken) device would not have access to any of the information it would need. Sure, there are APIs to get your location, and there may be one to get contacts and the like - but call logs? SMS message contents? Email? Very unlikely :)

All this means is that the software does exist (see http://www.iphonespyapp.com/ if you want to see some of the scary software you can get!), but it's been driven 'underground' simply by the technical requirements imposed by the iOS 'walled garden'.

This is why Apple don't want people jailbreaking their phones - it opens the phone up to all this kind of software! For the most part, your average customer would not WANT that stuff on their own phone (although a few might want to put it on someone else's!) - and that is exactly the difference between the 'open' (read: unmanaged) Android, and the 'curated' iOS.

And which countries will this be available in?

I live in Thailand, and we can't even buy music (let alone movies) on the iTunes store online. All we get here is iOS apps and that's yer lot.

I can, however, subscribe to MobileMe. This gives me syncing of all my contacts, calendars, bookmarks and wotnot.

So if they are going to can MobileMe and replace it with something that does effectively nothing where I live, then where does that leave me, except up a certain creek without a certain implement?

However, I'm not going to start handwringing just yet. The actual announcement is about 73 hours away, if I counted my time zones correctly. I think I'll wait and see. Then I'll start the handwringing, as appropriate.

Paris, just ... because.

Spyware

Is this even news? There is a plethora of spyware out there for almost every smartphone platform, and even some for dumbphones (which are apparently called 'feature phones' these days?).

See http://www.iphonespyapp.com/ and others like it, for a taste.

There are legitimate uses for this kind of software, including keeping track of kids or employees - most parents would probably love to know where heir kids are, when it's after midnight and they said they'd be back before 10PM, and companies whose employees spend a lot of time away from the office would surely be interested in tracking the location of a company-provided mobe.

Paris because ... I'm sure there were times when she would have liked to have known where her phone was :)

As good as an iPhone 4?

The iPhone 4 got a score of 75%, and so did this phone.

Therefore this Nokia-with-a-horrible-OS is as good as an iPhone 4?

Corporate iPhones probably want to know if they are jailbroken

There are some pretty scary iPhone apps out there - see http://www.iphonespyapp.com/ for some examples.

If you ran a business, you could be in one of two camps:

1. You might want to make sure that the iPhones you gave to your employees do not have such spyware installed on them, or else all corporate emails sent to/from the phone could be read by an unknown third party.

2. You might actually want to install such spyware on the iPhone yourself! You might want to see that the company iPhone is not being misused (or simply used for personal stuff when it shouldn't be), or that the employee is not down the pub when he says he's feeling sick.

For people in the first camp, how are you supposed to be able to tell if a device has been compromised, if the OS can't tell you? Given that the kind of checks you would need to do would be the sort of thing you can't do from a standard app's sandbox, you are pretty much buggered.

Conversely, the author is 100% correct in saying that once the phone is jailbroken, you can't trust anything the OS tells you, because the nice brightly-lit safe walled environment just became a large dark wide open space.

The only way you (as an employer handing out iPhones) can be sure that you know what state the iPhone is in, is to jailbreak it and put spyware on it yourself. I am sure that installing TWO bits of spyware on an iPhone would break something!

It's a bit like carrying your own bomb onto a plane because the chances of having *two* bombs on a plane are miniscule ...

Reducing the score because of the price is not fair

I read all the points made in this review, and after having said how great it is as well as how beautiful and portable it is, it then got marked down in it's score (to 75%) because of it's price?

This is not fair, because if you look at all the netbooks as well as the MacBook Air, your first reaction would be "woah - that machine scored less *and* it's more expensive?" when in fact it should have scored higher, as well as being more expensive.

Also I agree with the poster above that the battery tests should have been performed while doing similar tasks on every machine. Scoring a huge score on a PC benchmark which strongly favours a GPU is going to suck the batteries a LOT faster than say browsing the Internet or running Office or similar.

Having said all this, I am surprised that the MacBook Air performed quite as well as it did. Perhaps a real CPU and a real GPU actually do make a big difference - which is why comparing the MacBook Air with a range of netbooks is probably not fair. To the netbooks.

Paris, because ... just because.