* Posts by Ian Watkinson

134 publicly visible posts • joined 16 May 2007

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Lights, camera, camera, camera, action: iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip biz in new iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip shocker

Ian Watkinson

Re: Subscription services

Doesn't play well in hotel rooms with isolated wifi - for the price you may as well get a fire tv stick and it just works...

Ian Watkinson

Re: So what?

Except that Market is shrinking year on year. P30 Pro, still better cameras than what's just come out from apple (arguably) and available on a UK network for £40 p/m as opposed to the Apple £80 p/m.

Apple wins in resale, as they are still worth silly money 4 years later, but again that's going away as people move away from them, the 2nd hand value is also going down.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Ian Watkinson

Re: Eh?

They Figured Ming the Merciless would never notice?

Huawei smartphone sales up but only thanks to China as US trade ban gives punters the jitters

Ian Watkinson

Re: I'd happily buy a Huawei .... if:

You might have missed the most important one.

5) Get support for them.

So far my P20 pro has had random crashes.

Pointed to forum - "Development are looking into it"

Huawei Health app has stopped syncing with Myfitnesspal and google fit.

Pointed to forum - "Development are looking into it"

GT Watch not working properly after an update.

Pointed to forum - "Development are looking into it"

Are we seeing a pattern here?

I'm not convinced that Huawei has any non-chinese support outside it's telco switch team.

Nope, we're stuffed, shrieks Apple channel as iPhone shipments enter a double-digit spiral

Ian Watkinson

Re: Have you seen how much a Ferrari costs?

Actually your analogy is a little off.

Lets keep apple as Ferrari for your Car Analogy.

So they've produced the Ferrari XR, it's a bit last years Ferrari X, but some tweaks, but it's only the hardcore following that will tell the difference.

It goes 0-60 in 3 seconds, 0-100-0 in 5 and is the third fastest time around the nurburgring

All good things for a super car. However it costs £1,000,000

However Porsche have their new 911 GTR10 which does the same and costs £700,000 people are also saying that the new GTR10 comes with more options and feels more useable for a larger number of drivers, plus Porsche welcomes drivers to have different options available. Whereas Ferrari is known to sue car tuners and even their customers!

It goes 0-60 in 2.9 seconds, 0-100-0 in 4.8 and is the second fastest time around the nurburgring

Finally the shock arrival is Hyundai. With their I30 mate. Which "only" costs £300,000, arguable has the best engine by far than the other two and is producing great results from that engine.

It goes 0-60 in 2.7 seconds, 0-100-0 in 4.3 and is the fastest time around the nurburgring.

Yes people will buy the Ferrari, yes people will buy the porsche, but more people are going, you know what I don't care what badge it has, the other option is really good value for money....

P30 pic pyrotechnics in Paris: That's one Huawei to set the smartphone world alight

Ian Watkinson

Sunk cost?

Know lots of people switching from iOS to android.

£999 iPhone vs £699 Same or better spec android buys an awful lot of apps.

Plus a lot of paid apps have free equivalents now

Can anyone name any iOS exclusive apps now that would stop someone switching

iMessage vs telegram perhaps

Facetime vs Skype

Find your friends vs life360

Just look at Q! Watch out Microsoft, the next Android has a proper desktop PC mode

Ian Watkinson

Re: pholdables

???

Surely you mean Phone Book!

Premiere Pro bug ate my videos! Bloke sues Adobe after greedy 'clean cache' wipes files

Ian Watkinson

Re: What an idiot

No, as others have pointed out, it deleted at the parent level, not sub-directories.

Sure he's glad it wasn't just d: instead of d:\videos...

I hope he wins, if poor testing means it costs them millions, they are likely to test their software better.

Taken a while but finally here's the first proper smart-home gizmo

Ian Watkinson

Re: Smart?

"For me, a smart light source will:

- not produce radio-frequency interference"

Oops, best not go outside then..

https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity

Ian Watkinson

Re: First "proper" smart home gadget?

Useful to you in your limited view of the world you mean?

I've not got one, but a quick think gives me 3 reasonable usecases.

Stress reduction. I can set it to turn off all the lights when no one is home. Which will stop me yelling at teenagers that they've left every fricking light in the house on as they leave for school.

Security. I could buy a timer for each lamp, or I could set them to come on in the house at 15 minutes after sun down, moving each day.

Laziness. I'm watching a movie. I want all the lights off now...

Yeah you're right, in no way useful to anyone at all...

YouTube TV will be huge. Apple must respond

Ian Watkinson

Agreed, had an apple TV..didn't use it..used the Mede8er, then Dlink, then roku and now amazon.

Why do I need to go back to apple?

Also interesting comparing them with traditional TV, but I suspect that as I can get an Amazon video and Netflix for 1/2 the amount of you tube tv, they are going to have to have a lot of very good original content on it.

Oh UK. You won't switch mobile providers. And now look at you! £5.8bn you've lost

Ian Watkinson

Re: Not everybody you'll be pleased to hear.

I'd love to be with Three, except they have no mobile signal in most of the places where I go.

Daughter is on three, with a boost box, but mainly for the fact that as a teenager unlimited data is all she wants.

I get the best deal out of vodafone every year. If not I'd switch. Was tempted this year, as they still have the worst deal on a iphone 7 out of any of the big 4. But payg and buying a phone outright was a better deal. (still is)

Vinyl and streaming sales offset CD decline in UK music sales

Ian Watkinson

Vinyl sales rose by 53 per cent to top 3.2 million units

Wow that's an awful lot of closet Hipsters....

Good God, we've found a Google thing we like – the Pixel iPhone killer

Ian Watkinson

Backup

Unless I missed something, backup on android still sucks.

By backup, I mean over wifi every night, when I put the phone on charge.

I then take phone, kill it, get new phone same model do something - restore, re-identify, whatever.

It then restores and the phone is the same as the broken one, no need to re-set up a single up, no missing text messages, nothing.

Last time I tried android it needed adb and a command line to do anything close.

Plus, not all the apps worked as before after the restore.

Smell burning? Samsung’s 'Death Note 7' could still cause a contagion

Ian Watkinson

Re: Disagree with general consensus here...

" a fucking heavy battery pack"

So buy a small light one then.

Which can also charge other devices.

Why buy 200 spare batteries for your phone? If you need 200 batteries life worth of charging for your phone you COULD buy 200 spare batteries, or a really " fucking heavy battery pack"

I know which one is easier to charge for second use...

or you know do what the rest of humanity does and get one that suits their needs and charge it overnight/in the car/on the train etc...

Will US border officials demand social network handles from visitors?

Ian Watkinson

Oh you mean my orkut and myspace details...well why didn't you say...msn and icq addresses, yeah sure.

What do you mean you don't have any more space...

Samsung Note 7: Probably the best phone in the world. Yeah – you heard right

Ian Watkinson

A what?

a person who leaves one place or country, esp a native country, to settle in another Compare immigrant. (as modifier): an emigrant worker.

"This took off with non technical users – there’s a niche of emigrants for whom this is their main computer"

So Samsung Notes are popular with people who leave the country?

I always wondered why Samsung had an Experience Store in Marbella....

Catastrophic 123-reg VPS cockup deletes Ross County FC website

Ian Watkinson

No I'd say that's about right.

115,000 WEB servers running on 67 virtual servers.

1716 per server.

Seems about right, it's not like most of the websites are going to generate much traffic or load, and if 123-reg are clever with their capacity, they'd move the livelier sites around to balance them on the 67 servers.

FWIW.

123-reg bad, no back up prior to running a destructive script and no roll-back or fall-back plan.

Customers bad for not having their own backups. It takes all of about 1 day to set up an sftp pull to get their site down stored locally. To then put back up couple of hours later should 123reg you know be 123reg again...

Mozilla: Five... Four... Three... Two... One... Thunderbirds are – gone

Ian Watkinson

Re: Coupling?

I used to.

You know back in 1990, when dial speeds meant that it looked horrible and took ages to load.

Now we want in line pictures, the odd table etc, I just leave it on.

Too few years in a life to worry about rich text vs html, vs plain text browsers.

You'll be worrying about "-- " signature lines in corporate emails not being followed next...

Mystery Kindle update will block readers from books after Wednesday

Ian Watkinson

Re: Not very user friendly

You mean as you pass your Dad the free phone Amazon support number, and to be fair to amazon, they support their sometimes 5 year old devices for nothing.

Apple are pretty good at support too, but try getting support on an Iphone 3G now, for free.(via the phone)

For that matter, try getting a security update on an Iphone 3g.

Android, meh, try getting an update on an devices that's more than 90 days old (Huawei looking at you here) as loads never get security updates from the manufacturer at all. (I know some like Nexus devices do, but almost all the 'droid manufacturers, seem to have a device that was "hard to update" so they decided to quietly renege on promises, or decide that updates for 2 years wasn't what they meant...

Microsoft beats Apple's tablet sales, apologises for Surface 4 flaws

Ian Watkinson

Re: If we can cut through the fanboy drivel from both sides briefly....

So sure of your comments you've gone AC huh...

"Xbox one, however I suspect will also outsell the apple TV"

Xbox One vs Apple TV???

I must have missed some news here.. Is Apple TV a top-of-the-range console gaming machine?

Nope, but, shocker, as we are talking about consumer devices. They are both consumer devices.

Both have a TV Part.

One of them has a few hundred games the other thousands.

Neither of them can do 4k video.

But yes, I suspect if you want to play call of duty 74 - Black Pants, Black TShirt (I get killed by shrill sounding teens quickly )

You'll need an Xbox...

Ian Watkinson

Re: If we can cut through the fanboy drivel from both sides briefly....

Except for the fact that MS sells Multi millions of Consumer devices, that would make Apple in the same niche eat their own first born for the sales numbers.

Xbox vs Apple TV (both games consoles)

If we only take the older Xbox 360, that sold 84 Million....

Xbox one, however I suspect will also outsell the apple TV (interestingly the Xbox one should shortly get low enough to be the same price as the new Apple TV)

So MS can definitely do consumer devices.

Motorola’s X Force awakens a seemingly ‘shatterproof’ future

Ian Watkinson

Re: Best so far

You're one of those people sitting on public transport playing crap music through your phones speakers aren't you.....

Adobe: We locked our customers in the cloud and out poured money

Ian Watkinson

What would you sue adobe for, making a new version? They didn't remove any functionality from their suite. They didn't make the last version a shorter timescale for support. Arguably they decided to let their customers know that their business model was changing, they released a major upgrade to it, said this will be the last, but given that some people had been quite happily running on CS2 for a number of years, and not everyone upgraded every year, gave customer 2-3 years notice.

If your business can't deal with it's tooling prices going up, then don't upgrade, buy CS6 today and use it out of the cloud.

Or, you know do what the rest of us do, look at the alternatives, evaluate them, work out if they are better for you, buy them and train again.

There are loads of alternatives to the CS suite, so they are hardly a monopoly.

Key to their turn around I suspect is that businesses had to sort their licences out, and it's not easy to pirate a cloud.

Hyundai i30 Turbo: Softly, softly, catchee Audi

Ian Watkinson

"Hyundai's car can't quite match the absolute depth of quality of the considerably more expensive Golf GTI,"

So is it more than 30% or 8k not as good?

I30 - £22,650.00 5 year unlimited miles.

Golf - £27,500 3 year limited mileage warranty.

Adding 3 years cast iron warranty it about 2k for VW brinnging the golf to

£30k vs £22k for I30.

Brimming with VM goodness: Qnap TS-453mini 4-bay NAS

Ian Watkinson

Re: Not quite the same

Running costs on the Qnap vs the HP? (given that both are going to be on for 24/7/365 for 3-4 years)

Apple's big secret: It's an insurance firm (now with added finance)

Ian Watkinson

Re: Jumped the Shark

So out of interest, you looked at a Mac air 11". What did you buy?

From what I've seen there are no comparisons.

Critiera.

Same Weight. +/- 10%

Similar size +/- 10%

Ability to go to a store and get advice/get it fixed under warranty the same day.

*nix based os supported for 2 years by one phone call.

Ability to also run office 365 for work stuff.

Now I know Dell and Fujitsu have next day on site fixes for a price But the support is normally restore the rescue partition. But normally when you factor it all in. The apple "tax" isn't that high or non exisitent.

Now the AUDI tax...I mean cars of the same weight/size/power exist, with 5 and 7 year warranties over the paltry 3 year one limited mileage Audi one, but people buy an Audi...I mean how dare they be that stupid...(repeat for BMW/Mercedes etc)

High-heeled hacker builds pen-test kit into her skyscraper shoes

Ian Watkinson

Re: Given the size of a small mobile

Yes but they are not say, look I'm a Women, I did this, and I will help you do it.

Or if they are, then they need better advertising...

Goodbye Vulcan: Blighty's nuclear bomber retires for the last time

Ian Watkinson

The Vulcan Aviation Academy

next to the Vulcan Science Academy?

:-)

Google cracks down on browser ad injectors after shocking study

Ian Watkinson

Re: Unwanted ad injectors aren't part of a healthy ads ecosystem

"Yes totally agree, all ads should be banned. We should be back to BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, BBC NEWS and the BBC radio stations only in the UK."

Hmm, wonder how else we'd do it.

Well just like sky sports then, you know every 15 minutes through a football game it stops to advertise chocolate, or beer, or football boots.

Or...you know people could produce great content and I could well subscribe and pay them money to watch it.

Na, it would never catch on, who'd pay money to watch football and other sports on Television...

Thecus N4310 4-bay: A NAS-ty beast for the budget-conscious

Ian Watkinson

One of the keys to "inexpensive home nas" is the running cost.

how much does this cost per hour of streaming video compared to the likes of the Drobo 5N for example?

German minister photo fingerprint 'theft' seemed far too EASY, wail securobods

Ian Watkinson

Layers...

People seem to be missing the fact that security should be layered.

I like the fact that when I'm unlocking my phone on the plane, the person next to me can't look at the passcode as I'm just pushing my finger on it. (look at screen remember passcode - much easier than taking a photo and producing a balloon.

However I also like the fact that on a cold boot you need the whole pin, so having a fingerprint doesn't cut it all the time.

Given that for a lot of people they've gone from no passcode to finger, it's a step up.

If people are securing national secrets using fingerprints ONLY, then there's an issue.

UK national mobile roaming: A stupid idea that'll never work

Ian Watkinson

I get the reverse, zero 02 reception at home without a boost box. 4G 5 bars with Voda.

So the sharing is definately not working.

Ian Watkinson

Actually normally if I can see the sea I'm fine. Vodafone tends to think I'm in France, but the reception's fine....

VINYL is BACK and you can thank Sonos for that

Ian Watkinson

Re: What's the point?

"I can't quite see the point of buying an LP and then ripping it to digital?"

Really?

So you only ever listen to music at home?

Since the 80's (thanks to some chap called Sony Walkman) music has been portable.

Unless we can expect to see you with a portable turntable mixing it up on the 0755 to Clapham Junction?

Google begins to roll out Lollipop to Nexus devices

Ian Watkinson

Re: Longer battery life

They do, plenty of phones last a week.

But did you buy a phone that didn't meet your requirements? If so, surely then Samsung or whoever got your hard earned dosh thinks well, he bought it anyway, so why worry.

Unfortunately for most, a £30 battery pack and a £3 micro usb cable fixes the problem for all phones.Fro the rest, the phone only has to last from home to office, and then goes and charge and office to home again.

Xperia Z3: Crikey, Sony – ANOTHER flagship phondleslab?

Ian Watkinson

Re: OEM Bloat not Decreased since Z1?

The walkman app is terrible, because I can't choose to remove it.

It doesn't connect to spotify, or my amazon music app, yet it takes over playing when I plug in headphones in, because the sony built in dosomething app, won't do anything that isn't walkman related until you disable it.

So it doesn't do it for me, the interface is bad, the buttons aren't where I like them, but the main reason it's terrible, lack of choice to remove it!

Ian Watkinson

Re: Watertight charging

Until it burns out....which it has on quite a few, as the only cables for it are not sony ones...

Ian Watkinson

Thats ok, you don't get 21 mega pixels for spur of the moment, it defaults to the idiot cam mode, which is 8 mega pixels only.

You also don't get 4k video for longer than 2 minutes before the phone overheats and shuts down..

Main issues with the Z series.

Updates means that no one makes any decent cases for them, as they update every 6 months, so they wont sell enough cases to make it worthwhile.

Backup, Sony's backup sucks.

Take new phone, install facebook and g+ on it, set them to login.

Put them in a folder called social.

Backup phone using Sony's software.

Wipe phone

Restore phone.

Backup has lost of the login details, and the folder.

If the app was hangouts, it's lost all your SMS as well....

Sony has crippled Android so that you can't move any app to the SD card, zero, none at all.

Plus the inbuilt apps don't remember the store stuff on SD card settings.

My TIGHT PANTS made my HUGE iPHONE go all BENDY!

Ian Watkinson

Re: Corporate development

He wasn't very expert though was he, as it's do-able...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7MIJP90biM

How to Draw seven red LINES, all Perpendicular, some with green ink, some with transparent ink, and one in the form of A Kitten. (response to "The Expert" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= BKorP ... )

iPhone 6: The final straw for Android makers eaten alive by the data parasite?

Ian Watkinson

Re: lets look at this in another way..

Slightly more up to date, but same sentiment - 5 to Z2.

Over the next 2 years, the choice not to go iphone 6, is going to save me, £700 x 2, approximately.

Ian Watkinson

Re: lets look at this in another way..

"If switching to Android from iOS was so easy for you, then I'm assuming you have no investment in the iOS/Apple ecosystem (iPhone/iPad/MAx datasharing etc) nor any iOS apps, iTunes films etc."

Just done this so:

iphone some apps, none that I can't do without, or aren't already on android.

Ipad, yup got one, can share data via dropbox/box/google drive etc fine.

itunes films...do people buy films from itunes?

about the only thing I'm missing so far, is the choice of cases. You can get everything for the iphone, 90% for a Samsung Sx, but about 10% for a Sony Z2 :-(

Ian Watkinson

Re: An unsually poor article

"Apple simply can't make the volume to change this"

Really, but they have more volume than almost anyone else, except Samsung. They are going to sell approx 210 million iphones in the next 12 months.

Care to come up with how many Galaxy S5 (or S6 if it arrives) Samsung will sell in the same period?

Sony says year's losses will be four times deeper than thought

Ian Watkinson

Poor customer service and not listening to your customers will do that.

Just gone from iphone to sony Z2.

Quite a culture shock on the support front, apple, lets get this to work. Sony it's not our fault and if it is, we're not going to fix it.

Looking at the Z - Z1 - Z2 - Z3, still the areas where customers are asking for fixes, not implemented.

Finally, apples releases software it goes on phones.

Sony releases their software, is disappears to the network.

Erm I bought the phone, give me the choice. Voda/O2/Orange will soon perk up if they don't get the update out the door quick enough, then people will go with the unbranded version.

Buying memory in an iPhone 6: Like wiping your bottom with dollar bills

Ian Watkinson

"A little eBay shopping and you can find 128GB Micro SD cards for under a tenner"

Slow fake ones maybe.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-SDSDQUAN-128G-G4A-128GB-UHS-I-Class/dp/B00M562LF4/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=undefined&sr=1-1&keywords=128gb

Decent ones:

RRP: £135.78

Price: £90.81

So same point...but with some facts.

Quit drooling, fanbois - haven't you SEEN what the iPhone 6 costs?

Ian Watkinson

Re: OnePlus One

Sony Z2 has it, plus Stamina mode, which lets you turn off most things (except call text etc) and get 3 days s out of it.

Whoops, my cloud's just gone titsup. Now what?

Ian Watkinson
Facepalm

"is meant to be humours"

or even meant to be humorous?

Guardian reader by any chance?

Google Maps community competition falls foul of Indian regulations

Ian Watkinson

Sounds like a case of the Cowboys getting caught out by the Indians...

:-)

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Top ten car gadgets: Get your motor running with new shiny-shiny

Ian Watkinson

Tomtom and Garmin traffic vs Waze?

I'd say Waze is the king of the real time traffic now. I've not seen it beaten by either Garmin or Tomtom. Plus the price kicks the other two as well, it's free (aside from your data)

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