Posts by uhuznaa

iPhone 5: skinny li'l fella with better display, camera, software

The day

such articles will only draw a handful of comments Apple will have lost it.

LG first to flaunt quad-core Qualcomm smartie

Re: 4-sided, Rounded corners...

To be fair, this thing borrows quite heavily from the iPhone's aesthetics. Totally flat, black/white front and back, silver band running around it... LG must be desperate.

'$199' Surface tablets: So crazy it might work, or just crazy?

It has no apps

The ARM version can't run "normal" Windows apps and there are no ARM apps yet. At all.

MS would never be able to sell enough of them at higher prices. Selling the things dirt cheap is the only chance they've got. People WILL buy a 11" tablet for $199 even if it has just five apps or so initially. It's not only a good idea, it's the only way to make that thing fly.

Microsoft dumps Metro from Windows 8

Epic fail

Metro was a nice, catchy name. Not checking for trademarks and coming to some agreement with others holding that trademark before naming the fscking software is just... unprofessional.

I'm really curios if MS has been more careful with checking for other trademarks and patents in Windows 8 or if the thing will be shot down within a week.

Apple MacBook Pro 13in

A bit behind the curve now

...but still a decent machine. I'm still using the very first iteration of this (late 2008 unibody MB, with no "Pro"), and despite daily abuse it still works and looks as new after nearly four years. I still would buy a 13" MBP without hesitation.

And yes, it may be pretty mundane inside but everything else you can't buy elsewhere at all, cheap or not. Great keyboard, best trackpad ever...

Big media little iPad stories suggest Apple is cranking up the spin cycle

Obviously

A 7" tablet would be trivial for Apple. The only reason there isn't one yet is that they didn't need to sell one. The Fire and the Nexus 7 will make them think they have to compete (and they surely have to), so there will be an iPad mini.

Carefully controlled leaks now and then selling the thing in October or so would be the right thing to do, too.

I rather fear it will be an iPod touch maxi, with no 3G radio and a rather crappy screen. But surely at a good price point.

Analyst fears iPhone 5 power pack to prompt launch postponement

Re: Display

Current apps already have to be somewhat flexible about their UI's height, since there's a double height status bar when you use them during a phone call. Vertical flexibility won't be very much of a problem.

Re: Real news would be...

Well, since most iPhone buyers never had one before and so can't be actual fanbois, those people seem to have other reasons not to buy other phones. Maybe they just have other priorities than you?

Anyway. Apple has not announced any release date, so speculating about any delays is somewhat moot.

Chrome hits iPhone and iPad, storms to top of download chart

Depends. iWork is nice, but again a total lock-in. Garageband would be tricky on Android (Android just sucks for low-lag, realtime-like audio stuff). But yeah, let them port all of that, I would like it. Also port Facetime and iMessage to Android and Windows. Or accept that in the end everyone just uses Skype and the like instead.

Re: Is it really Chrome?

It's Chrome with Apple's WebKit implementation instead of Google's. I doubt very much you would be able to spot any difference between both.

Cookies are good for you

Says Google and gives you only a choice of enabling cookies for all the world (including third-party cookies) or disabling them altogether.

No need anymore for Google to hack around the default setting in Safari (which allowed cookies, but banned third-party cookies, which is the only sane setting when it comes to cookies and privacy).

Apart from that and the fact that you can neither up- nor download files with it, Chrome is nice. It can even sync your passwords over from your desktop, something that OS X, iOS and Safari can't do even after 5 years.

If there's still any doubt if Apple is just coasting along by sheer inertia now, imagine Safari being ported to Android and the world don't giving a shit.

Android Jelly Bean won't get Flash Player

Re: I still don't understand ...

Exactly. Video isn't the problem at all. Of course if you browse with Flash installed you will see Flash video all over the place but without it you'll just get your video served by other means, mostly.

The problem are games and such things. And many sites designed by "designers" that are just a big blob of shivering Flash. If you don't need those, just forget that something called "Flash" ever existed.

Apple iPhone turns five this Friday

Don't know of the "status symbol" thing, but the iPhone is just very well known. No Android phone of the day (or half year) can ever get to this "status" thing because it just has no time to establish it.

And to be honest: Just blindly going for the iPhone for most people means they will get a decent smartphone which does what most people want to do with a smartphone in a very straightforward way, while going blindly for a random Android phone easily leads to being stuck with a dud.

At any given point in time there may be one or two Android phones that are "better" for some very specific needs than the iPhone, but there are also hundreds of them that are much worse, never get any update, or any third-party attention, and vanish down the slope of the history pile three months later. This then is the opposite of a "status symbol" and just says "I was too silly and lazy to inform myself and also too cheap/proud to just get an iPhone".

What's most amazing

is the fact that the iPhone and especially iOS have hardly changed at all in these years. OK, it got some badly needed things (copy&paste, third-party apps), but many stock apps and iOS itself are still almost the same five years later. I'm not sure if this just means that Apple got it just right back then or if Apple is falling back, or a bit of both. Probably the latter...

Google Nexus 7 price, details confirmed in pre-I/O leak

Re: No rear facing camera

A rear facing camera is very useful to take snaps of documents, scan codes or show things to someone over Skype. There's an awful lot of things a front facing camera is totally awkward to use for.

Apple's iPhone 5 connector said to be a control freak

Re: How about Apple spend some time fixing the damn power cables?

I never had an iDock cable fail. My gf uses my old iPod touch from 2007 daily, with the cable that came with it and it looks and feels as new.

Either that or

Apple just needs room in the iPhone for something. It seems they are moving the headphone socket to the bottom, which means the dock connector needs to shrink to make room for that. With a taller display and case this gives at least half an inch of room over the full width and depth of the phone. What for is anyone's guess, mine is: a camera with an optical zoom.

Or this is just about milking the customer and nothing else. In this case I will sell my iPhone 4 and jump ship to Android and will never look back.

Samsung frees fanboys from iPhone with freeware

If Kies is the solution...

... I want the problem back!

Why I love Microsoft’s vapourware tablet

What's the opposite of "synergy"?

Because MS is demonstrating exactly this. There's "Surface", an ARM-based tablet that is very similar to the iPad: Halfway affordable, light, long-running, Appstore-only apps. Just that it will run *only* Metro-only Apps for Windows 8 compiled for ARM, of which exactly none exists right now. Hard to see why it should fare better than WP7 with smartphones.

Then there's "Surface Pro", an Intel-based low-end Ultrabook with an optional awkward keyboard and a display angle you can't adjust, making a hot and short running, heavy, expensive tablet PC into a laptop you won't be able to use on your lap. It will also run every old Windows application on a 11.6" screen with 1920 x 1080 pixels, which will mean the keyboard, trackpad, digitizer and stylus aren't just nice options -- they are there for a reason. How this thing should be much more successful than the bad old Tablet PCs I don't know.

So each of these devices lacks something important that the other has in scores: Surface is a great tablet with no apps and Surface pro has all the apps and compatibility without being an usable tablet or even an Ultrabook.

MS should have named them "!Synergy".

'iPhone 5 case' sparks supplier fondle frenzy

Re: Innovations

Headphone jack at the bottom, case half an inch taller -- this frees up lots of room at the top of the phone. I would guess Apple will need that room for something. Like a camera with an optical zoom behind a prism.

Everything else just wouldn't make any sense.

Ultrabooks: objects of desire but just too darn expensive

Re: should have bought a mac...

6 years is a stretch.

The point with PC stuff is not so much software bloat, it's the hardware losing its value. You can use a Macbook for two or three years, then sell it off for a healthy chunk of money and get the latest and greatest from Apple again.

The "Ultrabook" of today will be worth hardly anything in three years, though.

And all of this is a trick of Intel anyway. Subnotebooks have always been a very small market segment, there is no way you blow that up into something it isn't.

Leaked snaps said to confirm iPhone 5 speculation

Awful

No, really. The two-toned back, the asymmetric bottom part with different sized mic and speaker grills, the headphone socket squeezed in next to these... And if Apple REALLY throws away its almost total market penetration for music players everywhere this would be just straight crazy. Especially if this will be a new, incompatible dock connector instead of USB or such. Madness. If this is the new iPhone I would start to sell my Apple stock (if I had some).

7.85in 'iPad Mini' said to sport retina screen

Re: Don't start...

Inertia. More than with many other things people don't care that much for the actual exact size of a screen, they just want to know how large or small it is compared to other screens they're familiar with.

Additionally screens happen to come in sizes that are nicely expressed in inches in somewhat comfortable and memorable (low) figures.

It's somehow strange but I'm comfortable with that.

Possible, but doubtful

Well, the costs of high resolution displays scale more with size than with resolution, so this isn't totally impossible... Still, I doubt it. 1024x768 on 7.85" should be fine, the backlight uses much less battery (which makes the device not only cheaper again, but also thinner and lighter), you get better performance and the price (and margins!) surely would be much better compared to a retina display.

Honestly, I would instantly buy a cheap, light and thin 7.85" iPad with 1024x768. Should be great for ebooks and couch surfing.

Telly is becoming moving wallpaper for constantly online Brits

Re: Cure for cyber bullying

If bullying victims always were tougher nuts than bullies, there would be no bullying.

iPhone 5 gets a 5in screen

Well...

I certainly like a big screen, but I also like a small phone and a touchscreen I can reach all corners on with my thumb when I use my phone with one hand. It's a compromise. I think about 4" is OK.

Apple totally nailed it with the 3.5" screen in 2007 -- this was just big enough to be usable and just small enough to be accepted by customers who had become spoiled by ever smaller (dumb) phones. Nowadays people do much more with their phones and have come to accept larger phones more easily. Back in 2007 a phone with a 4.3" or even 4.6" screen would have been dead in the water.

I guess Apple will come with a 4.0" screen for the iPhone 5. This is still fine for 960x640 and with a smaller bezel the phone will be hardly larger.

Confirmed: iPad 3 runs hotter than iPad 2

33.6°C

is not exactly hot. And as others already said: A 70% larger battery being depleted in the same time means 70% more energy is turned into heat.

I'm pretty sure that the next generation will have a more efficient SOC. It's somewhat amazing that Apple managed to pull this off right now, the huge battery and waste heat is a sign that it wasn't easy at all. A 45 Wh battery in a tablet is quite a stunt.

Free apps suck your power: researchers

Re: Exsqueeze me???

Every app that displays ads wants to know where you are (and several things more) and beam it home.

From the AdMob Privacy Policy (Google):

"AdMob will automatically collect and receive information about those visitors such as, but not limited to, browser identifiers, session information, browser cookies, device type, carrier provider, IP addresses, unique device ID, carrier user ID, geo-location information, sites visited and clicks on advertisements we display."

Anyway, one shouldn't overestimate the energy consumption of all this. Most of the power is used for the display anyway.

iPhone tethering app uses HTML5 to defeat Apple's censors

Only HTTP then?

Can't be "real" IP tethering, no way. This thing will just work as a kind of HTTP proxy, sending the content of web pages over from the iPhone to another device with some custom software running on it. A bad crutch, at best.

Paying for tethering would be reasonable if you had unlimited bandwidth on a mobile device, but if you get tight limits anyway it should be your choice how you consume your bandwidth. Luckily my provider does it exactly this way, tethering just works.

Tim Cook's post-PC iPad domination dream crushed by reality

"Post-PC"...

Read this as "post PC-domination" and suddenly it starts to make sense.

I think it's fairly obvious that smartphones and tablets *are* replacing PCs for many home/casual users (who can afford this) and even for quite a few business users. This will lead to the PC finally being degraded to what it actually always was: Office machinery. Nothing wrong with this, really.

Hands on with the Apple iPad 3

Re: new, newer, even newer, newer newer?

"Coming later in the year will be the newER ipad, and next year the EVEN newer ipad, and followig that is the NEWER newer ipad?"

No, the new one will always be the new iPad and the old one the old iPad. Exactly like a new Macbook will be the "new Macbook" as long as it is the new one. What's so hard to get about that?

Apple 7.85in 'iPad Mini' on course for Q3 intro

The iPod touch sells very well, though. As a kind of micro iPad it also works totally fine, just the screen is a tad too small. A smaller (and cheaper) iPad would certainly sell well enough.

Belkin Keyboard Folio case for iPad

I hate these things

The case is thick and heavy, if you don't need to carry the keyboard you have to wrestle the iPad out of the case (and put it into another one)... Just get a nice separate BT keyboard instead (even the really nice standard Apple BT keyboard *plus* a case is cheaper than that).

I can somewhat understand people doubting the advantages of this case over a netbook. But an iPad and a BT keyboard is a good option when you're travelling light. Use the keyboard when you have to do lots of writing, keep it in the bag otherwise.

Motorola 'Intel inside' Android 4.0 phone spied on web

That CPU is not at all crappy, really.

This will get to a point with Windows 8 and tablets

Doesn't matter much with smartphones, but we WILL see tablets running Windows 8 on Intel with the ability to run legacy Windows apps. Not that I would want to do that, but you can be sure there will be people who will love it.

Never underestimate the power of MS and Intel to stamp back into the market.

Apple 'seeking part makers' for 8in 'iPad Mini'

7" would be too small for existing iPad apps

With the same resolution and the same apps going from 10" to 7" would make the UI just too small. With 8" it may work.

I'm pretty sure Apple needs to somehow fight at the low end. With the Fire there's a cheap tablet for occasional ebook reading and lots of content by Amazon -- Apple can't just leave this part of the market alone. And then there's the textbook thing, the iPad 3 is just too expensive for that. In the long run driving the price of the cheapest iPad down by making the screen a bit smaller is just a reasonable move.

Samsung shows third-gen Galaxy Tab

No need to wait

You can buy things like the Lenovo A1 (very similar to the original Galaxy Tab) for £169 now.

Samsung 'Galaxy 4S' spied in benchmark results

Strange kind of "+"

Still 800x480 on 4.3", still no Android 4.0...

I would say this is just another angle from which to spray subtly different models all over the market. Samsung has always been very good at that.

Apple dishes out cheap, tasty Macs 'n slabs to staff

Great

Apple -- the scapegoat for uncounted gadget-addicted geeks everywhere, ripping apart Apple so they can continue to buy their cheap fixes Made in China with a cleanly washed conscience then.

Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Android Tablet

One, two, three...

This is the second transformer and the third is on the way (with even more pixels and a working GPS). All within less than a year.

I don't know about others, but I just can't buy any of these. First, a tablet is very much a luxury, so I don't have to buy one. Second, as soon as you could buy one nice model the next and better one is already coming, which makes waiting very tempting. Third, the apps are still lacking. Most of them are just the usual smartphone apps on a larger screen.

I'm still looking at all this with a kind of bored fascination.

Windows 8 hardware rules 'derail user-friendly Linux'

Just wait and see

It will be still about a year until Windows 8 is there. There will be a lot happening in this year and it's an open question if then anyone will be interested in buying into the next MS monopoly for lots of money.

MS clearly is trying to control the hardware without actually having control over the hardware. In how far this will work is in no way clear. On the other hand, if Intel manages to offer low-power X86 compatible CPUs until then and MS can offer tablets that support all the legacy Windows crap out of the box... Business users will love that.

And Linux? Well, the current situation on mobile hardware is as bad as it gets for Linux. Some standards controlled by MS might turn out to be better for Linux than no standards (and proprietary hardware) all over the place.

And of course we will see the good old PC surviving for a long time. There's a huge legacy market and nobody will be willing to give that up any time soon.

iPad typos are Apple's fault, not yours - new claim

Everyone with even the slightest interest in how things actually work, especially how user interfaces work, will know that even with a mouse a button on the screen is only "clicked" when you release the mouse button and not in the moment you press it. Keep it pressed down and nothing happens. Move the mouse pointer off the button while keeping the mouse button pressed and you can release it then without the button actually firing. Exactly this is happening in this video.

With such touchscreen keyboards a much better mental model of what's actually happening is one of "pulling" the keys instead of "pressing" them. Imagine the keys being gluey and you fire them by touching and pulling them off the screen. Try this and you won't have lost keys anymore.

(And I find it telling that the super-smart "Apple users are iSheep" self-proclaimed geeks seem to have never thought about how such things work)

Well...

The greying of the key does NOT mean that the keypress is taken. It means that if you raise your finger now this key will be taken. Sliding your finger off an UI element before raising your finger is the iOS way of cancelling a tap in progress. Happens easily if you're trying to type fast and not very accurate.

Either this or there are iPads with glitches. I don't have any more keys lost with iPads than with other touchscreens.

iOS 5's iMessage chops carrier SMS routing traffic

Not a world changer, still a good idea

The nicest thing about iMessage is how it integrates seamlessly with SMS. If you think about smartphones having persistent data connections for years now and usually the phone's software STILL makes you use bloody expensive SMS for texting, it's quite obvious that the carriers just don't want to give up on that cash-cow.

Apple giving the boot to the carriers here is one thing I love them for (even if there's lots not to love about them). Apple has got some balls the other phone and OS suppliers just seem to lack totally. The whole phone world surely would be a poorer place without Apple (and it was a poorer place before the iPhone).

Now, if Apple would open up iMessage, so that third-party apps on Android could support it... this would be even better. And Facetime. And integrate all of these.

Dermandar Panorama

No good

Might be a clever app but the panoramas are awful.

Try AutoStitch Panorama -- you don't need to hold the phone any special way, just snap away overlapping in vertical and horizontal orientation just as you like, even in several rows, and it will analyze and stitch the photos together. Creates much better panoramas with even less bother while taking the photos.

Apple preps TV enabled iMac ahead of own-brand telly

"Imagine the fun that could be had by broadcasting a show with lines randomly inserted:" -- Not not much fun to be had here, I'd say. This audio output goes through the thing anyway and it will (have to) filter this out, it's just background noise.

No, natural language recognition is a perfect fit for the living room, even better than for a smartphone. Just speaking to the room is so much better than fumbling around with a handful of silly remote controls that only geeks can overlook this simple truth.

Note, I do not say that Apple is still able to put something like that onto its feet. But if they do it, great.

"Copy whatever Google does" and do it right, I would say. Google TV is a nightmare and TV sets altogether are a nightmare. If Apple can pull off something that is a really straight and simple and shiny TV, they will make a load of money with it, and rightly so.

China gets 64 quid Android 4.0 tablet

800x480 pixels

Really, this is smartphone resolution, just on a larger screen. You won't be able to do anything on that thing you couldn't do with your smartphone anyway.

Siri gets Android rival as Cluzee goes live

"I have yet to see an iphone owner talking to siri"

And how would you know? After all he won't be looking any different from someone actually talking to someone else on the other end of the line.

Anyway, when the telephone was new, people thought it to be very strange to talk to someone who wasn't actually there. When the mobile phone was new, people found it very strange to talk to others over the phone in public. Now some people think it is strange talking to your phone (instead of someone else over the phone) and I'm fairly sure that this won't feel strange for very long.

Chromebooks: the flop of 2011?

Mistargeted

Google is totally wrong with targeting this thing at mobile users. The "thin client" idea certainly has some appeal especially for business, so they should support really cheap and limited all-in-one machines (17" or 19" screen with integrated everything, based on low-power Intel or even better ARM CPUs) for typical low-end business desktop use.

You get a browser, email, contacts, calendaring, docs, spreadsheets etc. basically with no setup (just log into your Google account and that's it), no further costs and minimal administration effort. No backups needed, no handling of local storage, no installing, fixing and updating local software, no restore when the hardware fails, no complex server systems and networks for roaming accounts... Sit down at a desk, log in, work. Hardware breaks? Plonk down a fresh thingy on the desk, log in, continue working.

You're guaranteed to have reliable and fast network connections in a office anyway and not being able to install software and not having local storage is almost a feature here. Admins all around the world are slaving to chop down perfectly capable PCs to not much more than Chromebooks are anyway. What a waste of time.

But as a notebook or netbook replacement for mobile use this is totally a failure for more than just one reason. Casual users WANT to install software and games. They don't have always reliable and fast networks on the road. They're not just working with a limited set of tasks. Clerks do that.

As always Google may have good engineering but a lousy strategy. Do they have a Thinking Department there? Doesn't look like that, really.