Posts by Dave Fox 222 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Nov 2006
Clearly you've never tried to do any *real* work with Android Office suites, because if you had you'd know that they are all incapable of anything other than fairly rudimentary document creation and editing.
Yes, they work to a fashion, but real world spreadsheets are usually more complicated than these suites can deal with.
Simples!
One word - Office.
The Surface has been touted as coming with a near-feature complete version of MS Office. This is a big selling point for many and easily worth a few quid extra.
Whilst I own Apple kit in the form of Macs, for my tablet and phone fix, I'm Android. However, I've pre-ordered the Surface based purely on the fact that it comes with a proper Office suite. I've used pretty much all of the Android Office suites, and tried the iPad equivalents too, and none of them is capable of replacing MS Office for my requirements.
Surface and Windows RT may just change all that, and I'm prepared to take a punt on it.
One can only assume that when you talk about "human" hands, you are referring to members of your particular pygmy tribe, and not the human race as a whole! :)
My hands are average size at best, and I have no trouble holding or operating the OG Note with one hand, and I don't look daft when using it as phone.
I really do wish people would stop using terms like "too big" when discussing the Note and Note II unless it is accompanied by the words "for my purposes" so some other such qualification.
I have no use for an iPhone, but that doesn't mean I think they are useless - just that they don't suit my own particular needs and requirements. And it's not because I'm an Apple hater either - the 4 Macs in my house, including the particularly lovely Retina Macbook Pro I'm typing this on, are a testament to that! :)
It isn't going to sell like an iPhone because, wait for it, it's not an iPhone!
It is, however, going to sell extremely well for what is essentially a niche smartphone at the top end of the market, which is exactly what the original Note did.
Samsung don't have a one-size-fits-all mentality, and therefore produce a range of devices to suit consumers who like a bit of choice.
Don't know if the ROM on the review model has it, but there's also split screen multitasking on later ROMs if you hold down the back button. Apparently, the first batch of UK Note II's didn't get this feature, but will get an OTA to add it.
http://www.talkandroid.com/134347-samsung-highlights-multitasking-feature-on-galaxy-note-ii-smartphone-in-new-promo-video/
That should add a few percentage points to the score! :)
"Is it unreasonable to think that if we dropped all the pay walls around scientific research that research would thrive?"
Yes, I'm afraid it is!
Whether we like it or not, we live in a risk/reward society, and that is what drives an awful lot of scientific endeavour and research.
Why would company X invest billions to develop say, a new cancer drug, if company Y could immediately pick up their work and produce their own generic version of the drug having incurred none of the development costs?
In such a world, for every company X there would be hundreds of company Y's leeching off them taking most of the revenue and driving the innovators out of business.
Patents do serve a purpose when applied to the right areas - it's just that in my opinion, for the most part, software isn't one of them.
I've nothing against inventors patenting their work, but it should only apply for genuine invention!
Take a smartphone for example - there's an awful lot of real invention in a smartphone. The capacitive touch screen, invented nearly 50 years ago, is one such example of a real invention.
"Slide to unlock" though - where's the invention in that? When I my shed door I have a bolt that I have to "slide to lock" - it's an action, not an invention. The same with "Pinch to zoom". "Bounceback" also just mirrors some real world effects.
In my opinion, these sorts of items should never have been patentable. Some may disagree and I respect that, but the figures that Apple were bandying about for licensing this "technology" was just absurd - $30-$40 dollars per smartphone or tablet? Frankly unbelievable - even if you believe these sorts of patents should exist, the licensing for them should be in the single cents per unit, or perhaps even lower than that.
The decision to validate some of these ludicrous patents by finding Samsung in breach of them *isn't* good for the consumer and it *is* a damning indictment of the patent system, particularly in the US.
How do you work that out?
Android has at least 3 real browsers in my opinion - Opera Mobile, Firefox, and all those using the stock Webkit rendering engine (so are all essentially the same). I'm not even certain that Chrome for Android doesn't use it's own "internal" version of Webkit, so it is possible that Chrome for Android is a "4th" browser.
As has been previously stated, this isn't really new at all. I've been using the TMo £10 for 50mb for a couple of years now using a prepaid SIM for most of the period as I'd already shifted to Three for unlimited "domestic" data.
The new Three £5 per day unlimited is much better though IMO - travelling for business for 3 days, I'd often consume the 50mb within a day and have to cough up another £3.
I say let EE build their LTE network at 1800MHz.
Whilst this will definitely give them a competitive advantage of their rivals, I suggest this can mostly be mitigated against by mandating that they cannot have anything other than month by month rolling contracts for services provisioned over that network.
That way when the other operators do manage to get enough spectrum to deploy their own LTE networks, customers using EE's LTE network can jump ship immediately if they so wish as they won't be tied into long term contracts.
It's perfectly apposite to quote RRPs in this context. I've got plenty of Android games free from Amazon App of the Day, but that doesn't mean I should be comparing these based on "actual cost" (which is zero). Simple fact of the matter is that Vita games are, in general, several multiples more expensive than comparable Android games.
Asda and Amazon are both selling Uncharted for Vita for a shade under £35 with an RRP for £45,, so hardly the savings you are suggesting. In general, even 360 games won't be significantly discounted until after they've been on the market for a few weeks, and by then the hardcore gamers will have already purchased them. Hardcore gamers (the Vita's target audience) won't generally wait for a game to hit a budget price point!
If you look at phone gaming, for many the price of the device is free when they've tied themselves into a 2 year contract, so the subsidy argument doesn't really work too well for the Vita. Given that most people will have a mobile phone anyway., why carry two devices when you can carry one.
At this precise moment in time, the Vita is an impressive bit of kit, butl the technology in the Vita will be out of date compared to mobile phones before this year is over, let alone the 5-10 year lifespan that Sony predicts. Yes, it has the dedicated controls, when then again so does the Xperia Play which is a line where Sony should've concentrated their mobile gaming efforts.
Not all mobile games are shallow and simplistic you know! ;)
Galaxy on Fire 2, Shadowgun, and GTA III are all extensive, in depth, mobile titles and all are priced at a *fraction* of PS Vita games. Yes, I can play Uncharted
The DS, and to a lesser extent, the PS VIta, are more likely to appeal to kids than the people who can actually afford the £40 per game that these require. The Vita will still appeal to hardcore gamers for a time, but Sony seem to think that the platform will last 5 to 10 years - given the pace of mobile development, it simply won't be competitive hardware-wise in 1 to 2 years, let alone 5 to 10, so it will lose those hardcore gamers too.
Sony actually had the right idea with the Xperia Play - an updated version of that could've owned mobile gaming, and they could've easily produced an updated version every couple of years to tie in with cellular contracts.
The age of the dedicated gaming device is over IMO. Convergence is where it is at.
So the NYT's "commissioned" an app developer to put together something incredibly trivial because it's a known fact (and presumably a design decision) that the "user data" (let's call it external SD, because it differs from /data/data, which is some what protected) is accessible to any app. This is newsworthy?
How else are apps like Photoshop, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, etc going to gain access to your photos for retouching/uploading? Yes, you could have them encrypted on external SD with an API and explicit permission set for accessing them, but then you wouldn't be able to access them when you connect your phone via USB mass storage, which would be an incredible inconvenience.
I have several different video and/or music players on my Android devices, and they can all access my stored videos/MP3s, which is what I want to be able to do. On my wife's iPad, I accidentally loaded some non-video files into the walled garden of her CinePlayerX app, which I'm now completely unable to delete because they don't appear in the file list of the app.
Sometimes we have to balance the needs of security with convenience, just as we do in real life. I'm not going to be taking naked pictures of myself, or copies of state secrets on my phone, so if they somehow end up on a public website, I don't particularly care.
If I were to do something that required more security, I would be taking the appropriate steps to safeguard my data.
So, I bought one of these for £90 from Amazon, based on the strength of this review and to be honest I'm pretty pleased with it.
The resistive screen isn't great - I'd have paid a few quid more for a better quality capacitive screen, but for what I want it for it will serve well. The sounds quality is much better than I expected so as an internet radio it's all good, and having now installed the Android Market and GMail, I can now check my emails in the morning without having to use my phone
It occurs to me that this will also be great when I'm travelled for work - not to take with me (though undoubtedly I could), but because I can leave Skype running on it and then video call with my kids whilst I'm away.
I have a US bank account with Bank of America, and I can assure that for the most part when I use my debit card in a US store, I have to enter my PIN. Same is true of most gas stations too.
True, there's no chip on the card, so I guess it has to validate the PIN "online" so to speak, and I believe if you press the credit button on the keypad in say Walmart, it will ask for a signature, but the point is that our US cousins are already used to entering a PIN code for most debit card transactions - they've been doing it longer than we have!
Who says?
I have a 16gb i7 desktop replacement laptop that I generally use on a day to day basis, and for more heavyweight tasks.
However, I also have an 11.6" Macbook Air (which is an Ultrabook IMO) that I use when travelling for both business & pleasure.
Different tools for different job!
So, if the rumours are to be believed, the new iPad will have 2048*1536 resolution on a 9.7" display - what a totally pointless idea!
It would only add cost and not really add to the user experience given that it's going to need a decent GPU to shift around that number of pixels, and that touch interfaces are suited to large controls anyway.
You wouldn't see a resolution that high on an 11.6" Macbook Air, so why's it necessary on an iPad?
"But you can't see the individual pixels" - so what? I can't see them on my non-retina display phone either unless I look really, really close!
http://www.redmondpie.com/track-your-3g-data-usage-with-data-counter-app-for-iphone-jailbreak-req/
Oh look - similar to NetCounter, but for iOS.
http://www.macstories.net/reviews/appswitch-cool-process-management-app-for-iphone/
Oh look - similar to WatchTower, but for iOS
Ok, perhaps there isn't a Media Scan analogue for iOS, but that's probably because apps can't share media in iOS for the most part, and have to maintain their own copies of any files/data that they require.
http://moreinfo.thebigboss.org/moreinfo/depiction.php?file=keyboardcachecleanerData
Oh, look, cleans a cache.....
See what I did there? ;)
Not exactly a great example though is it? There's no Honeycomb optimised version of Google+ for Android tablets as yet - the fact that Android apps can often scale depending on screen resolution, as Google+ does, is immaterial. How long *exactly* did it take for Facebook to launch an iPad version of their app?
So how exactly are Google in breach of the GPL, given that Android itself is not GPL'd code?
Only the Linux kernel at the heart of Android is GPL'd code, and Google have always made the kernel source available for "there" devices (e.g. the Nexus range) pretty much as soon as the devices ship.
As someone who owns both consoles (and a Wii FWIW), and has done so since both consoles originally came out, I can say that all you have stated is an "opinion".
Now, I personally prefer the games on the 360 than those on PS/3, so much so that in *my* particular case I use my 360 for games, and my PS/3 as a media player. That's not to say that 360 games are necessarily "better" than those on the PS/3, just that I prefer them, and also that I prefer the feel of the 360 controller.
In short - if the acronym GOW means Gears of War rather than God of War to you, you're likely to prefer the 360 over the PS/3.
As to the Xbox looking "very tired and end-of-life", that's really sounding like fanboi nonsense! :)
One last comment in defence of the Xbox 360 - Sky Go! :)
I just used YELL.COM to get the same information, and I *bet* it look less time than it did for you to look it up in the physical yellow pages!
I see absolutely no need these days for a physical copy of the yellow pages any more, but that is my personal preference. I couldn't even tell if I still have a copy kicking about somewhere, but I can access the same information online in seconds.
This entire story is frankly absurd!
Most of the major Android players (e.g. HTC, Samsung etc) do comply with the GPL although often not as quickly as perhaps they should.
To say this "threat" is hanging over Android, is a nonsense because all any individual phone/tablet manufacturer needs to do to comply with the GPL is publish the kernel source which isn't exactly rocket science.
Also, did the author of this article even look at the link which shows the list of GPL compliant/breaching list of tablets? It's so woefully out of date it's untrue (no Xoom, Transformer, GTab 10.1 etc), and when you look closely you'll see that the vast majority of the tablets in breach are the cheapo no-name Chinese clones who basically don't give a monkeys about the GPL.
The problem is that the Asus TF isn't a superior tablet to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 - I know this for a fact because I own both.
The TF is an excellent device it its own right, but I see it as more of a hybrid tablet/netbook. If that's what you want, then the TF is the device to buy.
However, from a pure tablet perspective, I do find the Galaxy Tab 10.1 to be a superior device - especially with Touchwiz - Heresy I know, but it does seem to me that Touchwiz in this incarnation provides for a much nicer user experience than vanilla Honeycomb, so much so that the GT with Touchwiz and Android 3.1 seems much slicker than the TF with Android 3.2.
I still love my TF, but it doesn't get anywhere near as much use now that I have the GT.
It may have escaped your attention that the white plastic Macbook isn't actually part of the the Macbook range any more - just the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro, both of which pre-date the Samsung Series 9 by a few years, and are made of aluminium, which also "won't shatter into white plastic pieces"!
Whilst the Galaxy Tab 7" doesn't have a dual-core Tegra-2 CPU, that isn't necessarily a disadvantage. The video playback capabilities of the Hummingbird in the GTab7 are way better than those of any Tegra-2 tablet. It also fits very neatly in a jacket pocket.
As to the 4:3 vs 16:9 discussion - it's very much horses for courses. Apart from browsing the web, I watch more video on my device than I do read books, so from my perspective the 16:9 aspect ratio is a better choice for me. Having said that, on a 7" tablet , reading books in portrait doesn't feel particular odd especially when you consider that most paperback books have a ratio closer to 16:9 than 4:3.
On the subject of the Streak 7 - it simply isn't as good as the GTab 7" - full stop, done, dusted.
The A4 is based on the Arm Cortex core, as are many other ARM processors (e.g. Samsungs Hummingbird, TI's later OMAP processors) but Qualcomm are an instruction set licensee - they have designed their own core (Scorpion) which is ARMv7 compatible, but is a completely custom design and not based on any ARM core.
16:9 works much better if you are using an RDP application to connect to a remote server, or watching practically any video since it's all wide screen these days.
Since I do both regularly on my Asus Transformer, a 16:9 aspect ratio suits me personally far better than 4:3 would.
I ordered one of these last week primarily out of intellectual curiosity rather than expecting it to be a usable business tool.
Battery life on the Chromium-OS based Kogan appears to be only half what other OEMs (e.g. Samsung) quote for their Chrome-OS based devices, but at this price point I'm prepared to give it a shot!
Personal bugbear here, but Quadrant scores are worth less than this comment!
They have absolutely no relation to real world performance, and given that it what benchmarks aspire to achieve, makes Quadrant an absolutely worthless benchmark.
I'm sure that someone will pipe up that it's all we've got, but in the case of benchmarks, no benchmark definitely better than a flawed benchmark!
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