Posts by Stewart Atkins 50 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Nov 2007
Not soon I'd imagine, it's been several months since the US release, and they only just got a second US provider onboard. I'd love one of these, I'd be using one right now if I could get one. TBH I'm not sure why it didn't also launch over here since we also have Netflix and I doubt it'd take much to get the BBC on board as well but hey
I have to say I want one, get the Beeb to put iPlayer on it and they'll absolutely fly off the shelves. As I recall they said it would be in the UK in "the coming weeks" but nothing more was said.
What I personally am curious about is:
1. How the user pairs it to the wireless network
2. How the chromecast was able to control the television - in the video it appeared to be able to turn the television on and select the appropriate input to display content, it also manipulated the volume although that may have been the chromecast doing that rather than controlling the television's volume.
I own a Nexur 4, so thought I'd weigh in with a few comments of mine.
I got mine (easily enough - Carphone Warehouse had them in stock and provided one free as an upgrade when i renewed my contract) last month, I knew it wasn't great in the battery department, but I've always wanted a nexus phone and not only was this particularly powerful, and brand new, but I fell in love with it when i saw one in a shop.
The battery life is indeed not much to write home about, but it's certainly usable. Personally - if i feel like playing games i'll do it on a tablet - bigger screen, better battery life, and so on.
The case does indeed feel sturdy and solid, though as the article states, care should be taken not to drop it to avoid damaging the glass. I have yet to peel off the plastic, so I cannot answer to the effectiveness of the oleophobic (anti-fingerprint) coating on the screen.
Photosphere is interesting, i haven't tried taking a panorama outdoors, but indoors it does seem to make the occasional mistake when stitching the picture together, not sure if this is a side-effect of trying to take large and full-360 panoramas, and may work better for a smaller image.
It does indeed include inductive charging and NFC, neither of which I personally have much use for, though I have tested the wireless charging once with a friend's charging pad.
I believe the device also includes an HDMI out over the micro USB port, though from what I've read on the internet it uses a different specification to the common and cheap MHL It does however include Miracast for wireless displays, not that I own one of those either.
Altogether - it's a pretty nice phone, nothing to write home about if you already have a recent nexus device, but if you're only upgrading from an old gingerbread device, it should be very nice.
I also purchased a Vodafone SureSignal box a couple of years back, when I was in the middle of nowhere in the Scottish Highlands, it worked extremely well there once it was set up (as the article said the old boxes took a while to get started the first time, but they were a lot cheaper than the current generation of boxes at around £45). I only really had 2 complaints, one being that the box only did 3g, so when the family came to visit their old 2g mobiles wouldn't work, the other is that in the middle of edinburgh votadfone were sending me a text message once a week saying i needed to update the address on file for my box, even though it was correct. Given that i didn't reeeally need the box in the middle of edinburgh it ended up getting shoved in a drawer where it still resides today.
Still, for the year or so I was using it, i felt it well worth the £45 I paid so i could make and receive calls and texts at home.
Here's hoping it's intelligent enough to be able to navigate on it's own to find a signal if it loses it (the article says it uses 'wireless' although whether that's normal wi-fi or something specific to the device), if not can see people at work getting phone calls saying "my robot's stuck again, can you wheel it back out of the black spot for me please"
I was under the impression that all the UK mobile ISPs did this (granted T-Mobile screwed it up) - compressing javascript/css down, dropping it into the page inline, compressing images (and adding a JS file to your pages so that you can say 'gimme the original version of this' if you need to) and so on. While it does save some bandwidth, the speed-constrained part of the transfer will be completed faster thus improving the end-user experience.
At least this was the experience i had with my o2 3g cellular modem dongle. I wouldn't have even noticed that they were fudging with things except on a desktop some of the graphics look visibly lower quality, and there's a tooltip on them saying press (key combination) to load the original.
When done correctly, it's a useful feature, especially when you have a particularly weak signal, as long as it's done correctly, and as long as you aren't trying to do code debugging etc.
Great, although i wish firefox came with a built in mechanism for overriding the maxversion of addons (something more user friendly than downloading the xpi, stripping out any signatures, manually editing the manifest, repackaging it and installing it) given that the version numbers are jumping so rapidly nowadays.
I think more to the point the developers/advertisers think you wont check or care that they've decided to add location permissions to your list of requirements. At any rate, the latest angry birds update remains 'pending' on my own droid until the permissions are changed or I get another option such as an app like this one.
I saw a simiar tech on top gear a year or two ago in a range rover or land rover or something. It was a (roughly 7 inch) screen in the dash that could play a dvd or tv to the passenger while showing the driver a sat-nav map. Admittedly that tech could use lenticulars because the position of each person was fixed, but the concept is the same
Tried to send some texts last night at about 1am, which failed to go anywhere, Rebooted phone this morning and full signal changed into no signal, so it looks like the fault is reaching quite far west, and i'm near to the devon/cornwall border, and there's not an awful lot west of here.
If they want people to be able to send out text messages to users, could they not simply provide a permission that allows applications to have access to a FB API that lets them send a SMS to a user. With the right framework they could even charge the app owner for SMS sent so it doesn't actually cost facebook anything.
As for your address, well the only way to stop that being abused is to vet the applications to make sure they're being owned by real stores.
... towards creating Cybernetic Overlords, first all the computers around the world begin collecting as much organic matter as they can until the formula for growing Arnold Schwarzenegger is discovered in a small machine somewhere in southern california. Before we know it, we'll all be killed!
Cleaning your machine regularly is important.
The glasses in use at cinemas or theme parks (black ones, not red and blue) are just simple polarising filters which are easy to make work if you're using actual projectors. When it comes to TVs and screens the only easy way to do it without losing half the resolution is to have 120hz screens and active glasses which black out each lens in turn at the same rate as the TV is switching frames. That's why the part is so expensive
My laptop barely goes above 10% usage (with what i'm running its using 5% for everything else) in both firefox and chrome.
While it is impressive, i imagine some older machines will struggle and google really should've provided a way to turn it off, although fair play iGoogle, https google etc all do just that
Geo-targetting is nice, but when nobody knows its happening it makes things a little confusing. I would imagine that anybody from Oz would be similarly the article to relate to Britain unless specified otherwise although they probably at least recognised the named people.
Perhaps some kind of 'localized news' category, or special marking on the page could be used to indicate that this article is intended for a particular area?
From Steam:
Title: Grand Theft Auto IV
Genre: Action, Adventure
Developer: Rockstar North Rockstar Toronto
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Release Date: Dec 2, 2008
Languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish
3rd-party DRM: SecuROM™
Unlimited machine activations
It does appear that the steam version carries SecuROM too
[quote=AC]Sleep cycles literally go in cycles so you reach the given state where it would wake you several times per night. So do I want to be woken at 3am?[/quote]
No, you set the phone's normal alarm clock for the time you wake up, the app reads this and wakes you up when you're ready WITHIN 20 minutes of the designated alarm time
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