There's really no reason to buy a Nook now that there are better tablets at the same pricepoint and comparable ones for less. A lot has changed in two year's time.

They're using an OMAP SOC for the explorer editions. TI stopped development and is phasing out manufacturing of mobile chips. For Google to deliver the millions of Glass devices that they anticipate, they must find another hardware solution. That's a pretty good indication that the current hardware isn't final. The 4430 is overkill anyway, and a more purpose-designed SOC should be more cost-effective and yield improved battery life.

The problem with these patent agreements with Microsoft is that the details are kept confidential. No one but Microsoft knows what the patents cover, the conditions or fees, and which patents Microsoft is licensing in return--which is more likely to be the case. Microsoft releases these puerile press releases announcing something that probably happens in the business world on a daily basis, yet only they feel the need to do this. I have my doubts that these agreements are as one-sided as Microsoft brags, especially since ZTE is a telecommunications giant in China.

My transformer came with Polaris and I also own Quickoffice. They're both pretty good for document compatibility, but the interfaces take a little getting used to. That's the main gripe I have. However, with the tablet is docked in the keyboard, it's much more intuitive--like running an office suite on a laptop.

It may not be the most elegant solution, but hosting your own Mumble server works pretty well for secure private IM and voice chat. There's a really slick Android client called Plumble, and I believe iOS has a basic one as well. The built-in authentication and encryption is sufficient, and the newer builds support the OPUS codec.

Isn't this more of a problem of enforcing device security policies? If the data is encrypted, does it really matter if the device is locked by PIN, pattern, fingerprint, facial recognition, or some other mechanism?

I think there's a bigger picture here that most people don't consider. Internet sales, except for digital downloads, require shipping...and that's not free. I might be wrong, but I imagine that some portion of these shipping costs that everyone pays find their way back to the states in different forms such as road tolls, airport fees, income taxes of employees and so forth. In fact, I'd wager that the USPS would be in far worse shape if shipment of online goods hadn't filled the hole that email has caused. Again, I could be wrong, but I don't think that the states are being screwed like they claim they are, money is just coming to them in a different form. It will be interesting to see what effect this will have on our economy--will consumer confidence fall? For states like CT with huge budget deficits, will increased taxation of consumers take the place of making cuts to overspending?

*There is a standard way to exit...it's called the home button. Really.

*There could be an option to unlock the homescreen orientation, but only you and a hand-full of people would probably notice. Really.

*MTP sucks...I'll give you that, though the monolithic data partition was the right thing to do. Something like Airdroid is probably the way to go. It's fast enough for most things over wifi, and if you use USB tethering with it, you can tranfer gigabytes in minutes. QtADB isn't bad either.

*I think I've only seen maps crash once. Ever. Honest.

*Given the amount of time Google has spent getting the Android pieces accepted into the mainline kernel source, I don't know how one could argue that they are pretending that Android isn't Linux.

*Unlocking and relocking the bootloader, and rooting is absolutely perfect on the Nexus. Period. I'd say it's probably half-hearted on non-Google devices because that process sometimes wipes the DRM keys and you have to either flash a custom ROM or modify some root files to get that functionality back. There's nothing Google can do about that though.

*It would be nice if Google would collaborate more with the community on merging patches and bug fixing, but I don't know that Android would survive solely as a community project. This industry is moving fast.

I still think Google should have thrown their money at Libreoffice and financially supported the efforts to port it to Android, instead or in addition to purchasing Quickoffice.

And it's hyperthreaded, so both are capable of processing the same number of threads. Atom wins some and loses others, despite a significant clockspeed advantage.

For myth 1, I don't know how the cpu cores have evolved over time, but the older atoms had a hard time keeping up with the A9's, despite having a larger die and clockspeed advantage: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=pandaboard_es&num=1.

For myth 2, the A15 design is significantly faster than A9, which was a big step up from the A8's. In four years we've gone from A8 to A15. It's quite impressive to consider how fast the phones in our pockets have gotten is such a short time, and I think it's a little early to forecast the trend. For myth 3, the Qualcomm Krait design is pretty equal to the A15 reference platform, and it's using a very power-efficient asynchronous design. Big-little isn't necessary, it's a less-elegant design solution that ARM chose. I think by the holiday season, the market will be flooded with A15-based phones. I believe the Apple A6 is also an A15 reference CPU, since they don't have an architectural license like Qualcomm and Marvell.

So if you leave your garage door open, the police can also walk up your driveway and search your house because it's not locked...otherwise they need a warrant. That makes sense.

They acknowledge that bootloader must be unlocked for this to work though. That's really going to limit the utility of their procedure. Non-Nexus bootloaders are generally locked and encrypted, and the ADB whitelist feature of 4.2.2 should make stock Nexus devices a tough target.

Without providing specific examples of malware that's led to security breaches, the article could be describing any mobile platform. In my opinion, the greatest threat isn't which operating system is running on a device, it's all of the morons carrying their devices on them and leaving them lying around without using any lockscreen security. Slide-to-unlock is the biggest problem.

Desktop Linux is a garden without a wall. The easiest and safest way to install a program is the official repo, but i can add third party repos easily, or compile packages for source myself. You see, it's the wall that makes the walled garden a problem.