Posts by BigAndos 367 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2012
I love how the comments section for any article related to either Apple or Android immediately degenerates into a fandroid vs fanboi flame war. I have an iPhone and a nexus 7. I like both of them, they are both well engineered and easy to use pieces of kit. Am I allowed to make comments on these articles?
Amazing... all this expertise and effort being thrown at solving the problem of, as the headline says, storing old photos on Facebook! All so we can upload an unlimited amount of junk and FB can keep selling access to us to advertisers? Couldn't we divert some of these engineering minds to something slightly more useful like, I don't know, renewable energy?
No icon as I can't find one for "prematurely miserable old git"
I've always been frustrated with the grass is always greener problem when choosing a console. Two generations, I bought an Xbox. Then I decided the PS2 had better games so bought one of those. Then I bought a Wii! I'm better at not wasting all my money these days so I've resolved the problem by not buying consoles anymore.
If Steam play this right and get the major studios on board then consoles may become commodity hardware. That would remove the dilemma for indecisive types like me. Nintendo, for example, would be well advised to refocus on developing games rather than hardware given disappointing Wii U sales. Sure it is a massive leap from where we are today, but I for one would be very excited about a well supported hardware neutral console gaming platform.
I had a Blackberry from 2008 until 2011, an 8900 I think it was. When I first got it (from work) I thought it was quite a nice piece of kit. I cancelled the personal phone I had at the time and loved it.
Then Blackberry app world came along. "Brilliant!" I thought. But then, every time apps needed updating you had to update them one at a time. Each individual update required rebooting the device, which for a hard reboot took several minutes. That mean if you had 10 apps installed the best part of an hour could be wasted!
Then there were all the issues which required me to pull the battery out and do a hard reboot, e.g. menu items disappearing or text becoming corrupted. Even a replacement device didn't resolve those.
To be fair, this was a few years ago so it was an older version of BB OS (can't remember which). However, my girlfriend has a BB7 device and still has a lot of similar problems. When I tried out my friend's iPhone 4 I was blown away by the comparative ease of use and stability. I bought one and haven't looked back, although I accept Android has caught up or even overtaken iOS!
The moral of the story is, if Blackberry had put more effort into usability and stability with earlier versions of BB OS they possibly wouldn't have lost me as a customer. And, I assume, many other people too!
How exactly will releasing BBM on android and iOS make them money? It might shore up BBM user numbers but I always say this as a service to help sell Blackberry phones as I don't believe it is directly monetised? Don't they have more pressing concerns - i.e. getting people to buy their handsets?
Oh yeah I did the same, I played the death out of that demo until I was eventually able to go buy it myself when I turned 18! I still have the disk at home, might have to fire it up this evening. I still remember being almost overwhelmed with the amount of freedom.
Even in the newer ones like san andreas, I still tend to spend most of my time exploring and playing around rather than doing the missions.
This would be useful for me at work. We have encryption on our machines that will automatically encrypt any drive plugged into the USB ports. Hence I can't charge my iPhone from USB as the internal disk would get encrypted and unusable, a few people have had phones bricked from doing this. This would save me having to carry my mains charger with me!
Pretty happy with it in general. Setting it up was a piece of cake, far easier than an early android tablet I owned and gave up on a few years ago (Viewsonic Gtablet). It runs like greased lightning and the screen is spectacular. It is very satisfying to use, quick and responsive.
In bad points, I struggle with the touchscreen occasionally but that could just be because I'm not used to the tablet form factor yet. I've also had a couple of crashes in chrome. Once it started updating Chrome unbidden while I was surfing the web and it just booted me out back to the homescreen with no warning. I also tried to post this review from it and Chrome crashed when I hit submit! Also, still not the same range of tablet specific apps that iOS has but this will improve.
All in all, for over £100 less than an iPad mini it really is hard to argue with. I just hope the stability and touch screen issues are temporary!
Yeah! Everytime El Reg publish a review of a new laptop with (groan) a 1366 x 768 screen scores of us comment bemoaning it, same on any tech review site. Surely manufacturers don't need a market research genius to point this out?
It always annoys me how complicated it is to pay for wifi, I'd obviously prefer if it was free but at least make it simple to sign up and pay for it. I'm reluctant about giving out my personal information given the number of security breaches we see these days, especially if is to a wifi provider I haven't heard of.
What about simpler options like pay by SMS where the only personal details it would need is a mobile number to send a verification text? Even The Cloud wants personal information from you despite it being free.
(Although, PROTIP: The Cloud doesn't need you to confirm the email or details you supply. As it is owned by BSkyB I signed up as Rupert Murdoch).
I moved from Three to Vodafone a while ago as I can got a discount through my old company. However, Vodafone have been terrible value for money. Their network is horrendously overloaded throughout London and they are really stingy with bandwidth caps. I get 500MB a month on a £36 a month contract! As soon as it comes up I think I'll go back to Three. The other operators seem to regard data as an inconvenience.
Maybe Nintendo should follow the Sega route and give up on hardware. I could see a huge market for DS quality games on iOS or Android. I would happily pay £15 for something the quality of Professor Layton, Pokemon or Advance Wars on my phone.
I rarely play on my DS anymore as I can never be bothered to carry it around, so a 3DS never appealed to me. I enjoyed my Wii for a while, but got a bit bored of the limited types of games being promoted so a Wii U never appealed either.
For me, this would be a complete non-story if only film & tv downloads were more competitively priced. I would switch to buying films online and give up on disks altogether, but iTunes still charge way too much for downloads and I haven't found a good alternative! It can be £25 for a series when you can buy the dvd boxset for £10 or less online.
Netflix has a lot of stuff but not everything, but I don't like the idea of not owning content in case they go bankrupt etc. Blinkbox seems worth looking at for a wider range of new content, but when you can buy a film on a physical disk outright for £5 in Tesco it is hard to justify paying rental fees. They also don't seem to be economical if you want to watch a long TV series.
Amen! I've got a Dell Latitude E6320 and yes it has the same old 1366 x 768 line display these laptops have had for donkey's years. I normally work on customer site so am stuck on this piddly little display only able to see half a page of a word doc at a time unless I zoom out to unreadable proportions. The few times I'm back at base and can dock it to two 19 inch monitors is blissful, I swear my productivity trebles.
I have an Asus Zenbook at home which has a 1600x900 display. That is much more like it but 900 isn't *quite* enough. I wish manufacturers would start competing on resolution, they would probably kickstart stagnant or shrinking sales.
You're right there! I recently got hit by nostalgia and decided to spend a spare evening setting up a Windows 3.11 installation in Virtual Box. I managed to install DOS and then 3.11, then came time to set up the peripherals. I installed the CD rom driver from a virtual floppy disc image, added to config.sys and autoexec.bat and then rebooted. It loads the driver and then hangs on the MSDOS screen!
Whatever else Windows 7 or 8 may have problems with, at least they (more or less) sorted out driver installation!
I love how the market whips itself up into an orgy of over-excitement and expectation, and then it is Samsung who has to pay the price when they are brought back down to reality...
take Apple's ridiculously overvalued share price at one point as a prime example. Despite being an very successful company with an incredibly healthy balance sheet, Wall Street just expects more and more so pumps up expectations.
I would like to personally volunteer my services to Microsoft . I will be happy to completely balls-up Windows 9, but I will only charge $12,000,000. I think this represents exceptional value for money. Some of my ideas include:
- A new "button roulette" replacing the start button. Enjoy a 1 in 20 chance pressing start will format your hard disk, adding a little excitment to your work day.
- Increase the alignment between the desktop and mobile sides of the OS by supporting a maximum monitor size of 10 inches
- Make it so that every 10th keystroke has to be entered via touchscreen. Not using a "touch-enabled" device? Better get on board quick!
Yes! I recently went back to "build my own" for this very reason. I want a machine with a decent amount of ram and a discrete graphics card. Amazing how few pc makers will offer you these options without bolting on a load of fluff like a garish case and bloatware. Or, of course, charging the Earth for it!
Is this the beginning of smartphones reaching "feature maturity" like PC's have? This is my clumsy term for the fact that PC's reached a state a few years ago where the hardware could handle everything the average user wants to do so upgrading gives minimal value.
I have an iPhone 4S, I would like to replace it with a Galaxy S4 or HTC One when the contract runs out. However, if I'm brutally honest the 4S does everything I could possibly want out of a Smartphone so think I'll switch to a sim only plan and wait a while. A bigger screen would be nice, and so would better battery life but not worth shelling out hundreds for a new phone.
My Samsung TV is five years old and going strong. My previous TV was also Samsung and that one lasted 18 years! My Samsung blu-ray player a bit flaky though. It will periodically turn itself off and on for no reason, and a couple of times the interface has changed itself to Korean which can only be resolved with a good old "power cycle". I think any manufacturer has good days and bad days!
Try using Vodafone's 3G network anywhere in central london during the working week! I'm normally lucky if I can load a mobile optimised web page. I would be perfectly happy with 3G for mobile use if they sorted out the backhaul in congested areas. Also, they are exceedingly stingy with data allowances (probably as a consequence of limited capacity). Fix those first please!
It staggers me how many security holes pop up in Adobe Reader. It has one function: Display PDFs on the screen and maybe print them if you want to. If Adobe stripped away all the bloat they surround it with then would most of those disappear?
(PS - I know alternatives like Foxit exist. If only my company's IT department would let us install them...)
I was with O2 for three years. The connect was steady as a rock, the support team was great but the speed... I was lucky to get 2.5M in the evening. This in central London less than half a mile from the exchange. I was sad to leave them, but when I could barely stream SD iPlayer and HD was an impossible dream I decided to move on. I would definitely be leaving now from what I've heard about Sky's service.
Slight digression, but after O2 I signed up for BT infinity... and haven't looked back. I actually get the advertised speed of 40M which I don't think has ever happened with any provider. The connection has been very stable over a year at two different addresses.
Not all rosy however, BT's customer services are a confusing mess. It took them three attempts to place my home move order - on the final attempt I had to speak to four different people but they did give me three months free service to apologise for making such a meal of it!
I agree. I think my iPhone 4S does everything I could ever reasonably need of a smart phone. However, I would just like better battery life and network reception. Those kind of features are now the differentiator for me, I may well jump the fence to Samsung when my contract is up.
I agree, the mail and calendar apps fulfill their basic purposes just fine. The main thing I'd like to see is an active standby screen. Instead of just notifications and the time, it would be good to pin things like train departures and transport status so you can check them out easily!
Same here, I've worked in several locations across central london over the past five years: Southwark, Canary wharf and Bank. In each place I get a decent Vodafone 3G signal (3+ bars) but the data speed is so slow it is unusable. It magically picks up early in the morning or late in the evening, so yes skimping on capacity like mad!
I don't like the fact they try and push you into a buying their suresignal box when you complain about dodgy reception in area, essentially trying to get you to pay to locally upgrade their network for them! I get no signal (nothing at all, never mind slow data) at my girlfriend's house which is in zone 2 for crying out loud.
I also don't like the fact that when my phone got stolen, they took the opportunity to halve my data allowance to 500MB when I bought a replacement phone for the same contract price.
Yeah I remember when I signed up with VM in 2008, my equipment came but they forgot to put the smart card in. I called up their unhelpfuldesk and the smart card not being in the box clearly wasn't in the script so the agent acused me of lying, told me to look properly and said he'd call me back. He never called back so I had to call again the next day.
Once I actually had a replacement card, and they provisioned it (which inexplicably took 5 days) the service was very good. The connection was a solid 10MB/sec and never dipped unless I broke their "traffic management policy". They just need some better trained call centre staff and (dare I say it) to invest in cabling new areas.
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