Posts by Vector 649 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Feb 2011
No, it's actually 1.2Gb per month, not per year as stated in the article.
Still, that doesn't seem like a lot of data if you want to do anything like stream video. And I still don't buy the whole "you need a separate data plan for every device you own" thing. My phone is a hotspot (even if I have to pay a little more for it, which I still think is absurd in it's own right), I can get all the mobile data I need on my wifi-only devices that way.
"... suggesting a closed 'virtual reality' headset closer to the Oculus Rift than the 'augmented reality' of Google's Glass unit."
Google Glass is not 'augmented reality' by a long shot. It's a tiny screen sitting at the edge of the user's vision. Augmented Reality, on the other hand, is an overlay on what the user sees in front of them.
"The real problem with a 10", 12" or 14" screen is that, so far, they weigh too much."
I always find this humorous when I see it. The Note Pro 12.2 clocks in at 753g. My Acer A500 is 730g and I've never once thought it was too heavy. I don't think the extra 23g would even be noticeable.
That being said, the thing is still way too expensive.
Subscriptions and such not withstanding, maybe this will finally put to bed the myth that tablets are only good for content consumption and useless for creation.
...and before you start griping about the on-screen keyboard, go look at all the real keyboards available for an iPad on Amazon.
"The reality - however - is that there is malware for Android, but the Winphone (and RT) malware stats are still zilch, nada, zip, zero."
First, I hope that you're prepared to back that statement with facts as I suspect that there is malware out there, you just haven't heard about it yet. Second, if there is malware out there, there will be far more targeting Android since it's a broader target, just as Windows has been the primary target in the desktop world due to its broad deployment.
For years, Apple touted how much more secure the Macintosh OS was over Windows when the reality was, they weren't anymore secure, just that no one really bothered to target Macs. Once their marketshare began to rebound, viruses suddenly started to appear on their vaunted systems.
"I see you didn't refute the AC's claim about mobile OSs at all. Why?"
How about because an OS is an OS? Its purpose is to provide an interface for applications to the hardware on the device. The distinction between "Mobile" and "Desktop" is getting sillier and sillier everyday. With 8 inch Windows 8 devices and (for the moment, at least) 21 inch Android AiOs, they're all just computers at this point.
"Cue flood of comments explaining that they do, in fact, want one."
Okay, I'll bite.
Actually, I think everyone wants VR, they just want the Matrix or Caprica. The problem is, you don't get to that in one swell foop. I've played around with some of the HMDs that have come out to date and the FOV and price have been the death knell of every one. The market speak for all of them has been "It's like looking at X size screen from Y distance" which has always translated to "Here, strap this tiny monitor to your face and pretend it's immersive." The excuse has always been the motion sickness issues. Oculus and now, possibly, Sony are finally trying to deal with all these issues and maybe we'll finally move forward with this whole VR thing.
One thing though: Sorry, Sony. I really want VR but this ain't gonna get me to buy a PS4.
" What fucking idiot would buy into anything like a tat-bizarre[0] based in Mainland China?"
You mean the company that posted $792 million in profit in their last earnings report. To put that in perspective, America's favorite tat-bazaar, Amazon, only posted $274 million or about a third of Alibaba.
And those are actual profits, not "don't worry, we'll figure out how to monitise it someday" speculation.
"The problem with the larger Samsung pads is the price"
Agreed. I'm getting so sick of manufacturers adding a hundred bucks for every "feature" they throw in their devices. Add 16GB of memory that costs them maybe 5 dollars and that'll be another 100 to you and I.
This one is particularly nettling because the larger screen is either cheaper or a wash to the 10 inch due to probable lower defect rate in the glass.
I'd love to have a large tablet. I'd really like to have a 15" tablet. Maybe when Samsung starts writing off the 12 inchers and the discounting gets serious, I'll think about one.
I'd agree with your analysis if it weren't for the fact that there appear to be 3 Million of these mistakes lying around.
Generally, in the scenario you posit, the company will short run the experiment, not tie up $1.5 billion worth of potential writedown just to thumb their noses at the shareholders
Inventory, yes. A glut of inventory, probably not.
I never understood the point of the 5C once the price became known. I doubt it increased marketshare by much and it's so ugly, it's got to have diminished their brand. Apple may not intend to make "junk phones," but this one sure looks to make a liar of Mr. Cook.
"It's a brand values thing."
Sorry, but that's not brand value. That's simply market reduction and customer inconvenience all for an attempt at lock-in by the phone vendors.
The sad thing is, it rather assumes that you'll change your $30,000 car almost as often as you change your $600 phone (which is more like $200 at point of sale these days), something which I'm sure would delight the auto manufacturers.
"Apple clearly hope that everyone will see what they do is the "de facto" standard..."
Not much of a "standard" when It starts by requiring a connector only available on the iPhone. And only newer iPhones at that.
Apple is not alone in this. Google is apparently doing something similar with the "Open Automotive Alliance" for Android devices.
I just don't get the thinking from auto manufacturers. "Hey, let's limit our market by putting an infomatics system in our cars that only works with certain devices!" What a great idea...
"Your car from 1994 probably has a cassette player"
LOL, didn't think that one through. I actually do have the audio bluetooth connection because after market car stereos with new features can still be added to older vehicles.
But, thanks, DJO, maybe I could get one for my Boombox!
...is a bluetooth connection to the audio system in my car. I'd like to have a bluetooth connection to OBD (though I'm not really sure why, just 'cause). Unfortunately, my car is too old (1994) to have OBD2, so no luck on that one.
Other than that, I have a dash mount for my phone and access to everything I need from it without some auto manufacturer's re-imagining of how it should work.
We may not want cloud storage, but it sure looks like Google and the manufacturers want it. Finding a phone with an microSD slot is getting harder every year. It's the primary reason I bought a Galaxy S4 over an HTC One.
You can desire it all you want, but if no one makes it, you're just as screwed.
Oh, yeah! And just a moment of wonder at 128GB (no matter what the speed) in a thumbnail. Weren't too long ago (2001) that was a cutting-edge 3.5 inch HDD.
"Highly unlikely that any lock+wipe mechanism will stop the phone being useful for emergency calls."
As I understand it, the idea behind this is to make the phone useless to the thief. That would mean "bricking" it which would have to be irreversible or, aside from protecting personal data, there would be no point. Bricking means no functionality which would include emergency calls.
One other thing that occurs to me, even if the phone is bricked, it would still have many parts, in particular the screen, that would still be valuable on the black market.
This legislation is a fool's errand.
"Honestly, this is such an obvious thing, I don't know why anyone would be against it..."
Ok, let me fill in a couple of reasons:
First, although this will change the behavior of criminals, it is likely that it will have minimal deterrent effect in the long run as thieves will simply learn that they need to quickly shield a stolen phone to keep it from being wiped.
Add to that, the new vector for hackers to create havoc in our daily lives. Eventually, they'll figure out how to compromise it and you'll reach for your phone one day to find it's dead, quite possibly at the time you need it most to make an emergency phone call. As mentioned in another thread, this has already happened to reporter Matt Honan though that was more social engineering than coding trickery.
This is a knee-jerk (read: not well thought out) reaction to a problem that's getting media attention.
So, Lenovo takes the parts that are flooding into low end chinese tablets, wraps them in a shiny case with a tube moulded on to the side (which, I suspect will just become annoying as time rolls on) and then charges 2 to 3 times what the competition wants?
Allow me to point out that the cylinder thingy that everyone is raving about would be better incorporated into a case/cover which could be removed when not needed.
Other than that...pass
"Last I checked, most cell phone plans treat any number within the country the same: including "toll-free" numbers because it's the AIRTIME you're paying for"
That's certainly true today, but in olden times, we had this thing called a "long distance" bill where you had to pay to call outside your local calling area. For decades, the toll-free number was a way for companies to absorb those costs for their customers to intice them to call.
This sounds like the same thing for the internet with one large caveat: AFAIK it only pays the bandwidth for AT&T subscribers unlike toll-free numbers which covered all telephone customers regardless of their service provider. Fix that and I see no effective difference from toll-free service.
Take off your tin foil hat.
This is not about the wireless transition, it's about eliminating an old network infrastructure (TDM) that would have died long ago were it not for a mandate from the FCC to maintain it. Those "Bell competitors" will still be able to offer their services on the replacement IP network.
Hyping the IPO? Not.
Embracing a privately held commercial portal as a public forum? Is.
I don't want anything to do with FB or Twitter, but it's getting harder and harder to participate in anything anymore without having an account on both (with whatever privacy issues are associated). Please review the difference between a public standard like email or sms and a privately controlled platform like Facebook or Twitter.
@PJI " Android or Google had shown no inclination, not a hint in the direction of mobile phones or tablets until their man on Apple's board was intelligent enough to understand what Apple were about to do and betrayed his privileged position."
That might be true of Google but it certainly is not true of Android. That company was focusing on a mobile operating system a year before Apple even started the iPhone project. Google may have stepped in after seeing what Apple was doing, but Rubin & Co were already doing it.
@AC 23:40 "Gosh, how's that for a non sequitur. By the same logic, as Apple (and Samsung and HTC) were founded much earlier, did they all have a "pretty idea" long before Android or Google founders were even born? How about, credit where credit is due?"
Your assertion might be valid if any of the companies you mentioned had been created to focus on mobile operating systems as the original Android company was.
As to "credit where credit is due," that's exactly my point. Although Apple has been incredibly successful in mobile, they no more created the smartphone or tablet markets than they invented the GUI.
"The original Android phone was basically a BlackBerry clone. Google had to go away and reengineer it in order to make it a touch based system."
Again, wrong. Even the G1 was a touchscreen phone. The slideout keyboard was just an added feature of the phone (a feature which persisted across many different models well into the Gingerbread era of the OS).
"Love or hate Apple, the fact of the matter is that they upped the bar for smartphones in 2007 / 2008 and really forced other manufacturers look hard at what they were doing, they made Google say "fuck, we gotta do something about this". In 2010 they released the iPad which is the first tablet to ever acquire a mass market adoption, making other manufacturers say "fuck fuck fuck, we've got to get a piece of this" "
Wrong, in many ways. Android was founded as a company in 2003, several years before the advent of the iPhone and bought by Google in 2005, so they had a pretty idea of how the wind was blowing before Apple "upped the bar." The same is true of tablets; the concept had been around for years before the iPad and the screen interactions refined in the smartphone segment were going to lead to tablets whether Apple entered the market or not. They did get a bit of a head start in tablets as the Android team scrambled to adapt their OS to the larger screen, but that lead is now evaporating just as it did in smartphones and apps. Next, their lead in "tablet optimized apps" will tail off.
Apple's biggest fear at this point should be what we learned in the Mac/PC wars: cheap and functional trumps elegant. The Mac OS was far more elegant than anything Microsoft came up with until, possibly, Windows 95 (which, for all it's faults, was a superior operating system to any Mac OS prior to OSX primarily due to preemptive multitasking). Yet, for all that, Apple slowly sank towards bankruptcy until Jobs salvaged the company with the iPod.
"Nice price and from the renders at least they look good, shame that I bet they're plastic rather than metal bodies."
Sorry, but you can get a tablet with the same guts as these (1280x800 screen, MediaTek Cortex-A7 class SoC) for a third of the price. IIRC, there is a bit of aluminum in the body, but nowhere near enough to justify these prices.
Take it down a notch, would y'all!?
Apparently, Mr. Kutcher has a fairly well respected track record as a tech investor (though how much of that is him and how much is his partners, I wouldn't begin to say). I wouldn't presume to say how much better or worse qualified he is than any of the millions of others in tech who have had the title of engineer misappropriated for them (I've had the title once or twice, but I've never asked for it).
Don't assume he's unqualified simply because he's an actor. Remember, one of the foundations for modern wireless communications was invented by Hedy Lamarr. He certainly couldn't do much worse than those Yoga tablets Lenovo just released yesterday.
"As far as locking mechanisms go, this was solved a long while ago with the ZIF socket, no?"
No. ZIF sockets clamp the pins into the socket, but they don't lock them in. Using ZIF in this context could still result in the modules popping off if the device were dropped. You need a ball or flange of some sort at the end of the pins, which the phoneblok's design has. How secure that will be remains to be seen.
I really like this concept on so many levels, but I'm afraid that primarily because I'm a geeky, built your own kinda guy. I'm not sure there is enough market out there to support this, since most people just want a phone.
Yeah, it's nice that they've contained any future damage, but could we please have a list of the affected apps! Just because updates have been made available, doesn't mean they've been installed and I, for one, don't like allowing auto-update. I'll update (or remove) the affected apps if I know what they are and if I have them.
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