Posts by Grant Quinn

Samsung plans Symbian-free future

Genius or stupidity.

I am in two minds about this.

On the one hand, we don't really need another smartphone platform. There's Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile which are all open to any manufacturer. There's WebOS, iPhone OS and Blackberry OS which are all platform specific AND Samsung already has LiMo on some phones.

On the other hand, if Samsung are going to use Bada across the entire range, and actually cease producing feature phones, then it could be a runaway success. The perfect example of that is LG who have their own proprietary semi-smartphone OS on millions of handsets across multiple models. If Samsung have everything on the one OS and they make sure there's an on-device app store for every handset, they could make a killing. Yes, I'm aware that LG still have some handsets with Windows and Symbian on them, but that's because they need those devices in their lineup or they'd lose sales.

The difficulty however will be attracting developers to the platform to make all those apps, and for that reason I think they would have been better adopting Symbian (or possibly Android) instead of re-inventing the wheel. Keeping Android in their lineup, when it has no enterprise market share, just complicates things.

HTC Tattoo

Tat too

It does seem rather expensive for a "cheap" smartphone. The Nokia 5800 has all that functionality for less than £200 now and you'll get a bigger screen and better battery life to boot.

Palm waves farewell to Windows Mobile

Symbian...

... isn't owned by Nokia. Nokia owned some of it, then bought the rest of it, then spun it all off as an independent foundation. This is why Samsung, Sony-Ericsson and LG all make Symbian phones as well as Nokia.

Nokia N97 price skyrockets

Nokia have to be realistic...

Otherwise people are more likely to go for a Samsung Omnia HD, which is similar, and in some ways better, than the N97.

I think a majority of people who want a high-end phone would limit what they buy to what is offered relatively cheaply by their network. I know of only 1 person who has bought a full price smartphone. If Nokia push the price up too much, they'll lose sales.

iPlayer chief pushes tiered charging for ISPs

Isn't tiered just different caps and silence by ISPs?

From my first read of it, I got that Rose was essentially saying that ISPs need to charge an appropriate amount for a connection that's capable of showing iPlayer at high quality. Tiered internet to me meant that some connections have caps. I.e. a 10 GB a month allowance isn't exactly iPlayer friendly, a 100 GB cap is much better and an unlimited account is best yet. But you can't charge the same for all of these and that ISPs need to come up with better pricing and shut up with the moaning.

The BBC are with us punters in that it's our bandwidth and we should be able to waste it on whatever we want, but they've made it clear they aren't going to pay the bandwidth twice for the ISPs.

Nokia chief: Mobile superiority coming to America

The difference is AppStore...

There's a reason that Apple will make a killing in the mobile markets and all other handset makers won't - it's that Apple will get a cut of almost every piece software sold on all iPhones. Lots of people use iTunes every day, so it's easier to get people to browse applications. Nokia software on the other hand has few reasons to use it casually, so a slick AppStore type interface is going to be harder to pull off.

I know you can buy stuff online for Nokia phones, but I think people mentally prefer just to use a thick client.

Dead Vulture, because it symbolises what's happening to all heathenPhones.

How to stop worrying and enjoy paying for incoming calls

I've had another thought

If 3 are complaining because they don't have enough customers, so end up paying a lot more on termination fees to other operators than they themselves receive in termination fees, then they should increase prices to cover their costs. They can either raise prices across the board, or they can charge more for cross-network calls.

Bottom line: either charge enough to make money on your product, or don't sell it.

The Skype argument...

doesn't mention how many people don't use Skype because it doesn't have "termination fees". I suspect that people on PAYG broadband packages don't use Skype.

I can understand some of the arguments regarding number porting etc, but I honestly don't care about porting my house number to my mobile. Further to that, landline numbers are geographic, and if we start making mobiles geographic, it'll only give the mobile operators more ways to charge us. Local calls will be cheap and part of our minute bundles, but oh, you want to call Wales from Scotland? That'll be extra!

I'd rather keep the system the way it is.

IT pay jumps as skills gap widens

When entry level doesn't mean entry level.

I graduated with a CS degree last year from a well respected university. I'll admit I wasn't a 1st class honours student, but after several years at uni I can program and design software well enough. I also have a fair amount of support experience now, having worked on a helpdesk for the past year.

My biggest issue was that pretty much every employer I looked at, even for jobs marketed as junior or entry level, wanted commercial experience. How are you supposed to get that before reaching entry level?! I'll probably end up out of IT at this rate as my skills stagnate. I accept responsibility for my career not being stellar, I should have studied harder, learnt more, launched my own open source project etc... but I'm not the only one who has struggled to get my career going as several of my friends have IT qualifications of some kind but are stuck doing menial jobs. One of my friends is making more than me as a waiter.

If the IT industry wasn't so determined to only employ those with experience, we wouldn't have such a skills gap. There is no shortage of people who want to work in IT, there's a shortage of people willing to train and develop talent that's out there.

The Top Ten 3G iPhone beaters

Nokia N82

The N82 has all the features of an N95 8 GB, albeit it has a micro SD card slot and only 100 MB or so of internal memory. It's also got the best camera bar none, thanks to a decent lens, high pixel count and xenon flash.

It's a far worthier contender than most of these phones and is in a nice compact format as well.

Only thing lacking is a nav-wheel, but that may come yet...

Heart - because I love my N82.