Yes, I am sure you can attach a USB display controller to a plug-server, but that is still not coming with a built-in display adapter. Secondarily, the MIMO USB screens you cite are quite a lot more expensive than the entire plug computer, which makes a mockery of the "inexpensive" part.
You can use almost any kind of computer for almost any kind of role, but it's not a great idea to use a server as a desktop - it's expensive & performance is poor. Similarly, something like a RasPi or BeagleBoard is not a great server, as it has no native Ethernet (it's running over USB) or SATA.
It is generally best to use the right device for the job.
I'd be happy to do a roundup of inexpensive plug servers, but the cited devices are mostly a couple of years old now so it's no longer news. Part of the point of this article was to highlight that the RasPi was not the only device of its type, but equally to highlight how it is dramatically cheaper than the alternatives. A ShivaPlug is not an alternative to a RasPi and nor is a 2010 Tosh kinda-sorta-netbook.
And thirdly, there are limits to the length of this sort of piece. There isn't room to include every even-vaguely-comparable device that is aimed at a different role but happens to use the same CPU. This was about *desktop computers*. Not notebooks, netbooks, servers, tablets or phones. Desktops. *Just* desktops. No battery, no built-in screen, no onboard keyboard and trackpad, but display & sound ports. Desktops.
No, today, ARM cannot compete against x86 kit on price. But it hands x86 its backside on a plate when it comes to performance/Watt.
I am hoping that Raspberry Pi will catalyse a new generation of very-low-cost ARM systems.
Once a suitably low-power display is available, say from Pixel Qi or using e-ink, this enables the possibility of capable, flexible solar-powered ARM computers running FOSS OSs which could transform the lives of billions in the developing world.
Me, personally, I want an open, flexible ARM-powered netbook or ultralight laptop with a Pixel Qi display & a honking great battery - something that can run for a long weekend on a single charge. Tablet, schmablet.
The reason for omitting the likes of the ShivaPlug is that they're *servers* and this roundup was for desktop-type devices, capable of running a general-purpose OS with a GUI. Sure, there are various plug servers, and HardReg has covered some of them before...
... But none of them have any way to attach a display.
And yes, there are other ultracheap devices out there, such as Arduino or MiniEMBWiFi, but they are so low-spec they can't run a graphical desktop. Great for hardware hobbyists, but not much use for WIMP merchants.
A nostalgic former Psion, N7710 & E90 owner agrees
I had a 7710. Great design, crippled by no Wifi or 3G. It would actually support a 1GB MMS card, though - I had one. Worked fine. Took several hours to format the thing, but that was a one-off task.
I then went to a friend's old (free) SE910i for a while, but a 9500 would have been a much more sensible move. Then an E90, which had great hardware, let down by a poor, substandard OS. I still long for an "E90i" with a faster chip, an internal touchscreen, USB charging & a standard headphone socket. That would be the perfect phone handset for me.
This story explains a little of why Nokia made such bizarre decisions when it did. It's still a massive shame, though.
The hardcard has risen from the grave of obsolescence
This formfactor was very common for a while in the late 1980s, when it was called a "hardcard". Never thought I'd see them again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard
It would seem to me that technologically, there would be greater efficiency in the OS managing the "cache" of fast Flash between the system and the disk - but then again, caching hard disk controllers worked pretty well, and today, running one OS under another with a Type 2 hypervisor often results in great disk performance from the guest as the host manages caching for it...
I will cop to some errors in this piece, including missing IBM's latest name-change from zSeries to the System z, and that VMware does indeed now use hardware VT if it's available - and indeed, according to several comments, /requires/ it for 64-bit guests.
This article series was a long time in gestation and when I started researching it, VMware was still adamantly maintaining that its software virtualisation was better than Intel's hardware implementation.
However, this comment titled ABEND is notably incorrect in almost every detail.
KVM does not fall back to software VT; if no hardware VT is available; it *requires* hardware VT support. Without it, you can't use KVM at all.
Xen falls back to paravirtualisation, meaning that it needs modified guest OSs.
VMware and VirtualBox both use software VT if no hardware VT is available; in VirtualBox, enabling hardware support is an option - you can run without it. I have not tried this yet in VMware but it might be possible.
This is not "do[ing] the same thing"; it is doing 3 different things: failing, offering different, incompatible functionality, or switching to an emulation-based alternative.
[1] No, Apple did not let me in to the preview; my request for a (p)review copy was refused by Cupertino PR, so I got it elsewhere. Which does mean no NDA was violated, mind.
[2] Performance: hard to tell. As it's unfinished, I did not attempt to benchmark it. However, my overall impression was that it felt fast. Quicker than Leopard, I'd say; as to whether it was quicker than Snow Leopard, I'm not sure. I had to buy a copy of Snow Leopard just to install it, update it to current and then immediately upgrade, as a bare-metal install did not work. This does mean it was a clean copy, with no added anything, and I only had an hour or so to play with it - so not a great basis for comparison.
[3] Sadly, I can't do any further testing - the Mac mini used was a loaner & it has now been returned.
I have to agree with the commenters who say that the Classic MacOS Finder was more pleasant - and in quite a few ways, better-featured. I don't like the new one much & never did. The Dock is fine but insufficiently flexible and customisable.
No, TotalFinder etc. are not adequate replacements.
BeOS - it was a superb OS, I loved it. But if Apple had bought it, it would be dead & gone by now. BeOS didn't have the world-leading development tools - they were as important as NeXTstep's polish.
Those who find Macs constraining and prefer Windows just have no taste; but then, most people have no taste, and most of them don't know it.
As for those whinging about iPhoto etc. - those are *apps*. They are not part of the OS, they're just bundled. You don't have to use them. I don't. There are other choices out there - lots of them once you include FOSS stuff.
There are enough other people agreeing with me that no, I don't think it's me.
I have it polling my Gmail, giving me Facebook and Twitter notifications, connecting to any known Wifi connections it sees, as normal, routine operation. I update Foursquare every day or 2, sometimes a few times a day. I use Google Maps to navigate every now and again - less than every week, normally. I occasionally listen to the radio. A half dozen to a dozen or so times a day, I look something up on the Web, and a few times a week, I'll spend half an hour reading Twitter and Facebook.
None of this is "heavy" usage.
I leave Wifi on, but Bluetooth off and GPS is only turned on when I need it. Brightness is left on default auto setting normally.
As others have noted, since the 23rd Dec Android 2.2.1 update, it does a little better, but it now occasionally spontaneously reboots itself, which is not ideal.
I reckon you guys are either /very/ light users, or you're manually disabling loads of functionality and managing power usage by hand. Neither of those strikes me as a fair comparison, really.
No, it doesn't have the "chin". It also has no pointing device at all, unlike most of the other HTC Android phones, and the camera lens sticks out at the back.
It's good, but it's considerably too small & too thin
I've had one since October & overall I like it.
The battery life is appalling - it lasts about 6h in normal use, which I do not regard as heavy. It's the first charge-twice-a-day phone I've owned; I now constantly carry a charged spare battery & a USB charging cable.
It really would benefit from simple cursor & select keys & make/end call buttons - both for ease, precision & for use with gloves, for instance. You lose the onscreen cursor keys with Swype or any other enhanced keyboard; even with these tools, text entry & editing is infuriating, slow & painful. Entering more than a short paragraph makes me shout at the device in rage.
Those whinging about its size are munchkins, hobbits or something. The Desire HD is *too small*, if anything! A phone should reach from ear to mouth; this thing is a good inch+ shorter than its predecessor, a Nokia E90, & HTC's battery is just laughably tiny.
It would benefit a lot from being 2-3cm longer with some of the extra space used for just a few physical buttons. It also really needs to be twice as thick, with a big slab of detachable battery on the back - it needs something like 3500mAh to be usable *as a smartphone* all day. By which I mean calls, email, social networks, GPS, some music playback, occasional Web use, etc. Even with spare batteries I daren't listen to music or run the IM client on mine - it would die in a few hours.
Of course, then the little tiny people with their little tiny child hands & tiny miniature pockets would whine - but sod them, they have an abundance of microscopic kiddie-sized hairdressers' phones to play with. Let 'em whinge.
Better still, a slide-out keyboard on a phone with a screen this big - or bigger. An Acer Liquid Metal with a half-decent keyboard and a 3500-4000mAh battery would be ideal.
But no, oompaloompas rule the mobile-phone world these days, so even we proper man-sized actual *adults* are cursed with phones designed for infant People Of Restricted Growth.
For comparison, my old HTC Universal, with a 3rd party extended battery of ±3800mAh, could last for about 2½ days on a charge. Go to work Friday morning, go away for the weekend & it was still running when you got back to the office on Monday morning & could charge it. *That* is a credible battery life. The Desire HD's is a joke. Yes, it was 1½" thick & weighed about 400g, but it was totally worth it.
I must admit, even as a regular ROUGOL attendee - 'cos they're a good bunch - I do not actually ever use RISC OS any more myself. I ought to dig my A5000 out of the attic and find out if it still works.
But plain old nostalgia aside, it did have some really good aspects to it. It gave the world the icon bar, which begat the Windows 95 taskbar - indeed, Windows 7's taskbar has gone back to something considerably closer than Acorn's 1987 original. The system-wide font anti-aliasing and full-window-drag are now ubiquitous, but RISC OS did it first. And personally I feel that the RISC OS desktop was one of the most elegant and efficient GUIs ever, even if it did (and to some extent still does) lack some amazingly basic features, such as cursor-key folder navigation.
No, I wouldn't recommend RISC OS to anyone today as a mainstream OS - but it's an interesting thing to play with. It may have been largely forgotten but it was tremendously influential. And on the gripping hand, I'd give good money for one of the tiny ARM-powered netbooks running RISC OS instead, if only as a portable writing tool.
Webkit is indeed open source & was developed by Apple, but it's a refinement of the KDE Project's KHTML renderer framework. It's not original to Apple at all.
Yes, you're probably right, several current Nokias would be more attractive running WebOS than Symbian. (A Symbian phone owner writes...)
But Espoo is already heading in that direction with the N900, I think. Trialling their own phone-enabled Linux in a geek device before refining the UI & taking it to bigger markets.
After buying-in Symbian, I think Palm would be too much of a climb-down.
Symbian's not a good fit for touchscreen finger-operated phones, I suspect. Certainly my E90 (with the latest v400 firmware) clunks very badly indeed next to Android or iPhone... and *surely* they must know this.
I think Symbian ought to be destined for keypad-operated non-touchscreen featurephones and Maemo/Meego/Moblin/whatever for high-end gefingerpoken type gadgets.
But I've never understood the mindset of those crazy Finns. Virtually the whole adult world loved the 6310i, for instance, so they killed it and offered tiny toylike hairdressers' phones in its place. Incomprehensible.
It isn't a good fit for Nokia, as others have pointed out. They already have at least 3 phone OSs, one Linux-based, shipping in a 4th generation product & with major-player interest & support.
Apple? Naah, they're laughing all the way to the bank.
HTC - if, as the rumours have it, it really does want an in-house OS - is a *much* better fit. It has some great hardware but no OS of its own & some of its best hardware - like the Universal, AKA Qtek 9000, I used to have myself - was crippled with the abysmal WinCE. If it wants to differentiate itself from the growing Android crowd, WebOS is a gem & well worth it. If it can afford it. I love the look of WebOS, I just don't like the Palm hardware. It could buy Access & reunify the 2 arms of the old Palm empire, too.
Rank outsider: Well, Oracle could buy into a whole new market with Palm, I guess.
So this is basically a GSM version of the US-market CDMA Droid? How come the review (AFAICS) doesn't even mention this? The Droid is one of the best-known new models of smartphone in the world... That merits a line, doesn't it?
The Valley was a particular personal fave of mine. Spent ages playing it on the original PET and later on my Spectrum. There was even a commercial version for the Speccy at one point...
http://www.mobygames.com/game/zx-spectrum/valley
... which really was taking the Michael. I bought it anyway. Same game, but line-drawn pixel graphics instead of UDG characters. Appalling rip-off. :-)
I've been looking for the source for years - many thanks for the link & a splendid article!
& to "Sysgod" & the Anonymous Coward: if you look back on your own youth without pleasure or nostalgia - don't blame the machines, blame yourself for not making your life better, you miserable buggers.
The late-90s-spec thing is a fair comment; I apologise unreservedly for my inability to accurately remember PC specs from 15-odd years ago. :¬)
Yes, an ARM chip would be a better fit for such a machine, but there are few ARM-based Linux distros around just yet. Some of the tinier thin clients also use MIPS processors, which are even less-well-supported. The snag with going non-x86 is that suddenly you can't use off-the-shelf Flash players, Java VMs and so on - while some of them are out there, they are often not free to download & cost the system-builders serious money to license.
Yes, a "netbook" would be cheaper, but it would also be around twice the size. The Linutop2 really is *very* small and netbooks still have cooling fans and so need airflow.
As for a CarPC, I'm afraid that never even occurred to me. I don't have a car - I'm a biker myself. As such, like most bikers, I am generally dead set against any in-car distractions for drivers whatsoever.
Actually, I quite like it! (To channel Arthur Dent for a moment.)
Grabbed the RC candidate off a torrent as my TinyVista and TinyXP systems self-immolated. As someone who is normally an Ubuntu user and hankers for a much faster Mac than my elderly G5, I'm actually modestly impressed.
It runs a smidge slower than TinyVista, which is Vista with all the unnecessary bloat removed - which is to say, vastly slower than TinyXP on my ancient Athlon XP 2800+ with 1GB of RAM and a mere 120GB PATA disk. I'm going to compare it against Win2K for a laugh, as well, but I have to patch that up to date & install all the drivers first.
It's pretty - shinier than Vista and a mite more polished. Looks cheap & plasticky compared to Ubuntu, though, let alone OS X. Everything seems to work OK. Installation was quite quick but the unexpected and random-seeming reboots made me think my PC had died.
It is going to utterly blow the minds of people migrating from XP, though. There must be hundreds of millions who know nothing else and this is *very* different. Compared to the changes from NT3 to NT4, it's modest, but it's still a substantial leap. The legions of parrot-fashion click-this-then-that users will be all at sea. Those with a clue will love it, though.
So far, not a single feature of it seems actually *advantageous*, but the nicer bits of Vista are still there (Start menu search box, automatic online and recursive directory tree search for drivers) and the tacky ones (like the sidebar) aren't.
Your friend, colleague or whatever does not have a firm grasp of basic arithmetic, so his analysis is more than a little suspect. He talks continually of "a decline of -6%" and so on. A *decline* is a subtraction. Subtract -6 from a number, you *add* 6 to it.
Don't just take my word for it - grab a calculator. Take 100, subtract -6. Result, 106.
Given that extremely serious error - and no, this is not just a small matter of definitions, it means he can't add up - then frankly the rest of his message is of no interest.
The tentacles are stealthily concealed in the form of an implausibly large moustache, you see... Once in microgravity, it transforms into giant appendages. I mean, even more giant than normal.
People could do what I do. Get an old bike of Freecycle, do it up and ride it to work.
Factoring in the walk to and from the Tube station, it's as fast as getting the Tube - and I travel from the very edge of London on the Surrey borders to SW1 - and it saves me >£5 a day.
Quick, healthy, fun. Doesn't cost a few grand and makes you fitter rather than fatter.
Mind you, I'm not 100% sure whether this counts as an inspired hack or savage butchery of a classic machine. Still, kudos to the chap: all the original ports and controls work, as does the original screen, keyboard and SID chip!
AmigaAnywhere was just a licensed version of Tao's stunning Taos OS, a technical tour-de-force. It's a brilliant bit of code; binaries were completely cross-platform compatible. The same single executable ran on x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, whatever, without any cumbersome bytecode interpreter or just-in-time compiler; Tao's VP code was converted on the fly into native machine code as it was loaded from disk.
However, with the world converging on X86, I'm not sure there's much need for it any more. SPARC and POWER and ARM are going their own ways; the desktop is now X86-only. Perhaps Taos' deep multithreading and very SMP-aware code might benefit it, but it didn't do BeOS much good.
Tao is dead and gone now. Amiga can't be far behind.
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33 posts • joined Monday 7th January 2008 18:00 GMT
@Gordan - Re: Why not ShivaPlug etc
Yes, I am sure you can attach a USB display controller to a plug-server, but that is still not coming with a built-in display adapter. Secondarily, the MIMO USB screens you cite are quite a lot more expensive than the entire plug computer, which makes a mockery of the "inexpensive" part.
You can use almost any kind of computer for almost any kind of role, but it's not a great idea to use a server as a desktop - it's expensive & performance is poor. Similarly, something like a RasPi or BeagleBoard is not a great server, as it has no native Ethernet (it's running over USB) or SATA.
It is generally best to use the right device for the job.
I'd be happy to do a roundup of inexpensive plug servers, but the cited devices are mostly a couple of years old now so it's no longer news. Part of the point of this article was to highlight that the RasPi was not the only device of its type, but equally to highlight how it is dramatically cheaper than the alternatives. A ShivaPlug is not an alternative to a RasPi and nor is a 2010 Tosh kinda-sorta-netbook.
And thirdly, there are limits to the length of this sort of piece. There isn't room to include every even-vaguely-comparable device that is aimed at a different role but happens to use the same CPU. This was about *desktop computers*. Not notebooks, netbooks, servers, tablets or phones. Desktops. *Just* desktops. No battery, no built-in screen, no onboard keyboard and trackpad, but display & sound ports. Desktops.
OK? :¬)
@Irongut
No, today, ARM cannot compete against x86 kit on price. But it hands x86 its backside on a plate when it comes to performance/Watt.
I am hoping that Raspberry Pi will catalyse a new generation of very-low-cost ARM systems.
Once a suitably low-power display is available, say from Pixel Qi or using e-ink, this enables the possibility of capable, flexible solar-powered ARM computers running FOSS OSs which could transform the lives of billions in the developing world.
Me, personally, I want an open, flexible ARM-powered netbook or ultralight laptop with a Pixel Qi display & a honking great battery - something that can run for a long weekend on a single charge. Tablet, schmablet.
Toshiba AC100
HardReg has also covered the Toshiba AC100 before:
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/03/review_netbook_toshiba_ac100/
... And whereas it /is/ possible to put another OS on it, not all the hardware is supported, there are significant caveats and it is *not* easy:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/TEGRA/AC100
So I would not rate it as a suitable device for someone wanting to just play.
Furthermore, it's a 2+ year old device; I am not sure if they are even available new any more.
Why not ShivaPlug etc
The reason for omitting the likes of the ShivaPlug is that they're *servers* and this roundup was for desktop-type devices, capable of running a general-purpose OS with a GUI. Sure, there are various plug servers, and HardReg has covered some of them before...
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/02/12/review_storage_cloud_engines_pogoplug_2/
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/11/review_peripherals_cloud_engines_pogoplug_pro/
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/10/20/review_storage_network_lacie_laplug/
... But none of them have any way to attach a display.
And yes, there are other ultracheap devices out there, such as Arduino or MiniEMBWiFi, but they are so low-spec they can't run a graphical desktop. Great for hardware hobbyists, but not much use for WIMP merchants.
A nostalgic former Psion, N7710 & E90 owner agrees
I had a 7710. Great design, crippled by no Wifi or 3G. It would actually support a 1GB MMS card, though - I had one. Worked fine. Took several hours to format the thing, but that was a one-off task.
I then went to a friend's old (free) SE910i for a while, but a 9500 would have been a much more sensible move. Then an E90, which had great hardware, let down by a poor, substandard OS. I still long for an "E90i" with a faster chip, an internal touchscreen, USB charging & a standard headphone socket. That would be the perfect phone handset for me.
This story explains a little of why Nokia made such bizarre decisions when it did. It's still a massive shame, though.
Threading
That's nice, but it's lipstick on a pig without proper threading support.
Can't you outsource it to Livejournal, like the Independent does, or something?
The hardcard has risen from the grave of obsolescence
This formfactor was very common for a while in the late 1980s, when it was called a "hardcard". Never thought I'd see them again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard
It would seem to me that technologically, there would be greater efficiency in the OS managing the "cache" of fast Flash between the system and the disk - but then again, caching hard disk controllers worked pretty well, and today, running one OS under another with a Type 2 hypervisor often results in great disk performance from the guest as the host manages caching for it...
Re. ABEND - the author responds
I will cop to some errors in this piece, including missing IBM's latest name-change from zSeries to the System z, and that VMware does indeed now use hardware VT if it's available - and indeed, according to several comments, /requires/ it for 64-bit guests.
This article series was a long time in gestation and when I started researching it, VMware was still adamantly maintaining that its software virtualisation was better than Intel's hardware implementation.
However, this comment titled ABEND is notably incorrect in almost every detail.
KVM does not fall back to software VT; if no hardware VT is available; it *requires* hardware VT support. Without it, you can't use KVM at all.
Xen falls back to paravirtualisation, meaning that it needs modified guest OSs.
VMware and VirtualBox both use software VT if no hardware VT is available; in VirtualBox, enabling hardware support is an option - you can run without it. I have not tried this yet in VMware but it might be possible.
This is not "do[ing] the same thing"; it is doing 3 different things: failing, offering different, incompatible functionality, or switching to an emulation-based alternative.
The author responds
In response to a couple of the questions.
[1] No, Apple did not let me in to the preview; my request for a (p)review copy was refused by Cupertino PR, so I got it elsewhere. Which does mean no NDA was violated, mind.
[2] Performance: hard to tell. As it's unfinished, I did not attempt to benchmark it. However, my overall impression was that it felt fast. Quicker than Leopard, I'd say; as to whether it was quicker than Snow Leopard, I'm not sure. I had to buy a copy of Snow Leopard just to install it, update it to current and then immediately upgrade, as a bare-metal install did not work. This does mean it was a clean copy, with no added anything, and I only had an hour or so to play with it - so not a great basis for comparison.
[3] Sadly, I can't do any further testing - the Mac mini used was a loaner & it has now been returned.
Odd that you all talk about it in the past tense
It's not like it's gone away or something!
To answer a few questions...
I have to agree with the commenters who say that the Classic MacOS Finder was more pleasant - and in quite a few ways, better-featured. I don't like the new one much & never did. The Dock is fine but insufficiently flexible and customisable.
No, TotalFinder etc. are not adequate replacements.
BeOS - it was a superb OS, I loved it. But if Apple had bought it, it would be dead & gone by now. BeOS didn't have the world-leading development tools - they were as important as NeXTstep's polish.
Those who find Macs constraining and prefer Windows just have no taste; but then, most people have no taste, and most of them don't know it.
As for those whinging about iPhoto etc. - those are *apps*. They are not part of the OS, they're just bundled. You don't have to use them. I don't. There are other choices out there - lots of them once you include FOSS stuff.
P.S. Small typo: "migirate"?
Threaded?
Are they buggery. I /wish./
Bring back CIX, all is forgiven. Ameol, we hardly knew ye...
This post has been deleted by a moderator
@Diccon & @The Original Ash:
There are enough other people agreeing with me that no, I don't think it's me.
I have it polling my Gmail, giving me Facebook and Twitter notifications, connecting to any known Wifi connections it sees, as normal, routine operation. I update Foursquare every day or 2, sometimes a few times a day. I use Google Maps to navigate every now and again - less than every week, normally. I occasionally listen to the radio. A half dozen to a dozen or so times a day, I look something up on the Web, and a few times a week, I'll spend half an hour reading Twitter and Facebook.
None of this is "heavy" usage.
I leave Wifi on, but Bluetooth off and GPS is only turned on when I need it. Brightness is left on default auto setting normally.
As others have noted, since the 23rd Dec Android 2.2.1 update, it does a little better, but it now occasionally spontaneously reboots itself, which is not ideal.
I reckon you guys are either /very/ light users, or you're manually disabling loads of functionality and managing power usage by hand. Neither of those strikes me as a fair comparison, really.
@Scott A. Brown:
No, it doesn't have the "chin". It also has no pointing device at all, unlike most of the other HTC Android phones, and the camera lens sticks out at the back.
It's good, but it's considerably too small & too thin
I've had one since October & overall I like it.
The battery life is appalling - it lasts about 6h in normal use, which I do not regard as heavy. It's the first charge-twice-a-day phone I've owned; I now constantly carry a charged spare battery & a USB charging cable.
It really would benefit from simple cursor & select keys & make/end call buttons - both for ease, precision & for use with gloves, for instance. You lose the onscreen cursor keys with Swype or any other enhanced keyboard; even with these tools, text entry & editing is infuriating, slow & painful. Entering more than a short paragraph makes me shout at the device in rage.
Those whinging about its size are munchkins, hobbits or something. The Desire HD is *too small*, if anything! A phone should reach from ear to mouth; this thing is a good inch+ shorter than its predecessor, a Nokia E90, & HTC's battery is just laughably tiny.
It would benefit a lot from being 2-3cm longer with some of the extra space used for just a few physical buttons. It also really needs to be twice as thick, with a big slab of detachable battery on the back - it needs something like 3500mAh to be usable *as a smartphone* all day. By which I mean calls, email, social networks, GPS, some music playback, occasional Web use, etc. Even with spare batteries I daren't listen to music or run the IM client on mine - it would die in a few hours.
Of course, then the little tiny people with their little tiny child hands & tiny miniature pockets would whine - but sod them, they have an abundance of microscopic kiddie-sized hairdressers' phones to play with. Let 'em whinge.
Better still, a slide-out keyboard on a phone with a screen this big - or bigger. An Acer Liquid Metal with a half-decent keyboard and a 3500-4000mAh battery would be ideal.
But no, oompaloompas rule the mobile-phone world these days, so even we proper man-sized actual *adults* are cursed with phones designed for infant People Of Restricted Growth.
For comparison, my old HTC Universal, with a 3rd party extended battery of ±3800mAh, could last for about 2½ days on a charge. Go to work Friday morning, go away for the weekend & it was still running when you got back to the office on Monday morning & could charge it. *That* is a credible battery life. The Desire HD's is a joke. Yes, it was 1½" thick & weighed about 400g, but it was totally worth it.
Ye Authore Himsselfe responds
I must admit, even as a regular ROUGOL attendee - 'cos they're a good bunch - I do not actually ever use RISC OS any more myself. I ought to dig my A5000 out of the attic and find out if it still works.
But plain old nostalgia aside, it did have some really good aspects to it. It gave the world the icon bar, which begat the Windows 95 taskbar - indeed, Windows 7's taskbar has gone back to something considerably closer than Acorn's 1987 original. The system-wide font anti-aliasing and full-window-drag are now ubiquitous, but RISC OS did it first. And personally I feel that the RISC OS desktop was one of the most elegant and efficient GUIs ever, even if it did (and to some extent still does) lack some amazingly basic features, such as cursor-key folder navigation.
No, I wouldn't recommend RISC OS to anyone today as a mainstream OS - but it's an interesting thing to play with. It may have been largely forgotten but it was tremendously influential. And on the gripping hand, I'd give good money for one of the tiny ARM-powered netbooks running RISC OS instead, if only as a portable writing tool.
£2 coin
I think you'll find that's a *two* pound coin. One of these:
http://i667.photobucket.com/albums/vv35/merlincove/2407901915_4d84759310.jpg
As in this fine explanation:
http://momscancer.blogspot.com/2007/08/coin-of-realm.html
Otherwise, though, a very splendid article, rich in win and low in lossage, as I believe the children say.
KHTML + Apple = Webkit
Webkit is indeed open source & was developed by Apple, but it's a refinement of the KDE Project's KHTML renderer framework. It's not original to Apple at all.
@Andrew:
Yes, you're probably right, several current Nokias would be more attractive running WebOS than Symbian. (A Symbian phone owner writes...)
But Espoo is already heading in that direction with the N900, I think. Trialling their own phone-enabled Linux in a geek device before refining the UI & taking it to bigger markets.
After buying-in Symbian, I think Palm would be too much of a climb-down.
Symbian's not a good fit for touchscreen finger-operated phones, I suspect. Certainly my E90 (with the latest v400 firmware) clunks very badly indeed next to Android or iPhone... and *surely* they must know this.
I think Symbian ought to be destined for keypad-operated non-touchscreen featurephones and Maemo/Meego/Moblin/whatever for high-end gefingerpoken type gadgets.
But I've never understood the mindset of those crazy Finns. Virtually the whole adult world loved the 6310i, for instance, so they killed it and offered tiny toylike hairdressers' phones in its place. Incomprehensible.
I don't buy it, Andrew
Not this time.
It isn't a good fit for Nokia, as others have pointed out. They already have at least 3 phone OSs, one Linux-based, shipping in a 4th generation product & with major-player interest & support.
Apple? Naah, they're laughing all the way to the bank.
HTC - if, as the rumours have it, it really does want an in-house OS - is a *much* better fit. It has some great hardware but no OS of its own & some of its best hardware - like the Universal, AKA Qtek 9000, I used to have myself - was crippled with the abysmal WinCE. If it wants to differentiate itself from the growing Android crowd, WebOS is a gem & well worth it. If it can afford it. I love the look of WebOS, I just don't like the Palm hardware. It could buy Access & reunify the 2 arms of the old Palm empire, too.
Rank outsider: Well, Oracle could buy into a whole new market with Palm, I guess.
Droid?
So this is basically a GSM version of the US-market CDMA Droid? How come the review (AFAICS) doesn't even mention this? The Droid is one of the best-known new models of smartphone in the world... That merits a line, doesn't it?
Oh my yes!
The Valley was a particular personal fave of mine. Spent ages playing it on the original PET and later on my Spectrum. There was even a commercial version for the Speccy at one point...
http://www.mobygames.com/game/zx-spectrum/valley
... which really was taking the Michael. I bought it anyway. Same game, but line-drawn pixel graphics instead of UDG characters. Appalling rip-off. :-)
I've been looking for the source for years - many thanks for the link & a splendid article!
& to "Sysgod" & the Anonymous Coward: if you look back on your own youth without pleasure or nostalgia - don't blame the machines, blame yourself for not making your life better, you miserable buggers.
Mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa
The late-90s-spec thing is a fair comment; I apologise unreservedly for my inability to accurately remember PC specs from 15-odd years ago. :¬)
Yes, an ARM chip would be a better fit for such a machine, but there are few ARM-based Linux distros around just yet. Some of the tinier thin clients also use MIPS processors, which are even less-well-supported. The snag with going non-x86 is that suddenly you can't use off-the-shelf Flash players, Java VMs and so on - while some of them are out there, they are often not free to download & cost the system-builders serious money to license.
Yes, a "netbook" would be cheaper, but it would also be around twice the size. The Linutop2 really is *very* small and netbooks still have cooling fans and so need airflow.
As for a CarPC, I'm afraid that never even occurred to me. I don't have a car - I'm a biker myself. As such, like most bikers, I am generally dead set against any in-car distractions for drivers whatsoever.
Posting from the product itself
Actually, I quite like it! (To channel Arthur Dent for a moment.)
Grabbed the RC candidate off a torrent as my TinyVista and TinyXP systems self-immolated. As someone who is normally an Ubuntu user and hankers for a much faster Mac than my elderly G5, I'm actually modestly impressed.
It runs a smidge slower than TinyVista, which is Vista with all the unnecessary bloat removed - which is to say, vastly slower than TinyXP on my ancient Athlon XP 2800+ with 1GB of RAM and a mere 120GB PATA disk. I'm going to compare it against Win2K for a laugh, as well, but I have to patch that up to date & install all the drivers first.
It's pretty - shinier than Vista and a mite more polished. Looks cheap & plasticky compared to Ubuntu, though, let alone OS X. Everything seems to work OK. Installation was quite quick but the unexpected and random-seeming reboots made me think my PC had died.
It is going to utterly blow the minds of people migrating from XP, though. There must be hundreds of millions who know nothing else and this is *very* different. Compared to the changes from NT3 to NT4, it's modest, but it's still a substantial leap. The legions of parrot-fashion click-this-then-that users will be all at sea. Those with a clue will love it, though.
So far, not a single feature of it seems actually *advantageous*, but the nicer bits of Vista are still there (Start menu search box, automatic online and recursive directory tree search for drivers) and the tacky ones (like the sidebar) aren't.
"Who's"?!
Tsk, tsk!
> Asus, who's original Eee PC
ITYF that's "whose".
And while I'm at it...
> But it won't lastr
"Lastr"? And finally:
> in DisplayBank's there's still plenty of demand
In DisplayBank's what?
I am scandalised, appalled etc. [cont'd. p94]
@Jason Newton
Your friend, colleague or whatever does not have a firm grasp of basic arithmetic, so his analysis is more than a little suspect. He talks continually of "a decline of -6%" and so on. A *decline* is a subtraction. Subtract -6 from a number, you *add* 6 to it.
Don't just take my word for it - grab a calculator. Take 100, subtract -6. Result, 106.
Given that extremely serious error - and no, this is not just a small matter of definitions, it means he can't add up - then frankly the rest of his message is of no interest.
Doc Oc in spaaaaace!
The tentacles are stealthily concealed in the form of an implausibly large moustache, you see... Once in microgravity, it transforms into giant appendages. I mean, even more giant than normal.
A cheaper, healthier alternative
People could do what I do. Get an old bike of Freecycle, do it up and ride it to work.
Factoring in the walk to and from the Tube station, it's as fast as getting the Tube - and I travel from the very edge of London on the Surrey borders to SW1 - and it saves me >£5 a day.
Quick, healthy, fun. Doesn't cost a few grand and makes you fitter rather than fatter.
You can run XP on one, too...
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/sx64/
Mind you, I'm not 100% sure whether this counts as an inspired hack or savage butchery of a classic machine. Still, kudos to the chap: all the original ports and controls work, as does the original screen, keyboard and SID chip!
I for one welcome our new bottom-inspector overloads
My best guess is "positive demeanour" or something like that, thoroughly mangled...
Awful casting
I mean, Ms Johanssen is actually quite attractive, and is thus clearly very inappropriate to depict Mrs Love.
But why is this on the Reg? I don't come here for bl**dy celebrity gossip, I come here to avoid it!
Taos lives on
AmigaAnywhere was just a licensed version of Tao's stunning Taos OS, a technical tour-de-force. It's a brilliant bit of code; binaries were completely cross-platform compatible. The same single executable ran on x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, whatever, without any cumbersome bytecode interpreter or just-in-time compiler; Tao's VP code was converted on the fly into native machine code as it was loaded from disk.
However, with the world converging on X86, I'm not sure there's much need for it any more. SPARC and POWER and ARM are going their own ways; the desktop is now X86-only. Perhaps Taos' deep multithreading and very SMP-aware code might benefit it, but it didn't do BeOS much good.
Tao is dead and gone now. Amiga can't be far behind.
- LP