I'd have modded you up if you weren't already at +5. This echoes my own feelings on the subject quite eloquently, although I have owned a smartphone, and browsed on it. IMO, the ONLY reason to browse on a smartphone is that you don't have a desktop available - it's a terrible experience all around; I'm glad that developers are trying to get all the functionality they can into mobile browsers, but when you throw a current mobile browser against a web site that's designed for a desktop PC, which have the ability to make changes to the page on the "mouseover" event, usually a lot more processing power, and a far wider range of available plug-ins for browsers....it's seems likely to utterly fail, not because it's not a good for mobile, but because it's not a good for desktop.

I can see some purpose to HAVING a mobile interface...but mobile is SUCH a different environment from desktop that it deserves to have a totally separate UI. A mobile UI might also be worth copying for, say, an Android-on-a-TV type device that use Wiimote style pointer for input...but is definitely NOT worth copying for the desktop space, where a mouse and keyboard are the expected interface devices.

You don't understand how natural selection or evolution work, do you? The innumerate are winning at the natural selection game because they can't figure out how bad having another kid is going to be for them financially. And the "survival of the fittest" doesn't imply fittest for anything but producing lots of offspring. (Of course, this is self-limiting, since this planet has a finite carrying capacity, and the innumerate are incapable of running a space program...)

Do you ever wonder if it would be cheaper and easier just to go back to using horses? I mean, we've been breeding them for hundreds of years...and I'm sure we could make some Kevlar-and-ceramic armor for them to protect them from bullets and shrapnel...

I suppose the advantage is that robots don't need to trained not to panic in the middle of battle. But I still wonder if chasing a technological solution is the wrong path.

I was bored this morning, so for those interested, since the article makes it hard to extract this information:

All iOS versions total 84.36% of crashes; all Android versions total 15.49% of crashes. The worst offenders for iOS are version 5.0.1 at 28.64% and 4.2.10 at 12.64% (with seven other version listed at above 1% of crashes). The worst offenders for Android are versions 2.3.3 at 3.86% and 2.3.4 at 3.65%, with 4 other versions listed at above 1%.

I wonder that, too. Seems like they'd be perfect for things that regularly get used outdoors in bright sunlight - like cell phones. Last I look, Pixel Qi wasn't offering a screen that was suitable for use in cell phone.

Heh. Just re-read that and realized it should have said "to use a smartphone outside than there is to use a laptop". It's late and I've been up since 5AM local time.

Dear PixelQi guys:

Please make a screen suitable for smartphones. There is a lot more need to use a smartphone than there is to use a laptop, as you can't control when you get incoming calls.

Thanks,
Ender Stonebender

I agree. 16:10 is slightly better, but not much. I'd love to get a massive 4:3 monitor. 2048x1536 monitors exist, but they're "medical grade" and cost like it.

You bought a tablet at a price point where you could expect a dog's breakfast, and you're surprised that you got one? I fail to understand what you think is wrong with the world here. There are always going to be hardware makers that are willing to put out shoddy (and possibly knock-off) products at super-discount prices.

I suspect that you bought the tablet on the self-fulfilling prophecy "Android is terrible, even this cheap tablet can't do anything properly!" Next time, either spend 10 minutes playing with the device in the store, or spend enough money to get a product that goes through proper quality assurance (both hardware and software).

I've had an Android phone for most of year now - never had a problem with it until I loaded CyanogenMod, and even the one problem I have had is relatively minor and easily worked around.

"Cloud computing" is this decade's "The Network Is the Computer". (Remember that?) It got slightly more traction because the network has actually considerably improved since the late 1990s, but the problems are essentially the same. I suspect we'll get another round of this bullshit, under a new name, sometime around 2024.

Then you get into another definition of how to define "working computer". My cable is also a DVR, and has a function that lets my pay my cable bill, so it's obviously got some fairly capable hardware - but it doesn't let me browse the internet or write programs to run on it's hardware, so is it a "working computer"? What about my learning remote with LCD screen and macro functions? That's got some limited programmability, so is it a working computer?

That doesn't mean that they can't fund a genuinely objective study... But there's a good chance that things are going to be biased.

Keep in mind that Microsoft is a really big corporation. They may have funded 15 different studies, and only this one showed that Microsoft solutions could compete with F/OSS, so this is the only one that they're publicizing. If they really wanted us to believe that the study was objective, they would have announced the study at the time that funding was provided, and then given us the results when they were available. I think this radical idea should be called "transparency".

Having over 100% per capita usage just means that there are more people with two (or more) mobile phones than there are without mobile phones. Given that in the office I work in (~25 people), at least 5 have both corporate issued phones (Blackberries) and personal phones (mostly iPhones, to my great dismay), I don't find this all that surprising.

Because it's the least bad of the three, at least as far as "making total asses of themselves while enforcing policy" goes. I mean, if I have to live with something (which in the case of games, it certainly seems that I do), I'm going to pick the least bad option. PC games are, if anything, worse than consoles. (And don't even get me started on the stupidity of Blizzard's recent actions.)

Sony's the company that threatened to sue people who "circumvented digital locks" by holding down the Shift key to prevent Windows Auto-Run feature from installing a rootkit in their PC, and has taken away support for Linux on the PS3, not to mention their involvement with HDCP and AACS. Microsoft is currently in court because they think its illegal to mod the XBox360 hardware (to be fair, they may be correct about it being illegal - but it's not unjust, which is a separate issue). Nintendo has...uh...occasionally made a fuss about people selling blank cartridges onto which pirated ROMs (or homebrew software equally well) could be loaded and then those games played on their various cartridge-based systems.