Right now I am torn between the Samsung Moment and the HTC Hero I just hope that we see them get 1.6 and 2.0 updates very soon.

FWIW, I've got an HTC Dream and am quite happy with it. And one of the main reasons I'm so happy with it is because it's got a fold-out QWERTY keyboard. I couldn't imagine trying to type out text messages or e-mails using an on-screen touch keyboard. Nowhere near efficient enough.

On the other hand, between the two you've listed, I'd go for the Samsung. Built-in 3.5mm jack is what sells me, but having a d-pad instead of the trackball is also a major plus. My biggest annoyance with the HTC phone is that it uses a single mini-USB connector for everything... charger, headphones/hands free, etc. It doesn't actually have any other input/output ports besides the single mini-USB. That means I can't charge the phone while listening to music on the headphones, or I can't transfer files to/from the computer while listening to music. On the plus side, at least, it does charge directly from the USB on a computer, meaning I don't need to bring the wall wart with me to work in order to charge it. :)

Actually, the focus is fixed to about 10 feet with those.

The image may appear as though it's a big screen 10 feet away, but the physical display device is an inch away from your eyes, not to mention the frame itself. Your eyes are focusing at a fixed focal length an inch away from the eye for prolonged periods of time. That causes eye strain at best, and permanent damage to your eyesight at worst.

So... would the logic then extend to smaller LCD panels being EASIER to make in higher resolutions? It seems reasonable. However, if that's the case, why isn't the market full of high resolution small LCD panels that can be used to make these $900 into $100 units that everyone could be using instead of massive LCD monitors?

There's a practical limit to useful pixel density for most computer uses. Some, the higher your resolution the better... things like photo editing and medical imaging, for example. For something like text display, even a 100dpi font would look pretty small/squished on a 300dpi display, unless you were artificially increasing its size so that it takes up more physical real estate on screen. Now, Windows Vista and 7 already do that for icons... they automatically adjust the size of the icon based on the dpi of your display, as detected through plug & pray. It's not impossible to do this for fonts, and with modern computers it's not even a serious hinderance to performance, even if you start doing anti-aliasing to get rid of jaggies from the enlargement. But if all you're doing is displaying text, why spend the extra money on a screen with a super-high pixel density?

Plus, the fabrication of high density screens is always going to be harder than low density screens. There *may* be some merit to what you're saying, in that it could be easier to make a high density small screen than a high density large screen -- I haven't looked into that, but my cell phone has a pixel density of 140dpi on its screen, and my netbook is 180dpi, whereas my 15.4" laptop is only 120dpi -- but just from a physics standpoint, it's going to be easier to make a 20dpi screen than a 120dpi screen.

I wouldn't buy a pair of those even if you paid me. 1024x768 maximum effective resolution, with the native resolution on the screens being 640x480. It's cool and all, but that's nowhere near enough pixels for me to actually get some work done. My laptop's got a 1680x1050 LCD and I complain that *that's* not enough pixels for me to effectively multitask. Not to mention the harm you're doing to your eye by trying to focus on something that's an inch away from your face.

They're a cool toy, and might be fun for gaming, but not really any good for actual work, IMO.

Since most of these phones wouldn't last all day on a charge, how about adding
some solar cells on the top of the cardboard box?

I have an HTC Dream, and it lasts all day... I turn GPS off, and don't spend all my time playing video games or browsing the mobile web, but I do have it checking/syncing my e-mail every 5 minutes to both my gmail, and my work's exchange. A full charge on the battery lasts long enough for me to ride the bus to work, put in my 8 hours, and ride home, with what I'd consider "normal" e-mail and talk time usage on the thing. (I'm sending probably 20-30 e-mails a day with it, the rest from my desk)

When I play video games, it depends on the game. But some of them have a way of getting the CPU to be running at full speed for a long time... result? It gets hot, and the battery drains really quickly. Mobile web drains the battery too, but I don't spend my time watching YouTube or surfing Facebook with the thing.

They seem to have fallen in love with the nVidia GeForce 9400M for offerings like the Mini and Macbook/Macbook Air, but you're right. I've seen several of them with an Intel GMA 950, and I could swear I've seen a couple with a Intel GMA 4500MHD as well. Many Mac versions of games will list the GMA 950 as the minimum system requirement to play the game... SecondLife and WoW are among them. (I don't really look that hard, just what I've been asked to support. Truth be told, I run a hodgepodge of operating systems/computers, and not one of them is actually a Mac)

Are you stupid?

Nope, but clearly you are. There's nothing that says a GPU-style chip can only be used on a discrete graphics card. The GPU-style chip usually performs enormous numbers of calculations in a massively parallel way. Every pixel on your screen has to be rendered... the graphics engine needs to figure out what colour it's going to be in order to render the object being displayed. It accounts for lighting effect, reflectivity, and opacity. And it does it for every pixel you can see. Millions of pixels in a screen, each rendered sometimes upwards of 60 times a second. And it does this by performing row and multiplication operations on *massive* matrices.

If you can't see how a CPU that's optimized for that kind of performance could be helpful for something like searching an index or database, then you need to turn in your geek card right now, and start surfing Disney.com.

You're trying to apply morality and emotion to a discussion that's quite clearly based solely in the numbers. You're absolutely right that the dog will love you back, and that there's countless benefits that simply can't be measured by the numbers. (well, can, actually... having a pet has been shown dozens of times to improve your overall health, which means that as an individual you'll consume less resources)

From a strictly mathematical standpoint, though, a pet dog will consume a lot of energy, and owning it will increase your carbon footprint. That's the point of TFA, but IMO it's completely ignoring the side benefits that can't be measured.

I've been doing that for years with a programmable thermostat. Bonus points, actually, since the newer models (and we got a new one from the insurance company a month ago, because we got a new furnace after a flood) also allow you to program seasons into it, and controls for different heat levels at different times of year.

In the winter, the overnight temperature is 14'C. It goes up to 18' starting at 5:00am, and back down to 14'C at 7:00. Back up around 6:00pm, and starts going down at 10:00.

In the summer, the rules are slightly different. We run the A/C overnight, cooling the house to 18'C, and let the house heat up naturally (closed curtains, thermal glass, etc.) over the course of the day, with the A/C not coming back on until 10:00pm.

The thing is... this is something you could have been doing for a very long time... programmable thermostats have been available for almost 20 years now. While some would count it as home automation, I wouldn't, as you don't need a dedicated computer to handle the automation for you. In fact, most of what people would consider home automation can be done quite cheaply with things like socket timers, an electronic thermostat, motion detectors, and for things like your outdoor house lights, an ambient light sensor hooked up to the switch. All of these technologies have been around since the 80's and earlier.

... a few lamp modules to control my non-drug-related plant lights to extend their photoperiod ...

Enquiring minds want to know... what do you use to control your drug-related plant lights?

GPUs are massively parallel though, and usually optimized for working with enormous matrices. When you think about it, an average GPU would probably make a pretty good processor for searching databases/indexes. Maybe not so much for rendering something server-side, like a php or asp script, but it'd certainly be passable at it.

Wonder if that's where the folks at Tilera got their idea?

Well, I didn't choose to bother with the Apple App store, I've only used it on my girlfriends phone. I'm holding out for an Android phone for myself. I haven't used their market yet but rumor has it that they do allow trial periods.

I have yet to encounter an app on the Android market that I had to pay to download/install. I've run into a few which then said "this is a limited/trial version, please pay to use the full-featured version"... such apps get promptly uninstalled without even being tried.... I wish that those app developpers would put in their app description that it was a trial version of something they expect you to pay for. It's not that I'm cheap, it's that it's a phone, and I really don't see the point in paying for extra applications when I can get diversions for free. That's all I'm really looking for: something to waste time on when I'm on the bus or waiting for a movie to start or something.

The thing of the app market, though, is that you have to be smart. My phone vendor put their own app market as an option on the phone, too. If I go to the cell phone company's app market, I'm presented with games and applications and such, but every single thing on the Rogers market is pay-to-download. Needless to say, I removed the link from my home screen, and ignore it when I see it in the menu. But I'm concerned that many people won't think to check the Google market because the telco's app market was prominently displayed on the home screen.

But this also re-iterates the point of mainstream usage. Should I, as a user, really have to worry about these things?

No, I agree with you there. You really shouldn't have to worry about it... I'm cautiously optimistic about some of the new Android phones, though. Yours and mine have a 528MHz processor and 192MB of RAM, and some of the new planned ones have a 1GHz processor and much more RAM. The problem is that mine and yours were the first and second Android phones to market, respectively.

I'm wondering which app you're using, though... TasKiller (that's the name of the app, it's free through the Android market) shows the widgets on my phone. As for why stuff like browser, and market stay open after you've closed them, I think it's so that they open up faster next time you use them. On a phone where memory's not an issue, that's fine, but I think that you're running into a situation where the phone is running out of RAM and swapping. In the server world, if you start swapping you've lost the game... I think the phone world isn't significantly different from that. :/

The Android reminds me a lot of using linux. One clicks and wonder if something is going to happen or not. Both the Blackberry and the iPhone give immediate feed back response.
Too often, going back to the home screen from an application leaves one staring at a black screen for too long ( 15-20 seconds).

Android *is* Linux... but your experiences with it do not gel with mine... perhaps it has more to do with what phone you've got than anything else... I have an HTC Dream (which I think is marketed as the G1 by T-Mobile). On mine, I find that it's very responsive, it opens applets quickly, and I never have to wait for simple tasks like reading my e-mail or surfing the web.

The thing of it is... according to the spec sheets, the HTC Dream and the HTC Magic have exactly the same memory, processor, and version of Android. They've got the same GPS, the same digital compass, the same everything... the only *real* difference between them (and the reason I got the Dream over the Magic) is that the Dream has a fold-out qwerty keyboard, while the Magic uses an on-screen keyboard.

Is it possible that yours is sluggish because there's a lot more applets running or something? I got rid of all the applets (including some of the more useful ones, like the wifi toggle, and silent mode toggle) in order to save battery life, but they also use up CPU time and if you have a bunch of stuff open it could seriously hinder the responsiveness of the platform. (on that note, download TasKiller from the app market, if you haven't already)

However, you're missing a point. If I sign up and pay for (say) 15Mb/sec service, and I'm trying to get a file from a server (or servers) that can feed it that fast to my ISP, then I should be able to get it that fast to my cable modem, dammit! Restrict my upload and download speeds at the rates advertised, impose capacity limits, these are fine. However, it is NOT up to the ISP to decide what I do within my limits.

In the days when ISPs were serving a few thousand dialup customers from a 15mbit ATM, maybe. Back then, it was possible to have full speed on all your lines without capping out your overall bandwidth.

But do you know how much it would cost Rogers if they had all of their customers (let's be conservative and say they only had 100,000 custoemrs). They're offering connections up to 50mbit. With 100,000 customers at 50mbit each, you're looking at 5 terabits of bandwidth that they'd need to purchase if they wanted to guarantee that all of their customers would have all of that 50mbit, at all times. While I don't have access to the pricing that tier 1 providers charge each other, I'd be willing to bet that the price per user would be well over the $150/month that Rogers charges for that 50mbit of bandwidth... we're still in an age where Tier 1 connection speeds are measured in gigabits and maybe tens of gigabits. A terabit connection isn't unthinkable, but it's still prohibitavely expensive.

Now let's be reasonable. Most of Rogers' high speed customers are on a 10mbit or 25mbit plan, but Rogers has a lot more than 100,000 cable subscriptions. They probably have that many subscriptions in the city of Ottawa alone, let alone larger cities like Toronto, and the rest of the country that they serve. If they're going to keep their costs reasonable, they're going to have to start cutting back on the amount of bandwidth that's available to you. There's an awful lot of math that's involved in figuring out how much bandwidth they can get away with buying in order to serve their customer base, but the short answer is that they're banking on the fact that most uses of network connectivity do not suck up full bandwidth 24/7, and the fact that their users will be connecting at different times of day. You may be paying for 15mbit, but honestly, you probably don't actually need more than 100kbit of that to surf to Slashdot, and that's only for a few seconds every time you click a link. They can provision you the 15mbit you're paying for when you do something like download a file from an FTP server (and for the most part, I do get that 10mbit I'm paying for... but only when I'm downloading from content networks optimized for the purpose, like akamai or youtube), but most of the time you're only going to actually be using a small fraction of that. On a smaller scale, this is why you can have 4 or 5 computer users all sharing a 10mbit connection via wifi, and they'll usually never notice the slowdown from sharing the bandwidth with each other.

Their issue with Bittorrent is that it breaks the pattern. People downloading torrents will use as much bandwidth as they can, constantly, and will often leave their systems on for prolonged periods of time. They feel they need to implement traffic shaping in order to ensure that the bandwidth is available for users who don't break the mold.

What the CRTC policy is saying is that Rogers should be buying as much bandwidth as they can get their hands on. They need to provision as much bandwidth as they can, and need to be a lot less conservative with those math algorithms they're using to figure out the minimum needed. But the CRTC is recognizing that it's not feasible for Rogers to buy up hundreds of terabits of bandwidth in order to provision full bandwidth for all users at all times, and that there will be times when traffic shaping is necessary in order to ensure quality of service for the bulk of their userbase. As such, the CRTC is saying to Rogers that they need to make public the policy of exactly what they're going to be shaping, and what times they're shaping it for. Rather than having a blanket "you can traffic shape 24/7" which is what Rogers is doing now, it's probably going to result in a "traffic shaping between 8am and 11pm, no shaping overnight" policy.

But it's completely unreasonable, and out of touch with reality, to expect that Rogers is going to provision that 15mbit to all of their users to be available 24/7. The cost per megabit to them is too high. If they were to allocate that kind of bandwidth, your monthly bill would increase significantly. Seeing as we're already overpaying for bandwidth as compared to Europe and Southeast Asia, that's seriously bad juju.