Agent Smith, we need to be on the watch for these pathogens entering our soil. Here, open this bottle and take a sniff. Note the scene. If you detect any of these while on shift, please inform your superior immediately.
Now, please report to quarantine room C for the next 36 hours....
I don't get it. Samsung, Sony, etc have Blu-ray players, they've got Android phones, why not combine both technologies into one awesome media box?
So I got to thinking... "surely somebody has thought of/tried this somewhere by now"
I've found this thus far. It says it supports 3d blu-ray and menus... though I don't see where you would insert the discs (hopefully it's not just for rips)
That used to be the advantage of cheap DVD players too.
The bigger brand names respected region encoding, un-skippable previews/warnings, etc. The cheaper ones were sometimes a bit noisy (parts movement) but generally they didn't bother to implement "features" such as region-lock or unskippable sections, which actually made them more useful.
There don't seem to be as many off-brand Blu-ray players, especially if you want one with Netflix etc. I'd love to see an android-based system which combines something like a Minix X8 or Asus Cube and a Blu-ray. Bonus points if somebody could come up with a blu-ray "shell" which basically includes the drive, power, and infrared remote but allows an upgradable android core for the advanced OS features. It shouldn't be hard to have something which just plugs into the base for power and connects to the drive via a OTG interface. The biggest issue is probably stuff like the Java and copy protection/licensing crap.
Also, how much of said "private data" is actually harvested the phone itself, other than perhaps location data?
Gmail: That goes to Goog's servers before your phone
Talk: Same thing
Contacts: Can be kept on just the phone without sync (for that matter, sync can be toggled on/off for most things)
Browsing history: Do they get anything if you use firefox instead of chrome, and/or don't sync bookmarks?
Maps/Latitude: Location stuff can be turned off
Most of the ways they can get information *from* the phone seem inherent in the functionality being used: i.e. use of gmail, maps, etc
It would be interesting to learn what data is being "sync'ed" beyond that needed to get the functionality out of the given apps.
Or just turn off all location services. On every phone I've got, it's usually a question during the initial installation process.
If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.