Battery life?
What's the battery life like on a HD2 compared to this thing though? And does it sound as good? In my experience, the sound coming out of a Cowon beats the hell out of anything around it.
Posts by Greg J Preece
2481 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Page:
Cowon iAudio J3 personal media player
Wednesday 7th July 2010 08:07 GMT
Thanks for the review - one question
I've got an S9. I had an X5 before that. Both have been excellent, but my main disappointment with the S9 is that in the 32GB version the Bluetooth transmitter doesn't function correctly. Has this been fixed in the J3? Going to hunt down a 32GB J3 and shove a 32GB card in it, seen as I've managed to fill this one.
Hack forces Flash onto iPad
Transformers: War for Cybertron
Apple's iPhone 4 denial: insulting or ignorant?
Nokia snaffles user data on the down-low
Nasa returns to the moon... in 3D game
Observer columnist in online porn mixup
Linux game-time refined with latest Wine
Monday 28th June 2010 13:12 GMT
Orrrrrr have both?
I do get a little tired of this argument sometimes. Console gamers will bang on about PCs being harder to keep up with, PC gamers will ridicule consoles for having crappy controls and (sometimes) dumbed-down versions of their own games. And of course, both camps are right.
So stuff it! I go where the games are. Time Crisis/God of War/Burnout games are on the Sony machines, so I have those. FPS/RPG/Strategy games are on both, but play better on the PC, so I have one of those too. Some consoles have exclusives I want to play, so I'll get those too.
I don't really care about the platform, so long as it's not totally crap (*cough* early-gen 360 *cough*). I just play the damn games and enjoy myself. I play a lot of games, so I have a lot of systems.
I have Linux, so I wanna play games on it.
See where I'm going with this? Quit the blah-blah and get on with the games.
BT boss brands Britain illiterate
Monday 28th June 2010 11:03 GMT
@AC 10:29
"Presumably, as you write about "high school", yours is an American perspective."
Errr...nope. I'm English, and I went to a "high school." They're quite common.
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=high+school&mrt=all&sll=52.842595,-0.791016&sspn=9.936275,28.54248&ie=UTF8&t=h&split=1&rq=1&ev=zo&hq=high+school&hnear=&ll=54.278055,-0.681152&spn=9.606298,28.54248&z=6
Monday 28th June 2010 09:46 GMT
They're not wrong.
The level of basic comprehension of the English language is shocking. A quick trip to Facebook will confirm that. The problem is that poor English is now generally accepted. People don't seem to care if you mix up your/you're/yore or there/their/they're any more, for example. That one really does my head in - it's not as if it's difficult!
It would be nice if that was drilled into kids in high school. Not just because I'm some traditionalist whiner, but because it does have an impact on how you are perceived. Poor English on a CV can easily cost you the opportunity at a job that you are probably perfectly capable of performing well in, because the poor spelling/grammar makes you look like a moron. Humans are fickle, simple as that.
I await the grammar Nazis picking over this post. Never said I was perfect, just acceptable. :-p
Jobs tells iPhone users to get a grip
Friday 25th June 2010 14:47 GMT
Going solely on YouTube vids...
...it's pretty bad. The video in the original article showed the signal dropping so far that service was lost completely. Another video posted elsewhere in this thread by a reader shows the same thing. The network switching tech - their non-standard method of trying to find a network with the least congestion - can't operate if it can't detect the networks in the first place.
Apple or no Apple, and my usual iPhone sentiments aside, it's a pretty shocking design oversight, and you really wouldn't expect it of any company that huge.
Windows 7 SP1 'beta' leaks, hits torrents
Google vanishes Android apps from citizen phones
Friday 25th June 2010 08:36 GMT
What's to stop you reinstalling?
This isn't the nicest thing to happen to you, but as someone else said, the Android Market isn't vetted, so perhaps in their case it's more needed. If they're removing apps for being malicious rather than being competition, then maybe that's fair enough.
This being Android, however, what's to stop you reinstalling the app from another location?
iPhone 4: Perfect for everyone, except humans
Googlegate: Mapping a scandal of global proportions
Thursday 24th June 2010 08:39 GMT
*Polite golf clap*
Well said. Google's excuses were absolute bollocks. However, you believe Google aren't above the law? I would beg to differ. Time after time the legal system in this country has shown that it's OK to break the law if you have oooodles of money - BT/Phorm being an excellent example. Massive wiretap, lots of data intercepted and processed, nothing done about it. I wouldn't get your hopes up about the UK going after Google any time soon.
Google claims Wi-Fi slurp legal in the US
Ubuntu v iTunes: the music playoff for Applephobes
Monday 21st June 2010 13:35 GMT
@handle
Woah, calm down lad.
First up, the "colour scheme" thing was but a substatement (if there is such a thing) of the overall "KDE looks nicer" point. No matter what colour scheme you apply, I still prefer KDE. What I said was that it doesn't *help* that Ubuntu choose horrible colour schemes.
And as for your assertion that I'm out of date, I beg to differ. I've seen and used the colour scheme for GNOME in 10.04 - it's also horrible. I like dark themes and use them all the time in KDE - I mentioned GHNS above because I know changing colours is easy - but the default one in 'buntu 10.04 is just nasty.
The default colour scheme for Kubuntu isn't the sexiest thing on Earth, but at least it isn't offensive to the eyes. ;-)
Monday 21st June 2010 09:09 GMT
See, I think the exact opposite
While I appreciate that Kubuntu does not make up the numbers compared to Ubuntu (for obvious reasons), I actually moved to KDE from GNOME because GNOME was too god-damned buggy!
Every time I opened a system dialog, bits of it were missing, or I had to do some bits there and drop to a command line for others. Some bits of it worked really well, other bits were broken.
KDE gave me a much cleaner experience. For a start, it looks nicer - don't argue, it just does. (It doesn't help that the guys at Ubuntu are experts in choosing horrific colour schemes.) Load up GHNS, install Aurorae, have some fun. The desktop/taskbar widget system is excellent, and to my mind more configurable than the ones under GNOME, which used to really piss me off in a multi-monitor environment. The system dialogs are well thought out, and they work. And now that they've integrated kcm_touchpad in KDE 4.4, I've no complaints.
Similarly, I prefer the KDE suite of apps. I don't understand your assertion that Nautilus is superior to Dolphin. I hit CTRL+T, I get a tab. I hit F4, I get a terminal that tracks the folder I'm looking at (nice touch, guys). Hell, the latest version has SVN integration, so if I'm in a project folder files are colour coded by version status, just like TortoiseSVN on Windows, and I've been begging for that for a long time. Again on SVN, KDESVN kicks ten bells out of RapidSVN every time - it's less buggy, easier to use, and auto-caches the server history to speed things up.
I really like Rhythmbox, but I like Amarok too. (I will give you the 2.0 release - that was garbage.) Global hotkeys without messing around, configurable playlist, and I really like the OSD doodad. It's a player that I can load stuff into and then just flick through it with the keyboard while I'm working.
And to answer (K)Ubuntu critics elsewhere in this thread, our company recently hired a few new people, so as an experiment I gave them all laptops with Kubuntu preinstalled. Sat down on day one and waited for the complaints....which didn't come. They had absolutely no problems finding the menu, getting the programs they needed and using the laptops. The fact that KDE looks quite a bit like Windows helped, I'm sure, but still, it was a good few days before one of them even noticed they were running a different system. Since then I've had the odd question raised, mainly to do with things being in a different place, but little more serious than that, and certainly no more trouble than I would get from a user on a Windows machine.
Some of our customer support lot - unfortunate souls running Vista machines - even requested to be moved to Kubuntu, and aside from the odd problem with running GNOME apps in KDE, they love it!
Saturday 19th June 2010 21:22 GMT
I cannot vote this post high enough.
Kubuntu whoops the hell out of Ubuntu. It's better in almost every single way. But Shuttleworth and the rest of the Ubuntu bunch don't give a toss about KDE, so we're still missing some of the highly-touted new features from this release, the previous release, and the one before that!
Wish they'd get off their arses and sort it out. Kubuntu might as well slide off and become a seperate distro. They'd never notice.
Antarctic glacier melt maybe 'not due to climate change'
Pakistani lawyer petitions for death of Mark Zuckerberg
Friday 18th June 2010 11:06 GMT
Wow, it's like I'm on the Daily Mail site
"Cut Pakistan from the Internet completely"
Yeah, of course! That's a reasoned reaction from the superior nation with the moral high ground! Cut them off! They're only a backward nation anyway. That's what we need - more simple answers from simpletons, It's common sense, you couldn't make it up, IYLISMWDYGLT, etc, etc.
My previous jokes regarding a Great American Firewall notwithstanding, I love the notion that cutting a country from the Internet is "simple."
Sometimes I can feel the grey matter at the front of my brain starting to liquefy...
Birmingham jihad-cam network suspended
Hands on with Nokia's flagship N8
Wednesday 16th June 2010 01:09 GMT
Errr....why?
"BTW, the N900 isn't a phone, if you bought one expecting it to have all the features of an average smart phone then that was foolish."
And why exactly is that? As far as I can tell it has every feature present in any of the other smartphones at my office, and a couple extra thrown in for good measure (mainly due to the end user accessing the native O/S and not a layer on top of it). Even the camera is surprisingly good.
Granted, the phone software had some bugs at launch, but they are gone. It does the phone bit perfectly adequately, and everything else superbly, though lacking some of the swish of other smartphones. I would love to hear what features it's missing that your "average smartphone" has.
Newsweek: 'Zombies rise from grave, invade US'
Ubuntu 'more secure' than Windows, says Dell
Monday 14th June 2010 14:14 GMT
Let's be honest, it's true, but there is a reason
Linux is more secure than Windows. Don't try and give me any of that "targeting the masses" bullshit. I hear that from MS users all the time, and it's nonsense. The numbers are simply disproportionate, and consider also that Linux has the largest portion of the server market, where security and reliability are most important.
However, this is not entirely Microsoft's fault. There is one overriding reason for this that Microsoft simply can't emulate to the same degree: peer review.
No-one is enough of an imbecile to think that people working on Linux can't introduce security holes into the software. I'm a programmer using Linux and Windows every day - I'd have to be thick as two short planks to think that Linux was invulnerable. The difference is, as I've said before on a similar discussion involving Firefox, that when vulnerabilities are found in Linux they are (generally) patched and rolled out very quickly, which helps reduce the threat to the end-user.
Quite often the issue is caught by a fellow programmer and patched before anyone with malicious intent is even aware of it. How many times has El Reg posted a story about a new Linux vulnerability, only to mention halfway down the page that a patch is not only already available, but you've probably already received it? ("Linux vulnerability" in the search box returns 265 results, most of them nothing to do with Linux.) And how many times has that scenario occurred in the world of Windows and Patch Tuesday?
And I genuinely believe that, when it comes to security, the quality of some of the code and setup in your average Linux distro is simply superior to that of Windows. The UIs might still be a little clunky and glitchy in places, but when it comes to networking and security? That's what Linux does, and does bloody well.
So good on Dell for making the assertion and standing behind the OSS alternative. It's nice to see a commercial entity backing it as competition in the marketplace.
Sony 3D TV kit, PS3 games released tomorrow
UK.gov unplugs Lane Fox digiquango
ID card scheme barely broke 13,000 mark, minister confirms
Tuesday 8th June 2010 19:49 GMT
What is on your ID card?
I don't object to ID - I carry enough of it. Between my credit cards, my photocard driver's licence and the passport I keep....somewhere, I have all the ID I need to prove who I am. And that's point 1 - the ID cards proposed simply weren't needed. If you really needed approved government ID, what the hell was wrong with a passport?
The second - and more valid point in terms of comparison with other schemes such as your own - is that our ID card wasn't just "this is me" ID. It was going to be linked to a very large, very costly database in the background, containing far more info than is really necessary. And you know full well how isolated that system would have remained if ID cards had been widely accepted. Function creep all round.
Final Fantasy XIII ate my Playstation
Monday 7th June 2010 15:42 GMT
If that's the case...
...then how come we haven't heard reports of this with GoW III, arguably the best looking game on the PS3? That's got to push the hardware a bit more than some of the cross-platform dross released in recent years.
Any word on *which* PS3s this affects, or is the answer simply "all of them"?
Sharp LC-52LE700E 52in LED backlit TV
Monday 7th June 2010 10:11 GMT
Fantastic TVs at a great price
I've had the 40" version of this for a while now (I'm not made of money and the 52" wasn't available) and it kicks ass. The picture is sharp, the colours are excellent, and as my TV signal comes via Freesat (ie, far less compression crap in the picture) even SD looks great on it. The only place where it kinda suffers is in very fast moving scenes, but I'm comparing it to my previous plasma, which was 600Hz.
Best moments using it:
Blade Runner Final Cut BD
God of War III (all of it)
^^^These looked absolutely incredible on this TV.
Microsoft: IE6 lives 'cause it busts Facebook
Google tells staff to snub Windows after China hack snafu
Apple opens doors to vanity publishers
Firefox takes walk down 64-bit Windows street
Blunkett threatens to sue for £30 ID card refund
Friday 28th May 2010 11:57 GMT
Did he just admit it was pointless?
>>He criticised the new government for scrapping the scheme, warning "it won't change anything for anyone out there".
If scrapping it won't change anything, will keeping it change anything?
And if it won't, then it's a waste of money, and should be scrapped. Am I missing something?
Nokia updates N900 firmware
Plug-in pledges to rid web of Justin Bieber
Cray-1 resurfaces in pieces on eBay
'Steve Jobs' switches to Android
Jobs drops hint on Google open video codec
Friday 21st May 2010 09:48 GMT
A little terse
Stock replies to e-mails are one thing, but this is a bit terse. No hi, no bye, no "thanks for mailing." In a bad mood, Steve? Did Google ruin your week?
Besides, it's kind of ridiculous to take an x264 developer's opinion of a rival codec and treat it as a balanced enough opinion on which to position your company in the market. Developer of established codec thinks it is better than rival codec that just appeared yesterday. In other news, bears shit in woods.
We all know what Steve is *really* thinking, and it is down to two things: control of content, and money.
As a side note, I am sat across from Mr Bloe here in Leeds, and he is grinning like the Cheshire Cat at seeing his name splashed across the tech sheets. You've made his day, El Reg. ;-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
