It's a shame we abandoned so much. The UK is the worst for that having developed and then abandoned both the ability to put things in orbit and supersonic passenger flight.

People say it's for economic reasons. Well, putting stuff in orbit is big business now. Virgin wanted to take over the Concorde fleet and thought they could make a profit from it, but BA wouldn't allow it. All seems very short sighted.

The lack of video is one the things that really days Star Trek now. The away team beams down and starts describing the scene over voice link. They don't even seem to have basic telemetry like environmental data as they have to describe things like temperature.

Laws of physics I'm afraid. A better camera needs a bigger lens and sensor, plus room for optical stabilisation hardware. More memory needs a bigger battery to keep it running all day.

Law enforcement use special bags to keep the phone powered up. The bag is basically a Faraday cage so that the phone can't be remote wiped, and has a charging cable built in to prevent the phone being powered off.

You shouldn't keep your credit card details on your phone in plaintext anyway. Contactless payments don't need to store them in a readable format.

The metal bodies gave them antenna problems. The Nexus 5 feels solid and strong, as do many other phones, without it. It's fancy like fancy jewellery, but doesn't really add much and isn't worth the cost.

Their glass is made by the same people as everyone else uses.

Windows 8 task manager shows disk utilisation. If it is 100% you are i/o bound.

PPC was chosen because it was the simplest upgrade path from 680x0. I can't remember if the early ones were dual endian, but they were certainly big endian compatible. Same buses, same interfaces, similar support hardware, even similar datasheets since they were from Motorola. The Amiga went the same way for the same reason.

The one are thing people do rely on reviews for is to decide if they will be okay long term with a larger phone.

The swipe keyboard is the single biggest change that makes phablets usable, which is I'm sure why they copied it. I think the Apple layout is inferior though, especially for quick numerical input.

Android had this stuff sorted out long ago. It's just that the reviewers are used to iOS so automatically feel a bit odd on Android, and attribute it to some kind of UX genius on Apple's part.

Thing is the iPhone 6 is only 326 PPI, while the 6 Plus is 401 PPI. If you couldn't see any improvement beyond the old Retina display level of about 320 PPI then why bother going to 401 PPI for the 6 Plus?

The 6 Plus is basically an admission that the whole Retina display thing was nonsense. If you compare a 320 PPI display to a 400 or 500 PPI one you can see the difference at typical viewing distances. That's all there is to it, everything else was just hype.

I think there is a desire for more processing speed to make things like voice recognition faster and more accurate. It's tempting to think that specialist DSPs will accelerate those things, but if history has taught us anything about processors it's that generic always seems to win. Clever tile rendering graphics cards and dedicated physics processors were quickly eclipsed by the raw power of GPUs. Dedicated audio processors made sense once, now a quad core CPU handles it.

People care mostly about features. Cameras are good enough for most people, but some are faster than others and have things like optical stabilization and batter automatic settings / post processing. As far as performance helps this stuff, it matters.

Other specs I'm sad to say don't seem to matter much. The iPhone 6 has a very low resolution screen for a high end phone, with pretty much everyone else at that size being 1080p now. Yet, it doesn't seem to matter... Not because you can't see the difference, because you can, but because people buy it more for the fact that it is an iPhone than because of the spec. On Android it matters, on iPhone I suppose you don't really have a choice.

It's quite something when Hitler is less willing to horribly kill soldiers to save his county than the US was to horribly murder civilians to test it's nukes.