Re: Elephant dead?
What ads are on Windows Phones that don't also appear on other phones? I've never noticed any other than the usual in-app adverts in free apps.
138 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jul 2008
Is this not just another distraction from One Plus to handle the fact that they still haven't brought their "2014 Flagship Killer" to market (i.e. I can't walk into a shop, go to Amazon or their website and actually buy one without spending time advertising them on social media)? Don't focus on the fact that we're all hype, focus on our new Android variant...
Guess it comes into it's own in warmer countries, but being able to quickly scroll through a news feed and send the articles you want to read to the eInk screen for reading while sat out side in the sun seems pretty useful.
Being able to see notifications without powering up a full HD colour screen, when most of the time you'll be dismissing/ignoring them.
Being able to put useful information (e.g. boarding passes) on the rear screen (and have them stay their after a shutdown) when the battery is dying seems handy as well.
Just a couple off the top of my head.
Not so much a free app; but a really easy way to setup a PC (and keep it up to date) with a lot of free apps (including several mentioned on this list).
Select the apps you want, download a 200kb installer. Run and it installs them all silently. Run again and it updates them all for you.
Years ago we had a fairly popular Symbian app in the Nokia/Ovi Store (free and a "pro" version available for about €1) that was available on numerous pirate sites (some with more downloads than we'd had paying users). The majority had a 20-30% increase in the file size for the "cracked" pro install. Maybe the crack to remove the license check was just really large, but I'm guessing there was a lot more packaged in with it.
Except you can't buy a OnePlus phone, it's only available if you have an invite from entering competitions, promoting them via social media, etc.
IF they start shipping them in numbers at that price while that's still considered a high spec, then great, lets start taking them seriously.
But at the moment, it's pure marketing. I'm guessing they're making a loss on the very low number of phones sold at the moment to try and build hype, and will then release on scale when/if the bill of materials approaches the break even point.
Sort of... developers need to bother to publish them (ignoring people sideloading the .apk). Which means buying some BB handsets to test your converted app on.
You also need to remove and potentially replace any Google service based features (Google Maps, push notifications, game/Play centre, etc.).
We've got a fairly popular app on Google Play (around 400,000+ installs), that has an Android Runtime version in BB World that has had 4,000 downloads.
It's a free app with adverts. We're not going to recoup the cost of getting handsets to test it on, never mind the time to test it or the time it took to create a custom build with Google Maps, etc. disabled.
I certainly wouldn't recommend any small to medium sized company to bother (maybe if you're BBC iPlayer, Facebook, etc. where 1/100 of the downloads is worth it).
A) I can't be bothered looking it up, but you could work out Apple's profit margin by taking the profits (documented in their quarterly reports) and dividing it by the number of units sold (documented in their quarterly reports). They're not a private company. It's not an internal doc.
B) The figure that I heard at a Deloitte event was 60% profit margin on a 128GB iPad Air.
It's not market share, it's sales share in the last quarter. Given that most people keep a smart phone for 2 years (contract length) the market share is roughly the phones sold in the last 8 quarters.
The increase in the EU, which is the figures I presume you're talking about (http://www.kantarworldpanel.com/global/News/Windows-Phone-nears-double-digit-share-across-Europe - I've not seen the 5% world wide mentioned anywhere else and my guess is that's a little high), is encouraging for Windows Phone, but as a developer they need several more quarters like that before they're considered as a requirement along with iOS and Android.
Not really similar to BlackBerry, in that Apple are still selling significant numbers of devices at a much higher margin that everyone else. I predict a PC-esque smartphone market where Apple = Apple (~10% market share, but at the high price end) and Android = Windows (the other ~90%, everything from dirt cheap upwards), with anomalies in countries with high number of contract / subsidised "free" phones where people don't realise or care (as it's such a small fraction of the cost of the network service, e.g. USA) how much they're paying for the Apple kit. Apple may never hit the peaks they've previously seen, but they'll be making lots of money for the foreseeable future.
Have I misunderstood this vulnerability or is it:
- Hacker could take Facebook/Twitter/etc. APK.
- Add malicious code into it.
- Distribute the app (via 3rd party sites unless they have access to the companies Google Play login) and it would be installed as a valid update to your already installed Facebook/Twitter/etc. apps.
But if you could get people to install your app from a non-Google Play source, couldn't you just as easily have them install any app that's labelled as Facebook/Twitter/etc. and just have the app open a web view or crash on startup (once you've done whatever you wanted to)?
So what's the real vulnerability to end users? Not suggesting it shouldn't be fixed, but how does this make it easier to infect a phone?
We have an app with 100,000+ downloads in Google Play (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.attidomobile.passwallet). They come from 1637 device models. 56% of the downloads are from the 10 most popular models, 5 of which are which are Samsung (Note, S1/S2/S3 and Nexus).
Fragmentation is a problem in that people with obscure devices (we have 520 different models with a single download on that model) will shout quite loudly when it doesn't work perfectly, but in reality you can test on 5-10 devices and pretty much cover you user base (either using the same device or something similar enough so as not to see issues).
I'm sure this is a bigger issue if you're using native code or writing the Facebook/Twitter apps where you'll have 100m+ users, but they they have larger resources for testing.
Compared to developing PC software, where people could be running on hardware they've put together themselves, the number of variants of Android is trivial.
Surely the Surface (running WinRT) is competing with an iPad, and the Surface Pro's main Apple competition is the MacBook Air? In that they both run the full versions of Microsoft and Apple's OSs, and are both spec'd to run full applications. You just get a touch screen thrown in with the Surface Pro.
By all means continue to criticise the Surface Pro for using more space for the OS than the MacBook Air does, but at least compare like for like.
But if you see them both as your personal devices, do you need to be able to use them both at the same time?
For me the main two advantages are (1) I only pay for one SIM & (2) when I plug my phone into the tablet over lunch / on a train / whatever my phone gets recharged from the tablets battery (Admittedly, I'm presuming that's the case on the Padfone2, as that's how the Padfone one worked when I saw it demoed at MWC).
Plus other benefits like watching a video / playing games / writing an email / etc. on the tablet and you can then just carry on with the phone.
I recently switched from a Nokia Lumia 800 to a Samsung Galaxy S3.
Yes the "resuming..." of apps on Windows Phone got annoying, and any improvements in the multitasking would be a huge benefit.
But I've seen the S3 fail to respond significantly more times than I ever saw on the Lumia 800.
Bringing up the list of apps and returning to the desktop are prime examples. I don't even have a lot of widgets on the S3 (mostly full screen task / calendar / mail / etc.)
Admittedly there may just be something wrong with my device, it's just an observation.
But my impression from using WP devices (I've also used a HTC Pro 7 in the past) was that the processing power (or lack of) wasn't a huge issue. It's almost like it's been designed to run with that (locked down) spec.
I thought the apps will be compatible with WP8, and it's the other way around that's the (potential) problem?
So you write an app now and it works on WP7.5 & WP8.
You write an app in future, and if you use some new features, such as native C/C++, it'll only work on WP8.
Or did I miss something / get the wrong end of the stick?
You can choose to output the 1:1 pixels if you want, which results in 34 or 38 MPixel images depending on the aspect ratio (Nokia have released a paper detailing the tech), so yes you're right that you can't output 41 MPixel images, but you can easily choose not to have the scaled down ones.
However, I think one of the main selling points is that you either get digital zoom that's reasonable quality (as it's not stretching the image) or you get low noise 3/5/8 MPixel images due to the over sampling.