Quite possibly iOS 10 is playing a big part here - but given that's the only flavor of iOS you can (currently) run on an iPhone 7 you can't really separate the two. I suppose it does present the vague hope that the might improve it in future releases but buying a top-line piece of kit on the basis that they *might* improve the battery life - something that is quite fundamental in a device whose primary use case is on battery power is a pretty big gamble. It's amazing how little effort manufacturers seem to expend on battery life given how often it seems to crop up as a complaint for people.There is a reasonable case to be made that battery life on smartphones only really needs to make it to the 24 hour mark as for the vast majority of users charging overnight is no real hassle and has become the norm so working to extend any life much past that is diminishing returns in terms of what the user will care about. But when reviews (and users) are seeing real-world usage of ~14 hrs then someone has dropped the ball somewhere, especially since the battery's fundamental nature means it's performance is going to get worse over the life of the device.

Aside from the Telegraph's rather over-simplified and clickbait-ey headline I really can't see anything wrong with what Microsoft are doing here to be honest, they've done some pretty shitty things over the years but this isn't one of them. As for the argument that they should just fund cancer research instead I think the posters saying that don't really understand what this research team is - it isn't them taking a bunch of spare coders and getting them to have a crack at it FFS. A quick glance at the info on some of the team members mentioned in TFA will show that this what they "do".

All the massive tech companies have their fringe R&D depts that are looking at something completely outside their "normal" niche. Google and (maybe, sorta, won't-say-one-way-or-the-other) Apple are building driverless cars, and here Microsoft are aiming for improvements in cancer detection and treatment. I know which I think is better. Now I'm sure that as a commercial business MS will be looking to monetize any of the detection/treatment solutions they may produce and I don't have a problem with that in the same way that I don't begrudge Siemens for monetizing their MRI scanners.

Will this work "solve" cancer in 10 years? Will it fuck.Looks like it stands a decent chance of improving quality of life and possibly survival rates for people being treated for it though and what's not to like about that?

So.... security by obscurity? :)

It's not a popular opinion on here (where you can't even mention the M-word in a remotely positive light without someone screaming "shill!!") but I'm in broad agreement with your points. I updated my three eligible machines at home to W10 some time ago. Started at launch with my guinea pig laptop that was running 8.1 and it quickly became apparent that even though there was a distinct whiff of "Beta" about the whole thing it was shitloads better than 8.1, so a few months later I upgraded the other two from Win 7 and to be honest I've not really had any problems. The actual upgrade process was less of a headache than installing El Capitan on the iMac was as well!.

There's still some god-awful franken-OS traits such as the whole settings/control panel divide but for day to day use it just does the job. All three of my machines are on the elderly side with the most powerful being an earth-shatteringly powerful Core 2 Duo (WOOO!) and they all seem just as quick, possibly quicker than they did under 7 so that's a win. The UI changes took some getting used to and it certainly needs work in some areas but it's far better than 8 was and it's similar enough to 7 that swapping between my work machine running 7 and my home machines running 10 doesn't feel massively jarring.

Stability-wise it seems similar if not better than Win7 as well, I might have been extremely lucky but across all three machines I have running W10 I think I've only had things crap out to the point of needing a reboot maybe twice.My iMac has managed similar in the same timeframe to be honest.

I'm aware of all the telemetry stuff that comes along with it but I honestly can't work myself up into a tiz about it. From what I can see unless you've got the telemetry level jacked all the way up to 11 it collects pretty much the square root of fuck all personal data anyway. Sure it might collect more than it says it does but the same could be said for Apple who, by default at least, do very similar data collection in OSX. I'd say there's a pretty simple rule of thumb to these things that if having read the privacy policy you either a) don't like what it says or b) don't trust what it says then don't use it. Most of the big commercial tech outfits these days offer products/services with at least part of the cost of that being data about the users that they hope to monetize in one way or another and like any other price if you don't want to pay it you don't use the service.

I don't know for sure how much detail about what I do on my W10 boxes could be pieced together from the telemetry but to be honest (and it might be an indicator of how boring my life is) even if I assume that it's basically "everything" then I'm still struggling to care. I don't do anything on any of the machines that I'd worry about MS, GCHQ, or even the NSA knowing about. If they really want to trawl through my browsing history to see what car I'm day dreaming about buying next, how many hours I've spent playing MTGO or what dirty takeaways I've ordered this week more power to them. Sure I'll probably get targeted ads paraded in front of me but that's exactly the outcome of me using Amazon or Google anyway, it's nothing new.

Agreed that Edge lacks that "finished" feeling - the mobile version on W10M is pretty good (certainly better than the mobile IE it replace) but the desktop version just doesn't feel ready. The impression is much more of a pretty good beta version than a finished product. Suffice it to say on my W10 boxes at home I use Chrome instead.

Another happy Windows Phone user here.. I have devices on Android, iOS and WinPhone (in fact as I type this I have an iPhone in my left jacket pocket and a Lumia 950 in my right), and while it's far from perfect (some of the changes they made between 8.1 and 10 are utterly nonsensical, and at least a couple of times a week Edge decides it's just not going to load anything and you have to close and re-open it) WinPhone is the only one I don't find frustrating to use day-to-day. It certainly hasn't been what you'd call a massive sales success but there are a few of us who really like it. The list of things I want my phone to do is pretty short - calls/texts, camera, sat nav, kindle, audible, and some light web browsing. My Lumia does all of these at least as well, if not better in some cases then the various iOS/Android devices I own or have used, obviously if you're someone who has an app for everything or is big into mobile gaming then you'll probably find it frustratingly lacking but I'm neither of those so I'm all good :)

I have every sympathy for the guy who got wiped out in the crash - he's facing up to what may well be lifelong impairments and I can see why the family might be looking for money because care etc for those sort of injuries is not cheap.

But I hope they lose the suit against Snapchat because they aren't responsible here - is the filter a bit of a stupid idea? Certainly. Is it aimed at people who traveling in cars or other vehicles at high speed? Sounds like it. But that doesn't make them responsible for what happened, this girl is someone who is supposedly responsible enough to drive, and she is the one who made the decision that driving at 100+ while dicking around on Snapchat was a good idea (Oh and with a pregnant woman in the car as well). Honestly she sounds like someone who shouldn't be trusted to be driving a pedal car!

While I think the figure would have to be more like 20% at least for me to really make use of it I don't think there is much wrong with the core concept. Buying games digitally is bloody convenient but it is a little off-putting when you pay the same as you would for the physical copy (if not more!) but have no chance to reclaim anything on it if you hate the game or just burn through it pretty quickly. It certainly raises my threshold for an impulse purchase game, which is a shame since impulse purchases are the IMHO the best target for digital buys. Knowing that I could recycle at least part of that cost into another game would make me more likely to give something I'm not fully sold on a try.

Some kind of open marketplace for digital copies wouldn't really work as a business model really - since a "second hand" copy would be identical to a new one there would just be a massive reduction in sales of "new" copies. What I think could work would be some sort of loan system where you could lend a game to a friend for a week, this would be relatively easy to police and may well result in increased sales as if the person borrowing the game likes it enough they may well buy their own copy.

The Halo example isn't really comparable - yes it was a new IP on a new platform and it did a great job of getting it's platform sold but the difference is that the XBOX was at least in people's mind as a gaming platform even if they weren't inclined to buy it before. Linux is not viewed as that and I can't see something like Steam OS changing that without a massive marketing push - which often means a big exclusive to showcase it and that brings me to the next problem which is that Steam is already spread across various platforms and I just can't see someone, even Valve developing a AAA exclusive game for it. Games of that calibre are just too damn expensive to develop to risk it sinking without a trace because of the platform. It's a different story for someone like Microsoft or Sony to entice exclusives because they are massive corporations with huge amounts of money to throw at it, even so it seems to be going the way that "true" exclusives are getting rarer and I might be wrong but it seems to me that many of those tend to either be developed by a studio they own or a smaller house that they take under their wing.

An existing, hugely popular IP would maybe have a good shot at raising the profile of the platform but why take such a risk with something that would be massively profitable if published in it's normal channels? A timed exclusive is unlikely to generate too much interest since people will just wait unless the period is on the long side and then the potential customers will just get resentful instead.

And the always have been IMHO - when ever there is a platform with a majority market share then the de facto standard is always going to be whatever that platform supports.Back when IE had overwhelming market share in the desktop people could cry all they like about how their code was "standards compliant" but if it didn't work for the vast majority of visitors then it was essentially broken and the devs were just wasting their time. Other browser vendors can either support what the majority holder is doing or accept that some sites won't work quite right and I don't see that has changed in anyway - just because it's the other way around now doesn't alter anything.

I'm really not a fan of ISPs doing mass data retention but I'm not sure that going around endangering customers privacy is the best way of getting ISPs to respect people's privacy.

The problem really is that Anonymous only really has two tools at it's disposal for dealing with people and organisations they don't like - data grab 'n' release and DoS. And you know what they say about when the only thing you've got is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail...

"I don't get all the people rushing to hack these to run Android, quite frankly? webOS is far more enjoyable to work with for a tablet than any of the Android tablets I've seen. Android feels like it was "made for a phone, but shoehorned onto a tablet"."

I couldn't agree more... I bought mine for relatively cheap during the firesale with the thought that I'd probably just stick Android on it and it would be a cheap way to get better hardware than most of the cheap 'droid slabs that are kicking around, a few days into using WebOS though that idea just dissolved - it's so much slicker than and Android tablet I'd ever used before and I find that it suits my way of thinking much better than iOS as well. The lack of apps hasn't been a problem for me as so far it's only taken one WebOS update and three 3rd-party apps for me to get all the functionality I need.

WebOS certainly isn't perfect and neither is the hardware but then nothing is and since it's managed to go from an impulse buy to an essential daily device for me I'd say I can't really complain.

Something tells me that if HP announced that they weren't going to open source WebOS and instead were going to kill it for example there would be much wailing and nashing of teeth on Slashdot crying "Why don't they just open source it?"

Some people just like complaining.

Maybe because some of us just want to Get The Job Done(TM) and couldn't give two shits about all the political bollocks

I didn't say anything about whether the hate was justifiable or not - in fact I didn't express an opinion of the quality of any browser. But don't let what I actually wrote have any bearing on your frothy-mouthed ranting :)