If there's one thing I miss in the current smartphone industry, it's design. Honest to good, real design. We basically see one boring slab after another, void of any true identity, whether it's iPhone, Samsung, or any of the others. In this boring world of grey, black, and the occasional white, Nokia is the jester, coming up with its own unique designs and crazy colour selection. Today, the company unveiled the Lumia 920 and 820 to continue this trend.
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Member since:2011-02-11
Wow, didn't know you could connect a pc to a lumia phone with wifi. How do you do that?
And again: I'm not suggesting that average people would know or care, I'm just having a hard time understanding how someone rooting for haiku and risc os while mourning the fate of beos still have only praises for this thing that deliberately makes it even more difficult to use anything other than mainstream os'es.
And about average people, just an example: Every classroom in my childrens school has a pc and some kind of "interactive whiteboard" with a projector and bluetooth connected pens, which is very frequently used. When one of the teachers has bought a "new nokia" and for the first time tries to copy off some pictures from the last school trip to show on the whiteboard, it won't work **** ONLY because microsoft decided that it MUST NOT work *****
The computers are running linux, as is every computer in the whole school district. As are the computers in the libraries. This is real, and happening, and microsoft is fighting it every way they can, as always. Still it might go the way of beos, only because people doesn't care.
Member since:2011-05-12
I don't know, but I didn't say that. What I meant is that connecting your phone to other devices/services is done using wireless technology these days. You don't need to transfer pictures to your computer to upload them to Facebook, you don't need to synchronize your address book via a wire with your computer. You don't even need a wire anymore to charge or connect a headset.
The teacher bought the wrong phone, but then he or she still could have put the pictures on-line. I'm not sure the IT department would like personnel filling up hard drives with pictures and other stuff.
If millions of people start using Linux then Nokia will put in the effort. Right now it makes no business sense to get all the hassle those hundreds of different Linux distributions give you for the VERY small percentage of Linux users that would/could buy a Lumia.
For a Linux user an Android phone would be a more logical choice.
Member since:2009-07-28
Member since:2009-05-19
If you're a Windows user, which most people are, what's wrong with buying a phone that works with Windows?
Should you switch to Linux the worst that can happen is that you can't hook up your phone to it, but who does that anyway these days? It's all WiFi, Bluetooth and cloud stuff now.
You might have missed the crucial modifier to his statement - "as an os-geek"
Member since:2011-05-12
The os-geek pas part of an statement regarding Thom's public endorsement of the new Lumia.
I don't think his personal characteristics (should) have any influence of the population targeted by Nokia. They target the average customer, like most companies do because this is the largest group of people. The average customer uses Windows.
Issues of open standards/protocols aren't high if at all on the average consumer's list (even if they should be). If it works it works, if it doesn't it's crap.
Relative few people use Linux, most have put some thought in to why they want to Linux. I assume they'll also put in this same amount of planning when selecting a phone and most will probably go for a Linux based Android phone and not a WP7/8 Nokia one.
Member since:2009-07-15
What phones Don't work with Windows BTW?
And just because these phone run Windows doesn't make them flexible like PCs that run windows. On any PC you buy today you have the freedom to put an alternative OS on it. We should demand the same of our phones, it's our hardware after all.
Member since:2007-03-06
The current trend seems to be restricting what you can run on hardware that used to be open, not giving you more freedom on devices that are currently locked down.
At some point you'll probably have to "jailbreak" your PC to install an alternative OS.
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Member since:
2011-05-12
Phones don't lock out people, people do.
If you're a Windows user, which most people are, what's wrong with buying a phone that works with Windows?
Should you switch to Linux the worst that can happen is that you can't hook up your phone to it, but who does that anyway these days? It's all WiFi, Bluetooth and cloud stuff now.