Posts by Si 1 441 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009
I think we need to start the TNLCA: Thin 'n' Light Computers Anonymous.
I don't have a need for another small lightweight laptop (I've already got the Alienware M11x), but it's such an attractive wedge of aluminium that I want one anyway. It reminds me of the time I first saw Sony's VAIO range with their magnesium casings back in 1999...
I think the rise in sales of Mac computers could be the most interesting thing here, as we've known the iPhones and iPads were flying off the shelves for a while. Is the "halo effect" really starting to kick in and entice iDevice owners to buy into the main desktop/laptop range?
I seem to recall reading that the number one laptop for kids going to university is now a Macbook, which in turn is going to result in quite a few people who will want to be using OSX after graduating. I think this is where Microsoft must really be shitting themselves at the moment, they've lost marketshare but much more importantly they seem to be losing mindshare. Ballmer is going to have to turn things around pretty quickly is he wants to avoid Microsoft slowly fading away into obscurity. Perhaps they should buy Apple outright while they still have the cash... ;)
After the demo I was planning to write the game off as a rather lazy God of War clone (and I've already played GoW Collection, GoW3 and a bunch of other clones this year, so I'm a bit burned out on GoW). I might give Lords of Shadow a second chance if there's more to it in the later stages.
I've got an older M15X too, and they really are huge, weighty buggers. If I've got a spare 10 minutes I'm far more likely grab the iPad and start playing Plants vs Zombies right away, rather than lug the laptop out, wait for it to boot and then wait for Dead Rising 2 to load.
I bought a 32GB iPad and I expected to quickly run out of storage and then regret not paying the extra for a 64GB model, but in fact I've set up AirVideo and just live-transcode everything from my desktop. For a lazy and impatient person like me, the iPad is very handy for simple every day tasks. If they could just do something about the keyboard I could definitely see it being a real alternative to a laptop...
Now off to bed to read a few chapters of something in the Kindle app...
I recently bought a nearly new iPad for a bargain price and I've been very pleased with it. I don't think it's worth the full price Apple want, but for the price I paid I'm very happy with it. In particular as the survey suggests I use it in bed a lot.
Probably the majority of use is with Kindle, I have surprised myself with the number of books I've devoured on the device. The iPad is also pretty useful for surfing, emailing and sniping the occasional eBay item late at night (although the iPad eBay app is shit, I use the excellent iPhone one instead. Why they're different I have no idea).
I think the iPad is ideal for a bit of bedroom action because it loads instantly, automatically adjusts the screen brightness based on the light in the room, doesn't have any whirring hard drives or fans, has good battery life and is small and light enough to stick on a bedside table.
It's definitely an over priced device, and certainly is more a luxury than a necessity, but I'm still very pleased to have it. Maybe like Rik I'll find myself using it less and less, but currently it's very much the flavour of the month.
I agree with the review totally, with one small exception- I do think the game is worth buying despite its flaws. I thought the first Dead Rising was too broken to bother with (rubbish survivor AI, single save slot, short time limits, etc, etc). This one has sufficiently smoothed those rough edges to make the game more palatable, and there's lots of fun to be had combining items and seeing their effects on the zombie horde.
The review should perhaps have also highlighted the crippling load times. The game would have been much better served if they had found a way to stream the game world instead of serving it up in chunks with long loads between each section.
Making money could do with being easier too. Even with all the gambling "perk" magazines, it's still taking ages to afford the $2M I need for Knight Arthur's boots. There's still a helicopter, car and Hummer to buy after that!
The review is dead right about the annoying bosses too (I'm at level 50 now and the final boss and the secret one after that are still somewhat tricky). It's absolutely stupid that there aren't checkpoints before a boss. Weaving between zombies to get back to a boss fight isn't difficult, it's just time consuming, doubly so because of the long load times. So why force the player to do that instead of just having a checkpoint before the boss? Seems like obstinate game design to me.
Likewise the time limits are improved over the first, but I still fail to see the point of them. GTA doesn't take a mission away from you if you don't decide to undertake it in time. The game world is a fantastic one, filled with weapons (and combinations of weapons) that can used against the zombie horde, but the time limits mean you rarely get the time to go climbing and exploring the environment. If you do decide to explore, your reward is either to miss out on a mission or be heavily squeezed on the time left to do it.
So after all those complaints, it's still great fun to strap chainsaws to your motorbike and cut a huge swathe into the zombie horde, and it's probably worth buying for that alone. Maybe Blue Castle will be given free reign to ignore all of Keiji Inafune's stupid design decisions in Dead Rising 3...
Personally I wouldn't buy a Touch if I could have an iPhone. I had a 1st gen Touch and I never used it, purely because it only worked on Wi-Fi and if I'm in range of Wi-Fi it usually means I'm at home or in the office. If I'm in either of those places then I might as well use my main computer rather than a device with a small screen.
The iPhone comes into its own by allowing me to use the web/email wherever I go. I'm not reliant on finding a Wi-Fi connection (or paying for one). I certainly couldn't use my iPod Touch while out hiking to find out how far I am from my destination like I did with my iPhone last week.
The iPod Touch has improved loads from the first gen system, which Apple deliberately crippled with no speaker, mic, camera, GPS and loads of apps missing. These days it's mostly an iPhone without the phone, but surprisingly, for me that's the most important part...
In other words, they didn't bother to tell anyone and kept it quiet in the hope that their customers wouldn't notice. I think these companies bank on people not caring enough to take the time to phone and cancel their contract.
Still, there's nothing new about this. O2 have been shafting iPhone owners for ages, what with their 18 or 24 month only contracts and charging for tethering (which apparently is free for any other phone).
I've got to be honest, I've never really seen the appeal of the Halo games. I had an Xbox 1 with Halo at launch and it was pretty good, but I never expected all of the 10/10 plaudits it received. It was a pretty solid FPS but nothing surprised me or made me feel it was revolutionary. It was a solid 7/10 in my book, worth playing but nothing special.
It feels a bit like the Emperor's New Clothes. No matter how many times I play the games, I just see a fairly generic but well made sci-fi FPS. Lots of people say that you need to play on Legendary to enjoy the game, but I found I just died a lot. Maybe one day I'll see what everyone else sees, but until then, I'll carry on scratching my head.
So far this year, my favourite game has been Mass Effect 2 by a country mile. Maybe Dead Rising 2 will challenge it?
The current version of TomTom on the iPhone seems quite happy to carry on giving directions even when running other apps. I'm not sure what extra multi-tasking TomTom think they can offer when it already does this.
In fact I have to remember to quit the app otherwise it starts demanding I make a u-turn from my pocket in the middle of a meeting.
I could easily see the same sort of 3D screen used on the 3DS and some mobile phones becoming a standard feature on smart phones. I think using the 3D effect to make text "hover" and stand out from web pages, ebooks, emails, texts and apps would work well. I think for web browsing in particular having the text separated from its background could be very effective.
It could also be used to make buttons or controls that are active stick out from the screen, making it easy to see what can be interacted with.
... by cutting up a larger SIM. I phoned and asked for a MicroSIM but the dullard on the other end insisted I needed an iPhone SIM and that it would work in all iPhones. Turns out she as right, it does work in all iPhones once you've taken a pair of scissors to them.
Both Apple and the mobile companies have been utterly useless when it comes to letting people switch to a MicroSIM. I know of two other people who have had similar problems with other networks. The shops tell you to call the help line and the help line tells you to go to their shop, and neither seems to know what the hell a MicroSIM is.
I've got to be honest, I never got on with Symphony, there's never any health around so basically I stumble around for a while, getting increasingly lost until I run out of health and die. Then I have to try and find my way back to where I was lost before and hope I find a save point before dying again.
Really I like the classic NES and SNES games the most, especially Castlevania IV with its multi-directional whip. I've never understood why all the games since then have gone back to only being able to whip directly in front of the character. Apparently the new Lords of Shadow game will hark back to the classic action games, so fingers crossed it's a good one!
I've just re-installed Windows 7 and all the files I backed up for iTunes have been completely ignored by the program. So I've had to re-create all of my playlists and re-copy all my videos, songs, apps, etc to my iPhone. Better still, it refuses to copy any of my Outlook appointments across, preferring instead to wipe them.
I suspect all this clunkiness is to encourage me to pay for MobileMe... As fantastic as I think the iPhone is, I think iTunes is one of the worst pieces of software ever written, and I haven't even got into all of the UI flaws and failings yet...
I've yet to find any significant problems between Firefox or Chrome versions. IE on the other hand always has significant rendering differences between versions. Furthermore Firefox and Chrome users are usually quite tech savvy and keep to the later versions of the browsers (the auto-update in Firefox works very well too).
At the end of the day, IE9 is another browser that I've got to validate sites against, it will likely still have rendering bugs that aren't in FF/webkit and it won't make much of a dent in all the IE6, IE7 and IE8 installs still out there. Things would be a lot better if MS just gave up and killed IE or replaced it with a webkit core.
Does anyone want yet another version of IE floating around? Regardless of improvements it's going to be yet another version of the browser that I am going to have to take into account when writing new sites. It's bad enough having to write custom CSS for IE6, IE7 and IE8 without also having to deal with IE9. Plus it means I'm going to have to use even more disk space for another virtual machine with IE9 on it...
I'm beginning to wonder if Microsoft's new strategy to kill all the other browsers is to force developers to spend all their time testing and fixing their sites on every version of IE out there. This will then ensure that developers don't have time to make sure their sites work with Firefox/Opera/Safari/Chrome...
I've got Kindle on the iPhone, the selection of books has improved significantly since I last tried it, but I was charged in dollars so maybe Amazon have been sneaky and are letting people buy US releases. That used to be blocked, so I'm not sure why it's allowed now.
My biggest gripe with Kindle on the iPhone is that there's no auto-scroll like in eReader or Wattpad. Sure swiping or tapping to turn a page isn't that onerous, but if there's a better solution, why not include it?
Kids don't want to learn about computing, they want to use computers to update their Facebook status and work out how to get around the parental controls.
It's also possible it's because the courses are crap and out of date. When I did A-level Computing about 15 years ago I was not impressed. It was all about tape spools and punch cards, which were archaic even in the late '90s.
IIRC Safari wasn't updated for iOS4, so this is likely an old exploit that they've been saving for the launch of new hardware to make jail breaking as painless as possible, especially now that it's legal in some places.
It's the same with the custom firmwares for the PSP, hackers find various exploits but they don't release them in case Sony fixes them in the next firmware. Then the hackers use the flaw to attack the latest firmware when it arrives.
I jailbroke (is it a verb now? ;) ) my old 3G the other day. I'm still not very impressed with Cydia or Rock, they seem to spend 99% of their time downloading lists of updates, which takes ages. Plus the stability and usability of the emulators on there is really rubbish, as are the high prices.
I had a 16GB 3G so I was getting pretty desperate to upgrade when the 4 came out, and it is a big improvement over the 3G in many ways. I've now got a video camera, a better stills camera, a compass (for orienting maps), 32GB storage and a faster CPU, which were pretty much all the things I wanted to see added/improved over my old phone.
As you might have noticed, all of those features were also on the 3GS, and while the 4 does have a slightly faster CPU, better camera and better screen than the 3GS, I'm not sure I would say they justify the upgrade. If you can upgrade for free, sure go for it. But I would suggest playing around with a 4 and seeing if the improved display and camera are enough to make you want to pay for an upgrade. My brother has a 3GS and we did a little unofficial benchmark of the CPUs by seeing which one would load the BBC's News site fastest and it was almost a dead heat, so I wouldn't say the extra CPU power is that important.
There's also the antenna thing to consider. I've had the phone since launch and it's never dropped a call for me. But since I own an iPhone many would say that means I'm an Apple fanboy who is covering up for the fact that the phone never, ever, ever works and explodes when you look at it. Like you I have no real love for OSX or the Mac range in general, but I do really like the iPhone, so you'll have to decide for yourself how impartial to consider my opinion. :)
As long as there are significant numbers of users with IE6, IE7 and IE8 browsers out there, HTML5 will not be able to become a widely used standard nor will it be able to replace Flash. I think we've got at least another 5 years before IE is fully flushed out of the internets.
My 3G feels very sluggish and swiping through the home screens looks very jerky. Oddly though, my un-upgraded 1st gen iPod Touch loads web pages at exactly the same speed as the 3G, so while the OS seems slower, I don't think it's affecting app performance much (that said, Safari on my 3G/iTouch is unbelievably slow anyway).
... I'll definitely buy one of these. The one thing I do like about Mac laptops is the multi-touch trackpads. I've got a hacked multi-touch driver for my Alienware but it doesn't work very well, it often ignores the fact that I've got two fingers on the pad and just moves the pointer.
Personally, I find whizzing around a web page using two fingers to scroll is a really comfortable way to surf the web (is it still cool to say "surf the web"?) Mouse wheels are pretty good as long as you don't need horizontal scrolling. That said I wouldn't give up my MX Revolution with SmartShift when coding, it's unmatched for scrolling through large C libraries...
"They prize self-direction, shun conformity, and are interested in video games, computers, electronics, science and the internet,"
"iPad Critics do tend to be young men. To add even more colour: they tend to have no children and little interest in family."
"One of the strongest single indicators of being an iPad Critic is a preference for the Linux (a do-it-yourself operating system for super geeks) over Windows or Macintosh."
For someone that shuns conformity, I conform scarily close to their profile of an iPad hater. I do have one spanner to throw in their works, I still love my iPhone 4...
It's a shame Apple's desktop stuff lags so far behind the PC when it comes to gaming, even with the introduction of Steam for OSX. Put two ATI 5970s in there and you've probably got a rig capable of running all games at fully max'ed settings even on a 2560 x 1600 Apple Cinema display.
Oddly enough it does look as if that is what they've tried to do when you look at the phone. There's a small black separator on both sides of the phone near the bottom. From looks alone this implies the two antennas are actually properly isolated from each other, but in practice that doesn't seem to be the case.
This could either mean the black separator on the right is purely cosmetic to balance the gap on the left or there could be some sort of manufacturing flaw that has rendered this separation inoperative. Hopefully we'll find out tomorrow what's really going on...
I've got an iPhone 4 and I'm very pleased with it, but Apple's claims just don't hold up when you look at Anandtech's review where they "hacked" the install of the iPhone 4 to display dBm instead of the signal strength bars. The dBms clearly dropped when the phone was held "the wrong way" and it would eventually result in a lost connection.
If it was just a bars problem and not an aerial problem then surely the dBm reading should have only showed a marginal difference? A sudden plunge is hardly the sign of a software fault...
It's nice to see a fair review of the iPhone 4 instead of the usual "ZOMG teh phonez doesnt wurkz when you hold teh bottum left". I can re-create the problem on my phone, but in general use I never hold it in the way that interferes with the antenna. That's not a conscious choice, it's just the way I naturally want to hold it.
I've had mine since launch now and I've been generally quite pleased, and the speed boost over my old 3G is brilliant. It used to take over a minute to load a web page on the 3G, the iPhone 4 does it in seconds. The camera also is really excellent compared to what was on the 3G. All in all though, it's actually more of the same, which is fine, but it's not as revolutionary as the 3G was for me after years of Windows Mobile.
I agree with the reviewer about the lack of need for multi-tasking most of the time. After Windows Mobile's way of handling things, I thought the elegance of only allowing one app to run at a time was a smart solution to limited resources, a small screen, ease of use and ensuring the running app is able to use the full power of the system.
As to whether it's a better choice than an Android device, I'm not sure. I've got quite a large array of games and apps on my iPhone now and I generally think iOS is a nicer interface to use. I am however very jealous that Android has Flash, as that's probably my biggest bug-bear with the new iPhone. I'd have preferred a 64GB model too as I've already filled the 32GB... If Android starts to get more games and the platform fragmentation problems are sorted out, my next phone might not be from Apple...
I wouldn't be surprised if you aren't far from the truth. I remember the Reg ran a story a while back suggesting that Apple had more than one iPhone 4 prototype and that the one stolen was a higher spec prototype than the others.
The leak might have forced Apple's hand into shipping a device they weren't ready to sell. The world expected the glass backed iPhone 4 with front facing camera so they had to give it to them, rather than going back to the drawing board or having time to engineer a solution. It would certainly explain why Apple had bumpers on the shelves in time for launch and why FaceTime is WiFi only.
Anyway, conspiracy theories aside, I've not really had any problems with signal on my iPhone 4 except when I try to replicate the problem! Generally I don't hold it in the way that causes the problem (and that's not because I'm holding it the way Steve tells me to, it's just my hand doesn't cover the bottom left when I hold mine).
This is very unlikely, as Mandelson is no longer business secretary. He can't go swanning around doing clandestine deals with moguls on their private yachts any more.
More likely the government looked at all the bribe tax cuts Labour threw out during their dying days and realised we just can't afford to be refunding the entire tax bill of a games company if their game flops.
I'm right handed, so I hold my iPhone in my left hand and tap at the screen with my right. This means the bottom left hand corner is covered by my left hand. So why is this a lefty issue? It seems more likely to be a righty issue to me, or at least a problem for either if you like to operate the phone one-handed...
It's a pity people have to pick one side of the Apple fence and stay there. To be fair the unwavering support true Apple fanbois dish out even in the face a phone that doesn't work when you hold it is understandably polarising. You either agree with them or want to bash them in the head.
I suspect I'm one of a very small group of people who can like certain Apple products without needing to convert to the Church of St Jobs. I've owned a couple of Macs for testing purposes and never found them to be that great, give me a Windows or Linux box any day.
However, I do really like the iPod, I've been buying them since they first came out and my trusty 160GB iPod Classic goes everywhere I do (at least until there's an iPhone with a similar amount of storage). I despise iTunes though, it's clearly the work of Satan. I bought an iPod Touch and thought it was crippled and crap, but I then moved on to an iPhone and I've been incredibly happy with it ever since. After years of Windows CE/Pocket PC/Windows Mobile it truly was an incredible device: portable, stable and very versatile. Anyone who criticised Apple for not adding multi-tasking until now clearly never used a Windows CE device!!! ;)
There's now Android to offer a credible alternative, and certainly the ability to use Flash is tempting, but I'm not massively impressed with the UI or the software keyboard, nor the lack of games compared to the iPhone.
So I've got an iPhone 4, I'm impressed with the camera and the display, the speed it loads web pages is fantastic and my games now run much more smoothly (these were my biggest gripes from my old iPhone 3G). The signal loss thing is incredibly crap, hopefully a bumper will fix it, but at present I'd be reluctant to move to a different phone maker/OS.
But I am starting to feel the time to pick another mobile OS grows near. The lack of emulators on the App Store, the lack of Flash in the browser, restrictions on movie formats the phone will play, etc are all starting to become more and more grating. Jobs is going to have to either open the platform or fall into obscurity, and the decision on which way he is going to go will need to be fairly soon I think... (and knowing him, he'll stubbornly lead his flock off the cliff).
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