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Comment Re:The world you want is here today, in UK at leas (Score 1) 355

I just did this math with T-Mobile, I figured I'd break even a little bit before the end of the first year. But it's really going to depend on which phone you try to use. T-Mobile's selection of phones for their monthly plans sucks. A Galaxy Nexus directly from Google looks a lot better, but it's hard to compare apples to apples.

In any case, I won't be staying on a contract plan once my current contract is up. If I elect not to buy new phones at all I'll start saving nearly $70/mo. by switching (two phones).

Comment Re:Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now (Score 2, Interesting) 332

How many Android owners like it when NO other options exist?

Yes, Flash on phones is horrible. It's only slightly less horrible on tablets. And many SWFs designed for keyboard-and-mice-toting desktop PCs are useless.

All these problems, plus the poor battery life and general sluggishness of Flash, were certainly convenient scapegoats. They're even true. But Jobs wasn't an idiot. He knew that if Flash had been available in iOS, legions of developers would have used it to do an end-run around the app store's restrictions. That's not about money (what Apple makes from the app store is trivial compared to what it makes on hardware) but about protecting the brand. Jobs foresaw a future where Flash became the default development platform for the iPhone, with all the crappy performance it exhibits on Android, and he didn't want that reputation for his product. The iPhone was already taking enough heat from at first requiring devs to make HTML apps; remember that Jobs didn't want native apps available at all.

And for the record, I own no iOS devices, am not an Apple fan, and can completely see where Jobs was coming from.

Comment Re:$100 is an impulse buy, $500 is not (Score 3, Insightful) 312

I've has my Galaxy Tab 10.1 for a couple of months. Before that I had a Nook Color that I rooted. I started with the NC because I wasn't sure if I would have a use for a tablet, and the NC was half the price of the Tab.

There's no doubt these are primarily consumption devices; although they can be used for creation, that's not their strength and the more creative work you do on them the less fun it gets. What surprised me was just how much of my ordinary computer use was consumptive, and that now it's easier to squeeze in a bit of consumption here and there without resorting to a full computer. Instant on, super-long battery life, and an OS that's simplified make a huge difference.

As much as I was surprised how much I now do on my Tab (so much so that my regular computer gets dusty), imagine what it's like for people that really do want a computer "appliance". Apple created an entire market of consumers out of people who previously weren't consumers: people who didn't want the hassle of [another] computer. This is part of the magic of the iPad, and why nearly 30 million have been sold. The TouchPad's demise doesn't tell us much about the tablet market overall except that the TouchPad wasn't what people wanted compared to an iPad. Android has similar market-share (and mind-share) problems, only differing in degree.

Google should be throwing money at devs to write Android tablet apps if they want to catch up to Apple, our even just stay in the game. Otherwise they risk being marginalized, and if that happens on the tablet side it may leak over to the phone side.

Comment Re:Why is this surprising? (Score 1) 129

The silly thing is, if you do it with a shader in WebGL you can do 3D raytraced fractals in real time in a browser. Doing this kind of thing in JavaScript really just shows how incredibly inefficient at number crunching JavaScript is. I mean, yes, you CAN do it... but really why should you? For the detail levels they're showing, a native application is 1000x* faster.

*Not directly measured. But I have some experience in this area.

Comment Re:can you say (Score 1) 139

Actually that's fine, too. If they start blocking people who don't spend enough money pre-emptively then suddenly they've sent potential future customers directly to their competitors. If you stop someone from even being able to be your customer, you can be certain they will never change their mind.

It's the same thing that happens to sites that have a following, then erect a paywall and discover nobody reads the site any more. They take the paywall down, but the users never come back. Any site that tries to block people based on their non-consuming will find themselves abandoned.

Comment Re:Are you serious? (Score 1) 342

Shareholders don't invest money into MS to get no return on their investment; they want to see growth in the stock price and/or dividends, because that's what matters to them. If the stock price stays flat even while profits soar, investors are right to ask where the hell the return on their investment is.

Comment Re:Logically... (Score 1) 412

Murdoch doesn't want a paywall. He wants Google to pay him, not the end user, because Google has deeper pockets and it's a battle that can be fought once and won. Getting users to pay would require winning them over constantly and is more work, especially when they're already used to free.

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