Road & Track drove the Golf TDI and Jetta over the same roads and in every kind of driving, the Prius was more efficient.

The Prius weighs 3042 lbs. The Golf TDI 4-door weighs 2994 lbs, all of 46 pounds less.

The 2.0 TDI is a fine engine, but an Atkinson-cycle gas engine mated to motor-generators through Toyota's e-CVT is a fundamentally better design. The European Blu*blah diesels that actually do match Prius' mpg are lower powered and have stop-start and brake regen, i.e. they're micro-hybrids.

Microsoft, like every hopeful in the tablet space and many other desktop environments, is encouraging developers to write apps using HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript. That does not make Windows 8 a browser-based O.S. like ChromeOS, you don't know what you're talking about. There's still a distinct I.E. browser app that you start from Metro. What you say is as ridiculous as claiming you it makes no sense to run other browsers in Gnome 3, or Plasma Active, or any other desktop that's allowing or encouraging JavaScript widgets and extensions.

Mozilla already has preliminary builds of Firefox running as a Windows 8 Metro application, you can follow along with the developers as they integrate it with Windows 8 Metro's tiles and charm/contracts for sharing and searching. The issue is

However, Windows on ARM prohibits any browser except for Internet Explorer from running in the privileged “Windows Classic” environment. In practice, this means that only Internet Explorer will be able to perform many of the advanced computing functions vital to modern browsers in terms of speed, stability, and security to which users have grown accustomed

Sounds great, pop one or two add-on batteries in the trunk for a long drive. But
* how do you mount a heavy battery safely in the trunk?
* how do you monitor it for electrical and thermal runaway?
* how do you cool it?
* how does you safely cable it to safely supply 40 kW (80 amps at 500 V)?
* what happens to all this in a collision?

These are all merely engineering problems, but they're non-trivial.

And to go the extra 60 miles, you're looking at 200 pounds-plus of batteries even with next-gen battery tech. (The Leaf's 648 lb battery pack sends it 73 miles.) So someone has to carry five 40-pound sheets back and forth at the Amp'n'Go station. It'll be a great job for underemployed weight builders.

Australia is a fantasy, Better Place got an agreement that if Holden makes an electric vehicle then it may be compatible with their swappable battery design. It's as meaningless as their deal with Chery. Better Place had a swap station demonstration in "Gladsaxe" in Denmark last year, but I can't find it on Google Street View, and I don't believe a Dane can sign up for BP right now. Much like the hydrogen vehicle future, "roll-out" means "planning something," not "the first lucky owners are driving away in one."

I'm with you on the dubiousness of battery swapping[**], but
Once we have 200-mile battery packs (really only 5-10 years away)
Surely you know the Tesla Roadster has 245 mile range according to the EPA. And coming in July:
"Three battery options are offered: 160-, 230-, or 300-mile range. Model S comes standard with the 160-mile range battery at the quoted $49,900 base price (after the $7,500 Federal Tax Credit)."

[**] I like the idea of dropping in a few extra battery slices/sheets in the trunk for a long trip, sort of like clipping a bigger battery onto your iPhoPablet. But at 40 pounds each and with a host of electrical, mechanical, and thermal safety issues, I don't see that happening either.

I agree with your standards war analysis. SAE had a "bake-off" between the Frankenplug and CHAdeMO for fast DC charging, but the standards process was dominated by companies that don't have a pure EV for sale. They have every incentive to pick a slightly better standard in defiance of the only DC fast charge system shipping in cars you can buy and charging stations on the ground (1154 in Japan, 207 in Europe, and 34 elsewhere according to http://chademo.com/).

The significance of this announcement is that the Europeans have gone for it. The existing SAE J1772 AC charging standard (up to 19 kW) benefited USA and Japan but didn't support Europe where much higher power three-phase 400V AC charging is simple thanks to its 240V supply; so the Europeans were off proposing the Mennekes plug for up to 43 kW.

Many companies announced CHAdeMO charging stations in the hope of making big $$$, I think all were blindsided by the relatively cheap charger Nissan introduced that they say they'll put in all their dealers. The best hope is that they all offer a charging station with two plugs during the transition.

The "best" plug is the Tesla SuperCharger (scroll down for a pic), slim, elegant, reuses the same pins for DC and AC, also goes to 90 kW. But it never had a serious chance at standardization.

Sure, Better Place raised all that money and Shai Agassi is everywhere saying how great it is.

But look at actual results.

*There is only one car in the world that supports the QuickDrop approach, the Renault Fluence Z.E. Despite all the PR and spin, no one else has an EV even planned for production using it. As others have pointed out, technology has advanced, so BP will have to offer a second pack for any second model, greatly increasing their costs.
* BP is only up and running in Israel and maybe Denmark. And I think they have only built one battery swap station in Israel, because a single swap station and a supply of batteries costs millions. (BP loves to conflate charging stations and swap stations, as when they claimed a Chinese utility was going to install thousands of the latter, or when they filmed some guys sticking an AC socket on a post.)
* Because of the cost of the stations and maintaining spare batteries, BP's approach can only increase the cost of operating an electric car. Their mantra "we sell you battery charge" means you have to pay them to recharge at home, where it's ordinarily cheapest and where most drivers do charging.

Better Place's value proposition is that with 5-minute battery swap range anxiety goes anywhere. It's great for a small country if and when BP can actually put in the swap stations required to cover it. It's an intriguing idea for city dwellers without a parking space with a (low-cost AC) charging station. But in the real world it isn't happening.

A bigger battery pack can usually charge at higher power than a smaller one. Sure enough the Tesla Roadster with its monster 52 kWh pack has a 16 kW AC charger, by far the most powerful of any electric car. It came out before the SAE J1772 AC charging standard was adopted in 2009, so Tesla developed its own connector; You can buy an expensive adapter cable for it to use at the thousands of public AC charging stations. The Roadster doesn't support even higher-power DC fast charging.

This new standard has a Frankenplug that adds two fat pins for DC power to the existing 5 pins (RTFA for a picture). But Tesla didn't go for it. They developed their own compact plug that supports both AC and DC fast charging (scroll down for a picture) with fewer pins. Using it a Model S with the biggest battery option can recharge at 90 kW (the same maximum power as this new standard) from a Tesla-specific "SuperCharger", and Elon Musk has talked about setting up networks of SuperChargers along major highways.. But I don't think Tesla ever seriously proposed it as a standard, SAE was always only going to choose between the Japanese CHAdeMO plug on the Nissan Leaf and this Frankenplug. I hope Tesla develops an adapter for the DC fast charge that succeeds.

http://wiki.merproject.org/ presents the Mer project as a "Core optimised for HTML5/QML/JS, providing a mobile-optimised base distribution for use by device manufacturers ... aims to share effort and code together with the Tizen project once Tizen tools and code are publicly available. ... We have some clear goals: ...To be inclusive of technologies (such as MeeGo/Tizen/Qt/EFL/HTML5)"

Sounds great. All these minor platforms share so many open source building blocks that isolating themselves based on a toolkit choice is silly.

Your strategy didn't move many units for Openmoko, Neo FreeRunner, N900, etc. Why will it start working now? The Vivaldi tablet running KDE Plasma Active is supposedly shipping soon, did you order one?

People's expectation for a phone/tablet have gone up. They expect a consistent touch UI which is only now starting to appear in Linux toolkits and will take a while to come to native Linux apps. They expect maps and navigation, calendar & contacts sync, device sync, an app store, which all require hefty investments in online infrastructure, or Google to provide it for your platform. It's daunting to compete, HP and Nokia decided they couldn't.

The only realistic hope of > 1% market share for "old-school" (not-Android) Linux on phones and tablets is if most apps are written in HTML5 as Tizen encourages. Then the platform matters less, and people can switch, the same way a desktop user surfing Facebook and Gmail plus doing some light document creation can switch to a Linux distro. Yet I mostly see old-school Linux users belittling HTML5 and insisting web apps will never happen. Fair enough; so long as enough developers are motivated to work on projects like Mer then users will be able to install Meego/Maemo/Plasma Active/Tizen on their phones and tablets, just like the few who install Linux on their desktops. But very very few will do so.

Developers write native code apps when the platform's market share makes it worthwhile, which is why every device without market share (except Linux distros!) is singing the same "take your HTML5 codebase, if you need them here are JavaScript APIs to our platform features that aren't yet W3C/WAC standards, now package it for our platform store" tune. And many Android and iOS apps are just a thin wrapper around a web view.

That you can write unimpressive widgets in HTML doesn't mean that you can't write feature-rich programs in HTML5; GMail and Google Docs and the other web office suites don't seem like "basic demos that lack real capability" and they're fast enough for me. That open web apps have yet to take off (while we spend much of our waking lives surfing web sites using the same client-side technology) doesn't mean they won't; the underpinnings for them have only appeared in browsers in the last year or so. I run Kubuntu 12.04; what are the KDE/Qt programs with features definitely beyond what an HTML5 app could do?

The Tizen IDE is based on Eclipse, thus requires Java; the Tizen architecture doesn't include Java. A lot of IDEs and SDKs are built on Eclipse regardless of whether the target platform runs Java.

Also "Tizen Web applications may be developed without relying on an official Tizen IDE, as long as the application complies with Tizen packaging rules."

If I'm willing to write in HTML5, I'd just make a web-app that works anywhere, not Tizen-specific.
Which is what Tizen tells developers to do:

Create the application by using standard web technologies, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Device APIs such as Tizen.

A Tizen app is just HTML, CSS, JS, and an XML "widget configuration file".

There are way more developers who know JavaScript than any other language... it seems the HTML5 equivalents of Gimp, Inkscape, OpenOffice, ssh, VLC that will run on any device in any recent browser are just a matter of time. I worry that developers will write them, but present them within a "Join our social {picture editing/music editing/code writing} site to share and chat" instead of making the changes so I can run them offline from local storage.

The Tizen SDK includes a QEMU emulator to run its ARM binaries. I don't know if anyone has tried rebuilding the software stack for x86, it should be doable. But they're telling developers to write HTML5 apps so for them the platform's architecture shouldn't matter.

I hope Mer can simply package Tizen as another product built on top of the Mer core, like Plasma Active and Cordia

The H summary is good. Tizen is straight-up GNU/Linux and X11, more or less standard packages but with the EFL libraries that Samsung likes. So it should be nice for hackers porting Linux programs. Tizen's message for developers is write HTML5 apps. Note that the message from webOS, Playbook, BBX, Windows 8 — everyone but iOS and Android — is also "write HTML5 apps". See a pattern here? (Yet Linux desktops continue to promote native development with GTK/Qt.)

Mozilla's Boot 2 Gecko is also "write HTML5 apps", but the phone's own software is also written in HTML5. It shows a commitment to the same code and development tools you're telling developers to use. And only Mozilla seems committed to open Web apps you can install from any web site or from independent app stores; the other platforms seem to be "write your app in HTML5... and then package it for our platform and offer it in our store." B2G's current stack is different from Tizen, it's being developed on Android kernel and runtime. In theory as the Web APIs get standardized the difference won't matter for HTML5 app writers.

Simulator: A new browser-based tool that supports the Tizen APIs and allows you to run and debug your web applications, and simulate running applications with various device profiles.

If that's really the case you would think somewhere there's a web site you can browse to run it, but like Tizen 1.0 screenshots I can't find it. You can run B2G's "Gaia" UI in your browser with lots of caveats (probably requires a Gecko browser like Firefox Aurora, your PC lacks many APIs), see an early demo at http://paulrouget.com/e/b2gdemo/