Posts by ScissorHands 334 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Feb 2010
I'm sorry - no different volume for ringer and apps? On an OS that has been around for four years? That's falling on the first hurdle out of the gate and I would immediately return it to the shop being "not fit for purpose". Nokia made phone first, computer second. My N9 is a wonderful phone. It just so happens to also have a very nice UI as well.
Sooo...
Double-tap to wake? Nokia N9.
OLED standby screen that shows time, date, and notifications (and next appointments, battery level, and more?) N9.
And intelligent enough that it pops up when you take it out of the pocket using the proximity sensor? N9 again.
A "newsfeed" view concentrating Facebook, weather, Twitter, the first two lines of any messages and all RSS feeds? The N9 once more.
You know, this phone I've been carrying around for two and a half years? Look, Ma, an interface with ZERO buttons.
Since they've dropped Presto, all they have left is a Chrome-clone with half the features (and 1/10th of classic Opera's features at that), their embedded sales (for Nintendo consoles, Smart TVs, etc) have all but dried up because they also depended on Presto, and now Google is about to kill Opera Mini.
The same ideas behind the N9 (which I own and love) but without the charm of the N9's interface, and it only took two years! Still no other "Other Halfs" available, especially the keyboard-half - the amount of developers that deliberately ignored the N9 in favour of their N900 because of the lack of keyboard was beyond the pale. Klunky Android has won, Windows is half-baked, BlackBerry is dead and Apple has lost the plot, it sucks to be discriminating in this mobile market.
The list of reasons given by Canonical was a lot bigger until it was systematically taken apart by Wayland developers that took it badly to Canonical spreading FUD about stuff where Wayland's progress has been "slow and steady" (especially where it has to wait for X to come to Wayland), while the supporting libraries they had built for having Wayland work on Android graphic drivers were merged into Mir for Ubuntu Phone without a word of attribution or acknowledgement, which was BAD FORM.
Process shrinking allows more cells on the same die area, increasing productivity. It also means £/GB drops following Moore's Hunch (TM) and approaches spinned-rust levels.
Unfortunately Flash is hitting a wall where it can't be shrunk any further...
Die stacking only increases the density (how much storage you can cram into a 2.5" SSD), while doing almost nothing about the £/GB or power consumption.
The new User-Agent does not have the string "Opera" anywhere, it's almost a straight copy of the Chromium UA with "OPR" inserted somewhere. This means that Opera's "marketshare" will drop like a stone because most sites identify Opera 15 as Chrome.
Also,many sites are showing their mobile version to Opera 15 Desktop.
I have a Nokia N9 at my side, and I'm writing this comment on Opera/Presto.
Nokia has been microshafted and Opera has been Chromified while the tech journals applauded - just like Lewis Page and its "Why bother with our own weapons, the USA makes them better and cheaper" - well, then, now you see the strings that come attached to the USA's "generosity".
Very bad. They've dropped everything that made Opera different from any-other-browser in the interest of the New Shiny.
I hope this state of malnutrition is solved by waiting a couple of months, whereby:
a) The recently-evicted Opera Mail (which is still on Presto) gets its own port to Blink and is reintegrated in the browser
b) Opera Link gets reimplemented
c) Mouse-button rocker shortcuts come back
d) Panels come back (we all use wide screens now, Panels are perfect)
e) Site-specific preferences
f) Site-specific ad-blocking
g) Customizable Speed Dial
h) Customizable Discover, or a "My Feeds" alternative alongside Discover
i) Proper page zoom comes back
j) Status bar comes back
k) Customizable search shortcuts or dropdown
l) Dragonfly comes back
etc., etc. If the Mobile browser hadn't come in Beta as Kate Moss and in Final as Kate Moss and two green-peas' worth of lunch, why would I be worried?
Opera is building a totally new browser, as the faithful feared. The new, streamlined version is twice the size and spends thrice the memory. And does a tenth of the previous one. But hey, it has the shiny Facebook and Gmail interfaces!
Analyse how a brain works on a logical, information-theory level (not the molecular-level boondoggle in the EU)
Build computer representations of it
Turn them to silicon
Pattern-matching, fuzzy logic predictions, emergent behaviour, etc.
Mo' silicon, mo' power
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y43qwS8fl4
How much do you pay every time you use Google Search?
Do you pay for your e-mail service? Do you have your own e-mail server?
Are you an user of Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Picasa, reddit, tumblr, etc.?
Have you bought a The Register Gold Account (can't find the article, that was hilarious)?
Etc.
Those messages usually had nothing to do with Presto's capabilities, but with developers not bothering. There was even an extension for Opera that stripped code that excluded Opera from certain "WebKit-showoff" pages and suddenly the sites started working perfectly on Opera.
Google showing that message on blogger.com was one of the most egregious shenanigans.
" I'm surprised how rapidly the BB10 gestures become so natural, you curse their absence on other devices. (I particularly like the task-switching, which is best on the market)."
Stone the crows, Andy Orlowsky likes something Nokia did first. And yet Andy had pilloried the N9 (or anything Nokia did after mishandling Hildon - prejudice much?).
It's a good thing that BlackBerry recognizes good ideas when it sees them dropped by the side of the road.
The Hardware Acceleration is broken, the Out-of-process plugins are MIA, they're making a WebKit browser to appease Apple, and the latest 12.13 was released after the testers complained of never-ending crashes on the release-candidate. Cue never-ending crashes while trying to update extensions and an official recommendation to reinstall 12.12.
I don't think Opera will ever support WebRTC.
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