Sporkers Helping Sporkers

Nokia is kind of screwed at this point. There are too many technical limitations in Windows Phone 7.5 to allow them to really compete with high-end iOS or Android devices.

It doesn't support multiple CPU cores.
It only supports a single screen resolution (800x480).
It doesn't support expandable storage which is obviously true of iOS as well but Windows Phone is currently limited to a maximum of 16GB on-board storage.

These issues are rumored to be fixed by Windows Phone 8 but nobody knows exactly when that will be released.

Several of my other gripes could be addressed by Windows Phone 8 as well but there are doubts as to whether existing devices will even be able to upgrade to the new OS when it comes out.

I hope Windows Phone makes it as well. It has a lot going for it.

I am also hoping that WebOS thrives in its new life as an Open Source project. If the dev community approaches it with the same enthusiasm given to Android, it could be an amazing platform. In fact, if RIM wants to survive, their best bet might be to embrace WebOS themselves.

When the question is phrased, "will Nokia survive", the answer is: of course, for the foreseeable future. They may not survive in YOUR market, or with YOU as a buyer, but for a huge part of the world where feature phones are all that are a) available b) supportable with existing infrastructure c) more than sufficient for the population (think rural and developing areas where people share phones and one person in a village is literate enough to SMS), Nokia has huge presence, sales, marketing partnerships, and the customized models that some localities need.

We discovered this exactly this as a side finding last summer at HIIT, when we were doing some ethnography on how people share information and get online in Kenya. If you moved half the population to smartphones, you'd get a lot of confused and frustrated users, and swamp the existing bandwidth to the point that nobody'd be able to send a text.

(ETA: This is not to say they're not gonna be in a world of hurt, earnings and projections will crash, and heads will roll.)

ddt



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/12/2012 12:14PM by ddt.

Being king of a low-margin, shrinking market is a dubious honor.

...shared by many many companies that are now "retro"

I've been tinkering with getting Bluetooth working on my Asterisk server. I'm having a problem, though, and I wanted to be sure that it wasn't the phone so I swapped my SIM back into my Android phone for the first time since March 24th.

Yikes. It really reinforced a lot of the positive things I've been noticing on Windows Phone.

The Bluetooth test had the same result so I swapped the SIM back into my Windows Phone for now. I still have at least another week left of my planned test period.

What's the current recommendation for an inexpensive SSD for a MBP 13-inch Early 2011? Would I also need to buy a sled or whatever it's called?

Tom's got me paranoid about my current hard drive's health... though I am pinching pennies.

ddt

Pinching? I bought the Seagate Momentus XT (Hybrid) 750 GB drive. Seems good. http://tinyurl.com/cdggcab

Interesting -- I hadn't know about hybrid drives. Though BareFeats isn't too keen on this model as far as speed: http://www.barefeats.com/mbps02.html

ddt

OCZ is fast and usually has some rebate going somewhere. Check Dealmac. Keep in mind the tiers of speed that affect price. I got 3Gb since my MBP can't handle more anyway, but the latest do 6Gb/s. Speed increase may not be noticeable unless you're moving big files around.

Thanks -- yeah, my MBP could handle 6Gb (I checked), but not sure I'd notice it.

And SmartReporter and Dick Utility both say my HD's SMART status is fine, so maybe I'll keep looking for OS/file solutions, Removed Little Snitch and MenuMeters and will check on other hygiene best practices.

ddt

Any way to change the default search engine for iPad Safari?

Preferences->Safari->Search Engine

You can choose Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Ah, yep. Just found that.

Not wild about the "kiosk mode" design philosophy of iOS. Sincerely hope it doesn't (further) creep into OS X...

Welp, put on my big boy pants and Carbon Copy Cloned my laptop's drive, and installed the new (750GB MomentusXT 7200rpm) drive. And it worked!

Though now I can see why Apple specs 5400rpm drives -- this thing is noticeably noisier.

ddt

Awesome!

Hopefully the hybrid fixes all of your stalling.

Personally, I doubt there is a spinning boot/apps disk in my future ever again.

People on the Mac Ach talk about putting things like their iTunes library and ~Library on the SSD part of a hybrid drive, but having trouble finding how one goes about that. Disk Utility and CCC, etc., show this as just a regular hard drive.

ddt

Quote

Personally, I doubt there is a spinning boot/apps disk in my future ever again

Does it matter whether it's the boot disk or not when you have numerous external USB drives attached (5 GB and counting in my case...)

Would I still have spinning beachball of death (from now on abbreviated to SBBOD for all perpetuity ... a bit like SBBOD) with the SSD if I have those USB drives attached?

ddt:
I don't know anything about independently using the SSD part of a hybrid drive. I didn't even know it was possible. My understanding of hybrid drives is that the SSD is used like a massive cache for the spinning disk. It's still not as fast as main memory - the SSD can only pump out data as fast as the interface, which is either 3Gbit or 6Gbit these days.

In my case, I have an actual 256GB SSD as my boot and apps drive, as well as the majority of my user folder. Big things, though, like my Music, Pictures and Movies user folders are aliases to a similar directory structure on my 1TB spinning disk.

If I need to work on some huge image, I can copy that to the SSD, and work on it from there temporarily.

Tony:
If you keep the transient user data on slow interfaces, you should be OK.

I still see beachballs occasionally in programs which are attempting to get data from an extremely slow interface, like the Internet. Or, sometimes, an app will beachball when it tries to reach out to a network share that doesn't resolve. The beachball usually lasts until the network resolver times out.

Thanks, Tom. I see -- these people might have been the ones with dual drives in their laptops, which would make that easier.

ddt

Hey Tom, you remember the trick you did here with the 91% rubbing alcohol:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1LCuU2MZ4M

Would that work with a MacBook Pro which has has a glass of wine spilt on it?

(I assume remove the battery & hard drive first? - the battery cant be removed from the MBA, can it?)

Tips appreciated!

PS This is my mother who did this, not me...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/07/2012 03:56PM by Tony Leggett.