Monthly Archive:: February 2015

‘Dell is back with an ultra-thin tablet – with Intel inside’

Thom Holwerda 2015-02-03 Intel 28 Comments

AndroidCentral reviews some Dell Android tablet, and concludes:

There's a lot to like in the Dell Venue 8 7840 tablet. The name is not one of those things. The display, however, most definitely is. Resolution quirks aside, Dell's got a gorgeous panel in this tablet. And the Intel Atom processor seems like it's pushing everything just as you'd expect a high-spec'd tablet to do. Battery life is pretty much on par with what we'd expect. And while on-board storage is close to shameful, Dell makes up for it with allowing for a massive amount of removable storage.

I'm not interested in the tablet itself, but in its processor. I find it remarkable that Intel has reached a point where it can power mobile devices with comparable performance and battery life... But with x86-64, not ARM. Intel isn't new to mobile, of course - I have countless Xscale-powered PDAs - but that was ARM, not x86(-64).

We're reaching a point where we have a standard architecture running from small phones all the way up to supercomputers. Remarkable.

Icaros Desktop 2.0.3 released

Thom Holwerda 2015-02-02 Amiga & AROS 5 Comments

Icaros Desktop is a distribution - if you will - of AROS. Its latest version was released over the weekend.

Once again, system files have been brought to Jan 6 nightly build (with all the fixes introduced by Deadwood in AROS ABIv0), including changes to workbench themeing system and locale library. We've now fixed localization (which stopped working with update 2.0.2) and themes, whose structure has changed a little in the meanwhile (the 'revert' image that was originally included in a subdirectory, has been moved to its parent directory and renamed to 'DirUp', and this for every given theme in the distribution). Update 2.0.3 now reflects these changes and themes work again as expected. This means that Wanderer's "Parent" (or "go back", or "dir up" as you wish to call it) button is now working again, not only on X86 but even on 68K Wanderer, where it disappeared since v2.0.0.

Apple Watch. Tesla car. How far can we drive them?

Thom Holwerda 2015-02-02 Apple 32 Comments

ELEKS decided to build a 3rd party Tesla application for the Apple Watch.

So, from the development perspective, Apple Watch is currently a quite limited device with a weak potential for programmers. No, hold on. Perhaps this statement isn't entirely correct, since the smart watch isn't selling yet and we can only make our assumptions based on the SDK that is in its first Beta stage. As a result, we get rather mixed feelings from the smart watch. On the one hand - everything is beautiful, new and interesting, and on the other - the stripped-down functionality makes it impossible to develop beautifully designed really functional apps right now.

Watch the video of the application in action.

"Let me unlock my car by fiddling with the homescreen on my watch' tiny, stamp-sized screen, looking for the Tesla app, pressing and holding on one of the arbitrary screens of the application and pressing the tiny unlock button."

Meanwhile, any sane person is already halfway home.

As my general attitude towards the Apple Watch as well as my very negative review of Android Wear/the Moto 360 make clear, I just don't see any benefit in the way Android Wear/Apple Watch currently implement the concept of a smartwatch. It's just way too much fiddly and cumbersome computer on a far too tiny display on devices that require far too much charging.

How long will it take for you to stop using that fiddly and time-consuming Tesla unlock process on your watch and just get out your keys/use keyless entry instead? Once the initial novelty wore off, my Moto 360 ended up in my device drawer within a matter of days. I don't see myself using it again, and so far, I've seen nothing to indicate the Apple Watch will be any different (for me! Your mileage may vary! This is an opinion! Yours may be different! Deal with it!).

Submitted by Kroc 2015-02-02 Hardware 51 Comments

The new Pi sounds like a beast.

Let's get the good stuff out of the way above the fold. Raspberry Pi 2 is now on sale for $35 (the same price as the existing Model B+), featuring:

A 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU (~6x performance)
1GB LPDDR2 SDRAM (2x memory)
Complete compatibility with Raspberry Pi 1

Because it has an ARMv7 processor, it can run the full range of ARM GNU/Linux distributions, including Snappy Ubuntu Core, as well as Microsoft Windows 10.

That's not all. Microsoft has announced a free version of Windows 10 for IoT for the new Pi.

HTC: ‘an update on our Lollipop rollout’

Thom Holwerda 2015-02-01 Android 22 Comments

In the spirit of continued transparency, I wanted to share a quick update on where we're at with our Android Lollipop rollout process. We've been working hard in the labs with Google and our carrier partners ever since the code release and are making great progress so far, but if you've been following the progress of this rollout you will know that Google has had to address several issues with this release. We've been diligently working to fix some of them on our end and incorporating Google's fixes as quickly as possible, but despite everyone's best efforts some carrier versions of the HTC One (M8) and HTC One (M7) will not meet our 90 day goal, which is February 1st. While we are committed to delivering within this time period, we are even more committed to ensuring these updates result in an even better experience with your device because that is what the updates are intended to do.

I applaud HTC for doing everything it can to reach its own 90 day promise, and it really sucks for them and their customers that bugs from Google itself causes delays. Android updates remain an utter and total mess, and by far Android's biggest weakness.