Posts by uhuznaa

Amazon Kindle Fire

"Erm, no, it's a tablet - no e-book reader has a battery life less than a week, let alone a month (like the "proper Kindles")"

Yeah, it's just a tablet.

Still, all this "a month of battery life" is really getting on my nerves. Amazon speaks of one month of battery life (for the "real" Kindle) if you use it half an hour each day. That's 30 days with 1/2h each which makes 15 hours of battery life. With WiFi on, it's three weeks. Which makes 10.5 hours. That's not all that much more than an iPad or a Kindle Fire.

Major difference is that e-ink readers have a very low standby power drain (since they're basically off then, they have nothing to do after all) and of course they have much smaller batteries to begin with, which makes them lighter. But the actual battery life when you actually use them is not so much better, really. If you use an iPad only for thirty minutes a day, you won't have to charge it for weeks.

Apple MacBook Pro 13in Core i5 laptop

"You've lost 50% in 2 years of ownership of a mac but you can beat the specs of this mac for less than half its cost if you buy a pc."

But you can't. You don't get similar (or even better) PC laptops for less than half its cost, really. They cost very much the same or more.

For me higher pixel densities are just meaningless as long as the UI can't adapt to it. If you're really working with such a thing staring 10 hours a day on microscopic fonts and icons is just a pain and 1280x800 on 13" is much better for your eyes and your sanity. The 11" and 13" Airs are already borderline for me. It's OK for an hour or two, but then it gets just painful.

Still not bad

The fact is that this is "entry level" for Apple products, not for laptops. If you compare the MBP with similar offerings from others, it's not overpriced. And if you factor in the fact that Apple hardware keeps its value very good over the years its outright cheap in the long run (I have a MPB from 2009 and could still sell it for half its price when it was new -- try that with other laptops).

Anyway, these days a Macbook Air would be the better choice if you don't need the optical drive, a large HD or more than 4 Gigs of RAM. IF you need those though, the 13" MBP is still a very sensible choice. And if you're using this thing to earn money ("Pro") for a few years the upfront cost is just irrelevant.

3m iPad 3 'retina' screens sent to Apple by month's end

The trouble with PCs is that their OS can't really make any use of higher resolutions, everything gets smaller with the smaller pixels and while you can cram more toolbars and icons and windows onto the screen there are tight limits to that since you still need to be able to read and click all these tiny things. A netbook running Windows on a 10" screen with 2048x1536 pixels would be just unusable and totally pointless.

The iPad goes the other way, the UI and fonts and everything stays at the same (absolute) sizes, the OS just uses more pixels to render buttons and icons and text, making everything look better and more sharp and clean. Around 300 DPI is what you want to have for things printed on paper and there is no reason to not want to have the same kind of detail and smoothness on a display, really.

It's very much like b/w displays against colour back then: At first it seems like a gaudy gimmick, but go back after getting used to see colours and you see there's something missing.

Motorola Razr Android smartphone

To achieve that thinness Moto obviously had to make the thing rather large -- there is a really enormous bezel around the screen. If you want to use that thing with one hand you'll need large hands.

Integrated battery: Has it a real, hardware reset button? Because if not, what do you do in these situations where you have to pull the battery to reset the thing? This happens occasionally after all.

Anyway, Motorola should offer this phone with a golden frame and call it BLNG.

iOS upgrade swells iPhone battery-suckage grief

Get real

Problems are problems, but a few thousands of several million users are just background noise. 0.05% of users complaining is nothing. I would expect it's awfully hard to get a yield of fully working batteries of 99.9% or so -- if you had and still have problems go to Apple and change your phone for a working one. Problem solved.

(My iPhone 4 had no problems with 5.0 and still has none with 5.01. 75% battery after 11 hours standby and 2 hours active usage is totally fine in my book.)

Nokia Lumia 800

Nice actually, but what I really would like to see are technical details: What exactly is supported with all the services WP7 syncs with? Just phone numbers and email addresses is not enough. What's with company name, street addresses, contact photo, birthdays and relationships... Even Google actually sucks quite a bit here.

For casual use the most basic things will certainly be enough, but for any kind of professional/business use I would really like to see a table of what gets synced here.

Amazon ups Kindle Fire production...

One thing I find really irritating with the Fire is the fact that it lacks both a webcam and a microphone. These days I take things like Skype, Fring or voicenotes just for granted and a tablet that has not even a microphone is just incomplete. And a VGA webcam and a mic are really dirt-cheap things to integrate.

Is Apple nobbling iPhones to avoid more patent misery?

Hmm

At least the panorama feature is just not ready -- it totally sucks, in fact. I'd guess that these are features that didn't get finished in time and were inactivated for the release.

HTC prepares quad-core smartphone for 2012

Why all these pre-announcements?

Nothing against HTC or quad-core smartphones, really -- but why do companies pre-announce phones half a year before they may or may not sell them finally? They will have a reason for that, but which reason?

Android voice assistant shootout

On the iPhone you can also just hold the thing up to your ear and Siri comes up, no button needed.

In the long run you'll need a specialized low-power chip that gets programmed with the name you would like to call your phone and that listens all the time, waking up the main CPU as soon as it hears its name. Everything short of that won't work, you can't have your phone listening all the time, this draws much too much power (and there are some creepy privacy problems lurking here too).

We will get there sooner or later, though. For many mundane things speech recognition and AI systems are just the perfect solution.

K-9

Nested folders...

Is here anyone who can recommend an Android mail client that works nicely with hundreds of deeply nested IMAP folders? Nicely means that you can actually read all folder names down to the n-th level, can browse them quickly and move emails around between them after selecting several somewhere (as in *not* one at a time)? And is still straightforward and easy enough to use for a CEO-type user?

Apple 'prepping smaller iPad'

Easy enough

Apple could easily take the iPod touch and scale it up from 3.5" to 7". Larger battery, larger screen, same innards, same resolution, same software. 960x640 on 7" is still a higher pixel density than the 10" iPad with 1024x768. There're plenty of apps running on that "retina" resolution and even if the UI elements would appear much larger than on the iPhone or iPod touch it would be perfectly usable. And cheap, because just a larger screen with the same amount of pixels and a larger battery with a new case aren't that expensive. With the iPod touch at $199 you could sell this with a similar margin for $249 or less.

On the other hand scaling the 10" iPad down with a smaller screen and battery wouldn't make it much cheaper and all the UI elements in the apps would shrink to nearly unusable absolute sizes. Idiotic idea, actually.

But Apple is between a rock and a hard place here. An iPad mini would be easy and would sell not too bad, but it would very much look like the start of what nearly doomed Apple the last time: Sprawling products to cover a market at all angles.

I'm sure they have production-quality prototypes of both approaches, but I'm also sure they will wait this out for a while.

Dutch court rejects Samsung iPhone ban bid

It's really not just "round corners", you know. It's lots of stuff right down to the icons that Samsung copied off the iPad. If Samsung had actually put some original work into that or just installed plain Android rounded corners would'nt have mattered.

Not that anyone would care for details here. Hating Apple is just inverted fanboism.

This was totally expected by everyone even having the slightest clue about what Samsung was trying to do here.

World+Dog goes bonkers for iPhone 4S

It's certainly not the first phone with voice control, but surely the first phone you can say somewhat complex commands instead of just a few keywords. Makes a world of a difference in real use, I dare to say.

Apple wins for now: no Galaxy 10.1 in Oz

No. First, copying is not always stealing (there's a fine legal line here) and second, Steve did not copy from what was hugely successful first. He copied what he recognized as good ideas, even from totally failed products nobody else would touch again (like tablet computers).

What tipped my opinion of this was that Samsung seemed to lack so deeply any clue about why the iPhone and iPad were such an success that they even copied the photo gallery icon to have yellow flower petals in it. I mean, I don't care if this is "illegal" or someone has any design patents or whatever, it's the sheer inability of coming up with own ideas and instead painstakingly copying what's already successful since they have no idea what of it exactly makes it successful in the first place.

It's like you in your work doing a real good job against all odds and then have some idiot aping you down to your clothing and hairstyle since he has no idea why you're good and tries to do just the same everywhere to be on the safe side.

No, at least in Australia it is *not* about design or rounded corners or whatever. It is about some patents that Apple has and Samsung ignored. Samsung is actively working on leaving out some features so they can sell the thing again.

Come on, you may like the state of affairs with patents or not (and there's a lot not to like about that) but as long as they are what they are you have to play by the rules or risk being smacked.

And honestly: Samsung builds some impressive hardware, but they're shamelessly copying, and they're always stealing from the top. Steve Jobs surely has also copied a lot, but at least he was able to recognise good ideas if the saw them, even in products and projects that had utterly failed on their own. There is a huge difference here. Waiting to see what works out and then copying it is not the same as grabbing exactly the right bits out of the bottom of the barrel and build successful products from those ideas that noone else recognized as good ideas.

iPhone 4S pre-orders obliterate sales records

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4951/iphone-4s-preliminary-benchmarks-800mhz-a5-slightly-slower-gpu-than-ipad-2

Well, it's very like with the steam engine. Which wasn't invented by James Watt but by the Greeks back in 100 AD. They treated it as a mere toy though. At the beginning of the industrial revolution things were different and people suddenly realised you can use it to do real work.

Same with the touchscreen phone/tablet, apps, and now maybe with natural language recognition -- nothing of this is really new, nothing of this is invented by Apple, but others before just weren't able to put it to work. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong implementation, wrong execution, wrong markets... whatever.

Apple news is news because many people care for it. Like it or not. Nobody in general cared for Nokia apps back then.

From the benchmarks it looks as if the A5 in the 4S runs only with 800 MHz (exactly like the A4 in the iPhone 4). This will lower the power draw dramatically. And then the iPad has a much larger screen which is the major power hog anyway. And the A5-powered iPad 2 does actually have a slightly better battery life than the A4-powered iPad 1. I don't see why this should be different with the iPhone.

Well, we will see soon.

Guys, if you don't like the benchmarks, thumb down Anandtech, not my comment please. Or even better, stick the thumbs into your eyes.

Anandtech is not an Apple Fanboi site, by the way. Rather the opposite.

The more I read such idiotic comments about the "tech illiterate" the more I prefer to be lumped in with the average instead of with the "tech literate" idiots. I AM a techie, but the sheer arrogance and aggressive blindness of my fellow geeks shames me really.

First benchmarks are in...

For all of you still interested in specs -- anandtech.com has the first benchmarks (SunSpider, GLBenchmark, Rightware) of the 4S.

It's nearly twice as fast as the Samsung Galaxy S2 accross the board.

Samsung sets back smartphone launch for Steve J

"It may well be a step up from the iPhone 4 and earlier models but comparing it purely from a hardware point of view Android phones have had better specs for months already. "

I keep reading this over and over... Which specs exactly are better with Android phones for months already and which phones and which specs exactly you're talking about?

Look at http://www.tuaw.com/2011/10/05/iphone-4s-what-can-you-say-to-siri/ for a list of commands that Siri is supposed to parse and understand.

Can you say "Reschedule my appointment with Dr. Manning to next Monday at 9am" to any Android smartphone and have it do just this?

I suspect they got thrown totally off their script not by The Steve dying but by Apple not going the "large screen, gimmicky case" route as all expected and instead coming with the 4S and Siri. Demoing a 4.6" screen under curved glass you need both hands to use when Apple stays with the (meanwhile) iconic straight steel/glass case on a phone you don't need even one hand to use might prove to be totally blunt.

I bet they're waiting to get their hands on the 4S and check out Siri. If this works as advertised they may find themselves suddenly in a new game that Apple started while Google and Samsung were still playing with themselves.

The life and times of Steven Paul Jobs

Fun with numbers

"We can't wait to feature your software right here, in every single one of our stores. So, go write some more for us, and we'll build more shelves for as much as you can write."

If all of the apps currently in the iOS App Store would come in a shrinkwrapped package 4 cm wide and you'd install an aisle five shelves high to hold all of them, it would need to be 4 km long to display them all.

iPhone 5: Apple 4S, pundits 0

Hmm

Apple NOT going for the yearly (or half-yearly) "all new phone" has at least the advantage that people with older phones don't feel that much left behind. I mean, these things are expensive enough and if (as with certain other phones) you're guaranteed to find your phone a few months down the road for half the price at Amazon, people aren't happy with their purchase usually.

I don't know how important this is in the big picture, but Apple has a quite evolutionary product philosophy and many people spending money on these products usually like that. How long do the MacBooks look the same now? My late 2008 MacBook looks and feels very much the same as the most current MBP and there's nothing wrong with that.

I just hear too many people saying "this and that seems to be a nice phone, but I'll wait half a year longer, there are some interesting pre-announcements...". And then they buy the latest and greatest and again half a year later it's just outdated again.

The iPhone 4 has a good reputation among normal people and the 4S being the same in faster and with a better camera surely won't change anything here.

The iPhone 4S in depth: More than just a vestigial 'S'

Large screens

are better for browsing but I'm fairly sure that most normal people like to be able to use their phone one-handed and with 4" and more this gets really tough. You need to balance the thing on three fingers to reach everywhere with a larger screen. Ok, some people have really huge hands but this is not the rule.

That being said, I would have liked a 3.7" display or so, but with a screen reaching to the very ege it becomes hard to avoid accidental touches when holding it around the edges.

What I really like

is the wireless (AirPlay) screen mirroring. OK, you need an ATV for that, but still... Having the ability to use all apps, video, photos, games etc. on the big screen without hanging off a cable and with no fuss is just sweet.

I think the 4S is evolution in a nice way. There was not much wrong with the iPhone 4 design, still a timeless classic as far as gadgets go.

Hands on with the Samsung Galaxy Note

Try it

I thought along the very same lines as you and thought the Dell Streak 5 was a lovely idea. Until I held it in my hand. No. It's too large and too heavy to carry it all day every day and if I have to have another phone anyway I can as well get a tablet with an even larger screen instead.

I mean, I somehow like that thing, but it's just good for being *another* device and then you can have a really useful display size easily with a real tablet. And how many SIM cards and phone numbers and data costs do you want to have?

TextGrabber

Hmm

Would be nice if the text would be saved to Dropbox or synced with SimpleNote or whatever.

Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO

Good timing

With the next iPhone in the coming and at least the next iPad in the works this was a better moment than in half a year or so.

Well, I can't imagine he would do that if he didn't have to and this is not a good sign. All the best, Steve!

Blackberry QNX phone details leaked

Hmm

It's not the OS itself that sucks power, it's the various subsystems. And saving power comes not from chosing the right OS, it comes from having decent power-management, which means integration of OS and hardware down to a level where you can throttle down or switch off every little bit of hardware that is not needed at a given moment. In phones and tablets that can mean running the radios independently from the actual CPU and waking up the system from low-power states only if the network buffers have filled up and there's actually a chunk of data to process.

All this is really hard to achieve, you need tight and deep integration of soft- and hardware development and you need engineers knowing about all the thousands of little tricks and strategies to save a microampere here and another there. This is nothing you put on its feet in a few months. "Porting to QNX" is the easiest part here.

Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Part Two

Some cheese with all that whine?

Switch off all the multitouch-gestures, install BetterTouchTool (free) and define your own as you like. Animations can be disabled from within the terminal (google for the right commands). iCal and AB can be re-themed (google for it) and apart from the looks iCal is lightyears ahead of the SL version. Terminal is *much* better, too (and it was good to begin with).

Come on, there are lots of positive changes and the few you may don't like are easily fixed. I assure you, use Lion for a month, go back to SL and it will feel incredible old and limited.

Corporates love iPhone, iPad more than Android kit

Small wonder...

Really. First, Google (as well as most Android handset makers) is somewhat ignoring business needs. There's no kind of FS encryption of any sort, support for things like Cisco SecureIP VPN is missing, managing business email accounts with deep hierarchies of folders with the Android email clients is a bad joke, the Android market is a crapfest, there're hundreds of devices to evaluate and every single one of them might be replaced with a totally different model three months later with no updates anymore for the one you bought in large numbers...

Apple at least has device management software, Enterprise solutions for app distribution (yes, without Apple controlling what you install), iOS offers ways of locking down, locating and wiping devices, the included email client works nicely with accounts with lots of folders, VPN of any kind is fully supported out of the box, you can rely on updates for years, you have just two models to chose from...

Face it, Google cares only for one thing: Eyeballs looking at the ads Google sells. Yes, Android is somewhat "open" and as a geek you can have lots of fun with it. But basically Android is a vehicle to beam ads at consumers and Google has everything revolving around that.

To employ iOS in the business you just need to look at things in a sober way. To employ Android you need to be a fanboi.

Things may (and probably will) change later on, but right now you need to be a kind of Android fanatic to coerce Android devices into corporate/business settings. And as usual with "everything is possible but hardly anything you need works out of the box" you need to take full responsibility and lots of time. With iOS you evaluate some products, look at the costs, make a decision and you're done with it. In any professional setting the latter is just the thing you want to do. It's work, not a hobby.

Sorry for injecting some realism into the discussion.

Major overhaul makes OS X Lion king of security

"Trivial" in Ubuntu...

http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2011/05/10/how-to-install-ubuntu-11-04-on-an-encrypted-lvm-file-system/

versus

http://static.arstechnica.net/2011/07/04/lion/file-vault.png

Full HD encryption

One has to say that enabling this in Lion is a piece of cake. Click a button and that's it, after a reboot the data is encrypted in the background, no setup woes, nothing. Compared to the burning hoops you have to jump through to enable this on other systems (although it is nothing new and entirely possible since ages) this really makes a difference.

Say what you want, Apple is good at making things easy enough to have common people actually use it instead of just nerds bragging about things being "possible". I know only very few people actually encrypting their laptop drives on Windows or Linux, even if most know that they could and should do it. Come on, do *you* encrypt your drives?

Files Connect

Full filesystem...

While I agree that the lack of a real filesystem can be annoying now and then, digging around in the mess that every OS and its apps tend to dump into the filesystem isn't exactly joyful either. It just feels "normal" as long as you're doing it anyway, but I bet digging around in trash and manure feels normal too if you do it all of your life.

Apple annihilates Wall Street performance estimates

Somewhat phenomenal

About fanbois: Again about 50% of Mac sales was to people who never bought a Mac before.

Apple plans to prune iPhone 3GS price

[No fucking title]

"Does this mean it'll get updates and be supported again?"

The 3GS is still supported and gets updates, including iOS 5 later this year.

I doubt this rumour very much, by the way. I could believe in a cheaper iPhone based on the iPod touch though.

Samsung Chromebook: The $499 Google thought experiment

It's not free...

And that's the problem. For free I would take one.

With Google things are always a bit creepy and they actually suck quite a bit, but hey -- what Google offers basically works and it doesn't cost you anything, so it feels like a good deal after all.

Paying a hilarious amount of money for what basically is a low-end but very expensive netbook... no.

Apple said to have 3G-enabled iPod in pipeline

iPod touch + 3G = cheap iPhone?

There were rumors of Apple coming with not one but two new iPhone models this year -- a cheaper version of the iPhone 4 and a truly new iPhone 5. An iPod touch based iPhone (with the same cheaper display and cameras) with a low price could be quite a hit. And what's an iPod touch with a 3G radio other than an iPhone?

Well, we will see.

LG Optimus Black

Not cheap enough

Basically a really nice Android smartphone, but a bit expensive for what it hasn't got. There's certainly room for somewhat bland looking, no nonsense smartphones which even don't need the latest and greatest multicore CPUs and whatnot, but the price just isn't right. The SGS2 isn't that much more expensive and offers quite a bit more.

Ten... Premium Android smartphones

It's not THAT bad

"Meanwhile my antique candybar Nokia 2310 will last the full week, and even makes those, you know, phonecall things..."

If you use a smartphone only for calls and texts it will also last much longer than one or two days. They are not all the same with standby power needs and background apps sucking power but basically these things run down their batteries that fast because you do so much more with them.

HTC Flyer 7in Android tablet

Well done, HTC!

This thing is indeed going to fly like a pig.

Apple uncloaks top 10 tools of iOS 5

WiFi sync

"So about the only useful feature is the ability to sync without tethering, but i'm not sure i really trust apple's "cloud" with my data - this is the big reason that I didn't buy an Android phone. Wireless syncing done properly would sync to *my* other devices, and to no other devices."

If you would look at the beta you would see that the iCloud is optional and WiFi syncing to your computer (in the same network, no idea if this works over VPN too) works fine without it. Doesn't seem at all as if Apple is trying to force you into their cloud.