Anyone can put anything up, but it's unlikely it stayed up long.. apps tend to vanish fairly quickly if there are complaints (and bad reviews are always a big hint - never download anything with one or two stars..). The reason you've never seen them is probably because you've never been looking at the right moment - I've never come across any genuine malware either (adware.. tons of it, but every platform has that).
Not only do android apps list all the permissions they need, if that changes due to an upgrade the OS will refuse to update it until you've gone in and read the new permissions list.
And of course if you never use premium rate numbers (the majority of us, I'd expect) you can have then blocked anyway, giving no opportunity for mischief.
£27,850 profit, even assuming 100% profit is 5,570 SMSs.. that's not a huge number compared to the number of phones, users, etc. Still the system could have worked faster in this case... and why the company directors are not in jail for fraud I've no idea.
My Galaxy Nexus goes great in my pocket.. could probably go bitter, like the Note, without any problems. It's also thin and somewhat lighter than earlier smartphones I've had.
I imagine the S3 is a similar form factor.. not a problem at all.
I tend to agree with the article - big is better for browsing, email, and 4.6" is about the smallest I could imagine running an SSH client for example (could definately do with bigger for that).
I also agree with an earlier poster that calling them phones is becoming a bit silly - they're mini-tablets now.
I get 3Gb for £5 a month.. was 1GB but they upped it, and as it's a Sim Zero deal that's all I pay (I rarely if ever use voice). Alas, you can't get that offer from them any more - or anything close from anyone else.
I chose three originally by doing a spotify test. Put spotify on (low quality, about 64kbps, easily achievable) , then drive around. A couple of years back when I did it *only* three could sustain even that speed. Nowadays Three happily copes with spotify on 'ultra' quality driving up and down the country.. I keep meaning to repeat my test with the others - I've no doubt they've improved (Still no O2 signal here in south manchester though, so that's O2 and giffgaff out of the running already).
Clearly nobody who knew anything had any part in the drafting of this legislation. Which is about normal. See.. well.. just about every piece of internet related leglislation ever passed.
The average modern bulb tops out at 11w. Probably one of the most efficient items in your house. And light is somewhat necessary.
Devices on standby rarely take more than a couple of watts, yet they're portrayed as the spawn of the devil.
OTOH the TV - drawing 150-200w, is on for 12 hours a day, and is never mentioned.
Of course the people telling you how bad standby is and how evil lightbulbs are? TV advertising execs. The *last* people that would want you to turn the TV off.
Do tell... Their share price is $0.20 and their description says
"Zap.Com Corporation does not have significant operations. The company intends to acquire assets or businesses to become an operating company. Previously, it was engaged in the Internet operations business."
So it seems dead, and therefore 'got away with it' seems optimistic.
"The youngest of the smartphone operating systems is less mature than either Google's Android or Apple's iOS"
I'm no fan of WinPhone, but.. well, duh.
The thing is, I doubt Microsoft actually care.. iOS and Android both went through this stage, and both sold like hotcakes, despite being 'not ready for the enterprise'.
Installed a system for them years ago... they paid for training, but only half the people turned up - one of which was the admin who hadn't been told we were installing and had a huge list of security questions (not unreasonable ones, to be fair) before we were allowed to do the install - apparently management had signed the contract and paid the money and not bothered to tell the IT people.
Subsequent discussion centred on how the system would work with their internal market as each department had to *buy* computing resources off the IT department!
Heard nothing for many months - then found out that something had broke, all the people we'd trained had left and those that were left didn't know anything including who to call to get it fixed. For all I know there's still a broken server sat in their IT department surrounded by cluelessness...
The problem is the staff have no clue about it, they just switch it on when they open up in the morning.. and so few people use it it can be broken for days before anyone even mentions it. They're sold a magic box that'll 'pull in the customers' barely know what it is.
A local McDs had broken cloud for about 6 months before they finally gave up and switched it off permanently.. The one in starbucks stopped dishing out IPs about a week after it was installed.. and I've lost count of the number of cafes and hotels offering 'Free Wifi' that offer nothing of the sort because it just doesn't work, and nobody gives enough of a shit to fix it.
No problem for me - I stick to 3G, which works everywhere.
Really that doesn't matter - there's a compat. layer that lets you program using fragments right back to android 1.6 (although for your own sanity you probably want to start at the 2.1/2.2 level, since that's when the APIs really stabilised).
The uniformity of ICS is the frontend - and that's mostly licensing really (a manufacturer shipping with ICS must give an option for all their crap to be switched off) - although the option to remove preinstalled apps is nice. Good for end users - google should have got tough on this years ago.. but for devs, it's business as usual.
Agreed. You'd have to be a pretty crappy developer to be unable to make an app that doesn't work on nearly all phones. It's no different to developing for Windows, or for that matter, any other OS, including iOS.
Google even went to the trouble of creating a nice system which allowed an app to be optimised for both phone and tablet at the same time.
Of all the problems I've had with apps I've written I've never had one that was phone specific - android is android, whatever it runs on. If you follow the app guidelines it'll work.
It had an interesting premise, completely ruined by seemingly being split into to completely different movies, and an good ending that happens 20 minutes before the second, totally stupid, ending.
Re: "Charities" acting like business ... Am I the only one
Same with RSPCA here. Guy turns up asking for a donation. I say sure, here's a couple of quid. Then he says 'oh we can't take cash, you have to sign this form, can I come in?'. Bad move.
Within 5 minutes he's escalated it to a minimum monthly donation of £20 (which I had to point out to him on the form - he was expecting me to sign it without reading it!), whereupon he was somewhat surprised to be physically picked up and thrown out of the house.
Later I found he'd taken the partially filled in form (which alas had my bank details by then but not my signature.. note to self.. take form and destroy it first), forged my signature and attempted setup a direct debit anyway.
Needless to say that's one charity that will *never* get a penny from me.
£1.98 per episode.. so half the cost of a film rental.
No sale.
Pay as you go TV will only work if it works out about the same as we're paying now. I watch maybe 5 programmes a night, albeit maybe only 1 of those intentionally (*so* hard to find anything worth watching these days). They're saying that's £280 a month's worth of TV? F that. Divide the price by 10 and we'll talk.
The only reason that would happen is if the app sucked and people kept refunding within 15 minutes. Deal with it - write a better app. *most* apps I download suck and get refunded - I keep maybe one in 20.
I've never seen google's payout system be more than a penny out. It's an automated system FFS.. it's not like there's someone at google manually entering the numbers and randomly missing a few.
Curb side charging posts? Paid for by who? In what timescale?
You're talking about digging up *every* street in the UK, adding a power infrastructure (the current one just won't cut it for mass deployment of something like an electric car), so more and bigger substations, etc.
Then working out how to charge the correct person when someone else has parked where you were going to (on our street there's only parking for about 75% of the houses so there's a regular shuffling around depending on what time you arrive back).
Adding a petrol station just means getting a sufficiently large area of land, digging a hole for the storage, and building the station on top. It's not even comparable to what would be needed to make electric cars viable.
No comparison of costs? OK these cars are so expensive they're basically in Top Gear Toy bracket, but eventually they'll come down so ordinary people can buy them... so then we'll want to know how much they cost to run.
Electricity costs are through the roof - and rising faster than fuel costs right now. If it ends up cheaper to use common or garden petrol, that's what will win out in the end.
The news report didn't imply that (although it's certainly possible, provided the advertiser doesn't mind the bad publicity and subsequent lawsuits). They got a 'researcher' to write a malicious app that grabbed every bit of information about the phone (even that was debatable, as the data they were showing looked made up to me.. some of that data eg. the content of SMS I'm pretty sure you'd have to be rooted to get hold of) then say 'see! Any app can be doing that!'.
When I saw it it came across like they'd heard of this (probably been reading el reg :p) and decided to make a story about it, but being unable to find a *real* malicious app on the marketplace, decided to fake it.
"However, if the code is not recognized, Internet Explorer will accept it anyway and allow the requester full access to the user for third-party cookie purposes"
If google knew this, so did every other marketing site - and I bet most if not all of them are still doing it.
MS need to fix their bug, not flap around blaming others.
I often stream spotify when in the car and it's fine.. Most of the time I use the higher quality 320kbps one, but that does get choppy out in the countryside (320kbps shouldn't be a challenge over HSDPA - heck, even over ordinary 3G - but mobile phone companies are so inept they've made it so).
I really don't think I could go back to 128k mp3, so pure music is out on those grounds alone for me. 9.99 is on the pricey side for Spotify (doubling the price for mobile clients.. hmm..) but given that it's the only option, without lugging around multi-gigabyte music collections as I used to do, then it'll do.
No it's not dead.. it's still used commercially. Modern pascal has modern features - generics, anonymous functions, namespaces, etc. and is far, far from what you probably learned at college.
It's big downside is it's single pass, which makes for some difficult choices as the program architecture gets more complex.
C++ is just different.. not more powerful, and I regularly write code in both where the situation demands it - along with half a dozen other languages. There's no overall best language, really.
I wonder how they're going to avoid megaupload-style problems. The others survive because they're somewhat under the radar (no I've no idea how rapidshare gets away with it). Google is huge, and could quickly become the biggest file sharing site in the world..
ITV definitely exists..it owns 11 of the 15 regional TV broadcasting licenses (and I bet it's going for the others). There are fewer well known brands in the UK. It would be like me trying to release a product called 'Wall-Mart' in the US.
Since all we read is speculation I expect apple have a much more original name.
I watch everything that comes on or off in the house, have switched to low energy everything - even PCs, don't watch much TV (which is a huge energy drain) and still can't get the baseline much below 500W, which according to the article puts me higher than average (376W apparently, which I doubt personally because a TV alone can be 200W, and heating pumps are about 150W - that's most of it right there even if you sit in the dark with nothing else plugged in..).
3D is broadcast at 720x1080i side by side (and basically all 'downloaded' 3D is too) so you're not actually losing anything... but yes it's not full HD in the traditional sense and they shouldn't have said that.
I agree can't stand active 3D - unless you're staring directly at the TV the whole room flickers as then 50hz shutter interacts badly with flourescent lighting that also flickers at 50hz. Having glasses that don't cost 150 quid a pop helps too.
Even then, what 3D? 3D movies are OK for a bit, but few are actually improved by it. TV programmes aren't broadcast in 3D (possibly sport, but I don't watch that). If I were to replace my TV it wouldn't be with another 3D one. Wasted some dosh there.
Terrible selection of films, and in the week I've had it I've not found one that I'd actually watch that hasn't already been on TV. They need to up their game a *lot*.
When they're asking £2 - £3 an episode, you might as well subscribe to the full package with either of the incumbents - it'll work out cheaper. In an average week the TV is maybe on here for 5-6 hours a day between us, so let's be really generous and say 5 one hour episodes (most are shorter) at £2. Or, around £280 a month to replace TV with IPTV.
Knock it down to 1/5th of that and we're talking. Of course the ISPs will then put their prices up to cover the increased bandwidth use... so you can't win.
Youview sounds good. Neflix and lovefilm are a joke unless you like movies over 5 years old (and *somebody* tell Netflix that 'Chitty Chitty bang bang' is not scifi!). Blinkbox has so many adverts it's basically unwatchable (When the adverts are so intrusive you can't follow the story any more, what's the point?) .
I'm also looking at Raspberry Pi to help (waiting for a plex client) to improve the WAF on my existing setup (since new TVs are totally out of the question in the current economic climate) enough so I can tell VM where to shove it. When that's gone there's money waiting for an IPTV provider that doesn't suck, when one appears.
Unless you use the same browser at home, at work, on your mobile phone etc. it'll be useless. If you want central password storage things like lastpass work well. There's facebook and twitter authentication, which this is basically competing directly with.
The motivation for accepting a system that's tied to a single browser is what exactly?
Since the galaxy nexus works fine for video rental when unlocked (not that I've tried.. paying more than blockbuster prices for a video on a 4 inch screen doesn't appeal). If google were that bothered you'd think they'd have done it first on their own device.
Also, you can't simply void the *entire* warranty because someone installed new software. Of course it's entirely reasonable to say if you install a 3rd party ROM and a software fault develops, tough. If the volume button falls off, then they'd have a tough time saying you caused it.
The original transormer had one from release.. it's just that the key was leaked soon after they changed it someone had worked out another way to root (Razorclaw).
That's now been plugged, so you can't root the latest firmware.. and it's the reason I won't buy another Asus tablet. On the original TF, for example, you have to root it to enable wifi channel 12, which just happens to be where the office wifi is, making the stock TF unusable for me. That and proprietary cables, inability to charge off USB (so can't be charged in the car), etc.
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232 posts • joined Monday 22nd March 2010 14:48 GMT
Page:
Re: ok, genuine question
Anyone can put anything up, but it's unlikely it stayed up long.. apps tend to vanish fairly quickly if there are complaints (and bad reviews are always a big hint - never download anything with one or two stars..). The reason you've never seen them is probably because you've never been looking at the right moment - I've never come across any genuine malware either (adware.. tons of it, but every platform has that).
Not only do android apps list all the permissions they need, if that changes due to an upgrade the OS will refuse to update it until you've gone in and read the new permissions list.
And of course if you never use premium rate numbers (the majority of us, I'd expect) you can have then blocked anyway, giving no opportunity for mischief.
£27,850 profit, even assuming 100% profit is 5,570 SMSs.. that's not a huge number compared to the number of phones, users, etc. Still the system could have worked faster in this case... and why the company directors are not in jail for fraud I've no idea.
My Galaxy Nexus goes great in my pocket.. could probably go bitter, like the Note, without any problems. It's also thin and somewhat lighter than earlier smartphones I've had.
I imagine the S3 is a similar form factor.. not a problem at all.
I tend to agree with the article - big is better for browsing, email, and 4.6" is about the smallest I could imagine running an SSH client for example (could definately do with bigger for that).
I also agree with an earlier poster that calling them phones is becoming a bit silly - they're mini-tablets now.
Re: hmmmm
And what if I want to wander into the garden with my laptop because it's a nice day? No network.. heck, even go to the bog and it drops out.
There's a reason IRDA failed - it requires line of sight and that is a huge disadvantage of such technology.
The flashing the mobile screen thing to send a message probably has legs - but as a general networking solution it's a nonstarter.
I get 3Gb for £5 a month.. was 1GB but they upped it, and as it's a Sim Zero deal that's all I pay (I rarely if ever use voice). Alas, you can't get that offer from them any more - or anything close from anyone else.
I chose three originally by doing a spotify test. Put spotify on (low quality, about 64kbps, easily achievable) , then drive around. A couple of years back when I did it *only* three could sustain even that speed. Nowadays Three happily copes with spotify on 'ultra' quality driving up and down the country.. I keep meaning to repeat my test with the others - I've no doubt they've improved (Still no O2 signal here in south manchester though, so that's O2 and giffgaff out of the running already).
Re: Is this legal?
Clearly nobody who knew anything had any part in the drafting of this legislation. Which is about normal. See.. well.. just about every piece of internet related leglislation ever passed.
Re: Hang on...
The average modern bulb tops out at 11w. Probably one of the most efficient items in your house. And light is somewhat necessary.
Devices on standby rarely take more than a couple of watts, yet they're portrayed as the spawn of the devil.
OTOH the TV - drawing 150-200w, is on for 12 hours a day, and is never mentioned.
Of course the people telling you how bad standby is and how evil lightbulbs are? TV advertising execs. The *last* people that would want you to turn the TV off.
Re: Old hat
Mine has that in theory - in fact it's the reason I chose that practice.
2 years later they've yet to allocate me a username despite badgering.
Re: On the subject of...
Do tell... Their share price is $0.20 and their description says
"Zap.Com Corporation does not have significant operations. The company intends to acquire assets or businesses to become an operating company. Previously, it was engaged in the Internet operations business."
So it seems dead, and therefore 'got away with it' seems optimistic.
Re: Another tiresome fingers-in-the-ears tirade
Glad it's not just me.. I read that back about 6 times trying to see how he'd got that conclusion from it.
"The youngest of the smartphone operating systems is less mature than either Google's Android or Apple's iOS"
I'm no fan of WinPhone, but.. well, duh.
The thing is, I doubt Microsoft actually care.. iOS and Android both went through this stage, and both sold like hotcakes, despite being 'not ready for the enterprise'.
Re: Ahhh, Aviva...
Oh they were Norwich Union?
Installed a system for them years ago... they paid for training, but only half the people turned up - one of which was the admin who hadn't been told we were installing and had a huge list of security questions (not unreasonable ones, to be fair) before we were allowed to do the install - apparently management had signed the contract and paid the money and not bothered to tell the IT people.
Subsequent discussion centred on how the system would work with their internal market as each department had to *buy* computing resources off the IT department!
Heard nothing for many months - then found out that something had broke, all the people we'd trained had left and those that were left didn't know anything including who to call to get it fixed. For all I know there's still a broken server sat in their IT department surrounded by cluelessness...
When it works..
The problem is the staff have no clue about it, they just switch it on when they open up in the morning.. and so few people use it it can be broken for days before anyone even mentions it. They're sold a magic box that'll 'pull in the customers' barely know what it is.
A local McDs had broken cloud for about 6 months before they finally gave up and switched it off permanently.. The one in starbucks stopped dishing out IPs about a week after it was installed.. and I've lost count of the number of cafes and hotels offering 'Free Wifi' that offer nothing of the sort because it just doesn't work, and nobody gives enough of a shit to fix it.
No problem for me - I stick to 3G, which works everywhere.
Well.. what actually happened was White Star sacked the entire crew as the boat was sinking so they wouldn't have to pay out compensation.
So it might be bad now, but it was worse then.
Re: I'll take 100
It's external. 1 inch smaller isn't going to make the tiniest bit of difference.
You want to pay 3 times the going rate for it? Go ahead.
The 2TB HDD is about £90 inc. VAT now.. So £150 for a USB caddy and software? Even with the convenience markup that seems a bit high.
Re: I would suspect...
Really that doesn't matter - there's a compat. layer that lets you program using fragments right back to android 1.6 (although for your own sanity you probably want to start at the 2.1/2.2 level, since that's when the APIs really stabilised).
The uniformity of ICS is the frontend - and that's mostly licensing really (a manufacturer shipping with ICS must give an option for all their crap to be switched off) - although the option to remove preinstalled apps is nice. Good for end users - google should have got tough on this years ago.. but for devs, it's business as usual.
Re: the big question
Agreed. You'd have to be a pretty crappy developer to be unable to make an app that doesn't work on nearly all phones. It's no different to developing for Windows, or for that matter, any other OS, including iOS.
Google even went to the trouble of creating a nice system which allowed an app to be optimised for both phone and tablet at the same time.
Of all the problems I've had with apps I've written I've never had one that was phone specific - android is android, whatever it runs on. If you follow the app guidelines it'll work.
Re: No TV Movies?
I suspect SyFi channel will need an entire category of its own.. It churns out bad movies on almost a daily basis.
A.I.
It had an interesting premise, completely ruined by seemingly being split into to completely different movies, and an good ending that happens 20 minutes before the second, totally stupid, ending.
Re: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!
Return of the killer tomatoes was comedy gold, though, that redeemed the original film.
Re: "Charities" acting like business ... Am I the only one
Same with RSPCA here. Guy turns up asking for a donation. I say sure, here's a couple of quid. Then he says 'oh we can't take cash, you have to sign this form, can I come in?'. Bad move.
Within 5 minutes he's escalated it to a minimum monthly donation of £20 (which I had to point out to him on the form - he was expecting me to sign it without reading it!), whereupon he was somewhat surprised to be physically picked up and thrown out of the house.
Later I found he'd taken the partially filled in form (which alas had my bank details by then but not my signature.. note to self.. take form and destroy it first), forged my signature and attempted setup a direct debit anyway.
Needless to say that's one charity that will *never* get a penny from me.
£1.98 per episode.. so half the cost of a film rental.
No sale.
Pay as you go TV will only work if it works out about the same as we're paying now. I watch maybe 5 programmes a night, albeit maybe only 1 of those intentionally (*so* hard to find anything worth watching these days). They're saying that's £280 a month's worth of TV? F that. Divide the price by 10 and we'll talk.
Re: True face revealed...
The only reason that would happen is if the app sucked and people kept refunding within 15 minutes. Deal with it - write a better app. *most* apps I download suck and get refunded - I keep maybe one in 20.
I've never seen google's payout system be more than a penny out. It's an automated system FFS.. it's not like there's someone at google manually entering the numbers and randomly missing a few.
Lets hope they remember to write protect the tags this time
Previous experiments along this line have been sidelined by people rewriting the tags to point to goatse, etc.
Re: But...
Curb side charging posts? Paid for by who? In what timescale?
You're talking about digging up *every* street in the UK, adding a power infrastructure (the current one just won't cut it for mass deployment of something like an electric car), so more and bigger substations, etc.
Then working out how to charge the correct person when someone else has parked where you were going to (on our street there's only parking for about 75% of the houses so there's a regular shuffling around depending on what time you arrive back).
Adding a petrol station just means getting a sufficiently large area of land, digging a hole for the storage, and building the station on top. It's not even comparable to what would be needed to make electric cars viable.
What about the real cost?
No comparison of costs? OK these cars are so expensive they're basically in Top Gear Toy bracket, but eventually they'll come down so ordinary people can buy them... so then we'll want to know how much they cost to run.
Electricity costs are through the roof - and rising faster than fuel costs right now. If it ends up cheaper to use common or garden petrol, that's what will win out in the end.
Re: As an app developer
The news report didn't imply that (although it's certainly possible, provided the advertiser doesn't mind the bad publicity and subsequent lawsuits). They got a 'researcher' to write a malicious app that grabbed every bit of information about the phone (even that was debatable, as the data they were showing looked made up to me.. some of that data eg. the content of SMS I'm pretty sure you'd have to be rooted to get hold of) then say 'see! Any app can be doing that!'.
When I saw it it came across like they'd heard of this (probably been reading el reg :p) and decided to make a story about it, but being unable to find a *real* malicious app on the marketplace, decided to fake it.
Glitch?
I bet the phone *was* there, but the tenant/squatter had hoofed it as soon as he saw the rozzers.
Yeah Apple TV + Plex/XBMC is a better deal right now.
Also, the LT isn't available in the UK (and as far as I can tell there's no ETA - Amazon deleted their listing for it completely so it's not 'soon').
£50 version not available in the UK
The Apple TV or the WDTV Live seem better deals than this (and both are cheaper - it's saying something when you're charging more than apple!).
And since I can't really justify £100 for a Pi in a box (£75 buys you a case and a remote), I'll Pass.
Re release with sane pricing and I'll reconsider.
"However, if the code is not recognized, Internet Explorer will accept it anyway and allow the requester full access to the user for third-party cookie purposes"
If google knew this, so did every other marketing site - and I bet most if not all of them are still doing it.
MS need to fix their bug, not flap around blaming others.
I like spotify, generally
I often stream spotify when in the car and it's fine.. Most of the time I use the higher quality 320kbps one, but that does get choppy out in the countryside (320kbps shouldn't be a challenge over HSDPA - heck, even over ordinary 3G - but mobile phone companies are so inept they've made it so).
I really don't think I could go back to 128k mp3, so pure music is out on those grounds alone for me. 9.99 is on the pricey side for Spotify (doubling the price for mobile clients.. hmm..) but given that it's the only option, without lugging around multi-gigabyte music collections as I used to do, then it'll do.
Re: Kang Grade Mark Eleven?
"But doesn't everybody do it this way?"
Yes. It's so bleeding obvious that I'm surprised the article needed to mention it.
Re: Pascal??
No it's not dead.. it's still used commercially. Modern pascal has modern features - generics, anonymous functions, namespaces, etc. and is far, far from what you probably learned at college.
It's big downside is it's single pass, which makes for some difficult choices as the program architecture gets more complex.
C++ is just different.. not more powerful, and I regularly write code in both where the situation demands it - along with half a dozen other languages. There's no overall best language, really.
More secure?
"electronic wallet remains a good deal more secure than its physical counterpart."
Show me a credit card that can be brute forced in seconds in the comfort of your own home.
Until that hole is fixed, it Google Wallet remains too insecure to be taken seriously IMO.
I wonder how they're going to avoid megaupload-style problems. The others survive because they're somewhat under the radar (no I've no idea how rapidshare gets away with it). Google is huge, and could quickly become the biggest file sharing site in the world..
Losing 4 billion tonnes a year, plus or minus 20 billion tonnes?
Isn't that basically the same as 'we don't know'? Under that degree of accuracy it could be gaining 16 billion tonnes a year..
"seek to build on the partnership approach to prevention that has proved successful in the field of child abuse and child protection"
So... it starts. IWF becomes responsible for 'terrorism', then 'extremism'.
Next it's 'subversive speech', and ultimately 'all speech'.
And all the real criminals learn to use encryption..
ITV definitely exists..it owns 11 of the 15 regional TV broadcasting licenses (and I bet it's going for the others). There are fewer well known brands in the UK. It would be like me trying to release a product called 'Wall-Mart' in the US.
Since all we read is speculation I expect apple have a much more original name.
Those do seem very optimistic
I watch everything that comes on or off in the house, have switched to low energy everything - even PCs, don't watch much TV (which is a huge energy drain) and still can't get the baseline much below 500W, which according to the article puts me higher than average (376W apparently, which I doubt personally because a TV alone can be 200W, and heating pumps are about 150W - that's most of it right there even if you sit in the dark with nothing else plugged in..).
"I'd happily kick back and watch the fireworks with a tub of popcorn."
And deckchairs. Musn't forget the deckchairs.
3D is broadcast at 720x1080i side by side (and basically all 'downloaded' 3D is too) so you're not actually losing anything... but yes it's not full HD in the traditional sense and they shouldn't have said that.
I agree can't stand active 3D - unless you're staring directly at the TV the whole room flickers as then 50hz shutter interacts badly with flourescent lighting that also flickers at 50hz. Having glasses that don't cost 150 quid a pop helps too.
Even then, what 3D? 3D movies are OK for a bit, but few are actually improved by it. TV programmes aren't broadcast in 3D (possibly sport, but I don't watch that). If I were to replace my TV it wouldn't be with another 3D one. Wasted some dosh there.
Interesting advert
Can you mark them in future with 'advertising feature' so I can avoid them?
Thanks el reg
Reminded me to cancel Netflix.. I nearly forgot.
Terrible selection of films, and in the week I've had it I've not found one that I'd actually watch that hasn't already been on TV. They need to up their game a *lot*.
It's also still too pricey
When they're asking £2 - £3 an episode, you might as well subscribe to the full package with either of the incumbents - it'll work out cheaper. In an average week the TV is maybe on here for 5-6 hours a day between us, so let's be really generous and say 5 one hour episodes (most are shorter) at £2. Or, around £280 a month to replace TV with IPTV.
Knock it down to 1/5th of that and we're talking. Of course the ISPs will then put their prices up to cover the increased bandwidth use... so you can't win.
Youview sounds good. Neflix and lovefilm are a joke unless you like movies over 5 years old (and *somebody* tell Netflix that 'Chitty Chitty bang bang' is not scifi!). Blinkbox has so many adverts it's basically unwatchable (When the adverts are so intrusive you can't follow the story any more, what's the point?) .
I'm also looking at Raspberry Pi to help (waiting for a plex client) to improve the WAF on my existing setup (since new TVs are totally out of the question in the current economic climate) enough so I can tell VM where to shove it. When that's gone there's money waiting for an IPTV provider that doesn't suck, when one appears.
Not really seeing the point
Unless you use the same browser at home, at work, on your mobile phone etc. it'll be useless. If you want central password storage things like lastpass work well. There's facebook and twitter authentication, which this is basically competing directly with.
The motivation for accepting a system that's tied to a single browser is what exactly?
Pity it's already dead
The TF700 was announced before the Prime had even launched. Asus botched this one big time.
Only reason to buy this is if you *really* can't wait until April for the fixed version.
"I expect better from the Register."
You must be new here.
I smell blame passing
Since the galaxy nexus works fine for video rental when unlocked (not that I've tried.. paying more than blockbuster prices for a video on a 4 inch screen doesn't appeal). If google were that bothered you'd think they'd have done it first on their own device.
Also, you can't simply void the *entire* warranty because someone installed new software. Of course it's entirely reasonable to say if you install a 3rd party ROM and a software fault develops, tough. If the volume button falls off, then they'd have a tough time saying you caused it.
Asus have always locked the bootloader
The original transormer had one from release.. it's just that the key was leaked soon after they changed it someone had worked out another way to root (Razorclaw).
That's now been plugged, so you can't root the latest firmware.. and it's the reason I won't buy another Asus tablet. On the original TF, for example, you have to root it to enable wifi channel 12, which just happens to be where the office wifi is, making the stock TF unusable for me. That and proprietary cables, inability to charge off USB (so can't be charged in the car), etc.
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