* Posts by Paul Shirley

2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

UK.gov vows to purify TV with £180m from mobile networks

Paul Shirley

Re:

Has nothing to do with the receivers selectivity (*), if the boosters are overdriven amplifying leaked 4G, everything gets distorted. Selectivity can't fill in for a corrupted signal.

The research documents were published early last year on ways to mitigate the effects of 4G and more or less just presented the problem and costs, it seemd pretty neutral. Today's reporting is about which option's been chosen.

(* substantially stronger 4G could trigger AGC and drop the Freeview below the receiver noise floor. Not particularly likely but possible. Actually, I'd say it's extremely likely on cheap USB tuners!)

Paul Shirley

Re: Problem is not due to signal boosters.

1: the booster amp or tuner inputs get overdriven into clipping by the 4G signal, wrecking everything.

2: AGC kicks in at the tuner, dropping the Freeview signal below the noise floor (but keeping the 4G clean ;) Buggy AGC goes into overdrive dropping everything too far.

Neither are good, 2 is cheaper to fix since the filters can sit at the tuner end. 1: may need a climb to the aerial which won't be a £10 job.

After digital switchover my signal is still poor enough that I could leave the masthead amp installed and there's still plenty of amp headroom. There are a lot of people that needed a booster before switchover but dont now. They don't have any headroom after power went up, see no problems yet so they didn't remove the amps. 4G will hit them swamp their amps.

Will Windows 8 sticker shock leave Microsoft unstuck?

Paul Shirley

@Charles 9

"in the eyes of the average Joe, it's either Windows or Mac when it comes to computers"

I believe the reality is 'it's either PC or Mac'. Windows is so ubiquitous it now has severely diluted brand awareness, users don't choose Windows they simply don't care enough to choose anything else. Its an effect of Microsofts continuing monopoly on shipped PCs.

If anything Office probably has more awareness and effect on buying choice, so they can keep opening their old documents. It's an easy 'habit' to break as well, on the new laptop my sister in law asked for OpenOffice because that's what I'd installed on the last one, didn't even notice the Microsoft bloatware installed. No doubt next time they upgrade she'll ask for LibreOffice after I switched them. Ordinary folk simply aren't starry eyed about Microsoft products.

Which leaves me completely clueless about how the public will react to Win8. Sink without trace like Chrome laptops or will they simply take what they're given and barely notice?

Ubuntu for Android: Penguins peck at Nokia's core problem

Paul Shirley

Yes, struck me as bizarre that the idiots trying so hard to dumb down desktop Linux think there's any point to this. Ubuntu is rapidly degenerating into something less usable than Android already is.

Mobile telcos bleed $13.9bn as IM apps chomp on SMS

Paul Shirley

you're still paying for those unused SMS

Few users pay inflated per SMS rates any more. The price is now buried in their contract bundle total, or as a 'free' topup incentive on PAYG. You've still paid the carrier whether you use those bundled SMS or not.

Maybe not as much cash as in the golden days but they locked in their profit before the rise of IM could wipe it all out.

UK mobile networks start to phase out Sony Ericsson handsets

Paul Shirley

Sony brand less appealing than SE

They've all been discounting SE Xperias heavily just to shift stock and the 'sale' started before the split was announced. The 2011 Xperias are nice enough phones but distinctly midrange hardware at above midrange prices was a hard sell, especially after the 2010 Xperias damaged the brand.

It's a fair bet Sony will fail to notice their brand has only niche value in the mobile market and try to hike prices even further. Sad, just as they were getting Android right they hand the whole business to the rich but clueless side.

Seems like a smart business choice to drop SE immediately. Going to be some good sale bargains coming up ;)

Heartland Institute documents leaked

Paul Shirley

General Pance said:"The sad thing is these cynical vultures who cheer catastrophe have no practical solution bar driving energy prices beyond our reach."

After 25 years of the denialist industry successfully blocking any serious investment in alternatives to fossil fuels, we do indeed have fuck all other options left. Does that 'success' give you a hard on?

EU, US sign off on Googorola merger

Paul Shirley

Google have tried *not* playing the patent game and that has allowed Apple and Microsoft to attack Google and it's collaborators at will. Now there's some chance the war will abate because Google are now armed and willing to fight back. We're returning to the normal MAD state.

That said, most of the attacks have been pretty damaging to the attackers so far if you just count the invalidated patents. Unfortunately that's not how the game is scored, the result less important the the collateral damage along the way.

Hong Kong operators fudge unlimited tariff conundrum

Paul Shirley

compare to the UK

Pretty tame compared to the UK.

5Gb is a lot better than T-Mobiles 0.5Gb streaming allowance before switching down to browsing only - but neither cut you off completely. But at least both tell you what the limits are and T-Mobile are marginally honest when saying 'unlimited browsing'.

giffgaffs 'unlimited' may allow much more data use before cutting you off but they've recently confirmed there are conditions/limits, they're secret, extremely variable (as little as 2Gb has triggered it) and the normal uses are quietly being relabeled as abuse in the small print in the T&Cs. Can be a little difficult contacting an Internet only company to challenge disconnection after they cut the Internet as well...

Right now only 3 seem to still be really doing unlimited internet on phones. Good thing they don't have enough customers to saturate the network ;)

Paul Shirley

...did you miss the *mobile* in the post? Nothing to do with your broadband.

Overclockers UK swallowed by private equity firm Afinum

Paul Shirley

Scan, still using a stock system with no ability to reserve sold items or resolve problems when items take turns being out of stock. Which happened a lot till i quit using them.

Also the only supplier so far to simply ignore queries about missing items in a delivery.

Must try harder.

Virgin Media finally turns an annual profit

Paul Shirley

The direCt route to customer retentions on their phone system is all the service i've needed for a long time. Dont even have to pretend your leaving to renegotiate. That's service ;)

Ten... Freesat TV receivers

Paul Shirley

Haven't tried it on the inlaws foxsat but... on our humax freeview box you rewind to the point you want to record from and hit record. Useful for saving space compared to dumping the enture buffer and you can grab programmes that already finished, not just the current one if the recorder tried to be smart.

Give it a try. Might work the same way. Review also failed to mention the foxsat can work in non freesat mode. And what a lot of really crappy channels there are to wade through, w

Oracle wins round in Java patent lawsuit against Google

Paul Shirley

If only it was that easy. There are 2 attacks.

1: Oracle are attacking the underlying use of a VM with patents, changing source language makes no difference. That's the patent attack and luckily it doesn't seem to be going well for Oracle. Working around the patents might not have a crippling cost, having to compile to machine code would be very bad news.

2: Copyrights. Having failed miserably to find anything but de minimus direct copying (of the 8 test files that don't ship with Android devices, weren't even used and were removed from the source tree), Oracle are inventing brand new law to try and attack the use of Java's library environment. The problem being that Sun didn't own the source they use and API's aren't currently copyrightable. I say invent, actually they're just recycling the paperwork from SCO vs the World (same lawyers, same crackpot thinking, same result?).

However, if they succeed on the library front, changing language or VM becomes irrelevant. Simply calling the system libraries would be infringement, regardless of implementation. If Oracle succeed the entire software industry is in severe danger so don't expect that to be allowed to happen.

I'm not sure Oracle are even trying to claim the Java language, something Sun very publicly gave away long ago.

Paul Shirley

correction

argh! that should be "begging for a J2SE licence". Sun would of course have happily sold them a useless J2ME licence. Need to drink more coffee before 1st post of day ;(

Paul Shirley

how often do we have to go through this strawman?

If Sun had done the right thing and actually offered J2SE licences for mobile that might have been an option. They didn't. They only offered J2ME, a crippled mobile travesty incapable of supporting something like Android. You want J2ME go buy any of the 1000's (literally) of featurephones in the market. Just don't expect anything describable as a smartphone.

Since Google needed to negotiate Sun into something Sun didn't want to do there was no point just begging for a J2ME licence, instead they went for something bigger. Sun chose not to partner with Google and stay in the game for the long term, choosing to protect their existing revenue in a rapidly dying market instead.

Its noticeable that Sun were mightily pissed off but didn't resort to the courts. I think they understood what Oracle don't, that they'd given away most of the rights Oracle are now trying to assert. There's a reason Oracle vs Google has collapsed to a patent infringement case, one Oracle don't seem to be winning.

O2 quietly cans gratis Cloud Wi-Fi connectivity

Paul Shirley

The Cloud is a paid service in many venues and only free if the site owner chooses to sponsor it.

The O2 deal covered all hotspots (AFAIK) and may have been easier than the hoops I've had to jump through to get online in recent years. Feels like different hoops every few months... and by the time I've remembered which magic incantation is current, my pint is nearly done!

Windows Phone 8 to get NFC, HD and Skype

Paul Shirley

look up MAX_PATH

NTFS may not have the problem but the older Win32 APIs have a strict path length limit on filenames: 260 char in total, 254 (I think) for the longest component. You had to use newer Unicode interfaces to bypass that limit. It was a rich source of buffer overflows down the years in Windows and it's apps.

That essentially guaranteed your filesystem was restricted because significant parts of the OS and most applications couldn't handle anything longer. I've not tested Vista/Win7 but XP's Explorer is affected, it's possible to create directories that Explorer cannot open or even delete because of it. Perversely you can create problem folders *with Explorer* just by cut&pasting.

Make your own mind up what to think of a developer unaware of that limit. I won't be taking any tips from him/her.

Android dominates first-time smartphone buyer biz

Paul Shirley

switching platforms can be painful & expensive

Surprises me there's any significant platform hopping. Do people really enjoy buying apps all over again or just not think about it till it's too late? Or is no-one actually buying apps they feel any attachment to, or sticking with free apps for the important stuff?

Just losing your progress in Angry Birds would seem an annoying enough deterrent for many ;)

Avast false alarm hits Steam's weekend gamers

Paul Shirley

Comodo much, much worse for false positives, they never fix some

I've been reporting the same false positives to Comodo for a couple of years now, with no improvement at all. Some of them are ancient Atari ST *source code* archives, in ST formats. Data files nothing could mistake for executables!

Can't even reliably exclude them from scanning because the useless bloody program keeps resetting its exclusion lists in far too many updates and rarely takes any notice of my attempts to exclude them anyway.

If it hammered my CPU as much as the alternatives I'd dump it in a flash, AVG had a wonderful habit of sucking 100% of every core from time to time. So bad it could take 10's of minutes to shut down - always surprised me how few times I borked the file system just hard resetting instead of waiting.

Doctors sick of anonymous-coward NHS feedback commentards

Paul Shirley

The majority of patients rarely need to see their doctor and might not find out if the practice is good or bad till it's too late. Think it took nearly 10 years before I met my longest serving GP. 4+ years on I've tried but still not managed too see a doctor from my current surgery - thank god for locums and a pox on 0845 booking systems and 25min call queues.

If the choice is no comments or inevitably biased comment, I'll risk mentally filtering for bias over pure chance.

Orange San Francisco 2

Paul Shirley

iPlayer does 'work' on ARM6

iPlayer is filtered from the Market for ARM6 devices but it will happily sideload if you can find the APK. It works (for certain values of 'works') on our OSF so it should on OSF2 or any other ARM6 device.

...after trying it you may decide it was right to filter it from the Market. Even on minimum bandwidth it's struggling on the OSF and OSF2 is only a little faster.

A 1GHz ARM7 performance much better than 800Mhz ARM6+25%. A year ago the OSF was a good deal, times change, prices fall, specs improve and OSF2 now looks like a distinctly average phone for its price.

Five ways Microsoft can rescue Windows Phone

Paul Shirley

"The interface is blazingly efficient though - you can get to any app in four moves:"

The Android contacts chooser also does it that way, although its even quicker to just start typing the name and let search do the job without starting the contacts app!

Nice, *if* the task is finding any random app, especially compared to scrolling through 10 pages/156 apps in my Android app draw.

...but not optimal because that's not how people use devices. Right now my 9 most used functions have 1 click links, the next 22 are in folders 2 clicks away and searching through the whole app list is a rare event. I still have widgets and unused space on that single screen. If use changes I'll rearrange things to a more efficient mix.

Efficiency needs to be aimed at the right part of the UI to make a difference.

Paul Shirley

current crop of smartphones are toys

...just remember the public love their toys ;)

Got to agree on the form factor, Microsoft painted themselves into a corner here. After investing so much effort in talking up Android fragmentation as a problem, fragmenting their own platform to widen appeal is likely to be resisted far too long.

Even simple things like adding a landscape mode hard keyboard requires forward planning to ensure the UI still works. Android built that in from the start and still has problems - sufficient that landscape is no longer supported in most launchers unless forced. How WP7s vertical interface could be made to work in landscape is a puzzle.

Similar argument for vertical Blackberry style form factors. The vertical UI collides with landscape screen again.

Whether you like the grid of icons approach or not, it's inherently flexible enough for different screens, with no inherent preference for orientation or resolution

WP7 seem to have too many implicit assumptions to be easily diversified onto other form factors.

Paul Shirley

Help me out here: what is it about scrolling vertically to expose more links that's so much better than scrolling horizontally to expose more links?

Also: please explain the difference between a 'live tile' and a widget? Other than the name and that widgets don't have to look like 'tiles'?

Perhaps you could also solve my confusion over why using 1/8th of the screen to show my SMS/Email/Missed call count is better than showing it in the notification line beside the signal strength, volume and connection indicators - using no extra screen space?

In many ways WP7 is different simply to distinguish itself from the competition rather than any functional justification with an added dose of lawsuit avoidance. The WP7 UI is certainly different, distinctive, even memorable. But none of those terms are the same as being 'better'.

Nokia Lumia 710

Paul Shirley

"if it wasn't for the fact I'm typing on a PC."

...bet it's running Windows.

Now we know where they borrowed the CAPS LOCK AUTOENGAGE from ;)

Paul Shirley

@Witty

The whole concept of merging difference media feeds has been tried repeatedly (and before WP7 went public) and it's a marmite feature, you love it OR hate it. I've tried a few of the Android apps that aggregate feeds, the built in Timescape version on my Play and whatever HTC shipped and just don't get on with it.

Which leaves me grateful it's purely optional, even though every manufacturer seems to ship with their own take on aggregation enabled its always trivial to disable. Worth remembering some of the brand loyalty to Samsung/HTC/SE is people liking the particular tweaks added over base Android.

Right now I let GMail aggregate most of my email accounts but isolate some in the Mail app, feed Twitter through Go SMS along with texts and Talk does it's own thing. Makes it easy to prioritise dealing with everything and hard to lose track of what I'm responding to. The flood with them all aggregated was overwhelming. That soaks up more space on my homescreen but Android gives me 20 slots per homescreen so there's less demand to combine them than with WP7s lower tile limit.

RIM: We topped December smartphone sales chart

Paul Shirley

Blackberry is the phone of choice when you don't have a choice but your boss does.

Blackberry. The rioters friend.

T-Mobile hails first 'truly unlimited' smartphone tariff

Paul Shirley

obligatory giffgaff pimpage

1st? giffgaff dropped their umlimited everything £35 tariff more than a year ago, after crooks realised they could resell minutes and make a tidy profit. Hopefully T mobile will be proactive enough to avoid that problem or this product is on shaky ground.

That said, the carrier is much better able to handle the costs of that scam than an MVNO paying pro rata for the usage and if restricted to contract more able to find the culprits.

Paul Shirley

Yet I get flat rate internet data and have done for longer than I remember, at least back to the 14400 dialup modem era! bandwidth is the ultimate perishable product, gone instantly whether used or not with low incremental cost. That makes unmetered a viable choice unlike the physical products you list.

Whether the explicitly throttle or just let contention limit use automatically remains to be seen.

Dumb salesmen are hurting us – Nokia CEO

Paul Shirley

It was going so well but you just couldn't resist knocking iOS. Apart from antennagate I dont remember much complaint about iPhone as a voice phone and a great deal of envy over visual voicemail on it.

Credibility pissed away in iust a few words.

Paul Shirley

Doesn't fully match my conversations with friends,family & acquaintances. I don't sit and have bizarre and improbable group discussions about phones though ;)

What I see is a bunch of non-smartphone users where perhaps 1 in 5 could tell me what brand their phone was without looking. I don't personally know anyone that chose their dumb or featurephone based on hardware brand this century, they bought the cheapest offer on the day or for the features they wanted. Or in many cases didn't buy at all, just took what they were given. To the extent brand mattered it's about which unreliable ones to avoid.

The iPhone users I wont comment on, the BB user has no choice (and hate's it).

Of the Android users, some seem to have strong brand loyalty to Samsung or HTC - but its clear from conversation their actual choice was a HTC Android or a Samsung Android or a Sony Ericsson Xperia Android (I jest not). My brother just asked which cheap Android phone to buy, completely brand agnostic.

This is what Elop got very wrong, smartphone buyers seem to have brand loyalty to both the hardware AND the OS running on it. Everyone but Nokia covered that by offering multiple OS choices.

Paul Shirley

variation is designed out of WP7

...but WP7s deliberate lack of fragmentation means this simply cant happen! (Yes, channelling one of the favourite strawman arguments against Android ;)

Seriously, how do you build cheap WP7 devices if the minimum allowed spec BOM forces mid-range pricing? Even worse, how do you create a premium version if all you can change is the camera, screen size (but not resolution) and throw in a little more Flash and MHz.. (Mhz the fan's persistently claim aren't needed because it's already 'buttery smooth' ;)

I understand the value in having a consistent platform but WP7 takes it too far. AFAIK there's more variation across the iPhone range than the entire WP7 market!

Paul Shirley

someday maybe they'll tell me why I might want WP7

Elop is right to blame Nokia for not giving any leadership on promotion but totally wrong to put any blame on the floor shop staff.

Since the launch one thing has stood out: the entire PR hierarchy have been very good at telling me why I shouldn't buy 'another OS' and very bad at telling me why I should buy WP7. From lowly astroturfer ground troops to free Lumia wielding journos&developers and even Microsoft+Nokia execs, the story has been consistently fuzzy and WP7 content free.

But no-one stopped to consider that attacking the competition doesn't automagically drive customers to your product, with a major concentration on knocking Android, the message comes across as 'buy *anything* but Android or Apple' not 'buy WP7'. Where anything could as easily be BB or featurephone as WP7.

Given the state of US politics maybe that negative PR will work there, it doesn't go down well in Europe and the sales reflect that. Doesn't help that the lower down drones persistently describe things I value in Android as faults, they can't even hilight the real problems properly.

Untangling the question of antimatter mass

Paul Shirley

The enormous difference in field strength means the errors in measuring the electric field would drown out the gravitational measurement. It's not a practical experiment. They're making electrically neutral atoms to remove the need for EM fields.

Billions of net-ready boxes in homes by 2016

Paul Shirley

Quite a lot of people already have unlimited broadband but it's only half the solution. IP TV is usually a distinctly lo-fi experience compared to even the poorest of broadcast channels, overcompressed and/or low res, it's sometimes enough to make the eyes bleed.

Until broadcasters choose to supply higher quality feeds and afford the associated bandwidth to allow it IPTV will be a 2nd rate experience. Even the supposed benefits of on-demand viewing aren't enough compensation for the compulsory advertising so many providers make unskippable.

In a world full of PVRs it's usually a better experience recording off air than watching over the Internet so it's hard to believe broadcast will die.

Small pile of cash, dying platform: 2011 is bad news for Nokia

Paul Shirley

combined with the Facebook results

We don't know if they can't make them fast enough or if the channel is full and not buying, which has a major effect on guesstimates... though maybe it's both and shipments are falling of a cliff right now!

Anyway... the most optimistic projection is Nokia have 1m of that 1.3m Facebook count and Nokia have jumped straight to 1st place against HTC&Samsung. In reality a guesstimate that half the handsets are still in a warehouse and only half the Lumia users were counted @FB would still look good for a 3month vs >12month share, with Nokia still grabbing the biggest share of the small WP7 pie monthly sales. Maybe the Nokia brand is actually still working for them?

I actually think a lot more than 50% are still in the warehouse, that most Nokia fans have either bought one already or never will, inflating the 1st quarter sell through. I suspect Nokia are at rough parity with the others, just keeping up with handsets the others don't seem to promote or even want to sell.

The USA is going to be so much worse, with no brand recognition and a history of failure. Trying to break America is both a sign of desperation and a clear indicator of who's really in charge - Microsoft can't be seen failing in their home market and will send Nokia to their death trying to break in.

Paul Shirley

"HTC are dumping Windows"

While was an easily predicted outcome if Microsoft really did give Nokia an insider advantage, I still suspect it rather depends on the terms of their patent licence with Microsoft. It wouldn't be the 1st time Microsoft made an offer that couldn't be refused (the PC 'tax' for example) and they're happy to do the damage today and argue the legalities years later in court.

New Euro IP law promises artists torpedoes to sink pirates

Paul Shirley

collective management of rights

Translation: too many creatives have escaped their middlemen and gone direct to customers, how can we yank them back into slavery? How about an offer they literally can't refuse?

Cynical? Been ripped off by too many publishers.

O2 leaks 3G users' mobile numbers to every website visited

Paul Shirley

The good news is: if you start getting premium SMS (as happened to some users recently) you have a big stick to hit O2 with. Hiding behind 'you must of have signed up to it, talk to PhonePayPlus' is not a viable escape clause for them any longer.

It's about time the networks were forced to hand control of reverse charges to customers and provide compulsory free barring support, the current system is an invitation to abuse. On O2 I can bar premium shortcodes but only combined with barring international calls, they really don't want to do it and will do what it takes to discourage users.

Paul Shirley

looks like the crooks spotted this last year

That would explain the bunch of text spam that started over xmas, the 1st time I used 3G data for quite some time and the crap started a few days in. Really must visit less dodgy sites I suppose ;)

There were a lot of premium text spam scams being reported on giffgaff late last year. I'm ready to believe this is actively being used by sms spammers.

Reding's 'right to be forgotten' bill polarises Euro biz world

Paul Shirley

...and a large number of clueless pillocks giving away their own privacy for any reason, voluntary or not, should not affect MY rights or make this 'not worthwhile'. Getting away with this for so long does not make it right.

Facebook sheds light on Nokia's Lumia sales

Paul Shirley

Sony Ericsson another Faceplant infestation

Something like 10 or 12 APKs to remove to clean the FB infection on 2011 Xperia's. The good thing is you root and just delete them and the only thing that breaks is Facebook, I suspect it's a lot more complex to rid WP7 of it even rooted.

...and I'll have to do it again when ICS ships :( No doubt SE will find a few apps that don't yet have FB integration and up the APK count some more.

Maybe I'll get round to nuking SE "Timeline" as well, the feature that finally convinced me jumbling all your 'social network' feeds into 1 place is an incredibly bad idea. That's another dozen pointless APKs festering away in /system. Oh dear, is that one of the supposed selling points of WP7?

Paul Shirley

"what is to stop Google from just sitting on the asses?"

Nothing. But the beauty of OSS is they can't stop someone else doing it anyway. With Amazon already forking Android and others capable of the same, Google would be committing suicide if they tried being that lazy. They don't have enough closed source content in Android to protect themselves.

Google+ lets in nicknames, slams door on plebs' pseudonyms

Paul Shirley

does anyone care that G+ don't want into the mass media end?

If you're already making up an identity to share with people you don't know it hardly matters which privacy raping service you feed lies to. If Google don't want that trade that's Googles problem, why does anyone care?

TBH it seems like a bloody good idea to me to separate that public persona from your real identity by running them on completely different services. Talk to friends and family on G+, the world on Faceplant and lie,lie,lie everywhere. If that makes it harder for them to link all your information, that's great.

I'll start worrying when Google inevitably work that out and start pandering to these demands, they won't do it for *your* benefit. Right now the temptations not really there with G+, the 'can't turn it down' adjunct to gmail.

Watchdog bites Nokia over Lumia 800 TV 'flash ads'

Paul Shirley
Trollface

chasing the dregs of the market, in all meanings of 'dregs'

I'm inclined to believe Nokia/Microsoft are actually targeting people too stupid to notice it was sponsorship... after all it's C5, a channel that needs a big channel dog to remind its comatose viewers which channel they're watching - as if the endless dross+CSI combo wasn't enough.

This late in the smartphone migration almost everyone that wants a smartphone has one and Microsofts continuing failure to advertise the WP7 features won't make many switch. The deliberate holdouts aren't volunteering. Seems believable they're targeting the leftovers too lazy to think or too stupid to understand the alternatives... which falls in nicely with showing a bright plasticky handset instead of trying to explain its USP!

Networks nag Nokia to lower Lumia levy

Paul Shirley

2.2 vs 2.3

"Although 2.3 is better than 2.2, it didn't seem worth the effort for an incremental change."

Depending on how they configured 2.2 on the Wildfire it may be a much bigger step up than you believe. Quite a few 2.2 releases had JIT disabled by default, AFAIK all 2.3.x releases default it enabled. Makes things a bit smoother. Concurrent garbage collection should make a very noticeable difference on low spec devices as well.

I think that's when they started turning on GPU acceleration as well but again the Wildfire's low spec does you no favours.

2.3 doesn't look like a big improvement but it does run a lot smoother. Lag in 2.3.4+ is usually a 1off thing, soon as the JIT kicks in it vanishes on my Play.

Intel chieftain outlines broad tablet, smartphone blitz

Paul Shirley

SOCs of this performance aren't Intels strength

I'm feeling a whole lot of 'what's he smoking'.

Combining the baseband and application processor is hardly a radical new idea, so playing catchup there.

Intel still haven't worked out how to build a really low power CPU, at least compared to their competition. So playing catchup from well behind there.

Intels history of building GPUs is embarassing and I think they probably underestimate how important getting that right is. We're well past the days when it had to decode 720p video just fast enough and into PS2 era rendering performance. Intel might manage the raw performance, what they've never managed is low power consumption or drivers and hardware that actually work.

Maybe they'll integrate someone else's GPU, I expect them to try to grab more of the licence revenue by using their own half assed designs though. They seem to have a real problem licensing 3rd party cores and splitting the profits with anyone else recently so they'll probably balls that up.

Oh well, I see some nice cheap devices in the near future, while they try to buy their way into the market and again when the unwanted stuff gets remaindered. Just don't expect to be playing games on them ;)

Windows Phone to overtake iOS in 2015

Paul Shirley

Haven't you heard? Microsoft just pulled a 'Nokia' on WebOS, putting their own man in to sabotage the company. WebOS is more likely to be a burnt platform before 2015 than revived.