Posts by David Black
50 posts • joined Friday 13th July 2007 00:09 GMT
Live with parents
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't a big driver of the start-up culture of California in the 60s through 00s the garage? Said garage wasn't in their tiny appartments in over-priced cities but generally fairly well to-do suburbs of the burgeoning middle-class parents. No over-40 with kids and much sense would stay in London so surely Shoreditch is the worst possible location. Silicon Surrey might have been a better bet. I seem to remember the pharma companies liked Surrey cause they could pay below London rates and generally pick-up highly qualified female (typically) 2nd wage earners who valued other aspects of work more than the salary. Those folks should have pretty grown and qualified kids now...
But good luck to anyon planning an IT park stretching into the world of NIMBYs that rings the M25 :)
Tax on business is fair
I'm not sure why so many people are so keen on defending Google here. I guess our society has lost its sense of right and wrong and redefined it based on "what you can get away with". Shame really.
But as to the appropriateness of taxing business... it is simply a way of they contributing to the society and paying for the resources of that society that they consume. Health, education, transport, military, police etc. are all provided by centralized government (whether you think that right or wrong, it is the way it is) and must be paid for. Do Google make business profits from the safe, socially stable UK with it's healthy and educated people? If yes then they have a liablility to contribute to the UK public finances at a fair level. Not really that questionable to me, maybe I'm missing something.
I take it all those defending Google's actions here are willing to pay a higher proportion of their earnings in tax to enable Google's behaviour as someone has to pay for our country.
Taxes
Good point well made. I think many more taxpayers will have doubts about supporting an IT industry that has so many promoinent leaders that seem to have issues contributing taxes back into the very society that fueled their growth. We already see a cynacism towards anyone in "banking" that seems to extend to the lowliest branch worker upwards based on the strategies of a few of those at the top of that industry.
Re: round objects
Sorry, I just assumed that most reg readers might understand the concept of an ecosystem around an OS.
You can't and won't find the apps and support for your device that other owners of other OSes will. Things are slow to get to the device and the experience will not be great for a £500 phone and you may regret your choice due to such factors beyond the specifics of the device.
Hope this helps. And I don't work in Marketing but was an Senior Engineering Manager at Nokia until recently.
Re: round objects
Actually, I was just drawing attention to the fact that the world around the device is crappy. It should merit a mention, particularly when it really is the thing that makes a £500 smartphone really worthwhile.
And yes, Linux is a "nearly" OS. I have no bad feelings toward Win Phone or other "nearly" OSes, just giving some feedback that many people may be disappointed with the experience, regardless of the device.
Sure... I just hate the fact the there's no real support in the wider app world for the devices. Just looking at the 20-30ish apps I have on my iphone then I only get 2 in the windows store and about 3 where I get the functionality online. None of my banking stuff, no BBC or Sky to watch the footie when I'm out, no ski tracker, no guitar tuner... just a snapshot of the things I can do with my iphone that I can't do with my Win Phone. There's just so much around the iOS and Android worlds and so much choice that removing it feels like reverting to a featurephone.
I'm not disputing that the OS is "slick", "lasts for hours" or is "funky" but without all the other "stuff" and an engaged world, it just feels like you're always on the outside and missing out.
And for the record, I've never used Instagram in my life and I hate the iphone but love the world that revolves around it.
round objects
I've spent more than enough time (6m+) with it and the lack of an ecosystem is totally shit. Yes it makes a change, like taking a shit in your bed makes a change. It's a "nearly" OS and I'm sure it has its fans like the amstrad machines did back in the speccy vs c64 days.
Can we please have an end to the drivel about "if you'd only tried it..." and "those who use it love it". I did, and I didn't. I own both an iphone and a few android devices and I can say that I don't feel any inclination to return to WP8 ever.
Nice looking device, shame about the ecosystem.
Posted in Review: Nokia Lumia 720
Re: So much fud in the comments
Actually I was thinking that there was a lot of MS astroturf bullshit in the comments. Most people seem to have givien up slating Windows Phone, rather like Windows 8... it's just become part of the landscape. I really had hoped Nokia would do so much more and be let off the leash with Microsoft to make something awesome. But stock Windows Phone with a great nav app just doesn't do it.
The niggles with Wndows Phone are what'll get you in the end... that and an app store that looks like it was supplied by teenage boys who don't get out much. As an overall experience you get used to it, but when you leave and go to Android or iOS, you just feel like you're not a freak anymore and it all just generally feels better. Sorry.
Posted in Ten Windows 8 Ultrabooks
Asus S200 does have 64-bit Win 8 and will do just short of 4h-ish of video viewing on VLC.
Picked it up in the US for $449 from Best Buy and was stunned at the value for money... I was looking for a cheap machine for my daughter but have hung onto it myself and am recomending it to everyone and their dog... consequently the price has been creaping up... was £379 in the UK for the 1.8G i3 model and now it is £420ish... in the space of the last month!
Posted in WTF is... Weightless?
Cyclists
Best use case that I ever heard for this technology was for fitting it to bikes, particularly in urban environments. Get's around the whole numberplate identity issue. Then the small number of cyclists who ride like idots in heavilly populated areas can be held to account.
The same guys also explained how it could make rural/single-carriageway roads MUCH safer as apparently a horrendous amount of the serious accidents are due to dirvers being unaware of other vehicles (oncomming, stopped at junctions, tractors etc.) but they also mentioned it being wearable by rural pedestrians and sheep too... not sure about the sheep bit though, but I think that's cause they'd be wearing the tags anyway to make them traceable.
2009
I see a lot of comments about using Symbian being like going back to 2009 in smartphone terms but I'd just like to understand what exactly is so different about the typical iPhone 5 experience and say the 3GS experience in 2009? Maybe a lift in performance and the improvement in screen (and the wonderful maps) but still it pretty much looks and feels very 2009 on both devices. Maybe I'm missing something.
Re: Err...
Phonebox in Espoo?
Really, who cares. Windows Phone is the Video 2000 of the smartphone race.
Posted in Nokia CEO: No shift from Windows Phone
Re: Tried... bag-o-shite
Yawn, fecking hilarious... but jokes on you spud, you own a Windows Phone.
Your mum loves you, special boy.
Posted in Nokia CEO: No shift from Windows Phone
Re: "...lies with Windows Phone and no other OS."
Old habits die hard? No surprise they still don't know their arse from their elbow.
Nokia always had internal OS competition, it was mostly a strength but when it came time to fight, the internal squabbles and divisions prevented them rallying the most powerful force of mobile developers on the planet and seeing off the challenge of iOS and Android.
The war is over Mr Elop, Nokia lost, now time for you to retreat into your bunker and do the right thing :(
Posted in Nokia CEO: No shift from Windows Phone
Re: Don't fracture your base
Take out redundancy insurance mate, you're going to need it.
Posted in Nokia CEO: No shift from Windows Phone
Tried... bag-o-shite
I gave it 6 months of use and just couldn't stand it's consistent crappyness (from WP7.0 then 7.1 and then 7.5). There's really no compelling reason to use Windows Phone and a great number of reasons not to. So please don't assume that everyone is ignorant and they just need to "try", some of us have and frankly I'd rather "try" being fisted a la 50 Shades of Grey than pick up a Windows Phone for the rest of my life.
Worked for Nokia. Still bitter.
We did
But sadly where 'your' company loses its mind there's only so much you can do. Investors tend to have confidence in anything that smacks of 'leadership' and dissenting voices are only causing trouble. I knew what was in store for and I left on Feb 10 2011... no, no coincidence that it was the day bfeore the MS deal was announced.
Re: Flops mission is complete.
Well you would want to weaken Nokia to make it a takeover target. There is no way in hell that the European regulators (possibly even the Americans either) would have approved the takeover by MS of Nokia in Feb 2011 (when Elop killed Symbian). It would've taken years to clear. Nokia just had too large a market share in too many spaces to let anyone merge with it, it was simply too big to swallow. The Nokia takeover of Symbian was previously defeated by regulators and only just scraped through in 2008/9 buy lots of assurances that the OS would be open sourced.
Elop set about changing that. I suspect that he was more sucessful than he imagined. He had to take Nokia off number one slot for smartphones, done; number one mobile OS, done; and number one all phone vendor, done (just). Now anyone looking to enquire about purchsing Nokia will be seen as a saviour and with the backing of the Finnish government, positively encouraged into a buy-out. To those of us on the inside, this was and still is entirely predictable.
Re: Sir
So true, in my youth I was involved with a group not disimilar to Irving Welsh's train spotters. Always a good upstanding kid, my eyes were opened wide to a world where the law and social norms were ignored and jesus when I actually saw how thin our veneer of lawfulness was, it was scary. And worse still, there's not really a path back into legality once you punch through.
Criminalising routine activity without the active support of the citizens and pro-actively acting against their interests will not end well for our legal and political representatives.
Maybe one simple solution is to never have copyright transfer into the hands of a "rights holder"... the original creator is the only one who can determine what happens with their creation. Preserves the rights of the creator but disempowers the shambolic media monoliths.
Re: Nokia
When MS completes the Nokia takeover, I'm pretty sure you'll see these tablets wearing a "Microsoft by Nokia" brand. The design and colours are straight out the Nokia design book. Also Nokia does have superb supply chain and production capabilities that would be ideal if you were a software maker looking to get into hardware.
Not that I personally like the joint branded products (such as the awful Sony Ericsson) but Nokia has fantastic brand reputation and still comes many notches ahead of Apple in almost every country. However that brand is depreciating fast (cheers Mr Eflop) and in the US was never particularly strong, hence retaining the coupling with the Microsoft brand.
Paris cause all branding is just pointless fluffy shit :)
Re: R&D and payback
The Vertu Ascent was a liquidmetal device back in about 2007 so prior art may be an issue for our fruity friends.
Liquidmetal was easier to work with than your typical alloy frame and the mechnics guys turned things round fast.
Posted in Nokia after the purge: It's so unfair
Sad
Shame, feel sorry for the thousands of very talented people losing their jobs due to totally useless management.
Anyone holding shares now is nuts.
Re: Nokia
don't worry about providing proof, evidence etc. a libelous claim is just grand
added the troll icon for you
Re: Elop has already halved the time it takes for Nokia to make a smartphone
I know why it grates you... it's because you know the failure was so avoidable. It grates all of us who watched the parent smother the life out of the child :(
Eflop
Couple of significant points being bundled together there incorrectly:
"The shareholders thank Elop for his important work for stablising Nokia (the demand for Symbian in the past 12 months speaks for itself)"
Err, Elop was the massive ahole that sank Nokia's most profitable division overnight... expecting the shareholders to be thankful is like expecting my missus to be thankful cause I've stopped shagging the next door neighbour.
"Elop has already halved the time it takes for Nokia to make a smartphone, simply by shifting to Windows."
And I can halve my bodywieght by chopping my legs off... not quiet the same as a diet. Nokia now produce non-differentiated, run-of-the-mill devices that clone everyone elses, even the HW production has been shifted out of the proven centres into clone-land.
Nokia has failed, the only mystery is why the remaining shareholders are still in the game at $3 a share. They'd be much better advised getting out now, there is no "climb-back". And the idea that a "crack" Windows Phone team exists in Nokia implies that someone is smoking crack. The value in Nokia is as a global trusted brand and a market share of 50+% in emerging nations, mostly on great featurephones. Just cause Nokia never figured out how to make this into a massive business doesn't mean someone else won't.
Shame, but even £800 won't get you much Ultrabook
I love ultralight laptops and have an Lenovo X301 for my more powerful PC chores (thanks to redundancy) and an old 1st gen macbook air for around the house surfing and mailing (my daughter pinched my tablet) and completely agree that the lightness, good battery life and form factor make a compelling offering.
When the ultrabooks launched, I was really, really excited, finally a laptop with some serious grunt that won't give me a hernia and lasts more than 30mins between charges. Then I tried buying one... all the entry level £800ish machines have some significant shortcoming, crappy screen size/quality, crappy drive spec, poor design etc. You really are ponying up in the £1,100 region for a proper bells and whistles machine that really does tick all the boxes. That's way too much and will never break that market. They are lovely machines but compromise a little on some of the ultrabook elements and you can get a "traditional" laptop that is a 90% ultrabook-like for £500.
Whomever thought of the price point for the ultrabooks should be taken out and educated on market economics.
Re: Is it me?
Having struck pedestrians in my 20 years on the road, I can assure you that every legal instrument under the sun is against the driver. In one case, the drunk girl actually jumped onto the bonnet of my car then fell on the ground (I had stopped by this time) and though she was totally uninjured, I got to pay for the ambulance that someone else called. Another time, a young girl ran across the road (with headphones and not looking) and actually struck the side of my car and broke her legs under my back wheel. There was no way it was my fault or anything and yet I got to pick up her £12,000 bill and had my car insurance hiked by 50% for 5 years! Because motorists are insured, you'll alwys be found partially liable :(
I only wish there was a compulsory insurance for cyclists and pedestrians, might level things a little.
Cameron is just doing a Ratner
Now I know the Tories want to keep the political machine running and ensure that no one forgets that "We are in an economic mess" unusally followed by "left by the last Labour government". Now without taking on the factual substance of the statement, can nobody see that if you have an entire government just constantly restating what a mess we're in, we'll never get out. Just stop saying it. We've heard it now. Well done, you're not Labour, they were bad, thanks. Just say something positive and provide a direction for moving our country forward and stop talking it down.
Technicallity really
I suspect that a lot of this is just down to the definition of featurephone and smartphone. The crucial difference is in the ability to load your own apps which the operators largely prohibited until recently. Almost of of their "featurephones" are based on smartphone OSes (Symbian, Linux/Andriod etc.) with the app loading turned off. These featurephones are outstanding, particularly for data connectivity and I'd suspect that if there was a similar offering available in the rest of the world over the past 5 years, our "smartphone" market would be tiny.
Windows Phone?
As a former HTC Windows Phone user, I can honestly say that the only REALLY well done part was it's Facebook integration. Great for a personal phone but on my business device, it wasn't really great during meetings getting updates telling me that "Scott has just had his scrotum pierced".
How much?
Surely everything in Nokia has a price tag on it now before the firesale begins, how much for a font? Couple of grand? Maybe they could just go back to making really tight nearly indestructable phones, I'm sure there's money in that?
Profiting from victims
Yeah cause someone should profit from the ability to make an emergency call when you've just been beaten to within an inch of your life. Trolls and scum in one.
Re: Infighting killed the beast
True, the picture is always fairly complicated. But I wouldn't say that it wasn't foreseeable to have to plan a different path on the UI & app dev direction. Actually "Hitchcock" and "Orbit" were projects leading that way that got killed.
I loved Qt and enjoyed my time in Oslo with some great folks though I did warn them of their fate once they got absorbed into the beast. Actually some of the mistakes that Nokia made with the Qt acquisition are what made them f$%k up the Symbian takeover so royally. They hated the independence of Qt and their small company ethos which they alllowed to persist and felt that Qt didn't really care about delivering value for Nokia. So those lessons meant that when they acquired Symbian, they came in with fists of iron and asimilate everyone to Nokia immediately. Actually if they'd preserved Symbian's independence and let the strengths of the comapny come through, they would naturally have aligned with Qt and fixed Nokia anyway.
Farewell faithful hound
Nokia actually had a strategy for surviving the "turnaround" and it basically involved pitching Symbian to the low/mid-range (and bringing competitive features and an ecosystem with it), cannibalizing the featurephone market of S40 and then bringing through Meego on the high-end. They could have maintained this approach and inserted Win Phone, purely targeted at their non-existant US market, possibly offering limited variants in other limited territories until Win Phone matured and could oust Symbian from the mid-range then laterly the low-end. This could all have happened without much pain or sorrow over a 2-3 year timescale.
Nope, Stephen burned the platform that was generating 93% of the company profit. That was his decision alone. It was primarilly motivated by overwhelming negativity to Nokia and Symbian in particular in North America who had just woken to the age of the smartphone about 10 years after everyone else. As the management of Nokia became physically more North American, their viewpoint directed everything. No one seemed capable of noticing that North America was (unfortunately) miniscule for Nokia (0.7% of revenue) and that really they needed to manage a European company that was storming Asia... even if it was losing ground.
Short, sharp shock better than managed transition... well only if it doesn't kill the patient. Revenues and profits would've declined savagely in the managed transition but Nokia would still be alive in 2 years time. At this rate, the brand will be alive but nothing that is "Nokia" will survive til Christmas this year.
bezels
Er, so you can hold them without touching/obscuring the screen area. On a phone you can rest it in the palm of one hand but a tablet needs gripped.
Re: Infighting killed the beast
LOL, always suspected the Maemo/Meego folks really did smoke crack but thanks for proving the point about the pathetic infighting. Porting Qt to Symbian as a serious effort in 2008/9 would've yielded results by early 2010 and just because it would've been hard to do, doesn't mean that wasn't the right thing to do. As you are no doubt aware, most of the trash in "Symbian" was the result of S60 UI, taking the UI and App layers off and building from scratch would've worked but the compatibility hit was the killer. Oh yeah, thanks for the N97 horror relived... that was truly dire.
Bonuses when business isn't doing well... er, Symbian kept Noka afloat and making profit. As Symbian declined where did Nokia's profit go? The platform was dying but remember that a dying platform can have a VERY long slow death (anyone know how Series 40 is doing when it was described by a former CEO as end-of-life in 2005?) Symbian at least would've given Nokia options for producing other form factors than touch-slab for the mid/low-end. Why did Elop need to shoot anything? Nature takes care of the weak.
Not bitter, I did very well out of the disaster, just sad to have lost a great European (more so British) OS once again.
Infighting killed the beast
Saw first-hand the shambles of Nokia from 2007 and it wasn't pretty. Crazy, slow decision making and constantly shifting objectives. Hopeless.
Qt on Symbian should've been the path out and viable in 2009. But the Qt team were wedded to their Maemo/Meego wet dream and treated their work for Symbian like colonic irrigation. At the same time the Symbian team were burning roadmaps of technology support and instead splitting codelines to create an illusion of open-source. Chaos. My personal fave was punishing all the Symbian developers for a 12 week dealy to N8 shipment by canceling all bonuses. Yet, the 13 month delayed Meego N900 team got full bonus and then another top-up to persuade them to deliver something "soon"... couldn't make it up.
Finally a decent strategy emerged in 2010 to move Symbian to the low and mid range, taking its advantages of running on limited hardware and then adding a great UI and the superb Qt app development framework. This was just begining to gain traction and had superb potential to buy Nokia some transition time until it found a new high-end. Then along came Elop and burned the platform, rather like moving into a new house, deciding you don't like the living room so setting fire to it. It was an ignorant, pig-headed decision.
Doomed. And Windows Phone... why oh why? I believe the 18 month old N8 still outsells all the Lumia devices combined. Who'd buy a device to be a beta tester of a sub-standard OS for 18 months and then be rewarded by being told that it's not upgradable to the next release???
DOOOOOOOMED
Sooooooooooo lame, was always going to come to this the crappy Nokia and MS QA combine to give a fail as bad as the grip of death... guess they're just lucky nobody cares about Nokia in the US.
Good luck Nokia purchasers, on a 2-year deal, you may even get a decent OS by the end (though I wouldn't bet on it).
Sad, used to love Nokia
Like the look of this, particualrly the nice large 4.3" screen in white but having used WinPho 7.5 for six months, I could never bring myself to go back. Like folks have said it's the small, minor shit that kills you in every day use. None of them is spectactularly bad (like clicking mute on the screen doesn't mute the microphone when headphones are plugged in) but together they just annoy the hell out of you every day. And I think the waste of screen real estate by the UI is criminal, and even worse is the crappy implementation of portrait/landscape switching that doesn't work more than half the time. Another 18 months and WinPho might be quite good, not sure if that's too far for Nokia though and I certainly won't be paying £36 per month to do their beta testing for them :(
It's all abouth the money, money, money
At sub £400 this would fly off the shelves, probably even very strong sales up to about £500 but at £1200, no way. Niche product, nice but niche. Also I suspect a lot of people wouldn't take Win 8/Metro even if all other tablets killed their first born... supposed to be cool but why does the UI look like the train ticket purchasing machines in stations?
Posted in Carmageddon
Re: Bloody EMI!
Also blocked in the US... I wonder what region it's not blocked in???
Re: Re: Who owns the data?
Er, Class Actions are possible in the UK, I was part of one against RBS for misselling. The only difference is that in the UK, the "Class" of claimants has to form itself and each has to opt-in. In the US a body (government, State or even big law firms) can take action on behalf of the group without having to identify all claimants. MAYBE before you flame, you could check Wikipedia...
And there goes the build quality
Sadly about the only thing that still distinguished Nokia was solid build quality of the hardware and they are now chucking that away. Me-to software and me-to hardware... not for me any more I'm afraid :(
Posted in Nokia sheds light on latest Lumia
Fugly
Yep, it's not a looker.
Sadly just gave up on my WinPho last week and after 4 years of total resistance swapped to an iPhone 4S. I hate Apple with every once of my flesh, but I hate a device that irritates the hell out of my daily life much more.
I loved Nokia (owned 17 Nokia phones since my first in 1993) and even after the slightly harsh killing of Symbian, I gave WinPho a chance. Total failure. It's not good and every day you love it less and less :( I can't think that any sane WinPho user with more than 3 months experience of the device would be posting anything favourable on here... I'm very suspicious of the significant pro WinPho comments that appear from "device owners" that don't even make 1% market share.
And in response to the earlier comments, the app store is truly pathetic (more apparent due tothe lack of flash in the browser) with even stuff like BBC iPlayer not there!!! Android has too much junk cluttering up the good but MS has only the junk.
Farewell Nokia, I don't think we'll be seeing you round the land of smartphone again. Shame as the N8 I had still pisses all over the Lumia and makes my iPhone 4S look weak (god that N8 camera is to die for).
Posted in HTC Radar WinPho 7.5 smartphone
Sadly I don't like it. It really is a lame design for a phone and so much of it lacks polish.
Tethering... er, it lacks hardware support but Mango is great. Well, being honest I'm a bit of a 'if it works it works' on this. It doesn't work on my device and that's incredible given that every device (mostly Nokia) I've owned for the past 12 years supports tethering in some form.
Ring/Vibrate... all good here. Maybe you are lucky but personally I like to set my phone to silent and have it beep once then vibrate persistently until answered. Not complicated but I can't do it. The vibrate has it's own setting (ie vibrate once for a reminder) that isn't mine to control.
Keyboard... really good actually. Again, how many other onscreen keyboards have you used. I type at an fairly quick rate and the flashing of the last letter is an annoying distraction (likely to induce fitting in some I'd guess) and the autocorrect poor. I'd say it has improved nicely in Mango, even the portrait mode, but still it's not on a par with Swype or the iPhone and much worse for single hand input.
USB... Zune is great. Don't mind Zune myself but I really would like the option of loading an MP3 onto my phone when at a friend's house without doing a 15 minute install and reboot of their machine to support my device. Why no mass storage mode? Also it does limit the ability to use other nicer music management software than Zune.
Portrait./landscape... all great. Again, seriously. You really think it is fine that your phone choses the orientation for you. This is just lame software implementation. Why is the homescreen only portrait? My phone even has a kickstand to keep it nicely in landscape but yet when I swap between videos I'm dumped into a portrait world with words half split across the top of the screen. It is just a lazy software implementation. I'm sure it boosts performance and speed, but from a user perspective, it is lame.
Web browser... everything works fine. Well except anything with flash or even more than slightly complicated javascript. I'm not some sort of testing scumbag, I just do some things on the move that I've been able to do with my other devices for years. Check my online banking... fail. Look for a movie in the area... fail. Watch a trailer for the movie... fail (well pass with the HTC pluggin, but still!). Listen to the BBC radio... fail. Watch some football highlights... fail. Read the Reg on the toilet... pass.
So what other issues...
- battery life is terrible and some apps really chew it (listen to music for 4 hours and you're out).
- screen lock activates on every screen timeout meaning you have to type a code every few minutes... sadly my corporate email requires the lock on, but lock and screen timeout should be different
- mute doesn't mute the microphone with headphones plugged in... prob more of a bug than design but massively annoying for making conf calls on trains etc.
-email client pulls email 24/7 with no control of 'sleep' times... gotta love those Americans emailing you viagra offers at 3am... luckily your phone wakes you up to tell you, don't miss out :)
- signal indicator is pretty much absent for no reason... there's space there for icons, they just don't show them... weird design choice.
- no receipts for texts or other messages to confirm delivery... an SMS funtion available since er, 1991
- messy (or lovely) social integration doesn't always give you the right number when you try to call... prob a design choice that I could get used to but really some of my friends have 4 or 5 numbers, I know which to call them on at different times, why does my phone assume it can choose the default and always dial just that?
- the pointless search button... just why when you have 7 buttons on a device would you devote one of them to search? It's an 8 gig device and I know what's on there (it is my phone) why would I search it? And if you're just doing a web search, why not just give me my browser?
- multitasking... the most disappointing fail in Mango, this is a pretty lame effort
- app store... laughable selection of crud, no iplayer bunch of other useless crap and not very navigable
I really can go on. I don't doubt than in a couple of years it'll be amazing when the edges are polished but why would anyone give it a couple of years. Sadly my contract has me for 20 more months of this so I guess I'll see...
Posted in HTC Radar WinPho 7.5 smartphone
Seriously... WinPho7.5 is major lame
As a 5 year Symbian vet, I had to change my work handset lately and went with the HTC HD7 (effectively the same devive without front camera). I couldn't face BlackBerry and the extra cost (paid by me!) to go with an iPhone seemed unreasonable. No more Symbian, so lets see the new WinPho 7...
What a disgrace. I cannot belive how much crack they must be smoking at Nokia to go with this pile of crap. The HTC hardware is nice (Nokia fanbois, remember that they will be fully outsourced devices too) and mostly pretty good. But the OS is like something from 5 years ago. If you were in a competition to create a new UI in 2006 for a touch mobile device and you'd come up with this then people would've said great effort and still gone with iOS. But nowadays this just feels plain retarded.
I really had high-hopes for Mango to fix BASIC phone functions like making the USB work without Zune, tethering so I can use my 3G witha useful device, crappy onscreen keyboard, a UI that sometimes is portrait only then sometimes landscape only (at its choice, not yours), bizarre ringtone/vibrate selection (cuae you only need 'ring' or 'ring+vibrate' and one vibrate is more than enough!!!) and my list goes on (currently 117 issues on my blog). The browser is soooooooooo useless without any other option it is almost criminal in 2011 how many pages you can't use.
After 4 months, I have to say that I have given up thinking of my phone as a smartphone. I have a lovely screen that does emails and occaisionally I can get it to answer a call (about 50% of the time it doesn't unlock fast enough to answer, 49% it is on vibrate and I never know about the call). In day-to-day use an HTC Windows phone is an untold misery of uselessness. And I so wanted it to be great. Shame on the Reg for giving this 75%.
Cash for peerages = censorship for copyright
When we have a PM being interviewed by police for taking money to put people in the worthless house of lords that'll make sod all difference to anyone.
How come this guy is offering to flog ALL of OUR rights to out of copyright material to a cartel in exchange for financial backing and developing his policies, how is that not corrupt?
Why is Cameron breezing through the media when he's such an obvious fool? I can't think of one thing he's said/done that he hasn't rolled over on the minute anyone challenges him.
I give up... I guess I could learn to like moose meat and herring!
