Tag Archives: PDA

Steve Litchfield has reviewed the HTC 7 Pro in the latest edition of The Phones Show. In the review he highlights many, many problems with the hardware and software, problems that should never be present in any new smartphone. He verges on ranting at one stage and if anything he should have thrown it against the wall and put it out of its misery. It is well worth watching and I think Steve should show his personality more in these shows- this was the most enjoyable yet.

Great piece over at MIR by Ewan called Data Roaming: Why non-RIM smartphones suck. I totally get what he is saying and if I was roaming a lot, it would be BlackBerry all the way for me. My iPhone used more data in 1 day than my Bold 9700 did in 10 on a holiday last year.

“This, then, is the difference between a BlackBerry and an Android device. I can only assume that the BlackBerry’s proprietary compression and communications layer is ridiculously efficient and that the Nexus S is behaving as though it’s connected to WiFi and sucking as much data as it wants.”

Jon Bon Jovi has made the following quite surprising statement- ““Kids today have missed the whole experience of putting the headphones on, turning it up to 10, holding the jacket, closing their eyes and getting lost in an album; and the beauty of taking your allowance money and making a decision based on the jacket, not knowing what the record sounded like, and looking at a couple of still pictures and imagining it. God, it was a magical, magical time. I hate to sound like an old man now, but I am, and you mark my words, in a generation from now people are going to say: ‘What happened?’. Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.”

Of all the people to accuse someone else of killing music. Anyone heard the last few Bon Jovi albums?

Bob posted a link to this video yesterday which talks about Information Overload Syndrome. It is humorous, but contains a serious message. Well worth 3 minutes of your time.

The teardowns over at iFixit are great and all that, but this collection over at Lost At E Minor is just wonderful. You don’t want to miss this.

Charlie Brooker doesn’t tend to hold back when it comes to stating an opinion and I don’t hate Macs, but they do give me a syncing feeling is no exception. Expecting some divided opinions on this one…

“Apple’s “sync” bullshit is a deception, which pretends to be making your life easier, when it’s actually all about wresting control from you. If you could freely transfer any file you wanted onto your gadget, Apple might conceivably lose out on a few molecules of gold. So rather than risk that, they’ll choose – every single time – to restrict your options, without so much as blinking.

Sure, you can get around the irritating sync-issue, but doing so requires a degree of faff and brainwork, like solving the famous logic problem about ferrying a load of foxes and chickens across a river without it all ending in feathers and death. And even if you find it easy, it’s a problem Apple don’t want you to solve. They want you to give up and go back to dumbly stroking that shiny screen, pausing intermittently to wipe the drool from your chin.”

A Brief History of Computing from Life is somewhat off-topic, but will bring back memories to many of you. I love the image below which captures the essence of early mass arcade gaming.

Tom found Mobile interface design: the need for speed which looks at how Palm OS had some advantages over the current crop of smartphones in terms of efficiency and speed. Food for thought…

“Apple’s design philosophy emphasizes beauty and simplicity, sacrificing some efficiency. It’s wonderful to have a one-button phone, but that means it has to take more steps to do other things.

In contrast, the original Palm OS philosophy emphasized the simplicity of efficiency, sacrificing beauty.  I sought purity in functional and visual efficiency. Ruthlessly minimize steps for frequent tasks. Press one button to power on and see your entire day’s schedule in a split second. Beauty wasn’t problematic in principle, but it was in practice–back then it would have required making a painfully slow and bulky mobile device.”

If you are running a Windows desktop, laptop or netbook you may be interested in Intel AppUp which aims to provide an App Store for Windows machines. The interface isn’t wonderful, but it could prove to be a valuable resource in the future.

“If you are a developer, find everything you need to easily develop and sell applications for the Intel AppUpSM center here: Powerful tools—including an SDK, easy deployment and validation, Developer Catalog to buy and sell application components, Application Labs in addition to a vibrant online community for support.”

Data limits, what’s all the fuss about? over at CoolSmartphone is written by someone who works for a UK network and I understand the pain, being that I work in mobile telecoms specifically in the area of mobile data. However, you dismiss your customer’s view at your own peril… Thanks to Murray.

“I was listening to one of my regular podcasts a few days ago and one of the presenters, who is a self confessed geek, obviously, and is constantly switching phones and checking data connections, and syncing all his data between several different devices was surprised to learn that he had a 500mb limit on his account that the didn’t even know about.  The man in question would certainly be in the power user group, and has been able to comfortably cope with just 500mb.

So 10 months down the line and most of the other networks have followed suit, and not just in the UK, so maybe that justifies the decision, but data restriction will always cause controversy, regardless of the statistics.”

Take a look at the photo below and the accompanying story here. Charming…

LG is set to announce the Optimus 3D on February 14th and there should be some stunning specs included. We are expecting a screen larger than 4″, dual core processor and multi-channel RAM. Some rumours point to being able to capture 3D video as well, but that is far from confirmed.

The big question is, do we really need a smartphone with a 3D screen? Personally I have to say no because of the extra power it will need to process it. It screams complete novelty to me.

Google has updated its mobile weather site to make it look more app-like. It still looks very simple, but includes new features such as a slider to let you look ahead to see what’s happening. Nice…

“At first glance, you’ll see content that we’d previously shown you before: current conditions and a forecast for the next few days. But by moving the slider over the next 12 hours, you can now see a detailed hour-by-hour breakdown of the changing weather conditions. As you do this, keep an eye on the temperature, wind speed and humidity and see how all these conditions are expected to trend across the day. You may also notice that the background color changes throughout the day. Of course, as you scroll further down you’ll see our regular web search results for your query.”