Posts by Edmund Green

Register SPB hacks mull chopping off feet

SI all the way

If you're going to bite the bullet and go with SI units then you should go all the way and not have any exceptions - the site title says "Sci/Tech News" so hopefully most of us reading it are familier enough with units to be able to convert to something else in those more stubborn scenarios that have been mentioned and maybe even encourage others to use the SI units in these cases.

re: altitude - I'm sure I've heard a pilot announce the altitude in km before now - about 10km seems typical? and OS maps switched their contour lines to metric intervals sometimes around the 1970s I think.

Speed is a tricky one - should you use km per hour or metres per second ....

Reg Hardware Reader Awards 2010

+1 Non-upgradable android, and appalling battery life mobiles

1) as Anonymous Coward above already listed - models such as Samsung galaxy i7500 have lots of bugs but are (without going down the hardcore and very unofficial route) stuck on their original Android 1.5 : they're also unable to update any of the buggy apps because the updated apps usually require newer versions of the OS.

2) In the last few years the battery life of mobile phones has suffered terribly at the cost of making phones have more features and be smaller / lighter : this has now got to the point that in some cases (such as the i7500) the phone will sometimes last less than 1 working day on a single charge (even without making any phone calls! it seems to be the background app data syncing that sucks the life out of it). And don't even think about enabling GPS for more than a few minutes.

For comparison in a related tech area, a Garmin edge 705 GPS claims (and in my experience does achieve) around 15 hours battery life with GPS enabled in a form factor comparable to a 2003-ish era mobile phone - so we're not asking for the impossible here.

Reg Hardware Reader Awards 2010

Dropbox and KeePass

Dropbox : makes syncing small files across multiple computers and mobile phones trivial - it is a truely cross-platform app (and amazingly the online storage is free!).

KeePass : a cross-platform (and open source) password manager. In lieu of there being a globally recognized SSO system out there, this is the next best thing to eliminate the risk of either forgetting passwords or re-using the same (or trivial varients) of username/password combinations across different systems / web-sites.

Combining Dropbox and KeePass together (at the significant risk of putting all ones eggs in the same basket regarding security) - you get a shared password database available on PC, Android and more

Samsung Galaxy S

Samsung support / upgrades

If Samsung's ongoing 'support' for this phone is anything like that for the i7500 Galaxy (one unfortunate gullible owner writing....) then steer well clear of this.

For the i7500 they've not released any major updates or bug fixes, so the phone is stuck with the version of Android (1.5 in the i7500's case) that it shipped with and as a side-effect in most cases the versions of the applications that it came with because Google also don't seem to be doing many bug fixes for software on previous versions of the OS.

A hardware show-stopper for the i7500 is the appalling standy-time, often less than 24 hours! - can the reviewer test what actual standby time you get out of this Galaxy S once it has been hooked up to your google acount and one imap account with the default sync-settings for mail and calendar etc.

Example software issues are numerous - e.g. android issue 1128 "Email app should allow moving messages between folders" has been open for close to 2 years. In conjunction with the delete-mail button being near to the corner of the screen and having no 'confirm/cancel' confirmation - this makes the imap client unusable : once you've accidently deleted an important email with no confirmation or 'undo' you'll never want to even open the application again.

The most bizarre example of their incompentance was shipping the i7500 with a CD in the box containing Samsung's "New PC studio" software that didn't support the phone : At least it sounds like Samsung have done better with this one.

Samsung's Galaxy stuck in history

much worse than other android-phones

I am one of those who has made the mistake of selecting the galaxy - having assumed that all phones running the OS were going to be similarly upgradable and hopefully even end-user upgradable with stock builds from google.

With HTC it seems that community enthusiasts have been able to create their own custom OS builds and install them on the phone, but this option is not trivially available for the Galaxy due to their lack of drivers - so the android SDK is unable to communicate with the Galaxy hardware (there are some hacks mentioned on internet forums regarding writing your own .inf file, but I haven't made it work yet)

Samsung's reputation has now been destroyed in my eyes (after I thought so highly of them based on the NC10) - they have sold a buggy 'beta' release of a phone, but without the expected ongoing updates (or bugfixes) that would have make such a beta-release acceptable.

An example of the un-finished state of the release is that the software supplied on the CD in the box with the Galaxy does not support the Galaxy. I would find this amusing if I hadn't fallen for it myself.

PC tune-up software: does it really work?

Error bars

First of all well done for at least mentioning error margins on the measurements on page 2 of the article - that alone easily puts this article in the top 1% for quality of online reviews!

However - could you please include error bars on all your graphs and quote uncertainties when writing numbers, otherwise they are meaningless for comparative purposes. This is especially noticable where you have shifted the origin of the bar chart such as for "L4D (fps)" on page 3.