Posts by matthewjs 15 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2012
No, phablet = phone so big it could almost be used as a tablet. And of course size is a differentiating factor: you don't get tablets with a 4-inch screen, and no one calls the 3G-enabled iPad a "phablet". As tablets start at around 7 inches, then a phone with a 6.3-inch screen isn't "bordering" on phablet territory - it's so far deep into phablet territory it's almost out the other side.
This article could have been written 10 or 15 years ago on the subject of fair trade chocolate, coffee and cocoa (or even textiles). Back then it was this incredibly niche stuff that you had to hunt out in a dusty corner of Holland & Barrett's; whereas now we've reached a stage where it's easily available in every supermarket, a sufficiently large number of people are willing to pay a slight premium for it and it's profitable. Even more importantly, the concept of 'fair trade' has become normalised and incorporated into the mainstream, so that now the likes of Cadbury boast that they only use fair trade cocoa. It was a long, hard slog to reach this situation, and if the people behind the earliest fair trade initiatives had given up after only cornering 0.006% of the chocolate market with their first product, then a lot of people would be living under far more desperate conditions today.
The point is that it's about the long game, about keeping the issue alive and making painful (and often painfully slow) progress towards a worthwhile goal, not about hitting the bullseye with your first dart. It's about the slow accretion of minimal gains and improvements, about the fact that in 2014, 40,000 people own a 'fair phone' compared to 0 people in 2012. I can't imagine that the Fairphone will ever gain huge market share, but if helps keep the issue alive then sooner or later the likes of Apple and Samsung will decide to play the 'fairness' card in a marketing campaign and it'll become mainstream. But if nobody does anything at all to improve fairness (however imperfect and unimpressive their initial actions), then the issue won't ever get off the ground and trickle into people's consciousness. That is why the Fairphone is important.
Final comment: look at us, 2014 and we're talking about fairness in relation to phones on the Reg board. That would have been unthinkable 10 years ago, because fairness simply wasn't an issue then. So something's obviously happening and we're moving - albeit painfully slowly, but moving - in the right direction. Even you, Tim, by writing this article and drawing attention to fairness in phones, are helping us to get there. So thank you. Or was that your intention all along? ;)
Tim, you pulled your punch at the end, which is rather unlike you: I was expecting a full-on "throw another child onto the fire, Jenkins, the parlour's a little chilly at this time of year" paean to the innovation-promoting, bottom-line-boosting benefits of Victorian-era drudgery and workhouses. But thanks for pleasantly surprising me.
My feeling is this: isn't the upwards revision of the definition of 'poverty' an indication that we're becoming more civilised? In the same way that 'cruelty to animals' encompasses a far wider range of actions today than it would have done 100 years ago, as does 'human rights' (and, indeed, encompasses a lot more humans than it would have done 100 years ago)? As you quite rightly point out, people pay much more attention to the word 'poverty' than they do to 'inequality', but, in the interests of developing a more humane society - or, if you insist, in the interests of increasing the number of potential consumers of goods - surely a more fluid definition of 'poverty' (and the consequent implementation of measures to tackle it) can help to make life better for an increasingly larger number of people.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the fact that 'absolute' poverty still exists today, elsewhere in the world. The question of whether it's better to tackle gross inequality here, or absolute poverty there, is perhaps one best saved for another day...
I daresay there's some key point I'm overlooking, but it strikes me that Phones4U could take this as an opportunity to try to get into bed with the MVNOs like Virgin, Tesco Mobile, Giffgaff, etc. and provide a one-stop shop where people can compare the various MVNO contracts and buy unlocked handsets. I know that the general public is still betwitched by the chimaera of the "free" phone, but maybe Phones4U could either team up with the MVNOs to offer subsidised handsets, or develop their own payment-by-instalments system.
It would also be advantageous for the companies concerned, given that your average punter knows next to nothing about Giffgaff or Tesco Mobile and would probably steer clear of them purely on the basis that they're an unknown quantity. If a well-known high street chain started promoting their tariffs and contracts, and (most importantly) explained to people that they actually use the same infrastructure as one of the Big Four, I'm sure a lot of people would be persuaded to give them a whirl, especially if they signed up to a rolling monthly contract where they can get out if they're not happy.
Aren't these the same specs as the LG G Pro Lite, which has been around for more than 18 months? In fact it sounds slightly worse than the G Pro Lite inasmuch as a chunk of the on-screen real estate is eaten up with the virtual buttons. That, and the addition of the stylus, are the only differentiating factors between the two models that I can see.
Surely it would've made much more sense to add stylus functionality to the LG Vista, which - on the basis of its specs, at least - seems to be pitched as a G Pro 2 Lite. It would also maintain a more natural separation between the 'flagship' G3 line and the 'phablet' G Pro line, instead of muddying the waters between the two.
Interesting how Samsung is now pretty much the 'undisputed champion' - at least in handset sales - of the Android world. Besides the (very significant) issues regarding the HTC's non-swappable battery and lack of expansion, I wonder just how much the Apple-Samsung lawsuit reduced the iOS vs Android battle to a simple matter of iPhone vs Galaxy, and whether - given the rampant tribalism and sectarianism on both sides of the divide - Apple haters gravitated exclusively towards Samsung as a manifestation of their hatred of the former. While top-of-the-range phones from HTC, Sony, LG and Samsung are all compared to one another in group tests, it's only the Samsung that seems to get compared to the iPhone, which must - unconsciously at least - create some sort of mental 'iPhone or Samsung Galaxy' polarisation in punters' minds.
Hear hear. I don't know where the assumption that most punters want a touchscreen (I use the term to mean 'keyboardless') phone first sprung from; maybe the success of the iPhone led everyone else to believe that the touchscreen was the only form factor that people wanted. It's certainly not a market-tested assumption, because there's never been a relatively even spread of competing touchscreen and QWERTY phones available. Off the top of my head, the only QWERTY Android I can remember being widely(ish) available was the HTC Cha Cha, and even then it wasn't offered by all service providers, or on PAYG. Samsung had something called the Galaxy Pro, but you would never have known it existed given that the marketing budget for it was probably around the zero mark. For almost a year now I've been waiting for a very nice-looking device called the Galaxy Chat, but there's still no UK release date, and I've been forced to buy a touchscreen phone as an interim solution. Trouble is, I suspect my purchase of that interim touchscreen simply adds to the misconception that everyone wants to buy a touchscreen. If QWERTY phones were widely available and received even half the advertising push their touchscreen cousins are given, I'm certain that manufacturers would uncover a significant hidden market.
The kind of person who would queue outside an Apple store on the first day a new product goes on sale will undoubtedly already have an iPad, so it kind of makes sense that they wouldn't buy an iPad Mini, too. Even the most die-hard Apple fan would surely not, for example, buy an iPhone 5 AND a hypothetical smaller, less powerful version as well. The true test will come when said Apple fan decides to upgrade to a newer tablet, at which point I'm betting he'll choose the Mini over the regular size, simply because it's both cheaper and - as someone commented above - is a better size for doing "tablet-y" stuff on. That's why I reckon the Mini will end up cannibalising sales from the iPad, as well as being very popular amongst normal punters; and of course, normal punters can't be expected to queue up during working hours for something they can buy online or at a time that suits them. For better or worse, I think the iPad Mini will be around for a long time, probably as the best-selling tablet on the market. Personally I'm pleased, 'cos I have an 8-inch, 4:3 aspect-ratio Android tablet and it's almost impossible to find a decent case/stand for it, so bring on the flood of (non-official and therefore cheap) iPad Mini accessories!
It's the same over here: very, very hard to get a job offering more than 30 hours a week in the retail or customer-facing services sector. Many companies now set a cap of 28 hours per week, ensuring hardly any of their staff (except the management) can be classed as full-time and therefore aren't entitled to the full-time levels of holiday leave, mandatory inclusion in the company pension plan, paid sick leave, and so on. Even at an absurdly high (for the retail sector) hourly pay rate of 10 quid an hour, that's only 280 pounds a week, a smidgen over a grand a month, gross. It's no wonder only students end up working in shops, to top up their loans, and it's no wonder they don't give a toss about their shitty McJobs and can't be bothered to do their job properly. What's the matter with this country; don't we want competent service when we go into a shop? It's not even a question of our own self-interest, because the wage savings aren't passed on to us, they're simply added to the shareholder returns.
El Reg, please add a Karl Marx avatar to your selection, that way anyone who feels the need to go on an anti-corporate rant can warn innocent page-scrollers in advance!
Sounds like whoever fired this guy deserves a raise. He did everything according to the "Chainsaw CEO" handbook; slashing staff numbers (at Dixons at least), replacing full-time employees with part-timers (thus reducing social-security contributions and employee benefits like paid sick leave, more paid holidays, etc.), generally doing everything the markets demand to ensure share prices go up while the possibility of landing a decent service-sector job paying a living wage goes down. This guy is most companies' wet dream, yet it seems as though Apple is one of the very few companies for whom the "purchasing experience" and customer service is a major plank of its corporate focus, and (while I am no Apple fan; far from it, in fact) the fact that the company decided to axe the hatchet man because he was disgruntling (can that be a gerund?) its shop-floor workforce deserves a massive, massive, round of applause. Even if, ultimately, Apple only did it to protect its profits: at least it recognises that contented sales and customer service staff can be a key catalyst for driving profits up, and should be protected accordingly.
My first-ever laptop was a ThinkPad R40, I work from home and used it all day, every day to work on and later to surf the net and watch films on, and it ran faultlessly for 8 years. The build quality was incomparable; I must have typed several million words on the keyboard and not a single key ever so much as came loose from its mounting.
That's another feature of (perhaps not all, but certainly many) ThinkPads: the duplicate mouse-equivalent buttons beneath and above the trackpad. My work is often heavy on the button-presses and so, for a task that would require extended, repeated button presses I'd use the 'other' mouse button above the trackpad, safe in the knowledge that if it broke or became soft over time I'd still have the other one, which was the one that 'mattered' as it was much more comfortable for browsing and using within documents anyway.
A few months ago I finally upgraded, to a Lenovo ThinkPad, which, although it's not as robust and doesn't inspire the same confidence as the IBM, feels at least ten times more solid and durable than anything else I've looked at. I wonder if it, too, will last me 8 years?
Just in case there's anyone out there mulling over the purchase of an LG Optimus L3 - it's a great little phone. I don't know whether I'm indicative of the average low-end smartphone user but I use mine to check e-mail, use Facebook, view websites, use Google Maps and watch the occasional clip on YouTube, and the L3 does all those things without any hassle whatsoever. The screen may not be the sharpest out there but it's more than acceptable for reading e-mails and viewing websites, and although the camera is "only" 3MP that's more than adequate for taking impromptu snaps at parties, funny street names while on holiday, dumb pictures of my own face to upload to Facebook... does anyone use a camera phone for much more than this? If I want a genuinely good-quality photo of something I'll use my DSLR.
It's not helpful when reviews like these simply compare the product to the current market leader, rather than assessing how well or how badly they do the simple jobs they're likely to be bought for.
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