Posts by Kevin7

Freecom Mobile Drive Sq 500GB external HDD

I'm sure you can get a 500GB external hard drive for much less money with a smaller physical footprint. It looks huge by today's standards, If you're buying hard drives based on their aesthetics I think you've lost your way a bit...

UK.gov: We really are going to start buying open-source from SMEs

Government in magic bullet initiative. Designed to fail I'd say.

Google goggles with Terminator HUD 'coming soon'

To make these cheap enough for gadget hoarders to buy they'll be monumentally shit. Only the military has the budget to make these feasible.

Colorfly Pocket Hi-Fi C4

It looks like an MP3 player a 15 year old would make in woodwork lessons. Epic fail.

Steerable bullet aims for mass army deployment

So it's a miniature guided missile then?

Netflix vs Lovefilm

Goodbye Netflix

Had my Netflix account for about three days. Looked worse than the bargain bin at HMV. What a disaster. If I want to watch ancient films or TV series I'll use Freeview.

Ofcom's Local TV dream: No smut, an hour of news, endless ads

Has anyone actually seen any genuine demand for this crap?

Microsoft gives up on proprietary 2D barcode, accepts NFC

How much money does Microsoft waste on proprietary tech that never catches on? And we all know who pays...

Yahoo! apps! showcase! makes! social! media! moves!

Let me help Yahoo! Portals! Are! Dead!

RIM backdoor access for Indian probers

War Games

Jim Sting: Mister Potato Head! Mister Potato Head! Back doors are not secrets!

Dixons stores knock £150 off RIM PlayBook

At this price it sounds like you're buying something on death row. The spectre of WebOS should be a warning to potential customers...

App Store groupthink is bad news for small devs

I think this is also hints at how few apps are actually needed. I think once people get their first dozen essential apps the novelty kind of wears off. Also on a store with 400,000 apps the number of redundant, duplicated and plain awful must be shockingly high.

iPhone 4S: Our *hit list

You would have thought that iCloud would provide space at least equivalent to that in the device, from 16 to 64GB. As it is, everyone gets 5GB by default, though you can buy more. The problem is, like BlackBerry users have found, is they';re possibly creating a single point of failure. It's probably a reasonable guess that iCloud will become ever more important to the device which could become a huge problem if iCloud fails.

I can see Apple's point: administrating disk space (or worse still, a file system) on a mobile device is a very backwards step but iCloud sounds like it's going to fall between the middle. My own iPhone 4 has used nearly 1Gb on iCloud yet I have no idea what its storing. Also, getting at data stored by iCloud seems very difficult without an iOS device - this could be a real headache for things like email, contacts, calendars, etc.

Apple iPhone 4S

£500 upgrade for a slightly better camera and voice activation that almost no one will use? May be if you're contract has expired this might possibly make sense, other wise I can't see the value.

iPlayer founder launches next big TV thing-Zeebox

Who is funding this kind of rubbish? I already an automatic system that recommends what I want to watch - it's called a brain. I like history and I like documentaries - it's hardly much of a stretch knowing which channels to keep an eye on.

Android Marketplace blocked by Great Firewall of China

It's kind of irony considering most Android devices are made in China...

Apple outs iPhone micro USB adaptor

In fairness to Apple the dock connector is ten years old and in 100s of millions of devices. Add to this the 100s of millions of accessories for said devices and you can see just switching to Micro USB is a non-starter. Nokia have been migrating for some time, phones like the N8 have both Micro-USB and Nokia Mini charging capability. Given that many Apple devices only come with a cable and no power adaptor they've actually been cutting down on supplying duplicate power adaptors for years.

Amazon's cloudy vid-tablet breaks cover: Not an iClone

Where's the demand?

Am I the only one who thinks that Android-powered tablets are a dead-end? Short of giving them away no one wants them.

Renault Scenic Bose Edition 1.6 130dCi

Is this what Scenic owners want?

Most people with Scenics buy them because they've got kids, like me. Their workhorses for families and generally have few complaints. For the life of me I can't see where a £1500 sound system really figures in this equation. If you're vain enough for this kind of thing you probably wouldn't want a Scenic. When it's full of kids, pushchairs and shopping you really don't care about the sound system. We only use the CD player in ours to play nursery rhymes for our daughter and she won't really care about the sound given that she's two. It's a big premium on a practical family car - not sure what market this is catering for.

Nokia accidentally unveils OS it should have had in 2009

Looking good

I might even dust off my Nokia N8 and upgrade it when its out. At the minute I'm still using my E72 as the N8 is almost unusable in its current form.

RIM BlackBerry Bold 9900

how much?

Over 500 quid for an averagely specified qwerty phone? I think I'll be sticking with my Nokia E72 for some time yet has much the same features, if not as slick but much cheaper. The Bold's seem to be endlessly tweaked with minor upgrades - when you can get a Curve on PAYG for about £140 I'm struggling to see who'll actually be buying this.

Magellan Explorist 710 hiking GPS

Seems quite dear

I bought a Satmap Active 10 for much less money than this - admittedly this looks a bit slicker but I think the functionality if largely the same. The cost of the maps is a major problem - they seem much more expensive than the equivalent OS paper maps. I certainly would never, ever rely on a phone's GPS in the outdoors. For casual navigation they're fine but if I was battling through mist in the Pennines I know what I'd rather have.

Apple, Walmart, and you: Making money in mobile

Good stuff

Can't disagree with the analysis. I think long term the apps market will decline - as the man with the Nintendo describes, there is no money in Apps. If $25 lasts a kid 7 months there is no market in developing and selling these apps. Unless you do huge numbers, selling your Apps/games at 99 cents a pop won't keep you in business. I'd go even further and say many apps are simply novelty items that won't create repeat business. Because you're forced to sell so cheap and hand over so much to Apple most people will end up in a race to the bottom. I'd be intrigued to see some metrics on the usage people make of third party apps - I reckon after the basic phone/SMS and PIM functions usage probably declines extremely sharply.

Yahoo! Mail! users! complain! of! server! flatline!

Why are you using Yahoo! Mail?

That is all.

Dell Streak 7 Android tablet

Android tablet fail

As the unfortunate owner of a Samsung Galaxy Tab, this seems like more of the same. They keep making them oversized phones rather than true tablet computers. They look awful and work even less well. I'm sure I was drunk when I bought the damn thing. They're great adverts for the iPad.

Copyright Kitemark plan flutters aloft

Been done before

Does anyone remember Channel 4's "Red Triangle" from years ago? This used to warn you of adult content - or at least that was the idea. Instead it became an onan magnet - it was a byword for one handed telly watching. Funnily enough the Red Triangle didn't last very long...

Ten... Portable USB 3.0 HDDs

Benchmarks

Surely you can't benchmark drives of different capacities in a comparative test? It surely goes without saying a 250GB drive is going to be faster than a 1TB?

Dell's Kace control freak ARMed for SMBs

No chance!

When I worked for a small company managing about 100 PCs and 7 or 8 servers you'd have a snowball's chance in hell of buying a "asset management appliance". For one thing there was little enough money for PCs and servers there just wasn't the budget for it. Second it's an overhead for a small network that's very hard to justify. SMEs are anything but bottomless bits of money.

Yahoo! reads! your! emails!

Ask yourself..

Why are you still using Yahoo Mail? It is the most miserable mail experience I've ever used, worse even that Hotmail.

Nokia X7 Symbian Anna smartphone

Update for the N8?

Even though the N8 is older it still has a better spec in my opinion yet doesn't seem to be being updated as well. The GUI on the N8 is very sluggish and desperately needs an update. Given the similarities between the X7 and N8 it strikes me as that Nokia still don't appreciate the problems associated in having too many models covering much the same ground.

Amazon Kindle Lighted Leather Cover

Fifty quid?!

Is Amazon the home of comedy these days?

How bin Laden thwarted US electronic surveillance

Non story?

If you were one of the world's most hunted men, you'd hardly be sending messages from your own PC would you? It used to be called a "dead letterbox" and has existed for as long as espionage has.

Plague of US preachers falsely claim to be Navy SEALs

Title needed

Don't they reckon that if that all the blokes who claimed they've served in the SAS stood on each other's shoulders, the man on top could piss on the moon?

Mentally ill file-sharer had 'low self-esteem'

Clearly had a real problem

Had downloaded "24,000 karaoke songs" - I'd say she had some kind of problem as well.

Google unveils Android 'Honeycomb' update for fondleslabs

No update for Galaxy Tab?

It may just be a rumour but I've heard won't be coming to Samsung's Galaxy Tab (7") - if this is true it may be the first and last Android tablet I'll be buying. In less than 6 months you get no further OS upgrades? No thanks. I'm not shelling out another 400 quid.

Motorola Xoom

Date very quickly

Having bought a 7" Samsung Galaxy Tab I have to conclude based on that example, they date terribly - my Tab looks and feels like an antique compared to this and I've only had it about 3 months. This market will eat itself at this rate, no one is going to pony up nearly 500 quid on an item that feels ancient within 6 months. I'll be very reluctant to buy another one, no one can afford a refresh rate this quick.

Apple floats iCloud for 'email, music, and beyond'

Hope it's better than MobileMe

As a former MobileMe customer I hope it's better than their previous offering. I found MobileMe to be rather sparse and many of its features available elsewhere for less or indeed nothing. When you're competing with someone offering services for nothing you have to be pretty outstanding to get people to pay. I found MobileMe anything but outstanding so I think iCloud will have to be really special to get me to pay again.

Microsoft inks Nokia deal with phones set to fly in 2012

Demand?

Where is the demand for Windows powered, Nokia phones? My Spider-sense isn't tingling for this one...

Solution found for climate change: Nuclear war

Not a good example

The Soviet "Tsar Bomba" is not a good example of nuclear effects. It was an airburst weapon dropped over Novaya Zemlya, a barren archipelago. It exploded at approx. 2.5 miles in altitude and set no major fires. Most of its effects were observed as blast rather than heat. Climate change effects come as the result of particulates becoming airborne which this weapon did not cause in significant numbers. Nuclear weapon effects of the most hazardous sort are by far the dirtiest, groundburst explosions of high density targets like cities pulverise and vaporise millions of tonnes of concrete, steel and earth whilst millions of tonnes of soot and ash through the burning of highly inflammable and and combustible materials are ejected into the atmosphere. "Tsar Bomba" can be almost completely ignored as an example of weapon effects on the climate. Volcanos are probably a better guide in some respects.

Ozone depletion?

They seem to have forgot that after a large nuclear exchange resulting in either nuclear autumn (what seems to be suggested here) or winter is that after the soot particles eventually fall back to earth or via wash out (thereby spreading large amounts of fall out all over the globe - groundburst explosions being the only type that could generate this much soot) is that the resulting ozone depletion would be a lethal after effect. We would be effected by much larger amounts of ultraviolet causing cancers, cataracts and leukaemia in humans and causing widespread crop failure in plants and destruction of phytoplankton in the sea. Naturally such effects at the base of the food chain will be pretty catastrophic leading to plant and species collapse or even extinction. The science behind the effects of multiple nuclear explosions is pretty robust - the literature is quite extensive on this subject.

Aussie advertisers call for more bloat in web ads

When will they understand?

People just don't want their ads at any size. You aren't doing us a favour - merely congesting the bandwidth users pay for. One day I reckon there'll be an ISP radical enough to block them at the network level.

Embrace your outsourced future

Bollocks

What a load of crap - it sounds like a manifesto for a race to the bottom.

Virgin Media to warn malware-infected customers

Long overdue

This should have been done years ago and all major ISPs should do the same. I mean, you wouldn't have a comprimised PC on your network, would you?

George Lucas names Star Wars Blu-ray release date

Sounds good :-)

Given the almost peerless technical quality of Lucas's releases the long wait is hardly surprising. Converting the original saga to HD will probably be quite an epic job in itself and no doubt Lucas will tinker with them yet again. Given the greater portion of the original saga is more than 30 years old whether they stand up to HD scrutiny is another question. The chances are most fans will be buying them for the extra stuff rather than films which by this stage are probably a bit over familiar.

Ballmer's 'lost generation' note finds resonance

Choose your own PC?

I don't think I've ever heard of companies where you can choose between a PC or a Mac - may be a few very lucky or senior people can, but everyone else will get what ever is standard.

Report questions millions spent on NHS.crap

Hard just an NHS problem

How much money is wasted on terrible web sites across the whole economy?

AOL sales drop by a quarter, reports billion dollar loss

Eh?

"...getting healthier every day" what kind of alternate universe do you live in to come out with this kind of rubbish?

Leicester City councillors eye up iPad to save £90k a year

How big a saving?

If they think they can save 90 grand a year on printing, how much are they printing? I mean that's a "saving" which presumably includes the cost of the iPads as well as a guesstimate figure on how much they'll still print. Still all sounds like horseshit to me. I don't there can be anything more galling than buying lifestyle gadgets with public money whilst laying off staff and cutting services. How about just educating these idiots to stop clicking "print" as often?

Android surges past iPhone in smartphone sales

BlackBerry?

@ceebee: What other phone have you ever had, where you could rely on updates?

That would be BlackBerry: http://na.blackberry.com/eng/support/downloads/download_sites.jsp

Nokia latest to feel wrath of Jobs

Oh dear...

Although Nokia's Symbian based phones do come in for their fair share of criticism, I've never read complaints about signal loss. Every Nokia phone I've ever owned all say in their manuals to be aware that the antenna (as well as GPS and Bluetooth) can be adversely affected by incorrect handling. Even as a true Apple fan, I think this has turned into a PR disaster and typifies their denial of problems-to-problems approach.