* Posts by rfdparker2002

8 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2010

Zuckerberg: 'Make partnerships, not war'

rfdparker2002

Exactly.

Tom said. “Facebook is certainly being competitive and trying to build their own little version of MySpace, but when I look at Microsoft I a company who is extremely aligned with us.”

HTC Desire Z Android Qwerty smartphone

rfdparker2002

Research would be Common Sense

"HTC handsets are never pure Android, since they always have the company’s Sense user interface running on top, and they’re all the better for it."

Nope. Ever heard of the HTC Dream (branded as the T-Mobile G1 in the US and UK), the Nexus One, or - something that might've been more topical to notice - this very device (generically known as the HTC Vision) was sold in the US with stock Android as the T-Mobile G2? But you'd be right in saying _most_ HTC handsets today are shipped with Sense, but hopefully that'll maybe change with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), at least to increase how fast users get updates.

BBC news apps squeeze onto iPhone, iPad

rfdparker2002

Yet again...

Nice to see the BBC releasing an app (and two others next in the line) for a three month-old device (the iPad) before even considering a platform which had it's first device in late 2008 (Android), especially when they've only just delivered an official way of accessing the iPlayer on Andorid, but via Flash, thereby limiting it to 2.2 (and ARMv7-capable) devices (not to mentioned that they C&D-ed the unofficial BeebPlayer app that worked on all versions of Android in the process...).

We've had this sort of thing with the BBC before... it was called developing the video delivery of iPlayer with Windows Media, and eventually they took our advice, and found everyone much the happier because of it...

Google snubs Labs again with brace of Gmail features

rfdparker2002
Welcome

HTML5 in GMail

The most interest thing about this is that, considering it works for me in Chromium on Ubuntu (Chromium is the name of the open source project behind Chrome, and the name used for daily-builds, etc) - which lacks Gears - means this must be done using HTML5.

Back at the Wave launch at I/O, Google mentioned how such drag-and-drop functionality was possible with both Gears and HTML5 (Wave is all HTML5). Chrome/Chromium for Linux lacks Gears as the devs expected everyone to be switching to HTML5's local storage, yet until recently the only Google product to use HTML5 in place of Gears was Wave, but a few days back Google said they're transitioning Docs to use HTML5 for offline mode. GMail (on the desktop) however still uses Gears, with no announcement I've seen about HTML5 support - but this Drap-and-Drop being done via HTML5 is hopefully a sign they'll add HTML5 for offline mode to GMail soon (maybe they'll support both HTML5 and Gears so they can move IE6-using enterprise customers from Exchange to GMail).

iPhone 4.0: iAds, multitasking, and 98 tweaks

rfdparker2002

Nope,

The purpose of iAds is to quickly get Apple a foothold in the potentially very lucrative mobile ad market.

Sony PS3 Slim

rfdparker2002

PS2 Compatibility

Just a note - not every 'fat' PS3 had backwards compatibility. Sony apparently had two ways of doing backwards compatibility - the first was hardware emulation,by implanting a PS2 chip (the 'emotion engine') into each PS3, and the second was software emulation. The first-generation 20GB and 60GB models, which had hardware PS2 emulation, never made their way to the UK; the first PS3 model available in the UK was second-generation 60GB model, which had software emulation - this was then superseded by third-gen 40, 80 and 120GB models, all of which had no PS2-support whatsoever. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS3#Model_comparison )

So the point is here that Sony technically could enable PS2 support for all PS3s that lack it, in the software form, if they wanted to; the thought is that they may use this in the future to add a 'PS2 Classics' section to the PS Store, similar to the existing 'PSOne Classics' section - the problem is that Sony would probably not enable running games from discs, unless they were also fazing out PS2s, which they're still trying to flog at the moment.

Windows Phone 7: free tools, captive Marketplace

rfdparker2002

Ah, but...

What you appear to forget is that every Android device (with the apparent exception in the US of AT&T's first Android device) let's you just tick one box, after which you can install any .apk you can grab off the web or throw on the MicroSD card; on top of that the Android Market is completely open in the first place. By contrast, you can't install anything from outside the App Store on the iPhone (and seemingly FailMo7) without jail-breaking.

And in respect to getting root access, which is only really useful when you're wanting access to some normally not-so-accessible hardware (such as to have USB or WiFi tethering, or use the flash of the Nexus One as a torch...), it really depends on the device you're using. Back when I rooted my G1, it was by going back to an older Android release and exploiting a vulnerability in that in order to replace the validation key against which updates were checked with a community one. With the Nexus One by contrast, you just send it a command over USB, and your presented with a special Google-created screen that warns you that you'll void your warranty, asking whether you want to continue - after this the boot-loader is unlocked, and you can flash something like CyanogenMod, which have root access out of the box (including a sudo-like application to assure applications can't abuse root access)..

As clever as WebOS is, I somewhat feel that maybe Palm would've been better with a Palm-ified version of Android (even if Android didn't particularly exist back then...).

Google Nexus One

rfdparker2002

Just a further note on VAT...

As someone else who brought this from google.com/phone to the UK (without regional charger - you instead get a US charger - a shaving adapter plug works fine as the charger supports our voltage, and saved me paying duty) - yes, you will get charged around £60 in VAT (mine was just under £60), but this isn't charged by Google - it's sent separately as an invoice by DHL around a week after delivery.

Maybe/hopefully, when Vodafone bring out support for the subsidised version, you'll be able to have a unlocked version shipped from within the UK, avoiding VAT and duty.