Posts by Bad Beaver

Boffins say Vodka Red Bulls make you sensible

Ahh, the memories of Vodka RedBull…

… I still have some, can't be that bad.

Anyway, the results presented do not exactly feel like a revelation. More like "duh".

Nokia straps Qt into ejector seat and hits the shiny red button

It's guys like him ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLdClPQpiHA&feature=player_embedded

Re: Good

No need to preach to the fanboys, man ;) No wonder people think you're a puppet.

Nokia has always had the best hardware, nobody doubts it. Your audience here is simply adept enough to feel limited by a consumer-oriented OS like WP. It just doesn't do – yet – for Symbian or MeeGo Power Users.

Good

Everything that is OUT of Nokia has a better chance of survival. And the people at Jolla are also very positive about this. Did I mention lately how utterly awesome the N9 is? It is scary awesome, despite its "outdated" hardware. I cannot wait what Jolla will pull off with MeeGo on fresh silicone. Probably will be able to levitate the device and cure cancer while idle.

Sony: Walkman, meet Android

Meh.

Could they not make this thing a little more interesting? To us jaded first worlders, this is not too compelling. I assume this it Apple in the dust when it comes to sound quality, which should be easy. From the 1st gen iPod on, iDevices have never really sounded "great" but always merely "good". So that's that and it might be the sole reason for this to exist in the first place. But

• 32GB? Really? I have a Nokia N9 with 64GB at my disposal that sounds pretty great and comes with a halfway decent player. And it's also the slickest phone in the known universe. So give me 64 or even better 128GB – or at least a cardslot. Something!

• Formats! From what I seee his thing plays neither FLAC nor ALAC (which is open by now!). If you want to cater to audiophiles you have to offer lossless support.

Who is the target?! SONY fanboys that are too much in love with their old candybar phone?

Tablets, copycats and Weird Al Yankovic

Panel on the right

much more interesting than whatever was on the left. Carmen Electra is 40? Damn, time sure moves quickly.

Sigma SD1 Merill 46Mp DSLR

Re: Foveon sensor good, Lens bad

"Any of the "big three" vendors will sell you a better and more reliable camera that takes better pictures for half the price."

Safe for the "better pictures" part, this it quite true.

Very well

At first I'd like to say that this is one of the better reviews I have read on your site and I have been here for a long time. Well done.

In terms of image quality, Sigma's Foveon is probably the most compelling technology available in the consumer frame of budget at this time. I have been shooting a DP1 for several years now and it is not going anywhere – unless maybe I compliment it with a DP2M, which puts the SD1M's sensor into a compact body, together with some of the best glass Sigma can make. Foveon is capable of incredible results and once spoiled by it you will look at almost any Bayer system with a pinches of pain. Some of that pain comes from Sigma's cameras having some … unique aspects like write speed and iso capability that you have live with – but also from knowing that they will allow you to produce pictures of a quality that is hardly attainable with anything else in their price range. They are not for everybody or any shooting style and they do not try to be.

There are many, many caveats but if you know what you want and these camers fit your bill, they will not stop giving.

Ex-Nokia staffers team up to revive MeeGo

It'll likely be niche

but so is MeeGo now and it kicks major ass. As long as they manage to be profitable enough that'll be just fine. I have doubts about a different UI as the Swipe UI is so utterly brilliant that it might be hard to improve upon but easy to mess up. Then again, these folks should know what they are doing. I really welcome this development.

Swype

I was pleasantly surprised how well Swype works on the N9. Every once in a while you have to teach it a name, place or funky word but most of the time you just blaze away with just yourt thumb. Nevertheless, folks who use consoles a lot would likely still want a hardware keayboard. So yay for that!

What he said.

I second this – only that I by now "fiddle" with MeeGo on a daily basis. And let me tell you that there is nothing much fiddly about it. It is extremely clean, straightforward and efficient to use. A very positive experience.

War On Standby: Do the figures actually stack up?

Re: Spot on

dotdavid, it does not work that way. People have a tendency to assign, label and rate others and their assumed level of expertise. They decide what you know and what you can do. Not you. Ever noticed how your average ignoramus superior person will not take your advice if it does not concern the fields he or she assigned you to – but will happily follow the exact same advice if you channel it through a person he perceives as a proper mouthpiece to emanate such information? This type of prejudice is a very interesting – if annoying – phenomenon. People do it because it allows their brains to act faster and with less thinking effort. I guess it is a reason why we invented degrees and certificates in the first place.

Sadly, it turns out you can be a nobel laureate in five different fields and your mother will still much rather believe in the advice of "experts" she picked up god knows where.

Dimming the lights on smart(arse) TV

Thank goodness

for me being a childless bachelor whose friends (it's not like I don't have any) rarely come by. Why don't they come by? Because they love the warm glow of the 50"++ leccyguzzlers in their own home. Find I have too little free time to get my money's worth out of TV at this point. Even if I got one, the last application of it would be watching actual TV – because TV makes me feel dead inside or inspires thoughts about towers and rifles.

Bonking for money to be built into the next iPhone

Yes, and another thing:

We will get used hearing things like "sorry, paying via NFC only works if you have an iPhone".

Just the same way as nobody bothers to implement their latest little online advertising doodad for anything else these days, often not even for Android. Yes, that means you are limiting your audience with levity, excluding people from your brand experience because someone was too lazy to do a platform-agnostic implementation. Basically, you're telling people to go fuck themselves because you think they bought the "wrong" phone, even what you are selling is cars, or detergent, or whatever else that is not an Apple product. Probably one of the more stupid things to do when it comes to selling stuff to people – but who am I to judge.

Gone fishin' with Nokia

Hell, YES. Go get an N9 while you can.

So true. I recently picked up an N9 for I could not stand the thought of them selling out before I could get one. The thing is pure sex – and that's straight from the box, I did not even start to "fuck with it" yet in terms of hacks / unintended functionality. You have to see it to believe it.

The main thought is disbelief – where I live, they didn't even bother bring it to market. Damn, what could have been.

Speedball 2 Brutal Deluxe

BAM BAM BAM

I really liked this one back in the day. Bitmap Brothers had a great run, they even cultivated their own visual style. Speedball / 2, Xenon / 2, Magic Pockets and all the other ones are classic showcases of how to make good games.

Ten... celeb headphones

Re: Oh no! Not 'The Beats'!

Head-Fi Is The Place. Sorry for your wallet ;)

Nokia's Great Software Cleansing scrubs off everything since the '90s

Yup. It is painful to watch…

… all that go to waste. What will we be left with? The pretty closed garden where you are told what to do, the slightly retarded closed garden where nobody knows what to do, and the open but ugly garden that goes obsolete every six months. Yay.

It pains me to see a brand of this caliber tearing itself to pieces like that. It pains me to see so many people being laid off after they contributed so much. It pains me to see a company that is able to turn out such outstanding products as the N9 or 808 will be reduced to making decives with an OS for dummies.

I dare not judge whether this new course is a good decision or not. It will certainly help to clear up the mess but will there be anybody left to enjoy that? All I see at the moment is loss of jobs for Nokians and loss of choice for the rest of us.

Asteroid zips past Earth

Re: 4 days warning, and it's 500m across....

Right. Depensing on your location, at 500m it might still be worth it to get "elsewhere" one on this little ball. Could get a little crowded at the airports.

Ten... Star Wars videogame classics

Re: Remake needed

I second this. Just imagine what could be done with it today. Wow.

Shaking the house with the thump of my ion guns

I cannot begin to imagine how much of my precious youth I poured into X-Wing and its expansion packs. It must amount to months. Several joysticks were broken in the process. Easily one of the best PC-Games ever. Only Wing Commander Privateer could finally lure us away from it.

Then you had to scrape together your last pennies to get the fastest CD-ROM you could afford for Rebel Assault – which meant double, triple or quad speed and actually made a hell of a difference.

I also liked Return of the Jedi for Amiga, although it had shoddy graphics and was ultra repetetive. But: you got to ride a speederbike.

Ten... Qwerty mobiles

So sliders are off-topic?

Nokia E7 is still ruling that part of the jungle. It is everything the E-Series is about – I am not aware of anything out there that can touch it in terms of build quality, hardware features and overall design. I would love to see this form factor run MeeGo – I shake my fist at Nokia for not releasing the N950 to the general public. Not that Belle wouldn't do. In fact it does quite fine. Especially since it does the little things you simply expect a phone to do but apparently are no longer to be taken for granted.

I nearly keeled over laughing the other day when an aggressively anti-Nokia mate of mine (some people act like Nokia at some point pissed in their pint and made them drink it) sporting both an iPhone and some Android complained that "these days, you cannot turn phones off overnight anymore and still have the alert work in the morning."

I could not resist to ask him "You mean like a Nokia does, right?"

Priceless face, absolutely priceless.

Re: No mention of things that matter?

Mentioning battery life would likely have meant to include the Nokia E6.

Nokia Lumia 900 WinPho 7 smartphone

You are describing a Symbian^3/Belle device

But then again that and Android is pretty close in many points. I, too, dislike the tiles in WP. For my taste they are too uniform and nervous. You lose the advantages of swiftly navigating by shape and or color.

But you have to hand it to them: those phones are really wicked fast and the interface itself is very smooth. Despite "yesterday's hardware".

I am not too keen on ever faster CPUs in everything just to have a faster CPU. It tends to make developers extra lazy and produce inefficient code, see personal computers. If you time travelled to the early 90s and told the Commodore / Atari crowd about the enourmous waste of RAM and CPU cycles these days they would shoot themselves.

Inside the Skynet ghost town built by bunker-based boffins

Totally

Testing for science, eh?

Re: Westworld?

I tell you, the best beaverin' is always done underground. You're in for some unseen subterranian rodent adventure action here.

Arcam rPac

Aha.

I say Arcam makes a nice profit on this one. They'd wax more about the headphone amp's output stage if it was really worth anything. Def. not £150 nice. I would spend $(sic)150 on something just like this made by some good folks in Bozeman, knowing very well about it being entry level. For $250, you should be doing much, much better than "crap chip, digital volume, very limited power supply"

Nokia on 'brink of failure', warns analyst

Dunno

WP is not too bad for regular folks. It just disappoints us spoilt Symbian and MeeGo powerusers. That's to say Jemma's comment is full of truth. The E7-00 simply destroys the competition due to its Communicator DNA that allows its user to do neat stuff that no X-core processor can help to achieve. Not even to speak of the Clearblack AMOLED display that is among if not THE very best you can shove into your pocket today. Which states one thing: Nokia is very able to make great phones, even with superbly innovative interfaces, see N9. Meanwhile, Nokia Beta Labs churns out impressive software that truly puts the "smart" in phones. And then there are the fashionable WP phones, pushed by an incredible marketing force but oh so depending on other peoples' work.

It's all very much "in transition" now which is what makes people so edgy. They like neither change nor challenges and they cry havoc about a platform being announced EOL four (!) years from now. Seriously?

Elop said plan B is for plan A to succeed. I guess we'll see about that. Four years is a long time – and if we have learned one thing lately it's that in Nokialand, changes can come quickly.

MS Office coming for Symbian

For journalists ...

You have a slight tendency not to "get it". AFAIK, Symbian is supported untill 2016. This is 2012. See the difference? Nokias biggest mistake after not going for MeeGo was to communicate Symbians EOL in the way it was done. Fearful shrieks of the weak ensued and only make life harder for the huge (check the numbers) established base of Symbian users that use this platform every day to get some real world work done.

Aliens Blu-ray disc set

Yay for proper smoke and guys in rubber suits

The downfall of visual quality due to CGI is perfectly illustrated by the later movies of the franchise, including the rotten AvP ones. ALIENS looks and feels as intensely visceral it does exactly because stuff is real and tangible. The last version I bought was the SE Laserdisc, so give me high resolution smoke any day. (but I'd rather get the full box. With extras, you know)

High school student expelled for dropping F-bomb in tweet

You now have 15 seconds to comply.

"automatic monitoring system for pupil's tweets"

The automatic WHAT?! What is wrong with these people?!

CD: The indestructible music format that REFUSES TO DIE

Lovin' it

Already bought more CDs and SACD-Hybrids this year than in the two last years combined. Zero trouble with DRM, zero fuss, great fidelity and the backup is right there on the shelf.

Rock'n'Roll Racing

Nice

This one was good fun back then. What's next? Supercars II? Nitro? Lotus Turbo Challenge II? Keep em coming.

41-megapixel MONSTER mobe shutters Nokia knockers

Well hello there…

While I could do without all the confusing messages the company is sending out in terms of longtime OS strategy, products like the 808 are exactly the kind of stuff I expect to see from Nokia, and they truly keep dishing out with the big spoon lately. Each and every product comes with a very clear positioning, even every accessory is well thought out and innovative in a relevant way. It all has much more "boom" than whatever the "boom" folks came up with in years.

The remaining issue is that WP7 is just not very … Nokia. It is packed with slick features, very smooth and stable – but if you're coming from Anna or Belle (which is a considerable upgrade and really grows on you in mere days) you just miss the flexibility: WP7 is clearly not designed with the Symbian poweruser in mind.

Ten... Valentine's Day gifts for her

Oh, it's pink

I think it is time males reclaim that color, like it used to be in the olden times.

Nokia: No Belle download for Apple users

It is possible to do the update on OSX

I found a link in the Nokia Beta Labs forum. It turns out that if you use an EARLIER VERSION of the Nokia Software Updater, you can do the update.

CAVEAT: Apparently Nokia has some sort of a point not letting people do it, as this updater will erase some personal data and settings. So do your backup, export all important / sync content / contacts etc. My apps were intact tough but YMMV.

Otherwise this worked just fine and Belle is quite quick on her feet, btw.

http://www.ukmobilereview.com/manufacturers/m-nokia/belle-update-mac/

Still can't figure out why Nokia was unable to do a decent OS X updater WITHIN THE YEAR they lost fooling around with the Belle update.

Why I'd pay Apple more to give iPad factory workers a break

Point taken, but

it is moot. A certain lifestyle has been established. Think what will happen if all the not so well off will suddenly find they cannot afford their flatscreens anymore. Chavocalypse!

Interesting article, horrible conclusion

Seriously. Apple makes a lot of profit on each and any piece sold that was made in China. They take that and add it to the incredible pile of cash they are hoarding. What do you want, a Fairtrade iPhone? You are not getting one. Because phones not locally grown by families of smiling foreigners in some pittoresque little village, just seeking to get a decent price so they can have enough rice.

Excursion: Maybe you are old enough to remember what it cost to own a Powerbook back when they were made in a pittoresque little corner in Ireland. Those puppies cost 2-3 times of what you are shelling out for one today without even adjusting for inflation. Do you want to pay €2500k for the low end model? No? See?

Our whole digital society of the 2000s is based on the exploitation of cheap chinese labour. Just like your €5 T-Shirt is based on the exploitation of Bangladeshis wading in toxic sludge up to their genitals. And think about the cocoa, just think about the cocoa. Just because we no longer have colonies it does not mean that our affluence is not based on the blood and sweat of the 3rd world.

So unless you want to kiss your precious lifestyle goodbye: Forget it. As long as you vote for cheap labour with your money, it will exist. No happy-do-goody-thank-God-I-don't-have-to-think-about-it-LOGO will change that for one bit.

Small pile of cash, dying platform: 2011 is bad news for Nokia

now why would that be

Hmm, cause they'd rather open wide for Microsoft than market one of the most interesting devices they ever made in major markets. When you see all great stuff Hypernaked is pulling for them in terms of advertising lately you really have to wonder what they could have done for the N9 on the same budget.

Child labour, lost wages uncloaked by Apple factories audit

each and every day

I become less likely to buy products that where made in China. I dislike the thought of my lifestyle being supported by slave-like working conditions. Unless you make lots of money this initiates an overall cut-back process, as anyone who recently bought something, anything, made in Japan, the US, the UK or continental Europe will be happy to confirm. And even that stuff is stuffed full of parts sourced in cheap cheap land. I am old enough to remember what I had to cough up for a Powerbook made in Ireland, which was also not too pretty a number, but when the loss of local jobs is spiced with the creeping suspicion of "blood on your iPod" I can only say that … I do not like it. I really do not like it. This from a guy who will be happy to state that globalization is not a bad thing per se and that some chinese companies turn out truly excellent products. I do not want to feel bad about what I buy. We need more transparency. I salute Apple for taking the flag and speaking out on it. Now they better act on it, too.

Ten... stars of the Consumer Electronics Show

Good it's over

Finally. That Endless stream of boredom cluttered up my RSS. Only thing of interest was bigger OLED screens. It's about the only thing that could persuade me to buy a TV again.

Smartphone-shot movie guns for cinema release

Indeed, you fail.

Don't diss phones you have no clue about ;) The Nokia N8 has HMDI out, as does the E7. Adapter comes included with the purchase.

Hypernaked have done great stuff for Nokia N8. In fact they have just won an award for their integrated campaign "push snowboarding" . Deservedly. Go check it out.

Anyway, this is a unique project and the phone aspect is a nice touch. AFAIK, there still is no phone out there that can reach up to what the N8 can do in terms of _overall_ picture-quality.

I'd like to see that movie.

Dyson sinks £1.4m into Cambridge engineering chair

Read his book

It is most inspiring.

Chinese £200 iPhone killer unwraps for Xmas

Who cares?

Bah, it's some cheap faceless android device. Despite all the crash-happy UI customization they pretty much all look the same. A problem that will soon reach Nokia with the not-so-customizable WP (which is very slick in use but lacks a lot of the bells and whistles you expect coming from a Symbian device). You have to stand out with exceptional hardware or you will be lost in a sea of samey slates. That lowers your brand value. But if "cheap" is your USP that may not be as much of a problem.

iPhone 4S is for failures who work in coffee shops - Samsung

Could have been better.

The barista line is outstanding. The rest falls short. Too blatant, not really persuasive. Want to see a nice ad? Check out this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MaOnVago88g

The Great Smartphone OS Shoot-out

E7, N8, N9?

Where are these? What kind of review is this supposed to be? Symbian is still good for years – and the devices are top notch. The N9 with Harmattan is the only innovative phone I've seen all year long.

Vlingo

This came pre-installed on my Nokia

For free, of course. It's not Siri but it does work pretty well for what it is. Also adds a "* bla bla by Vlingo" tag to SMS you dictate it, making it a natural choice for replying to iPosers' "* by Siri" text messages.

A rapid first hands-on: Nokia’s Windows phones

Pure Anger About the 800

Can you believe it? It doesn't come with NFC, it has little RAM… If you compare, the only thing that is BETTER than the N9 is the processor, for whatever that might be worth. That's just nuts, especially the NFC part. This might be due to some M$ regulation, yet it simply means that I won't buy it. Disappointing, really. I'd much rather import an N9, live with the "lack" of ecosystem. At least it brings an innovative concept to the table. The 800 is just meh. MEH!

Oh and yes, I'd take any of the 800/N9 colors. They are quite refreshing and you will have no problem finding your device on a table full of identical iPhones and faceless Android devices.

Man builds smartphone dock into arm

Nice

And the Nokia is just sugar on top. Send the man an N9!