Posts by gruffrey

Blighty's revolutionary Cold War teashop computer - and Nigella Lawson

Re: The Case For The First Business Computer

Nick Pelling = Orlando M Pilchard. Firetrack / Frak/ Zalaga ... Genius.

Nokia Lumia 900 WinPho 7 smartphone

710 owner - previously posted these problems but here I go again...

The ui problems, not sd cards or cores etc, make these a dog of a phone:

- Inbox - unread emails have a blue subject (or whatever you have chosen as the highlight colour), but open any email and the subject is then always in blue... So you cannot tell if you have read an email or not. A real problem when you use the next back buttons to move through a thread. It's inconsistent and bad design.

- For some reason the onscreen keyboard is not as accurate as an iPhone or Android phone - weird as the keys themselves are the exact same size. I have many more incorrect key preses than on my wife's iPhone.

- Only the top power button wakes the phone even though there are three front buttons. Finding the damn thing is sometimes (holding a fag or coffee) a real pain in the arse. I am left handed which doesn't help.

- Off centre tiles - just to show a small arrow... Stupid, looks ugly

- Unable to reorder app list - The Guardian under T not G ... Irritating

- Terrible spell checker and an even worse editing interface. It's impossible to correct a text without the text swooshing up and down and up and down as you try to position the cursor.

- boring live tiles ... What's the point if they impart so little info and take up so much space. 8 to view!

- telephone numbers too small in the addess book to read out if you need to give someone another persons contact number. I'm 40 and my eyesight's going so 7 point numbers under an 18pt heading 'call mobile' is rotten.

- a back button that has a mind of its own. You have cannot tell if it will take you out of the app or back on a web page, depends on if you have hit home at some point making the browser extremely frustrating.

- too easy to accidentally put on silent

- bing - bollocks. I know you can use Google but the default is double shit. And it gets it's own button... I could go on (as I already have) but for the love of god I feel like a beta tester for MS.

They are all pretty minor irritations but after 3 months of having the phone I go around telling everyone not to go near them. A 24 month contract is a long time to be with a phone that has so many bad points that even more irritatingly could be fixed, but with 8 coming so soon you know will not. Some bits are great, but not enough of them. As 'just a phone' they are ok, but compared to the competition they're 2 years behind and I really can't see them catching up before Nokia goes tits up.

UK retailers start taking Nokia Lumia 900 orders

Poor OS design will hold it back

I got given a 710 free and as I'm not tied into a contract I think I have an unbiased view - the interface is sadly crap (irrespective of missing features such as sending movies by SMS).

The screen doesn't fit the content in peculiar places - a good example is the start page - the 7th and 8th tiles are cut off at the bottom even though there is a big black space at the top of the screen. This means any text/image displayed in the live tile just falls off making it unreadable and look incredibly ugly.

Another bad design - email. Unread items in the main list are indicated by the subject in the highlight colour. But open any email and the subject is then in the highlight colour irrespective of the mail being read or unread. This means if you go through emails with next/back you can't tell which are unread. You have to come out and filter unread emails and then read them seperately away from the main flow.

Want to read to someone a number from your contacts? The text size is so small that in anything other than a darkened room I have to press the phone against my face to read the number aloud. Also the live area to call the number is not just the numbers - its the whole empty area to their right up to the edge of the screen. The number of times I've called people when wanting to just scroll up or down is insane.

As is three buttons on the front but none of them wake the phone - I have to fiddle around for the tiny on off button on the top even when it hasn't gone to full lock.

Small problems (and only a few examples of many off the top of my head) but add them all up and the frustrations are bigger than in the more mature Android or iOS. They are also easily fixed - but will they? I fear they will be retained as the interface feels like it was designed by graphics rather than UI designers. It needs possibly two more iterations before they will be ironed out so my advice - wait until version 8 - Tango looks like it won't fix most major issues and give the missing pieces.

Has Google wasted $12bn on a dud patent poker-chip?

Not Apple they were going to sue - it was other Android manufacturers

As a previous poster pointed out, the reason they bought Moto was to stop them crippling other Android manufacturers. Patents are bargaining chips, Apple has lots so Moto couldn't make money from them - Apple would counterclaim until the result is a small (like Nokia) win for either with no major consequences.

Other Android manufacturers don't have a bank of chips to bargain with like MS and Apple and were being eyed by Moto as a source of income. This had the potential of derailing Google's hope for the future growth of the platform. Again, fosspatents, written over the weekend just before the news:

http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/motorola-doesnt-have-license-to-kill.html

Nokia to help WinPho outsell iOS in four years

Profitable? Why do The Reg keep claiming that Samsung, HTC etc aren't making any money? #

There Is data out there that shows this to be the case. Not sure of the validity of the data but my guess is it's taken from some reference which is based on an element of actual facts that have been collated, and not just (educated) guesswork. Link below:

http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/21/can-android-change-the-profit-share-of-phone-vendors/

The important thing is comparing like with like - handset divisions with handset divisions. Just because Samsung make parts for other manufacturers doesn't mean that their handset division is necessarily hugely profitable. In fact making parts is probably as low margin as you can get - especially considering the investment in infrastructure and plant required to 'quadruple output' each year.

That's essentially the benefit that Apple have - they don't build factories and global supply chains, they concentrate on software, design and retail which have less capital costs. They let others make this investment while they rack up sales of (very) expensive phones. Surely this is the model we should be following in the UK (like ARM).

Strange too to use HTC's market cap as a way of showing how much money they make compared (not directly) but in the last paragraph, by association, with Apple. Have you see AAPL share price this last year? And just briefly risen above the massively underperforming Nokia stock? Not really an indication of great performance. And why is Nokia underperforming? Massive global sales but low profitability, and until the deal with Microsoft no real roadmap back to bigger profits. No future means low shareprice.

Jobs tells iPhone users to get a grip

More complicated than a design flaw

Had a play with a random blokes new iPhone and try as hard as I might couldn't get it to lose bars. Dry hands sweaty hands fully cupped - no drop. This is more than a design flaw otherwise it would be replicable on every phone. Not being a single identifiable problem on all handsets is probably more of a nightmare for apple to sort out.

iPhone 4: Perfect for everyone, except humans

Not so simple

Just tried a blokes iphone 4 in a poor reception area with no problem. No matter how I tried could not get it to drop bars. Sweaty hands, dry hands, touching all three segments, two segments, cupping it etc... This is not a simple design flaw that effects all phones. Going to make it very hard to fix.

The myth of Britain's manufacturing decline

golden days...

"I worked here and...." "I have a mate who..." yeah right - your insights are so much more knowledgeable than the blokes who put the original figures together. Post 701196 - we may not make the bullets but BAe (British and the 2nd largest defense contractor in the world) make all the clever things to fire them.

As a percentage of GDP (in 2007), UK manufacturing was 23.4%. France (the country that 'supports' it's manufacturers) was only 20.6%. Our GDP itself was also higher. I know you will all whine that 2007 (the most recent reliable figures I could find) are before our anglo-saxon created crash. But three years ago you still wouldn't have believed it (but don't they have Citroen!?) The percentage of our economy that is manufacturing may have been shrinking over the past 40 years (mainly due to the rise of the financial sector), but as the graph shows, the value of what we do manufacture has still increased well ahead of inflation.

My Dad worked in a factory all his working life. It was shit. Given the choice he wishes he had worked on a computer colouring in like I do, or serving lattes in Starbucks to people who make money in the city. Who the f*ck do you people think you are, sat infront of your comfy computer getting misty eyed about factory life like some 21st century William Morris.

Of course we don't dig coal anymore. We don't need to. It's a shit job. With little profit. Let the Chinese kill themselves down a mine getting it out.

Yes, educate children to a higher standard, encourage opportunities for communities that have not adapted to the closure of local industry. These criticisms of policy are valid but please, don't try to make me think we want those polluting, life shortening, dull, exhausting industries back.

Only the f*cking middle classes believe the bullshit about a hard days work being any kind of pleasure for a working man. Banging in hot rivets or coding software for banks… which do you prefer? Pricks the lot of you. Give it all up and get on a plane to China and work in a ship builders there mate if you love manufacturing so much.

The recent reports of the UK company that have harnessed quantum physics for a touch screen display show the future of UK industry, much like ARM. Design the tech, license it to far east manufacturers and make more profit per device than they do. Keep innovating and stay one step ahead of the competition. Not look back to some golden heyday when men died at 55 and never saw their kids grow up like my grandad.