Posts by spencer

Apple MacBook mid-2010

Shocking summary!

"It’s expensive, but I don’t care"

You should bloody care, and you should factor that against both your scoring and what your getting for your cash.

Rubbish!

Toshiba unveils ARM, Nvidia-based smartbook

8G is fine.

8G is a big step up from the first netbooks. They were 2-4G.

I'm sure you could stick a different Linux distro on it if you wanted.

I'm very excited about this, will probably buy on launch..

The Reg guide to Linux, part 1: Picking a distro

+1

Tiny Core Linux is by far the best small distribution around, it's stupidly easy to customise and you can make usb booting sticks with whatever you want on them.

Apple bans competing ads from the iPhone

Android Solution

Since Android is basically Linux, it has an /etc/hosts file where you can black-hole ad domains.

Apple picks death not compliance for open source iPhone game

orly

Apple's attitude to Open Source has been clear for a long time: thanks for the code and so long, suckers.

How do explain webkit then? Thats open source and maintained by apple (and others).

Regent Street blocked by iPad fanboi swarm

these people are idiots

there is nothing more to add.

Google blames developers for lousy Android battery life

Apple Iphone Battery Life...

is still rubbish *despite* not having true multi-tasking. And what about the symbian comparable; the nokia n97? Doesn't that have rubbish battery life as well?

The thing sucking up the battery is the 3g and wireless, and it's the same with all smart phones.

Differences in phone OS arn't really going to make a difference. And if they do, Orlownski certainly didn't bother to put any numbers up to support his argument.

The iPad, news saviour? Murdoch may have something here

No

It's just an RSS feed with a nice frontend. Who would pay for that tripe.

Pay for content, fair enough but fragmenting the content delivery system for each publication is taking a huge step backwards.

HP teases with smartbook spec

28wh??

Arn't battery usually measured in mAH? Does anyone know what 28wh is comparable to?

also...

28Wh / 12Hours = 2.3Watts power draw!?

Thats pretty impressive if that is the actual mean power draw, with screen on and wireless running.

'iPhone 4G' loser outed

guerrilla marketing?

I really wouldn't put it past apple to deliberately set up a stunt like this. Gizmondo is part of the tame apple press after all.

Ten Essential... iPhone Accessories

ok

After that 350 word essay in defense of the iphone battery, here's an elegant soloution on comparable hardware.

http://www.mobilefun.co.uk/extended-battery-and-replacement-back-cover-htc-hero-black-p22315.htm

A large battery. £20.

Milage may vary.

Within the context of the sentance, i think most people would have understood that 'the internet' would mean mobile internet enabled on your phone. But point taken.

That aside, here are Apples battery life claims: http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html

Internet use:

Up to 5 hours on 3G

Up to 9 hours on Wi-Fi

I just can't see how your claims are possible. My experiance and the experiance of my pals is that the iphone, 3gs or not lasts about a day if you have mobile internet enabled.

I'm not so sure

"If you're someone who regularly drains two (or more) batteries on a phone before you can get to a charger then you probably want something a bit more specialised than the iPhone."

The iphone battery lasts less than a day with the internet on (as do most of the android handsets, to be fair). To have a working phone for a couple of days i don't think is a particularly 'specialist' requirement, and swapping a battery at the start of the second day is not a bad or inelegant solution.

The fact that 4 of these 'essential' accessories are to do with the battery life i'd say it was a concern, no?

grreat

I can't help but feel like 'Essential' products; 1,2,3 and 4 could be all replaced by a spare battery you can put in when the other one has run out.

oh, you can't replace the battery. fail.

Dell Mini 10

A real shame about the SSD

once your used to how snappy the OS is, as well as the boot up time, it's hard to go back to HDD again.

Also, a shame about the lack of OS choice, it would be interesting to know why they stopped offering a Linux option.

Dedicated Vi device vies for buyers

site is down.

if there's an ARM chip in there i reckon you could maybe get a linux distro on that...

and then after that it's pretty easy to get the apps/functionality you need on there.

The article doesn't mention (unless i missed) what the chip is / if there's memory management etc...

Intel pitches Atom storage platform

"It ain't X86 but it's cheaper"

I though Atom used an x86 instruction set? How else does it run windows OS's?

Hacking human gullibility with social penetration

Same story here - word for word

google says it was posted earlier, doesn't link to or mention this website

http://hackingexpose.blogspot.com/2010/03/hacking-human-gullibility-with-social.html

Nvidia drives in second-gen Ion

Power Draw will be the decider

The first ION, while everybody seemed to bang on about it; never really took off in the netbook space because of power draw (WARNING! this is only my hunch, i never owned or tested any hardware with ION inside).

Hopefully the power draw will be better this time around, but i still don't really understand the point of putting in a fully fledged graphics card into a device which will probably only be used to look at email and youtube vids.

Tweets are free on 3

really?

surely this is just an unlimited data connection option?

Apple iPad vs netbooks: fight not over yet

In my eyes the fight is over

The personally think it's all about the keyboard.

The netbook is good because it fits in your bag and when you need to do some proper computing, you got the keyboard there to do it with.

Anything else you can do on your android/iphone/blackberry/n900

the ipad you can't carry on your person, so you gotta put it in your bag, why not just take a netbook instead?

IBM's monster tape will take three days to fill

2.98 Hours?

nitpicking i know...

2 hours, 58mins perhaps (59 if you round up)?

More MIDs with ARM than Atom by 2013

...Nah

This is not the kind of ARM netbook that is being hyped talked about...

released June last year:

Arm 926EJ 266mhz processor

64MB RAM

2GB FLASH

1800 MAH BATTERY (4 hrs battery life)

Ok, so it's only £100, but my phone has better specs than this (and also uses ARM)

...where are the ARM laptops (netbooks, whatever)?

I hear about them, i want to buy and use one. Where are they??

If 2010 is going to be a pivotal year then they need to start releasing these ARM netbook puppies into the wild.

Browsers could host a (simple) database

grrr!

Firefox already does it....

look for yourself in your 'Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\$usr\' directory for the *.sqlite files. They're databases, and they're using less resources than what was used in previous versions of firefox to do the same thing.

@Micky 1

"It's a piss poor practice that was stopped years ago."

perhaps you should look at the offline feature of google mail, google calendar and google documents, all using an "entire" database for offline use.

The idea is that you only download the database (or even just the schema) once, then update it intermittently.

cookies++

values can only be a string with cookies.

a database can have multiple types (int, char, string etc etc...).

ironically most browsers already store their cookies in a database already.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Cookies

They already host a database

Firefox and Chrome (i think) already have sqlite baked into them to deal with history, settings and bookmarks. This is Google Gears project sneaking into the latest HTML spec through the back door.

This is probably a good thing in the context that most of your future browsing will be done on your mobile which might not always have a data connection.

Nokia Booklet 3G

kinda expensive

the price point really turns me off.

Shame because it looks so nice and the specs are perfect for a netbook

Popcorn Hour C-200

A/V sync

To my knowledge there is no way to tinker with the A/V if it doesn't sync up so well.

No review ever seems to cover this, but it's a big deal for me (and i'm sure for others as well).

Google fits Android for visual search Goggles

'Available on the Marketplace'

I can't see it on my Hero. Can anyone see it?

(i'm in the uk, don't know if that makes a difference)

Samsung P2370HD TV-monitor

Can this handle other resoloutions?

Would this Tv be able to handle more pc-like resoloutions as well as the standard 1920×1080 (or whatever it is)?

Spotify embraces Symbian

@Studley

It's Expensive compared to other products that do the same thing.

Napster does it for £5/month, and it has an iphone client.

Sky Songs is £6.49/month AND you can download 10 songs a month for free.

Your right, spotify is more expensive than stealing, but it's also more expensive than most of it's rivals.

Like i said earlier, it's the mobile clients that make the difference.

Mobile Client Makes the Difference

It's the mobile clients that make the difference between Spotify and all the other all-you-can-eat services, some (most?) of which are cheaper than Spotify but don't seem to get the same amount of attention.

Better late than never for Symbian phones. At least these users will be able to listen to spotify and do other stuff with their phones, unlike the Iphone lot (thanks to a bizarre decision to not allow multitasking on for 3rd party apps)

North England to replace satanic mills with iPhone app factories

not really much money in this

unless your app is literally fucking amazing then it's just gonna get lost in the millions of other average apps.

IMO more profitable to use your mad programming skillz doing something else; like wholesale credit card fraud or something

Samsung N510 Nvidia Ion-based netbook

ION is lame

I always see comments on here asking why don't we see more ION products. Well this is the reason: look at the bars, the EEE 100HA beats it in Battery Life and is on par with this in every else and costs £80-100 less, all because they packed it with the stupid ION so people (idiots in my opinion) can watch HD content on a really small screen. completely pointless IMO

Cisco and the war for, um, hosted email

Murkey Waters

A lot of Cisco resellers (at least the ones that i can think of from the top of my head) also try and flog google services as well. I wonder if this will change anything.

Europe welcomes Dell's Mac Mini Zino HD

£750!!

seems like a lot, like someone else said, 300 for a PS3 is a lot cheaper, and also has media centre abilities, then you could spend another £300 on a half decent nettop (possibly even with HD ability as well if you get the right GMA chipset) to do your work on and still save some cash.

HTC Tattoo

@TeeCee

It costs ~£20 to unlock an HTC phone, so just add £20 to the final price and then it's an Apples to Apples comparison.

price point

at £280 it seems a bit steep. You can get a Hero for the around the same price, which is pretty solid now that the new firmware has been released.

Mandriva flashes its small aggressive penguin

Lazy lazy

Source? Link?

Here's the list of features from the Mandriva website:

http://www2.mandriva.com/linux/features/

There's a video there with an explanation of the "Semantic Desktop" which this piece kind of touches on.

Opera Mobile sings out new Symbian version

what about android??!

The current android browser is ok but i would gladly pay cash for a proper mobile version of opera on android.

Bloggers go ballistic over non-existent wireless tax

@mrs doyle/chris

I would love it if you could give us an example of this.

The £100 hike is for commercial properties that are used for transmission, and most of these stations are already paying well over £100 already (an order of magitude more in most cases).

Not going to break the bank.

I happen to work in the Business rates Dept of a certain soho square based company of chartered surveyors.

Let me assure you that an extra £100 pounds over the 5 year business rates period is not going to break anyone's bank.

I wanted to go into more detail about the costs of masts, but the way they price up the floor space makes it hard to evaluate exactly how much money a mast on a commercial premise actually costs.

But take a rate of £2,500 (roughly the going rate for a 'communication station' in london). £100 isn't even a 10% hike.

The new rates have gone up by 10% or more for most of these stations (in london) anyway. So this new supplement is just an extra kick in the bollocks, albeit a very small one

Symbian aims to baffle embrace community

shame, really

sybmian is fast and solid. More than a match for the other phone OS's out there. Though maybe not in the looks looks department.

Incidently Google maps for symbian is far better than the equivalent for both the iphone and android.

Apple Magic Mouse

Microsoft

....make a surprisingly good mouse for OS x. That one with the buttons on the side can be mapped to Expose (F9 button) among other things that speeds up workflow considerably.

MSI Wind Top AE1900

@Anonymous Coward 13:37 GMT

"The GMA-500 does not support Atom"

Look at the specs of:

Sony's VAIO P series,

Fujitsu's Lifebook U820,

ASUStek's Eee PC 1101HA,

Dell's Inspiron Mini 10 and Inspiron Mini 12,

Acer's Aspire One 751,[25] ,

ASUStek's EeePC T91 tablet

...For examples of an Atom paired with GMA 500

"GMA 950 consumes about 22w"

I hope it doesn't, i don't have the specs to hand but that doesn't sound right at all, can anyone verify?

meh.

netbook spec for slightly higher than netbook pricing.

45W seems a bit steep as well, hopefully 35W of that is in the monitor.

Finally the GMA-950 seems like an odd choice. Why not put in the GMA-500 which can do codec stuff in hardware so at the very least a user can watch HD content without it stuttering? It's not like you have to worry about battery life.

Touch screen is nice i suppose, looks decent enough as well.

IMO not worth the 80% score

Inside Intel's 'Moorestown'

Not in a mobile.

Shouldn't really be in a laptop either. ARM shits all over it.