Posts by Matthew Peddlesden

Android app sales skimpy, sluggish, slack, scanty...

Echoing HTC Desire comments...

I'd just like to echo the comments made by someone else about the HTC Desire.

I've actually bought a ton of apps for my phone, I disagree with many of the anti-market comments in this thread quite a bit - i've found it easy enough to find what i want, dead easy to get the apps paid for and use them and I don't recall ever having paid for an app and regretting it in any way.

The big problem is that most of the apps i've bought are no longer installed - there simply is no room on this stupid phone. Whomever sized up the internal storage for this phone needs to be dragged out in an an alleyway and forced to watch Eastenders for a month non-stop or something.

The phone has pretty much now got to the point that it has the things I want, it has no free space, and there is nothing that can be removed without causing grief, so there is now no opportunity for me to install anything new.

I could root the phone, put on a custom rom and then use one of the a2sd type things but, ugh, i'm sorry but that's just confused the heck out of me, multiple ways of doing it, this one works this way and that one works another way, and then this one is not considered good and not many roms seem to come with them out the box? And let's not forget the obvious risks with blowing a custom rom on the phone... I actually need it to work like a phone and take calls, not end up bricked so I could get some more free space via the sd card.

With the desire being one of the most popular android phones as far as I am aware, that must have had a significant impact on sales in app marketplace and should be taken in to consideration. The iPhone's obviously had someone who hadn't been smoking funny stuff coming up with their specifications and therefore their users are able to buy and install more fart apps than we are! :)

I'm not entirely sure I quite follow how Apple or Google can "rotate" the top x apps - surely it's top because it's top? Are you saying that Apple fudge the top listings artificially? Or is this referring to featured apps or something...

Must admit as with another poster - I rarely *find* apps on the market place, almost always found elsewhere (xda, the reg, cool smart phone etc) and then use market place to buy/install.

I also know a number of android phone users who don't even know you *can* install new things on to their phone and certainly have no desire (no pun intended) to, the fact it runs android is no more important to them than knowing what os their previous phone ran. Almost everyone who buys an iphone is specifically buying a smart phone. Not everyone who gets an android phone cares if it does anything more than make and take calls, do texting and so forth, because android phones naturally slot in at a much wider market from the iphone style top end smart phone down to cheaper "phone" phones, even DECT handsets, cheapo tablets and so forth.

Sounds like another apples and bricks comparison :) (referring presumably to comparing an iphone with a desire custom rom that's gone wrong, ahem)

Matt.

HTC's next-gen Android flagship phone to debut Feb 2010

Lots of info...

Lots of info here:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=595648

Personally looking forward to the Bravo - 3.7" AMOLED screen, Snapdragon 1ghz processor.

@Hayden Clark: HTC have already said that the Hero will be getting Android 2.0 so I'm not sure that there's any doubt there.

Matt.

Opera to take web back to the old days

Terms of Service...

Not to mention that many ISP's state in the agreement that you can't run servers...

Demand for consoles, add-ons skyrockets as PC games plunge

I quit with the PC years ago!

I stopped using the PC as my primary games machine years ago. It's seriously expensive to keep up a rig that will run the latest games to a good standard - coughing up £1.5k to £2k every couple of years is hard work unless you've got far too much money - particularly when for everything else you use the machine for it's perfectly fine.

Add to that playing around with drivers, installing patches, dealing with the DRM and so forth it just isn't as easy as it should be. Granted, it's easier than it was but the underlying problem now is the inherent advantage of a PC - the enormous variations and flexibility and the fact that no game will actually tell you WHY it's going slow - is it because my ram is a bit naff? Is it the bus speed on the motherboard? Are my drives running slow? Is it the graphics card memory is not enough or too slow? Is the processor not good enough? Do I need one with more L2 Cache? It would be a slightly different kettle of fish if the games actually gave you a good clue as to WHY they were running slowly - without which you're left stabbing in the dark "oh well, time for another graphics card, there goes another £250".

The last straw for me was a couple of games which actually could not run out of the box, once installed a patch was mandatory to make them work AT ALL.

Then there was a bazillion patches for Half Life and other FPS games of the time, I got completely lost - I managed to get upgraded and then the next time I got to multi-play I found we were all using different versions so we had to spend the next hour downloading patches to get us all up to the same level again.

I'm a converted Xbox gamer now, started with the original doorstep sized Xbox and i've now had the 360 since it was launched. I've had Xbox Live membership since the day it first started beta testing.

I bought a VGA adaptor so that the console plus in to my PC monitor and then when my PC is churning over some normal activity (download etc) I fire up the console and have a play.

The 360 has never crashed on me, i've never had to install drivers, online gaming just works 100% every time (at least once your firewall and router is set up anyway :) ) and if there are any patches it just goes ahead and gets on with it; though any patches i've had for games so far have only taken a few seconds to download and install, hardly a passion-killer.

Are Console games everything that PC games can be? Sometimes yes, sometimes no - strategy games are still king on the PC, but even then Command and Conquer 3 on the 360 was actually extremely enjoyable, much to my surprise... but I still would much prefer strategy on the main PC - that said, I shall not be buying Red Alert 3 on the PC purely because of the DRM, so that's another sale to the console market. FPS games I now really enjoy on the console - even after a decade of FPS madness on the PC I'll take slightly more awkward controls over overall ease, simplicity and put simply - fun.

I'm a techie, I used to build PC's, I develop all sorts of software at all kinds of levels from assembly up to C#, Java and even write my own programming languages from time to time where it helps a problem. What i'm saying here is that i'm no newbie, and i'm not afraid of technology. What I *am* is someone who does computers for a living and when I get home and want to have fun I need equipment which just works, 100% of the time every time.

The biggest problem my 360 gives me is when the battery pack dies, but it only takes a few seconds to switch it for the other one sitting on the charger and off we go again with no real interruption to the game in progress.

PC gaming will never die but consoles now generally exceed the power of the PC that the *average* person has and it does so at far lower cost, meaning better gaming is more accessible on the console than on the PC. Indies are well supported on consoles because you can use tools like XNA Game Studio (for example) on the 360 to make your own games. I foresee the console market set only to grow next year and the PC market to continue shrinking.

The PC is, imho, unmatched for Strategy and Simulation - but most other genres work very well on the console.

Ahem, verbal diahorrea now finished :)

Matt.