Posts by Peter Bond

A multitasking iPad? Let's bin the netbook

Wait until the end of the year

and something like ICD's Gemini will be widely available running Android and having an SD card slot, telephony, a longer battery life due to its Tegra 2 platform, WiFi and 3G and all for around £200 or on contract from the likes of T-Mobile for £15pcm. I still won't need one because I simply don't have the need for a gadget that sits between my HTC Desire which I always carry with me and my Inspiron 11z, which I carry when I need a real computer, but at the price I'll treat myself to one as a cool toy.

The iPhone sells because it is a very good phone and we all need phones but I doubt more than a fraction of the population of this or any other country - the self appointed urban tech elite aside - feel the need for a "pad" of any size shape or form.

What do you call the iPad in Arabic?

Oranges and Apricots

thought those words came from Sanskrit and Latin respectively, not Arabic.

Apple's iPad - fat iPhone without the phone

What on earth is all the fuss about?

It's basically a large iPod Touch with the option of 3G. Not a bad idea in and of itself I grant you but not deserving of all this broo-ha-ha. If HTC or Motorola or anyone else other than Apple had released this device it would not be generating one tenth of the press coverage.

Devolo dLan AVplus

oh yeah...

"Our offices border a domestic environment and these things are a clucking pain in the ass and results in us having to spend time getting OFCOM to get rid of them so we can do some work."

How did that work? OFCOM can't barge into a private residence and demand the owner stop using a device that is both legal and licensed just because someone nearby made has made a speculative complaint.

Acer to ship lots of smartphones, many of them Android, claims mole

@ Gerard

Gerard - I noticed that you made this same comment on the Reg's review of the Liquid but didn't reply when the reviewer asked you for examples of missing apps. I took delivery of my Liquid from Expansys last week and found all 18 of the apps on my G1 - 4 payed for, the rest gratis - in the Android 1.6 Market and all work.

With a few small exceptions - HTC have released some Sense widgets that only work on handsets running the HTC Sense UI - the Android Market is the same no matter what handset you are using.

Either let the rest of us know what apps you had running on your G1 that you can't find in the 1.6 Market via the Liquid or the ones that you can find but can't get working on the Liquid or quit complaining! BTW, if you have an app that works on the G1 but not the Liquid that is a fault with the app developer, not with the handset maker!

Barnes & Noble nobbled for 'nicking' Nook-e Reader notion

Twins?

I thought those two devices looked bloody similar when I first saw pictures of them. Now I guess we know why.

Belkin Powerline HD Gigabit mains Ethernet adaptor

@ Mage

"I think this review didn't test the unit in a realistic setting." Really? Having just read the review I'd say it would hard to come up with a more 'real world' test. The circumstances the reviewer tested the kit in sound more or less identical to the layout I have in my house, the only difference is that I am using Netgear kit.

Motorola Dext Android smartphone

@AC 13:26

indeed there is - one of the things I like about Android is the tick box that ensures it doesn't download any data while roaming unless it is doing so over the wi-fi radio.

Ford creates battery-powered Focus

Driveways @ AC 15:57

well, all the houses in the street I live have drives...and the next two streets over. I'd say quite a high % of car owners have drives or garages or some other form of secure off-road parking or similar at their place of work. And so what if electric cars initially only appeal to those of us with drives and two cars. Tough titty on anyone who lives in a third-floor flat. They can't have a garden or a patio either. Life can be tough sometimes.

T-Mobile's G2 denied the update Touch

Bugs and speed

Sorry, are we talking about the same phone? I have had a T-Mobile Hero for a month and can tell you for a fact it has no "bugs" - at least none that I can find - and the system operating speed if just fine too. All in all I am supremely impressed by it and have no intention of buggering about with the firmware in pursuit of some spurious and negligible benefits aimed at the "must have the latest" tech-head fad.

Renault unveils e-car foursome

Strewth...

you Poms don't have complain a lot for a country whose last mass market car maker went belly up four years ago after producing re-baged Hondas and other wretched tat for two decades and after the management trousered 40 million quid given them by BMW! OK, these Renault's aren't to everyone's taste, but kudos for brave efforts surely. And if you don't like, don't buy - nobody is going to make you give up your horrible Rover 75 and drive an electric Renault...

Plug-in Mercedes hybrid saloon emerges

MPG

I suspect the MPG is so much higher than the Prius because the Merc is a plug-in. Over any of the standard fuel consumption cycles those fist 20 odd "petrol free" miles are going to have a major effect on the consumption arithmetic. I thought we'd sorted this out with the Volt consumption claims! If memory serves one European standard driving cycle involves driving at various speeds for around 20 minutes - this Merc is going to be able to cover a big chunk of that on battery power alone. If you filled / charged it up, hit the M1 in London and floored it all the way to Leeds would you get 88mpg? Of course not, but that is not how standard fuel consumption tests are done.

Mercedes moves e-car concept closer to the forecourt

Spats

Rather like the transparent wheel trims and rear wheel arch spats. Hope they make it to production.

Honda Insight five-door hybrid

Cars and units

Reviewing electric cars - or the closest you can get at the moment - seems reasonable enough, the site has been covering electric car news for the best part of a year and they always seem to be near the top of the 'Most Read' column. As for mixing metric and Imperial, so you want all fuel consumption numbers as KPG or KPL and MPG? Looks to me like the Reg's policy is choose the system that will make the most immediate sense to the reader and quote both for electric motor output. Not the Reg's fault you Brits have yet to embrace the metric system in its totality!

Men in Green step back from GM's 230mpg Volt claim

Energy use

Interesting that nobody is suggesting that conventional MPG figures (or the energy used by petrol driven cars) should include a weighting to allow for the energy expended is extracting, refining and transporting petrol to the pump. The energy required to generate electricity shouldn't be left out of the equation, but nor should the true cost - in energy terms - of getting a gallon of unleaded into the tank.

@Ray0x6 - surely the EPA figures are intended more as a way to compare Car A with Car B on a level playing field than as an absolute definiton of fuel or energy consumption. Whatever test system the EPA cooked up someone was going to start whining, but some sort of methodology is needed to compare a Volt with a Prius plug-in with a Mitsubishi plug-in in order to give Joe Public some sort of idea which will be the cheapest to run.

GM hybrid SUV planned for 2011

@ Frank Bough

err no - Toyota are only vaguely thinking about a plug-in (PHEV) version of the Prius. GM are jumping a whole generation by going direct to plug-in hybrid. For what its worth the Saturn product manager reckoned the V6 hybrid would average 30mpg. Even taking into account small US gallons that's not bad - if true - for a big SUV that can hit 60 in 7.3 seconds.

What's Welsh for Orange?

Orange

As has been said, its melyngoch, from "melyn" for yellow and "coch" for red.

And there are a hell of a lot more than 3 native Welsh speakers who regard it as their first language, closer to 400,000 or about 20% of the inhabitants of the Principality.

And the best thing about being Welsh? Your not English!

Samsung N120

fragile

as someone who has dropped a running SSD Acer Aspire 1 down a flight of stairs I can see where El Reg is coming from. Netbooks are first and foremost portable, and portable means having to withstands knocks, bangs and drops. I wouldn't treat a £370 Samsung with the same disregard as a £200 AA1, and that's exactly why I bought the AA1. If I want to carry around something that I have to treat with kid gloves I'll my cart MacBook around with me. More reason I suspect to start calling machines like the NC10 and N120 "mini-laptops" and machines like the AA1 and Dell Mini 10v - btw, can we get a review of this soon? - "netbooks".

Philips GoGear Opus personal media player

Back at AC #2

No, not all bundled phones are "shit". The phones that come with a Sony S639 are pretty good. The bottom line is you shouldn't have to pay $500 for phones (Shure's RRP for a set of SE510s) on top of the cost of your player. Supplying terrilble phones is a con Apple have been allowed to get away with for far too many years. But be that as it may, the problem with Apple products is only partly down to the quality of the standard phones, its also down the electronics. I recently tried my son's iPod Touch through a set of Sennheiser HD465s. What a racket! I'm concerned enough about sound quality to not use an Apple music player.

Audi working on electric R8?

@ Mr Larrington

Voles? I'd never considered getting a car to track pulled by hundreds of small rodents, but its not a wholly unappealing idea!

Buddy unveils Metro e-car

if Ikea made cars...

If I could buy one flat pack from my local Ikea for £6k I'd be interested!

E-cars are a dangerous myth, says top boffin

Missing the point

Surely what is at issue in not how much the UK chucks at electric car R&D and adoption, but how little it spends on science and engineering in general! As for CO2, the UK is the windiest country in Europe, so wind power could be made to supply a very high % of our needs if only we would stop pandering to the NIMBYs who don't want a windmill within 200 miles of their house or the radical tree huggers who think its a mortal sin to build a wind farm on a blasted bit of moorland that nobody ever visits. Electricity can be produced without direct CO2 emissions and the only way to translate that fact into personal mobility is through electric cars.

Exclusive: Mitsubishi's iMiEV UK launch revealed

Price

didn't Mitsubishi say back in 2008 that the iMiEV would cost about 4 million yen when it was released in Japan? That's about £27k, so its actually a little cheaper than expected in the UK. OK, iys still a lot for a small EV but if we Brits will be able to get hold of them for £20k, knock off the £5k Govt electric car rebate then that's a £15k purchase. You could claw that 5 grand back from reduced fuel and maintenance costs in a couple of years making it actually a more cost effective buy than the the regular petrol version.

E-car supplier demos battery swap-shop

@Bod

Glasgow is 403 miles from London while Manchester is 208. A Tesla Roadster could easily make that trip with one stop at Manchester for a new battery. A hydrogen fuel cell powered electric car is a great idea but only once they work out how to make the fuel cells and get hold of the hydrogen on something even remotely approaching a cost effective basis. As for planned journeys, I do a fair amount of cross country motoring, but tend not to hop in the car and head to Scotland on the spur of the moment!

@Brutus

You could get around some of that by having to "book" your battery swap on-line. I can't see battery swap stations ever being run along the same 'roll in a random, fill up and drive away' idea as petrol stations, but if you planned to drive from London to Glasgow in your electric car it would be easy enough to plan a battery swap in Manchester and book it the day before so when you roll up the system has the right battery in the right place at the right time. As long as swap stations also have a decent number of high voltage charging posts on hand to cope with the random visitor it could work rather well.

Renault intros e-MPV

Gear stick

I'd assume it's for selecting forward/reverse.

Solwise Piggy 6 multi-device powerline network adaptor

PLC / HF radio

So is it the case that PLC networks and HF/CB radio systems will always clash when in close proximity? Or is it dependent on the state of the wiring in a house, the antenna on the radio system etc etc? If its a case of only a small % of HF radio users having a problem with nearby PLC set ups, well that's just tough tit, we don't live in a perfect world, on the other hand if its 100% of users, then action needs to be taken.

Edifier Luna 2 desktop speaker set

Class D

So Class D amps are "shit" are they? Have you heard an Alpine PDX ICE system? For compact active systems or in-car use Class D is ideal because it keeps the speaker drive unit on a very short leash and is very efficient. Like all amplification systems Class D can be executed either well or poorly, to dismiss the very concept is idiotic unless you get your jollies in the men's room with a copy of Stereophile magazine! As for Class D being "cheap and nasty" KEF's Cube powered sub-woofer is certainly not nasty and it sure as hell ain't cheap either. I'd say the reviewers comment about Class D sounding better - in the context of devices like these speakers - is probably right.