Posts by jbernardo
124 posts • joined Friday 27th January 2012 14:12 GMT
Re: What happened to HTC?
They seamed to have lost direction, launching several medium range devices and no good attention grabber flagship, then they decided to launch a great design One but leaving out functionality that many still want - uSD and removable battery - forgetting that apple already has the "shape over function" camp.
Posted in Review: Samsung Galaxy S4
@Dana W
Why not Samsung? It is not as bad as if it was "rootkit" Sony, "borg" Microsoft, or "patent troll" Apple.
Posted in Review: Samsung Galaxy S4
Re: Need advice
Transitions can mostly be disabled.
So, your choice depends on what are your main needs. If, like me, you appreciate having removable battery and uSD, then you can ignore the HTC One.
Your choice between S3, S4 and Note can now be narrowed to what screen size you want, if you want to pay the difference to have a faster cpu, longer lasting battery, etc.
Posted in Review: Samsung Galaxy S4
Re: I thought this was a technical magazine.
A technical mag? When you get "reviews" of a line of phones with a technically inferior and still incomplete OS only raving on the beauty of the garish colours and the speed of the transitions, carefully forgetting to mention the limited functionality and huge lockdown? Or where another line of phones always got 10% more points on the reviews just because of the manufacturer's name?
The reg isn't a technical mag, and hasn't been for years...
Posted in Review: Samsung Galaxy S4
Windowed apps
"only Samsung-jigged apps work in windows " - this is false. On my S4, I have google maps, ezpdf, facebook, mxplayer, yatse, youtube, mobisystems office suite pro, etc. as windowed apps.
As for the aesthetics, I also don't like the One "industrial design", but I don't go around insisting my taste is the true taste. There was a time when only fanbois ranted on about aesthetics, after having lost the functionality battle. Now they have been joined by HTC One admirers...
Posted in Review: Nokia Lumia 520
Re: @ Andrew
With a recent arch linux, the 800 shows just an empty pseudo-filesystem. I admit I didn't try moving music there, as before (wp 7.5?) it had an intentionally broken MTP implementation, and by the time I upgraded it to 7.8 and found out it now shows up in Linux I had already given up on using it for more than a feature phone, so I had no incentive to test it more.
I concur, a great little netbook. And you can replace the screen with a 1366x768 one- look here in Tom's hardware - http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/88590-35-trying-upgrade-toshiba-nb550d-screen-wsvga-wxga .
I am the jbbandos there, and my next upgrade will probably be changing the 4GB I put in to 8GB RAM. I've also changed the wifi for an Intel 6300-N.
Why can't the manufacturers give us something like that? A AMD APU (Intel GMA500 fiasco meant I won't ever buy an Intel chipset netbook/laptop), 1366x768 at least, 4-8GB RAM, a decent HD or a SSD, 802.11n dual band, HDMI out, all in 10" form factor, makes a perfect Linux netbook, but there are painfully few out there. And if you want 3G connectivity, you're out of luck.
Bring out your dead!
Old Man:"I feel happppppyyyyy!"
Son:No, you don't. You'll keel over any minute.
Old Man:"I think I'll go for a walk!"
*Son clubs old man and puts him on the cart*
I don't know why, but this Monty Python sketch seems very appropriate right now...
Posted in Windows Phone 8 support to end in 2014
Jellybean on something with the same spec as a Lumia 620
My personal experience is that either a Nexus One and a ZTE Blade are very fluid with JB. As good or better as WP7.8 on my Lumia 800. The only problem is the small internal storage, that has to be complemented by a ext4 partition on a uSD card.
Re: Pointless Bling
"Good job it's not shit then."
Well, it looks like it, and it stinks like it. I for sure won't taste it to see if it is shit or not - it was bad enough having been given a WP7 phone and finding out it really is shit - but if you tasted it, well, it was your choice...
Re: 50GB dropbox?
Buy a Galaxy S3...
Microsoft won't give upgrade prices to Win7 Starter owners. I also thought that WH8 with classic shell might be better than the crappy W7 starter that came with the netbook, so I tried to buy it, but the product key was rejected, with the clear indication that the upgrade offer wasn't available for W7 starter,
Oh well, I only boot into that crap when I need to access the office email from home, anyway. Maybe when they finally roll out exchange 2010 it won't be as crappy on a non-ie browser as exchange 2003 is.
Overcompensating, incompetent or fanboi
Doesn't matter. The judge Koh basically ignored the elephant in the room, the gross misconduct by the imbecile Hogan, including the fact he lied during voir dire, and just pretended not to be too partial by not blocking Samsung's devices.
As it had been seen almost from the beginning of the trial, the judge is either overcompensating for her origins, blatantly incompetent or a rabid fanboi, most of her decisions have been pro-apple.
Bad news for apple and microsoft
Seems like their lobbying dollars weren't enough.
Re: Windows 8 is still getting flak
Of course it is popular with Microsoft employees!
Or are you implying anyone else is using it by choice? And no, replacing TIFKAM with classic shell doesn't count as using windows 8.
Re: Developers Developer Developers????
Mono? Please, not that abandoned piece of glorified crap... Not even Icasa defends it any more.
As for the lumias selling out - you might be right. I've found a couple of news on that. Oh sorry, those links seem to be for that huge hit, the lumia 800, just some months before WP7 was abandoned by Microsoft. It is just that they seem so eerily similar to the news of the Lumia 920 selling out this time...
Oh well, we can all assume that this time the news of the Lumia's selling out are real, and that it will be a huge success, despite having the same fischer-price interface and the same garish colours as last year sold-out failures, the lumias.
Of course they will be a success! After all, last time we didn't have all those "users" on WP Central, WM Power User, and Microsoft Answers, as well as on Slashdot, Slashgear and the reg, all extolling the virtues of the WP phones, how you were not allowed to criticise until you had used one for a month, etc. Oh sorry, we had exactly the same reactions last time... But maybe this one is for real, right?
And maybe this time there will be some success stories for some developers, unlike last time. Maybe WP this time will prove more successful than Bada or Meego. And maybe,just maybe, pigs will grow wings and fly. After all, everything is possible, right?
Posted in Battle of the Clouds: Azure goes lower
USA and clouds
Anyone in the EU should avoid any US based (or even only doing business with the USA) cloud provider. According to an analysis of the patriot act, the USA government has decided they can access your data even if the cloud provider isn't American, just as long as it has business there...
So Microsoft, Amazon and Google are out, it doesn't matter how much they lower their prices.
Re: Social phones...
At least with an android phone, the data I decided to give to Facebook won't be cross-checked with the data I decided to give to LinkedIn and with the data I decided to give to Google.
On a Windows Phone / windows 8 desktop all is made available to Microsoft, as the credentials are stored with your Hotmail account.
Re: Social phones...
Interesting that nobody mentioned yet the worst disadvantage of the windows phone social integration - that it is done on the server, unlike android. That means that MS gets free reign on your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. Do you trust them with this information? I don't.
One for your mom? Do you hate her that much?
On sale article sells better than full price one
So, now you can "legalise" your copy of windows for €30 (it was even possible for €15 until last week) instead of a few hundred Euro, and people buy more? Colour me surprised... Even I am tempted, to update the W7 starter partition that came on my netbook and that I only use when I need to search on corporate email (search only works on IE). If I can disable the fugly tiles easily with classic shell I might do that.
Not to mention that this includes forced "upgrades", ie, this 40M include shipments to OEMs.
Re: I for one
"I have seen someone post basic and wrong information about Windows, things that can easily be checked, and get lots of upvotes. I've replied with posts that are sometimes nothing more than a factual correction, and the downvotes come flooding in."
I've dared to criticise the shortcomings of WP7 when And/Or was ranting about how great and fresh it was, and I got the record of downvotes for any post I ever made here (strangely that post is no longer visible in my history, maybe it is too old). I have a Lumia 800 and all I posted was factual, but still I got over 40 downvotes.
I can give a lot of other anecdotes of downvotes being given just because one has dared to criticise Microsoft's offering "du jour", just as you can rant on how you were unfairly downvoted for posting something positive about windows. So please stop with that tactic. Maybe people are downvoting you the same way they downvote RICHTO or Bob - just because they see your name and don't even go to the trouble of reading what you post.
Credibility?
One has to wonder what is the credibility of a "survey" that gives more than 20% mind share to windows tablets, and only 11% to android. The market numbers are around 1% and >30% for tablets, and 3% and 73% for smart phones, so who are they trying to fool?
Re: Kubuntu is still there!
It is still there - but has been relegated to a "community" flavour, down from its semi-official status. No official support from canonical, etc.
Re: Sending search terms to 3rd party
I've moved to Arch when Canonical dropped Kubuntu, in the 12.04 version. I was already pissed with a few questionable decisions (like disabling hibernation) and some idiotic moderators in the forums, so I started checking other distros. OpenSuSe almost won me over, until I had to use Yast. I had forgotten how bad it was... It has improved since I first used it 12 years ago, but it is still awful. I can't point exactly what, but it always seems to get in the way, instead of helping setting things up.
ArchLinux works very well, is always up-to-date, and now even has a couple of derivative distros that let you use a live version and a gui installer. It also has a vibrant and very knowledgeable community, so for me moving to it from kubuntu is a win-win situation. Give Manjaro a try, if installing from a console is not your thing.
Re: So who does apple market to?
Do you still need to ask? Baristas, of course!
Re: Bing?
I'd guess that windows phone users (all 5 of them) are probably stuck using it, but apart from those it is hard to defend a concious choice of using it. Every single time I try it out it finds nearly nothing of what I am searching for, and spews a lot of unrelated stuff.
I've tried and it also doesn't give any problem on the stock browser, it was patched on the S3 some time ago. Seems to affect the S2, though.
@Marcelo Re: Really dumb idea
Having been in Brasil for the first time when non-SIM phones were still dominant but after GSM already ruled in Europe, I couldn't even understand the concept of having to go to an operator shop to get a new phone "programmed" with your phone number. I can understand why you immediately switched to GSM phones as soon as they had coverage... :)
Really dumb idea
One only has to look at the mess in the US to see why removing the SIM form the GSM spec is a dumb idea. As it is now, I can take the SIM from one phone and use it on another (unless it is a nano SIM, which only apple uses), if needed with an adapter to fit a micro SIM in a "regular" mini SIM slot. I can just buy a phone on the shop, without contract and without paying the extortion interest rates of a "subsidised" phone.
Without a SIM I would be stuck like those poor suckers using the inferior tech over the Atlantic, as I would have to ask one operator very nicely to accept recognizing my new phone as being the replacement for the old one. That might even be impossible if I bought the phone from another operator, who wouldn't release the phone without paying a fee or even at all.
So thanks, but no thanks. SIM "free" phones have already been tried. In Brasil they were dropped, replaced by GSM phones. In the USA, they are still used, as the carriers prefer to have their customers tied to their service. Lets keep this ridiculous idea away from phones on the rest of the world, ok?
Posted in iPhone 5 tops benchmark chart
Reality Distortion Field?
One has to wonder how the members of the fruity cult have arrived to a figure of 1560 for the S3. Checking the shipping S3 devices benchmarks, most are way above that. Of course, it wouldn't look as good as saying that a single iYawn5 benchmark of an unreleased device was better than some S3 benchmarks, and much worse than many. It might dent the RDF...
Re: IP5
The iYawn5 outperform the S3 - no they don't. But don't let reality get in the way of the RDF.
"what appears, at a glance, to be clear abuse of market power."
Where is this abuse of market power? If Alibaba wants to release a OS that is an android variant, and if manufacturers want to release phones running that OS, they are still free to do so. But if that OS won't run all android apps, and if apps produced for that OS won't run on Android, then don't expect to have google play store on it, and don't expect support from Google.
In what is this abuse of market power?
Posted in Mio Spirit 695 LM satnav review
Re: fastest
My garmin has the opposite problem. If I wanted the fastest route to my house in Parma, it would make me take the much longer trip around the neighbourhood instead of cutting through it, because precisely of the traffic flow algorithm giving priority to avoidance of urban areas.
@mark
You know you can change your mod, right? You just need to mod him up and your vote will be counted as a up instead of a down...
"The app benefits from Microsoft's new minimalist approach to GUI design"
Translation - fugly, fisher-price designed interface. At least on android they can't disable the 3d look on the login button and text fields, but everything else is flat, lifeless, and filled with dumb rectangles.
But at least I can access those 25GB I thought I would never use, maybe put them to use as a backup of my backup of my photos.
@snapper
Really? A thread from crappleinsider, with a bunch of fanbois posting pictures pretending that the iphone was completely different from everything else, which have already been debunked to death everywhere? Qre you really that brainwashed?
Re: @John Brown (no body)
Steve, either you limited your information to apple's PR and that single Reuters article, or your comprehension skills really are low. Take a look at Groklaw's take on the subject; and before accusing PJ of being anti-apple look up what she wrote on Apple vs Psystar - here. You'll see that from what the jurors have been saying, they basically deferred to the foreman, a person who is very interested in defending idiotic patents with lots of prior art, being a holder of one himself.
The jurors also seem to have decided not to bother with previous art, as it was bogging them down, have ignored the judge instructions and awarded punitive damages, and decided on the first day that Samsung was guilty, effectively ignoring all evidence presented afterwards. In a fair legal system, this should be enough to grant a mistrial; lets see what happens in the US.
@John Brown (no body)
Did you see what patent that "engineer" has? Here - http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7352953.html
A patent for a tivo or any other system that records video from a tuner... No wonder he "instructed" the jury to ignore previous art because "it was bogging us down" and to vote for punitive sanctions against Samsung even if that was clearly stated not to be done in the jury's instructions (which they didn't read, apparently).
Aren't you?
Excuse me, but anyone who doesn' know its email and password has no business configuring activesync. I believe you need that too for the ipod. And that is all you need on ICS for most configurations. For the rare exceptions, you'll need your login and the mailserver name, in the rare cases that android didn't guess it for you.
Resuming, if it takes more than 5 minutes to configure activesync on an ICS android phone, either you don't have all the information needed (and you won't be able to configure any other activesync client without it) or your server is blocking you (and of course that other client won't work too).
I won't even discuss anything else on your message. If you are trying to make such a simple task into anything complicated, then the walled garden is for you. At least they will hand hold you like a baby to try to keep you from hurting yourself...
Re: "Naivety and posturing"? Please.
Nice troll - "obligation to respect the intellectual property of others". You even included the candidate to the worst oxymoron ever, "intellectual property". We are talking of patents on rectangles with round corners, and on monopoly abuse - trivial patents on a filesystem that is part of the uSD standard.
You just forgot the troll icon...
Re: Win8 for those that bothered to learn about it...
Interesting. We've seen EXACTLY THE SAME arguments for WP7, and it still is a major failure and a pita to use for anything too complicated for a featurephone. "Try it out, learn the new, enlightened way, you'll love it after you drink the kool-aid for a few weeks."
Is that a script, a press release, or is it really your experience? Because it is such a blatant copy of the WP7 zealotry that one wonders. Or maybe it was you all the time, first evangelizing for WP7, nor for W8.
Mislead
Here I was thinking the study was done on iThing users...
Re: Hype
Come on Dave, you'll upset the baristas. They are all ready to spend their hard earned tips on the brand new shiny, and here you are calling them sheep... They aren't sheep, they are "creative"!
I'm so glad
That canonical's idiotic decisions like disabling hibernate, on 12.04 and the ham-fisted forum censure by one of the ubuntu forum admins finally pushed me to drop kubuntu and try arch linux. At least there people won't censure your posts if you try to make it easier using a closed source driver, and stupid decisions won't be taken to remove features because some users might be 'tards.
Metro myths
Amazing how almost every comentard keeps spreading some metro myths. Like the one of its great design (best described as designed by fischer price, garish and flat), or the one of its "great usability", when the tiles are reduced functionality (and reduced usability) copies of android widgets, and at least in WP7.5 metro is marred by huge usability problems, supposed to be solved in WP8 - for which there is no upgrade path from WP7. While it seems that most WP7.5 owners (the installed user base for metro) suffer from stockholm syndrome, the global population has kept away from it, and will probably keep away from its desktop version. So why keep repeating the myth that metro is great on a phone? It is a huge failure, and it has yet to be seen if it will be any better with windows 8/WP8.
Another "myth" that all softies are now repeating is of the pretended invasion of the reg (and slashdot) by android supporters, when in fact it has been a huge invasion by msft supporters (and also some fanboi invasion in a smaller scale) with several accounts identified in slashdot as waggener erdstrom sock puppets. I know I will get downvoted a lot by saying this, and also probably denounced by Jim...
Posted in Ten budget inkjet printers
Re: Only use Epson if...
I gave up on Canon Pixma when my MP610 stopped printing black. I've since dismantled the beast, cleaned the feed tubes, pads, etc., but it won't print black. Seems like the only fix is a new print head, which costs more than the stupid printer.
Re: Why bother ?
I don't know about him, but here are some of mine:
AdAway, Titanium Backup, Angry Birds space, HD Widgets or BeWeather, a good dropbox or box client that can sync my photos automatically (skydrive doesn't cut it, too cumbersome to work with linux), google plus, fring or nimbuzz, a good voip app, a decent gmail client, etc...
Re: Metro is awful for touch
I'm not saying that metro is terrible only because of the keyboard. For me it is crap because even with a new WP7.5 I end up using my old Nexus One a thousand times more, and every time I force myself to use the lumia I end by givinp up in disgust. It feels limited, unfinished, and aimed at a public that would be happy with featurephones.
Touch twice to place the cursor? Never worked for me. One touch or double touch always selects the damn word. And the cursor showing above in touch and hold is an interesting gimmick - but doesn't help at all, at least it doesn't help me. I still can't see the word beneath my finger. At least in Android, as I place the cursor with a single touch I can aim first, if I place the cursor wrong I aim a bit to the side and it is in the right place. With the WP7 keyboard I can't do that. And don't get me started on trying to use it if you regularly type in two or more languages...
I admit the boring tiles are easy to touch, but so are the icons in my android.
