I see a lot more visibility/marketing of their stuff when I'm in India

Nothing to do with there being no Apple phone in the medium and low price range? In India that's not exactly a recipe for success (Yes, I know there are rich Indians, but far fewer than equally rich Americans).

The cheapest Lumia in the UK is now being priced to compete with the cheapest old Blackberry model. That's one way to get market share.

Re: desktop

I wasn't aware that SQL Studio was a legacy application, but I await with interest the Modern UI version, since the Azure Web version is OK if you haven't actually got to do any work.

Re: While they boast

Well, yes, the story appears to be bogus and I have sent a correction to El Reg. It looks like someone at the Guardian was trolled. Who by, they're not saying. But they do carry awfully big ads for a well known fruit vendor.

Re: Lithium ion battery

Real Dick Tracy - it will fire the thermally disassembling battery in the direction of your choice.

Re: I suspect, based on other sources

Why not simply agree to use a file system which is not Redmond's profit centre? If Android went with an Ext variant then before long it would be Microsoft feeling the pain of people unable to open their SD cards on Windows.

No, I overstated it I agree, it is mainly about selling cloud services, but getting into the secure market may well explain why models like the Lumia 920 do not have an SD slot, but other cheaper models do.

Re: I suspect, based on other sources

Because with Balance the corporate may not have any control over your camera. Remember this was not a security assessment of BB 10, it was specifically a security assessment of BB10 with Balance. If MI5 can't stop its operatives from using the camera to save stuff to the red zone, it will fail. If they can't encrypt your micro-SD card so you cannot read it out of the phone, it will fail.

The real root problem for our beloved Government departments and the like is that the whole idea of mobile phones is that they have become tiny computers optimised for receiving and sending data on a huge range of bands from audio through various radio frequencies all the way to optical, and that is inherently a very bad basis for limiting people's ability to shift data around.

Re: Bring your own Blackberry to work?

Or - you're a perfectly normal teenager who got one for Christmas with a £7 or £10 a month contract, can send unlimited messages to friends, and know your parents can't afford £600 up front or £43 a month for an iPhone?

Or you're someone who sends a lot of messages and really cannot get on with glass keyboards.

Much of the Apple or big screen Android owner mockery is directed purely at people with less money than they have.

Tail fins

I love the smell of bad analogies in the morning.

Those tail fins reduced fuel consumption by 15% or so. GM let people think they were cosmetic because the principle on which they worked was thought not to be patentable. Modern aerodynamic car design has reduced them to those little edges across the back.

But you are right - fins saved GM from the need to design more efficient engines right through the 50s.

The irony kills you

You're probably too young to remember a company that nearly went bust because of its old fashioned OS and went on to success with a new POSIX compliant one despite a small market share.

Mac OS 9

Mac OS X

BlackBerry has paid homage to Apple's reinvention by numbering their new OS 10.

Re: It's like the bike

No, the analogy is not apt. It's true I could ride a 1912 bicycle, but if I tried to do it in traffic on a wet day I would probably kill myself. The cyclist from 1912 wouldn't have a clue about the derailleur gears of a modern bike. They take some getting used to. Bicycles have different UIs - twist gear changes, gear levers on handlebars or stem, pedals with or without clips, coaster or lever rear brakes - that are pretty significant and have a learning curve. The differences between your 1912 bicycle and a 2012 one must be about is big as the difference between phone operating systems, given the actual number of controls involved.

When you say "Bikes still look the same" I can say "A phone is still basically a box with a microphone at one end, a loudspeaker at the other and some sort of user interface in between". This is as true of my original brick phone as it is of an iPhone. The weight ratio is a bit bigger than that of that 1912 bike to my Dahon, but the principle is exactly the same.

Re: The real question is...

Those who would overturn the throne - Huawei and Lenovo.

Discretion - obviously not Facebook or Twitter.

If you're a Confucian, the buy and sell instructions write themselves.

Scary stuff. But I bet it still can't find a decent restaurant in, say, Daventry.

Re: It's like the bike

If you think bicycles haven't changed in a hundred years, you don't know much about bicycles. A 1912 bicycle would today be laughably slow, uncomfortable, expensive and unsafe. I forget when brakes started to work in the wet and gear changing became reliable, but it was in my lifetime. As was the end of rust and tyres with some sort of grip on wet roads.

" Most of its one-time advantages are now commodity features"

This is rather the point. Technically the iPhone is pretty impressive. It squeezes an awful lot of clever stuff into a very small box, and that makes it quite expensive. (I imagine, for instance, that the aluminium case is needed for heat dissipation and to prevent hotspots, whereas the Galaxy range can get rid of a lot of heat through their large glass surfaces).

The problem starts when people don't care about things being the smallest any more, at least, not to the extent of paying £800 for a non-expandable mobile computer with 64G of Flash. If the competition is expandable, cheap to repair and cheaper to buy, the temptation to put up with an extra 20g for a saving of a couple of hundred £ starts to have its effect.

Re: Dual Use Item?

You've been reading that review of the Galaxy S4, haven't you?

I am surprised that the article seems to emphasise vibration when as we all know the real BlackBerry characteristic is das Blinkenlicht. The PlayBook has it, but no vibration.

Re: Really ....

I do wonder how many "apps" are really for the benefit of the user, and how many have data collection and advertising as their principal objective.

Those of us who can remember the early days of the IBM PC will recall just how much junk there was out there, and how few programs there were for the Mac by comparison. Yet in those days the Mac was a far more useful tool. I do wonder if we are just going through a repeat and before long most of the apps will start to disappear as the income drops below development cost.

BlackBerry still haven't fixed navigation, which is important, but the communications stuff looks good and the web browser is impressive. Give me a decent remote access toolkit, a GPS that knows about Ordnance Survey references, and the utilities from Maemo/Meego and really you can stuff Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp and the like into a burlap sack and drown them in a spent fuel pool at Fukushima and I won't even be bothered to watch the video.

run screaming from our only real hope of freedom from fossil fuel.

For maximum irony they should all run screaming to Cornwall, which has little industry, no nuclear plants, and is more radioactive than much of the exclusion zone around Fukushima.

Re: Thorium...slight correction

I can't resist adding that in a previous job, after I had persuaded the "industrial chemist" to pursue alternative career opportunities, I found he had squirreled away a cupboard full of exotica. Including a kilo jar of thorium oxide. These had all been bought in the days before you had to fill in forms about this kind of stuff.

It "only" cost £4000 to get rid of it, making it worth even less than Tim's - i.e. -$6500 a kilo rather than -$5000.

Re: 2 points

No, he just assumes that the BlackBerry faithful - and they tend to be very faithful - will spread his words around other markets.

They're sponsoring Mercedes F1. Given that in the US they won't know what that means, it tells you (a) what countries he's interested in and (b) the development platform to which they would like to contribute. Even if Lewis Hamilton may be going to have to spend a lot of time learning not to say "my iPhone".

Re: The real question is...

Easily understood.

Mountain: Apple

Earth: Chinese industry.

"Oppressors are violently seizing power" - the US is trying to dominate China.

This hexagram is clearly telling you that China is going to develop its own design, sales and marketing so that they will ultimately compete with and overthrow Apple.

So what were the moving lines? We need to know so we can predict the outcome and decide where to put our pension funds.

The Yi Ying. No scientific basis whatsoever but still a lot more reliable than stock market analysts.

Curiously both Tizen and Android both use the Linux kernel

AFAIK all the latest architectures with the sole exception of Windows are either POSIX compliant or derived from a POSIX compliant OS. Android, Tizen, BB OS 10, iOS, Firefox OS, even dead webOS and Meego. It goes with the territory.

mainly "big screen+heavy skinning"

In fact, the Samsung approach versus Apple seems to be:

Light weight

Big screens

Replaceable batteries

AMOLED (which may give their products some degree of built in obsolescence)

Cheaper

UI that could switch the underlying OS without 90% of users noticing.

One of the most interesting things in all of this is the way the Apple people bleat on about "premium feel" (i.e. metal cases) versus "cheap plastic". Functionally, an aluminium case is no better than polycarbonate or glass filled nylon, so when the argument reduces to this level you know someone is losing the plot.

I don't have a dog in this show, I just find it interesting to watch. Unfortunately I doubt anybody will write the definitive study of the Phone Wars in my lifetime, too many potential libel cases involved.

Re: Why Care About The OS?

"You forgot to mention Sony, also more or less universally hated these days by the nerd fraternity"

They invented the idea of putting rootkits on your computer without your permission. As far as I'm concerned that means that I don't buy their products and I don't allow their products to be connected to my network. That's why.

Re: Columbo* time, folks!

I congratulate your wife on her excellent memory.

Re: Scientific Terminology

What's your proposal? Ask the Chinese and the US to put their economies on hold while they clean up their coal power stations, or send loads of squaddies to paint the snow white?

Re: sick of it

There does seem to be a lot of patriotic South Koreans posting on the Internet at the moment, but I suppose it's a change from all the Californians. And the Canadian who must spend his entire waking life trying to boost BlackBerry.

It's a pity we pissed away all our phone makers, isn't it? Designing the processors and the graphics isn't quite the same.

Re: But

My phone does Gbytes a month on wifi, hundreds of Mbytes of data, hundreds of texts and I've never got near my minutes allowance.

I once read an article in Wireless World about how we missed the chance after WW2 to build a data rather than a voice network because the Post Office didn't grasp the opportunity that Colossus, Typex and the like had created. Well, now we've done it. And messaging is just so much less intrusive than voice.

Re: Time

I really should object to these sexist, objectifying headlines, which reinforce IT industry gender stereotypes, but they're part of what makes us British.

Re: Build it and they will come @Thomas Wolfe

Google could not afford to flood the market. Compared to Samsung they are a tiddler. As for forking Android, Apple already forked BSD to make iOS, and it did them no harm. Big enough market share and you can get away with a lot, Windows for instance.

Re: Build it and they will come

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Who made a lot of money from that?