Comment How does that work? (Score 5, Informative) 276
"Remember what happened to Jang Song Thaek before you think about crossing me!"
"Who? I don't remember him at all."
"Exactly!"
Sounds a bit more like bad comedy than a real threat.
“Bad drivers will at some point need to improve their driving or accept [having] to pay for the real risk they represent”
Snapshot can't measure driving quality. It measures speed and distance travelled and sudden stops. Presumably if I'm driving at night and take a longer route going 75mph on a wide-open freeway, instead of driving 35mph on the shorter twisty two-lane country road with far more hazards from drivers crossing the center line or deer jumping into the road, Snapshot will penalize me for it. Again, screw that.
I'm afraid that might be the problem, exactly - you can't fit the same specs with a decent battery life in a smaller package easily.
Or you might, but at a premium, and the larger devices are already pushing the maximum the market will bear (there are not enough people willing to buy a smartphone at higher prices to justify large-scale production).
I'm pretty sure the first half of that isn't true, though you may be right on the second half. The lion's share of space taken up internally is by the battery. However the thing that uses the most power is generally the screen, so if you reduce the screen size you don't need as much battery.
The Droid Mini came very close to matching its larger cousin's specs. The only shortcoming, and it's a pretty large one, is that it only has 16 GB of storage. I don't know what the form factor is for internal flash memory but i doubt there's a significant difference in size between 16 GB and 32 GB, or even 64 GB. If they'd just included a decent amount of storage, and it wasn't exclusive to Verizon, i would have bought one instantly. But going by what seems to be the standard cell phone pricing scheme, the extra 16 GB of storage would have cost $50 more, and i guess they didn't think enough people would have been willing to pay that to make it worthwhile.
The hardest part of climbing the ladder of success is getting through the crowd at the bottom.