Posts by Andrew James 399 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jul 2008
Until the non-tech-site-reading masses are made aware of the merits of windows phone 8, and until there are a selection of apps that are at least in some way related to those available for android and ios.
The two non-techies i know who have a Windows Phone 7 mobile have both said they wouldn't have another, despite their initial positive reviews of how well they seemed to work. It seems the longer term user experience just hasnt been good enough.
I hope they do release a smaller iPad. It will be cheaper. And cheaper, for me, is better.
My 4 year old already knows how to navigate iOS on the iPod touch and iPhone to select music or movies to watch. When travelling she has the iPod in the back of the car and keeps herself entertained with movies, games, colouring, etc. An iPad would be better suited to this purpose, and would be handy for me to play around with on the sofa while the wife watches her guff on tv. But i'm not paying £400 for one.
Are they comparing Bolt's average speed over his record breaking 100m run? Or have they analysed the data to compare with his fastest 20m section of that race?
Seems to me that Bolt is always super fast between 40 and 80 metres. The first 40 is acceleration from a standing start, and the final 20 metres are looking around, pointing, laughing, and generally feeling a bit smug. During his fastest phase of the race, he's probably quite a lot faster than his average over the whole distance.
1. New iPhone
2. New iPod Touch / Nano
3. Apple TV / iTV
4. iMac update
5. iPad Mini
Five products. Rather than "iPhone 5" ... to me, this is not a completely unreasonable prospect, however obvious it seems that its just an iPhone launch. An iPad mini wouldnt need that much introduction, just "hey look, its an iPad, but smaller" ... same with the update to the iPod line. An iMac refresh likely wouldnt take much headline time either.
My wife has a tesco credit card (for points accumulation). When the online statement is ready the sms reminder reads as follows;
"Dear *wifes password is shown here*, your tesco creditcard statement is now available"
You're damn right Tesco needs to have its security looked at.
It really bugs me.
Want unlimited data sir, yes, no problem, thats available with our £35 deal which includes 500 minutes and unlimited texts. NO !!! Take the minutes and texts off. Charge me less.
Someone needs to come up with a model that allows the customer to select their inclusive minutes, texts and data, and see the monthly fee changing accordingly until the right compromise against benefits and costs is achieved. We are all individual, i dont see why they think our usage patterns should be lumped together into a few options.
10 minutes per month talk time. I dont use this much, but i do occasionally use a few minutes, so having the option would be nice.
100 texts. Almost everyone i know is using whatsapp, or similar, these days. And those who arent i can contact by text if necessary, or email if its not important enough to need a quick reply.
Unlimited Data.
I don't want 200 minutes and 5000 texts & 500Mb.
I don't want 50 minutes and 500 texts and 1Gb.
Or any of the other seemingly random combinations.
I need, and i suspect i am not alone, very few minutes of talktime and very few texts, but i use a lot of data. Surely someone can come up with a deal that suits my needs. This £12.90 offering fits the data requirements, and is "cheap enough" but i dont want anywhere near the number of minutes and texts so it seems they could knock off a couple of quid a month or I'm paying for something i simply wont use.
Also, whatever the lads name was, came 4th in the 110 hurdles final last night despite being repeatedly hit by the south african next to him. A few years ago he was running 15 seconds for the 110 hurdles, and the coaching team have got him down to under 13.5. Another few tenths and he's right up at the front in most races.
How about you pick the one that makes a device that has the best trade off between desired features, actual features, and image conciousness.
Yes, i might be able to get a chinese cheap android that does the job, but no, i dont want it. For example.
People do vote with the wallets, and thats why all the law suits keep popping up.
Why are we taking the figures with a pinch of salt, just because people use more because they have no constraints? Thats ridiculous. People are using more because there are no constraints, yes. But unless you've got something that suggests people are actively selecting not to switch to Wifi when they get home, i dont see how this stands up.
Thats like Vauxhall doing a 1 years free petrol offer and you saying you will ignore the higher mileage on vauxhall cars compared to ford or renault because of this. "Ah yes, they've done 120% more miles on average than the same type of car sold a year ago, but thats just because of the free petrol you see, so it doesnt matter".
Same with the whole notebook > ultrabook thing. "Ultra" is a hell of a step to take from "Note" ... where do you go from there, reasonably? Is Super better than Ultra? I wouldnt have said so. How about Super-Ultra? Hyperbook. Megabook. Ultrabook II™ ... seriously, why do they do this?
I disagree. mainly because at the end of its "life" as my main device, if kept, it would then become a backup device, just like my old laptop - useful for an emergency email / spreadsheet / letter but thats about it. The phone, similarly, would be a backup phone in case one was lost, or something for the kids to play angry birds on.
Why would i continue to carry around a phone well beyond its 2 year contract life when i can get a replacement with better specs for free? Nobody gives me a "free" laptop after a few years, so keeping that and making use of it beyond its anticipated life may be more necessary.
Yes, while used as a primary device the phone needs to do lots of things, and if you choose the right device at the time of purchase it will do those perfectly well for a couple of years. Maybe your needs will change, but in the space of 2 years i cant think of anything i do with my phone now that i couldnt do with the one i had 2 years ago. All be it the phone i have now does it a little quicker and a little slicker - the difference is minimal. Just dont compromise your personal wish-list when you buy the phone and you shouldnt be too upset with it if it doesnt get a minor software tweak.
But when you get the phone on a contract, as most (i should think) will do, it comes with a lot less cost than a laptop (becuase you're paying for the contract anyway, so ignore the monthly cost from TCO).
By the end of a two year contract. you're going to get more from trading it in than you would have spent on it in cash-up-front terms in the first place. So its not really any sort of comparison with a laptop purcahse that costs you 450 up front, and is only worth 200 2 years later, but is still useful for another couple of years at least.
I have no problem investing say £50 cash at time of purchase to buy a phone that performs its required duties well, never gets a software update, and if kept, only does what it did on day of purchase if i decide to keep it.
Until recently i still had a Nokia 8210 in a drawer as an emergency phone. It never did anything more, or better, than the day i bought it. But it did its job perfectly well, so didnt NEED any updates. Much like my 8 year old laptop that now only gets used to monitor my cctv cameras, its not had a windows update for well over 5 years, but it doesnt care.
Oh no, LG aren't very good at providing software updates. Oh no, I'll have to decide now whether i like the features and stick with them for the lifetime of the phone.
Remember a few years ago when we bought a phone and its capabilities remained exactly the same until such time as it went to landfill?? Just because Google releases a new version doesn't mean it needs to be on your phone, especially if you chose the right phone in the first place instead of whatever looked like it had the most horsepower & biggest screen.
This sort of thing depends entirely on the item being received, and who your neighbours are.
At my old place, one side was fine, the other not so much. One side owned the house, the other was rented and changed hands regularly. Are we expected to add and remove stickers on a regular basis?
Why not simply implement a "this can be left with a neighbour" tickbox on websites using royal mail, and in post offices, so that the postie can see clearly on a per package basis what they are expected to do.
If someone doesnt want to update their webforms to include a new tick box, the item is assumed not to be left with a neighbour, and it all operates as before. Sooner or later more companies will implement this, and then it will start eeking its way into general practice.
"BS. Many narrow arches & thick supports mid stream SPEED UP the river.
To slow down the river you have to REDUCE the volume or INCREASE the channel cross section."
Surely many narrow arches and thick supports will create what is essentially a dam. The water that is allowed through will flow faster through the arches, but the water that cannot get through will create a higher water level that is very slow moving for some distance up stream until you get quite close to the actual arches where the bottle neck is.
Think sand timer. Grains of sand at the opening fall through rapidly. Grains of sand everywhere else moving very slowly. If it were water, those slow moving would freeze at the surface and underneath would continue to flow.
If Asus has any sense they'll do a Samsung on this, and produce their own similar tablet with higher spec, like Samsung do with the Nexus phone being superceeded by the Galaxy S shortly afterwards.
Is Asus were to release basically the same tablet with 3G and an SD card for about £250 they'd probably shift plenty of them, especially if the networks subsidise it on data contracts.
My Mrs went out and bought one of those "one cup" kettle things. Put your cup under, press button, and it boils and dispenses one cup of boiled water. Takes about 30 seconds or so. She takes a cup up to bed at night with coffee, milk, sugar and spoon in it... then, when she gets out of bed in the morning and heads for the toilet she presses the button. She then comes back to a cup of coffee.
Its a waste of money in my opinion, but she thinks its the best purchase of all time.
Of course, they could just spec it up like an iPod touch ... use most of the same internals, hook it up to a bigger screen and fill the void with battery. They wont. But they could. They're already churning out iPods cheaply enough so just adding a freshly designed casing and a bigger screen and battery wouldnt be a killer to their margins really.
Android might be moving along and improving, but there are so few devices at an affordable level supporting the latest versions at launch (or indeed within 12 months in many cases) that its almost progress for progress' sake. At least when an iOS update is released most of the features are made available to most of the devices immediately, hardware specs permitting.
Without 3G radio it would put me right off the idea. I've been saying for ages a sensible sized tablet could replace a mobile phone for me with my usage pattern (browsing, emails, messaging, no phonecalls). But i wouldnt buy one without 3G as i would then have to carry something else as well as an already bigger device so i could get online when and where i wanted.
But then if it were very affordable, then it might be a different matter.
@ Tanya...
Most of the people i know have no interest in "tech news" and buy whatever gadgets they want based on their experience of trying them out, the advertising surrounding it, feedback from friends, etc, etc. So Apple could sue Samsung over a different patent every day for a hundred years, and people like that will carry on oblivious and buy whatever they like the look of.
What normal, rational person would think "uh oh, Applie is worried about the quality of the latest Samsung & HTC handsets, I better not buy the new iPhone and buy one of them instead, it must be better". This is ridiculous. You buy what you want because its what you think fits your needs/wants the most.
I recently bought a HUMAX 1TB Freeview+ HD DVR. I think it cost around £270. The 500Gb version was around £240 if i remember right.
So if you're getting a 500Gb model here you're only really paying an extra £60 for the integration into the EPG of the historic bbc, itv, channel4 & Five content. For many people that will be reasonable.
Its alright having it built into your tv, but a programme guide used to be something you bought on a weekly basis from a shop. Perhaps thats a good idea too?
A lot of negativity here because of the 85% score.
Surely its an 85% for its price point and what it tries to be, rather than being on a par with the Galaxy S III. Nobody is going to think "right all these phones got 85% i will pick this one because its much cheaper but scores just as highly".
All this fail here, fail there talk is just silly. If it doesnt have the features you need, you pick another phone. There's enough choice out there for everyone. This phone will fit the bill for someone if it doesnt suit you, because the person next to you is not you, and they have their own set of requirements.
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