Posts by Giles Jones 2536 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Dec 2006
It's nothing to do with the hardware, it is the software to blame. The hardware does not cause application bugs in most cases, it is badly written driver code or other issues in the software that supports the hardware.
I had enough of this in Windows Mobile to ever want to go back to it. Games would crash the phone and you soon came to realise why there was a reset button on every Windows Mobile touch screen phone.
That's all well and good but these days people are on 18-24 month contracts and the smartphone and Internet market is developing really fast. That's a long time to wait.
The hardware is really capable on phones now and the software can be made to work on older phones. But handset makers made their money on the hardware.
You would have thought the keyboard dock could have been designed so the phone slotted into the front and became the trackpad.
Firstly would have saved costs and secondly the display of the phone could have been utilised for feedback or other functions (think games).
The phone could have been held in place with magnets and it could have used a wireless protocol to talk to the keyboard. Charging could have been done with induction.
It's very hard to trademark such a generic symbol. The logo contains a fairly generic Wifi symbol and a process symbol.
The makers of Casper tried to sue the makers of the film Ghostbusters as they said the logo was too similar to Casper. The judge ruled there's not really many ways you can draw a cartoon ghost.
Nothing to do with the environmentalists. Every other EU country buys gas in the warmer times when it is cheaper, stores it in tanks and and then uses it in winter.
In the UK we don't store anything near as much.
Those who get the winter fuel allowance spend 40% of it on heating, so why not 100%?
Time and time again? Windows Phone 7 is not Windows Mobile. WinMo had a reasonable number of users once upon a time.
Nokia's biggest failure was to announce the deal well before any new product was available. A startup company can hype up their vapourware and live on a loan from the bank for a year or so, but a huge company like Nokia needs sales to keep things ticking over.
iMS20
TouchOSC
GarageBand
EyeTV
iPhoto
and so on..
To name a few. It also makes a pretty good web browser, so long as your idea of the web isn't playing stupid Flash games.
As I have the 3G version I can use it with Navigon as a GPS, the advantage being the battery life is good so no wires for a charger and the screen is big. Plus you can look things up on the web too.
The 3GS has similar specs to the iPhone 4 in the CPU core department, although a slower clock speed.
It has half the RAM though, but the iPad 1 has only 256mb as well.
How many other manufacturers are giving owners of two year old phones the latest OS? you should be glad you're getting anything at all.
This is what is annoying though. Big companies and individuals look at C++ and then list its weaknesses before embarking on creating yet another language instead of improving C++ and moving things forwards.
Improving C++ improves games and productivity software which are never going to be written in a language that requires a VM or doesn't compile to machine code.
I hope Toshiba support is better than it used to be. I had their E800 Windows PocketPC and it shipped with a VGA screen but the OS only supported QVGA.
When the new version of the OS came out it supported VGA but Toshiba didn't implement hardware acceleration of the built in ATI graphics chip (one of the major selling points of the device), so performance sucked.
Microsoft isn't becoming like Apple because Apple doesn't tell OEMs what hardware to use because there are no OEMs. Apple does not sell OS software that runs on other people's hardware.
Microsoft setting minimum standards to ensure their product runs well is not control freakery and Microsoft has always set minimum standards for Windows, in some cases the minimum standards have been so low that Windows would barely run (Win95 and 4MB RAM?).
Anyway, tablets are different to desktops and laptops as they can't be upgraded (although CPU upgrades aren't easily possible laptops). So if you purchase a woefully unspecced tablet there's nothing you can do about it!
It's quite simple, Foxconn selling parts direct to consumers or non-Apple divisions is not allowed. It's Apple's IP and copyrighted design.
Just like a DVD and CD manufacturer doesn't have the right to sell cheap films and music CDs direct to customers either. They don't own the film or music, they are just contracted to make them.
How does twice the battery life sound? and that is just with changing the CPU from x86 to ARM. Once you've made the switch and designed a good system on a chip you can free up masses of motherboard space and probably fit an even larger battery in there. Three times the battery life of an existing laptop may be possible!
Not to mention rapid sleep and wake, much faster than x86.
Consumer electronics companies love being able to fab their own chips with exactly what they want, they can't do that with Intel. They have to resort to putting certain chipsets on the mobo and hoping they work well together.
Atom is just too power hungry and inflexible in this modern gadget/appliance age.
It's not the latency, it is what happens when data goes missing. When you start compressing things and lose a small part of the data it results in big problems. If you've even opened a corrupted JPEG you'll know what I mean.
DAB is proof that slight errors in the signal result in a annoying garbled noise.
Currently you get a choppy audio which is better than clicks, pops and other annoyances.
Should be banned from driving for life. Even if he had killed someone he probably would have been allowed to drive again at some point.
When are people going to realise that owning and driving a motor vehicle is a privilege not a right? a licence comes with conditions that you obey the law.
Thousands are killed on the roads every year and it isn't acceptable. Sure, the accident numbers have been falling for years but try telling that to someone who has just lost their partner or kids.
Surely that is the reason iPads sell so well? they don't cock it up and leave out such essential features. Not to mention generally better battery life and the price being cheaper or the same as the competition, oh and a 3G version from launch, not "coming soon when we can be bothered".
Flash isn't that essential, if it was then it would have been available in the browser as a plugin for smartphones 5 years ago instead of just emerging from beta now. Standalone Flash lite players don't count.
Win95 introduced the Start button and menu.
Before then everything else relied upon you opening a folder and double clicking a program to run it. Or dragging it to a dock to create a quick link.
Win95 also put the close buttons on the right of the window when the rest of the world had them on the left.
Perhaps there is prior art for some of the above, but obscure X Windows desktops don't count as they were not on 90+% of desktops.
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