Posts by uhuznaa 366 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2007
Hmm. If it's really true that iMessage combines SMS and an Apple-only protocol, this hardly can fail. The carriers of course will hate that. Why isn't something like that integrated with Android? Ah, yes, the carriers. Say what you want about Apple but they have the balls to stick it to the carriers now and then.
And having some (limited to iOS users) texting capabilities on iPod touches and WiFi-iPads is better than nothing. The kids will love that, especially since it's free.
As usual some people complain about long overdue shortcomings finally being fixed. I'm pretty sure though that most users will just enjoy this. The new notifications look totally fine to me, wireless syncing and iTunes more or less being replaced by the iCloud (and mostly for free) looks at least as good as anything that Google offers (especially with developer API's and a free key/value storage in the cloud for all devices with no need to convince users to open another and another third-party account somewhere), iOS 5 will come for free to all devices from the 3GS on... Lots of useful small improvements, too.
Maybe nothing revolutionary, but surely just everything one could cautiously expect, including iOS devices finally being able to stand on their own feet now.
And Apple now going full-steam cloud-wise is a good thing even for Android. Google was getting a bit complacent lately. Especially the Google Docs app being nothing but a painfully thin wrapper around the webapp was more than disappointing. With iWork now native on all Apple devices and automatically syncing across all of them there's hope now that Google stops just sitting on its laurels and putting some halfway decent office app on top of Google Docs (the lack of which I never understood -- Google has everything to blow MS Office out of the water for most users, but they just don't try).
A really watertight encryption of the file system is hard to do. Either you have the key on the device (which is mainly good for quick wiping and not much more) or you have an external key (like a strong password) and nobody wants to type a 64 characters alphanumeric password each time he wants to make a call.
Many people seem to find even a 4-digit password as too inconvenient.
I mean, this was scareware that pretended to be a virus-cleaner. Giving a vague "malware problem" publicity by confirming that there is a new Mac malware going around would probably make the usual headline-skimming users more, not less prone to fall for that thing. Actively ignoring it and playing it down until you offer a clear document what this is and how to remove it actually makes sense in this case.
BTW, you remove this thing by throwing the app into the trash and emptying the trash. Lol.
What matters though is competition among apps and one has to say there is quite a bit of that in the Apple app store. Having one app for a certain task is one thing but having half a dozen or more with every one of them trying to be a bit better and a bit prettier and a bit cheaper than the others is another thing.
I would really like to see something like that coming together for Android/Honeycomb tablets. Looks still very bland there, sadly.
I think Apple will come up with more and different devices running iOS and iOS apps instead of coming with a laptop running OS X on ARM. There's the Apple TV and I wouldn't be surprised if the next thing would be a 30" all-in-one Apple TV, also running iOS. And then a desktop tablet with 15" or so you prop up on your desk and use with a BT keyboard and trackpad. Running iOS, of course. Or an 11" MBA running iOS instead of OS X, which would be very much like an iPad with a keyboard.
I mean, if they have found lots of data and hope to get their fingers on more of those people, why talk about that and warn them? They would rather keep quiet, learn from the data what they can and act. But if they haven't found anything to speak of, then suddenly talking about loads of data makes sense: This will cause some people to panic and to run. You may catch them easier then.
Stop fighting about which company to trust. You can trust none of them. Instead start looking at technical details, because details matter. We should insist in implementations of privacy-related technologies that do not require us to trust them in the first place.
And "you can do almost everything with enough forensic effort" is no excuse to not care for such details, because "enough" effort is too much to spend regularly. If they're after exactly you urgently enough to make such an effort they can also just bug your devices or search your home and tap your lines. You'll have an altogether different set of problems then.
You also can break into almost every computer system with enough effort and still this is no excuse to leave the doors wide open, not care for malware and not update your systems. Because hardly anyone of us is worth much effort, but open doors invite mass-abuses our little worthless data may be worth enough summed up to undertake. If you're special enough to be worth special effort you will need to take special measures to be safe.
I have been looking into that quite a bit lately and was a bit surprised. iAd does transfer your location but not that is it you who's there, so to say. The iPhone generates twice a day a random ID and this ID is used for iAd. This is enough to get the right ad for the right place to the right device, but not enough to find out what device it is and what user it is (because the ID is random) and even this anonymous "you" can't be tracked over time, because the ID changes to another random ID every 12 hours. Tell me what you want, I think this is quite a reasonable implementation. I don't trust them, but with this implementation I don't need to trust them to begin with. As it should be.
Now, Google's AdMob doesn't bother with such gay randomness and manly tags the location data it sends to the mothership (and the advertisers) with both the Unique Device ID of your phone and your Carrier User ID. Which both never change. To be happy with this you need to trust Google and its partners really deeply.
Apple may be greedy and there're bugs and whatever, but where they implement their stuff in a way that I do not need to trust them I'm happy with it.
"Good battery life? Does it last more than a day, now? ;)"
My iPhone 4 eats about 10% of battery for every hour of active usage and another 10% for every 24 hours of standby. So, yes, usually it lasts more than a day. About three days with two hours active usage a day. Usually I charge it every other day just to be on the safe side.
If I use it like my old dumbphone (= hardly use it at all and just make a short call now and then or write a SMS), it lasts a week on a charge, with WiFi and 3G on (but in power-trickle standby mode, I suppose). Happens rarely, though.
I dread to say it aloud, but: Even with its rather yesteryear CPU the current iPhone is still one of the best and fastest smartphones with a smooth and stutter-free interface, hi-res screen, good camera, good battery life and a rather timeless non-plastic design. Just putting in a dual-core CPU should be enough to be good for another year and no changes to the general design will make all current iPhone users happy since they don't feel left behind as much then.
Apple really can't do much wrong here, I think. The current crop of Android phones is not exactly making leaps. Faster CPUs and GPUs help a bit with minimizing UI stutter (and Android is still not perfect here), screens are good but not better than the iPhone's, battery life is mostly worse... I do not expect many changes in the market, really.
"If anyone with any common-sense knowledge of antennas whatsoever had been in the room when the internal design of the Iphone 4 antenna system had been unveiled to management, they would have *immediately* pointed at the hi-Z ends and said, "You'd better insulate those ends...""
In a company run by engineers, maybe.
Fact is that the iPhone antenna causes very little problems. Yeah, it's not perfect, but the worst thing that can happen is that you have to hold it a bit carefully if you're in a place with very weak reception. And even this is just gradually worse than with other smartphones. What you get for this is a nice, elegant, very compact, non-plastic design.
Thinking that people prefer the absolutely best technical solution in spite of any other disadvantages this solution may have is just plain wrong. They don't. Look at the shoes and clothes peole wear and the furniture they buy.
I think the point is if you aim at a niche or at the majority of the population. If you include teens and women everything above 3.5" is just too large for one-handed use. If you just aim at large-handed males or those who are totally happy to use both hands when dealing with their phone and have large pockets, 4" or 4.3" is actually better.
It's no surprise that the male/female ratio of iPhone owners is about 50/50 while it's about 75/25 with Android smartphones. There are many reasons for this but many Android phones going above 3.5" and as such requiring the user to use both hands and kicking it onto the other side of "practical" is one of these reasons.
Pinch to zoom is fairly standard but one thing that seems to be missing from most (or all?) Android browsers is automatically zooming in exactly on a text column or photo by double-tapping it. This is one thing that makes the iPhone so much more comfortable for browsing (since you don't need to manually zoom and move around a page to fit a column/table/photo smack onto the screen) -- I'm wondering if Apple indeed has managed to patent this.
And really, those soft buttons are totally crap. You can't find them by touch and they're really easy to hit accidently. Worst combination ever. A set of good nice tactile buttons you can hit blindly and which don't readily fire when you lay your thumb across them while holding the thing horizontally is so much better...
If you're not fully sighted, iOS is much, much better. It actually has a full screen reader for text and UI, voice feedback for all UI elements... You can actually use it even if you're totally blind. For the blind and visually impaired the iPhone/iPad is quite a revolution.
Nothing against Android, but it has totally nothing to offer here.
amounts to almost nothing in the larger picture. Apple doesn't make much money from the App Store at all (yet -- this may change with more content being sold there). Between this and developing their own OS and store and everything I very much doubt Apple has any advantage here over Samsung.
But Apple seems to ramp up to produce and sell 40 million iPads this year. *This* gives an advantage in price. I bet they'll be making more money per unit than Samsung.
Either they drop the prices or they raise them... The iPad is now among the cheaper tablets which means there must be room above it. With the right marketing you could sell a Samsung (or Motorola) tablet as a "more fully featured tablet" for a higher price now.
That's probably not what all the Android lovers will like to see, though.
The jailbreak "community" is the most childish thing I've seen in IT in a long while. They're also not very open in any way. No documentation, no source code, no release notes, no changelogs, nothing. You let an undocumented application modify your phone's OS in an undocumented way, let it disable code signing and everything and then you install more undocumented binaries from people with no names. For much of it you even have to pay then.
Not liking to have Apple control your phone is one thing. Allowing a bunch of nameless hackers to modify and control your phone isn't necessarily a better thing. It's like escaping from the walled garden into a lawless slum full of bragging people wearing face masks.
(Disclaimer: I have an iPhone and it's jailbroken. I'm on pre-paid though and never would use my credit card or do any kind of banking with it.)
A while ago there was a video of an alleged iPhone 5 floating around the net. It looked identical to the Verizon iPhone, including the antenna gaps in the same places, just with a SIM slot. Might be safe to assume now that this will be the next iPhone.
Certainly good news for iPhone 4 owners, because even with new chippery inside (dual-core CPU?) and CDMA/GSM capabilities the phone will be (and look) very much the same and such the iPhone 4 won't look "old". Apple did the same with the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Helps a lot not to devaluate quite new but essentially obsolete hardware.
At first I hated the flat keys of the Apple keyboards (and now others have copied them as always) but you get used to this fairly quickly -- and they're very easy to keep clean. In fact that was one thing I always hated about computer keyboards, use them a month or two and they get really filthy and are almost impossible to clean. The chiclet things though are different, just wipe along, clean again. Very nice.
If you want to do something and not be located, don't carry a phone, iPhone, Android, whatever. Yeah, old-fashioned triangulation depends on the circumstances but can be amazingly precise. And if they're really after you there are other ways to pinpoint your location using your cellphone, even without GPS turned on, even with your phone seemingly (but not really) off. If they're good enough to have a missile homing in on a car with someone carrying an old Nokia phone in the middle of a desert you surely won't get away with using an Android phone with GPS switched off.
And switching WiFi and GPS off and on manually is so 20th century anyway. If your phone has a power management that relies on you doing this there is obviously not much of management going on. Smartphones should be optimized for practical use and not for civil war, I think. If you want to prepare for that instead, wire in a switch that allows you to really switch off the power from the battery. Everything else if futile anyway.
Someone complained about the search function in the App Store: This drove me crazy, too. Until I realized that you should *not* just type in some search string and then select from the automatically listed apps. Because if you do that, the name of the selected app becomes the search string and you'll have to type in a new search all over if that app is not what you were looking for.
No, type in your search string and ignore the auto-list. Instead press the Return buttom on the keyboard. Now you get a real, good old search with a list of hits and your search string stays in the entry box, even after looking at an app and returning to the search.
WRT the battery: Just plugged my iPhone 4 in again, after the weekend. Since the last charge it had logged 9 hours and 15 minutes of active usage and three days ten hours standby, it was down to 7% battery now. The usage included a birthday party where I shot 168 photos and some videos, as well as quite a bit of ebook reading, map staring, surfing, email, web radio and gaming. Only three phone calls though. The 3G and WiFi radios were on all the time. I have no idea what people who complain about their battery not getting them through a single day are doing with the thing. Eight hours of non-stop Angry Birds in the office maybe?
I have about 50 apps installed, although I use only about a dozen of them often (more or less every day).
Those aren't useful for shooting photos. They're very useful though when you're doing video telephony and want to show something without turning the thing around (and then not seeing anymore where the camera is actually pointing at).
Right now people are buying heaps of cheap iPod touches just to use them as home video phones with skype. Offering a tablet with no camera on the back is just plain stupid and shows that whoever designed that thing has not the slightest idea what people actually want to do with tablets, really.
but too less is too less. Having more than 300 dpi (which is about print resolution) is surely nice to have and there's no real reason to be happy with less. But even higher resolutions makes not much sense then.
Is there really any doubt that an iPad 2 with about as much dpi as the iPhone 4 is a good thing?
Isn't it always the same since the iPhone? Apple comes with something that sells great. All others try to copy what Apple did and make it bit cheaper, smaller, with more options and call it an "iWhatever"-killer. Then Apple comes with the next iteration, again besting everything on the market. Repeat.
So, yes. I think there is no doubt that the iPad 2 will come with a print-like resolution screen very much like the iPhone 4. The rather low-res, coarse screen is just the only thing that's still ugly about the iPad, especially since the iPhone screen looks so much better (I'm currently reading Iain Bank's "Surface Detail" on it. Lovely screen. It's the first time I actually prefer a serif font for reading on a screen, it just looks like print).
Somehow Android smartphones seem to try hard to still be a phone you only use upright -- I don't like these asymmetric humps on the back at all. Lay the thing down on a table in landscape orientation and it's tilted in a very comical way. Also the capacitive touch buttons seem always to be where you want to rest your thumb when holding the thing in landscape.
Anyway, not a bad smartphone but also not a great one, I think. But surely an expensive one.
All of those who refer to QuickTime as something similar to VLC: It isn't. QuickTime is the multimedia framework from Apple which is used extensively by all apps. It gets installed with iTunes on Windows because iTunes of course uses this for everything from audio and video down to JPEG display.
QuickTime Player is just a more or less silly video player using that framework.
I mean, really? Samsung seems to try to be just more expensive than Apple, or what? The iPhone 4 is £500 and that thing is £549? What for?
The Samsung Galaxy S is certainly a nice phone, although not four times as nice as the Orange San Francisco for £99 and that Nexus S can't be five times as nice. It's just an Android Smartphone, Google or not. I might buy it for £200 or maybe £300... but £549? Madness!
Now, what kind of display has this thing? A while ago it was said that Asus would come up with an Ebook reader with a monochrome high-contrast LCD display. Which was quite an interesting idea because e-ink is slooooow. Drawing or writing on such a display must be a nightmare when the screen refreshes only two or four times a second at best. I just can't imagine how this should work.
Where does Google profit from Android? OK, companies have to license the Google apps, but apart from that? Google never meant Android to take off in that fashion. It was Chrome OS that was meant to be used for tablets and Chrome OS is basically a web browser you use to run Google (and other) webapps in, with ads by Google.
Google has even been trying to keep Android off tablets because of this. The main reason there are so few real Android tablets is the fact that Google actually tries hard to make sure every fully supported Android decice is a smartphone and nothing else.
Sometimes I wonder if Google ever had a real strategy with its products. They're throwing things at the wall and see what sticks. And every time something becomes a great success they seem to be utterly surprised and do not know what to do now.
Really, they're an effing waste of money. Get your wife an iPad or a decent notebook. I don't think this Dell thingy is anything decent at all. It's too heavy for a tablet, it has no decent OS for a tablet and it has too small a battery and screen for a decent notebook.
I mean, this thing is *just* small enough to squeeze it into a pocket for a short while. Like going to the loo in the pub or such. A 10" iPad is something you don't leave unattended and you can't put it in a pocket. Something the size of a paperback is just about stowable, at least if it isn't as thick as this Samsung thing.
OK, I just wanted to say something positive and I couldn't think of anything else!
Resistive screens have to be calibrated and often re-calibrated to work nicely. Additionally, they consist of two layers of plastic you press together, so you can't have any scratch-resistant glass. Then: Not only multitouch but also any kind of swiping or dragging is poor with resistive screens, since you need to keep pressing on the screen all the time, touching it is not enough.
And then, accuracy: Have you ever used an iPhone or iPad in anger? A good capacitive screen is as accurate as an resistive one. As long as a text is large enough to be read at all I can hit a word or a link even on my three years old iPod touch (which has not a single scratch on the screen, by the way). And if you have a system with an UI that has elements that are too small to be hit with a finger this is a silly system. Forcing people to use anything that *requires* a stylus or a fingernail is a sure way to make them hate you.
I agree that there are cases in which using a stylus is better than using your fingers but for what 99% of the users do 99% of their time capacitive is vastly better, period. Most people just hated touchscreens until capacitive screens came along. Some people don't understand that, but these are exceptions.
"...tht people are so fucking shallow they pay nearly $300 for a poxy white phone cover."
Basically I agree, but people are paying much, much more for other poxy things with noone thinking of ridiculing them. Cars, motorbikes, bicycles, shoes, clothing, houses, furniture, cosmetics, food, flashy PC cases... actually everything.
I will never understand why everything Apple ignites such an amount of hate and ridicule when at the same time the very same thing is not only tolerated but even lovingly celebrated by the very same people with other products. I'm often wondering if those Apple haters live in a shed, wear some overalls and cheap plastic shoes while sitting on boxes with unkempt hair with a rusty bicycle leaning against their shed. All of this does the job as well and is much cheaper, isn't it?
Apple has sold 14 millions of these things now. Which means there have been parts for 14 million of these things been manufactured in China, many of them probably coming out of several factories.
I even wouldn't be surprised if some of the parts you can get from China meanwhile really were OEM parts, coming from the very same factories producing the parts which end up in actual iPhones.
Well, it's certainly nice to know for iPhone owners that there's a healthy industry producing spare parts for the things. A shattered glass back you can replace for $10 or so is better than having to buy it from Apple for $150, white or not.
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