or rather:
d) Leave s40 exactly as it is.

The people who buy this do NOT want a smartphone. Just a simple phone that is cheap (around the £10-£20 mark), durable, makes calls and text, long battery life, easy to use, and maybe have a torch/fm radio, at the most have bluetooth. There is NO need to replace S40, it is not broken.

I have both 7 Ultimate and 8.1 on my computer (dual boot on seperate SSDs). Her is my positives and negatives of Windows 8 over win 7.

Positives:
- Really fast and smooth compared to Win 7. The difference is noticeable, even in boot up.
- I am not too bothered with metro itself, nor do I care much for the loss of the start menu. Rarely used it on seven other than to open frequently used app, or search for other apps. I rarely even know whats on my start menu aall programs list, as its hardly used)
- Lightweight. It appears that Microsoft have finally got rid of some in built junk
- Metro apps have their uses. I can think of many types of apps that I would rather not have to install into my windows system normally (as an admin no less) complete with the potential to add further junk to my system folders complete with system wide spyware, and being unable to guarentee a clean uninstall. Metro apps seem to be a bit better isolated.

Negatives:
- Metro apps are still tooo touch focused, and certain things are less intuitiuve with KB and mouse only.
- MEtro apps and dual monitors. Despite the improvements in Windows 8.1, there are still huge usability problems still existing for dual screen users. For example, when running a metro app on the left hand screen, its more involved to bring up the charms panel with just the mouse. Whereas with a single screen, you can blindly flick the mouse up and to the right until it gets to the upper right corner to bring up the charms panel, with a dual monitor, the mouse will simply go to the next screen, making the user have to concentrate more in actually positioning the pointer in the exact region to show the panel.
- I still feel the desktop UI is very poor. I enjoyed aero on Win vista, and more so on 7. The transparency effects give me a lot of cues to order, and overlap. The new UI is frankly ugly, and personally a lot worse than win 7.

Even in the USA there are "bribes" paid by businesses. Its called campaign donations, political sponsorship, etc and is quite legal.

Find out how much the companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Exxon, Big Cigarette, Media, etc pay as political donations... Bet your bottom dollar there are strings attached.

It is corruption, for in a true DEMOCRATIC government it should be the desires of the voters that dictate the laws and governance moving ahead.

One person one Vote, and not One Dollar One Vote

You are not going to get hammered. I agree, the Windows Phone interface is actually very good from what I felt when I played around with a Lumia. Its other things about the OS that makes me stick with Android.

To be honest, although I myself would NOT be interested in a Windows OS phone, I can see my parents being quite comfortable with one.

Now coming to windows 8.... thats a different kettle of fish! They should have kept a limited aero for desktop use. I completely hate the lack of contrast on the new desktop (I do not mind the metro interface in "metro" world, I just HATE the desktop interface)

It was a paid advert, but for a fictional, made for the film Ericsson JB988 (http://www.007museum.com/ericsson_jb988_james_bond.htm) loosely based on the real Ericsson R320 http://www.gsmarena.com/ericsson_r320-194.php

Remembering the 80's Superman, especially the aweful Superman 4, I think the reboot was a good thing.

(the First was not too bad, and nor was the second, the third was getting a little silly at times, but all of them had a strong stereotypical american view which may have worked then, but is kinda tiring now.)

See the next announcement that Apple is pairing with Microsoft to bring Bing maps in 3.... 2.... 1.....

I can tell the difference between a "beginner" and a "professional" irregardless of what they are using. A professional with a camera phone, will tend to record the moment better than an amateur clicking away with a fancy DSLR on automatic mode that he or she bought at Best Buy to show off!

In fact most pros have a bit of a dont care attitude about their tools, because ultimately its whats in their head, and their skills that make the photo.

Ultimately though, it doesn't matter what tool, or the skill of the photographer, if the photo is a recording of a once in a lifetime event.......

Don't get me wrong; I am a DSLR photographer (amateur not professional, its not my day job!).

You are absolutely right about the technical quality of a DSLR, crisp clear photos when used with Primes. Nice fill in flashes. Filters. Large Sensors. nice DOF effects, etc.

However, do not dismiss a cam phone. set up of a DSLR can take time. And it is bulky to carry. A phone is always there.

Remember the biggest aspect of a great photo is actually being able to capture that moment, and sometimes its only with a phone. It doesn't matter how bad the quality is, or anything at that point, as long as you can sufficiently captured that moment.

I think a lot of photographers (mainly amateur, who are just starting out with DSLR) have forgotten that.

Mozilla suite was not credible for the normal users. Don't get me wrong, I used it as my main browser, hell I even used phoenix as my main browser on my laptop, but I just could not recommend it to most people at the time. Firefox was just right.

Wiping the computer and forcing linux if you have to clean their computer more than 3 times?

Calling a person as "Untrusted" simply because they got a virus?

God you are a piece of work, and you call THEM untrustworthy?

IT is their computer, their right to do what they want with it. IF you don't want to support them, you tell them you don't want to, or charge them appropriately. Don't wipe their computer and install a alternative OS, and treat them as if they are untrustworthy

I hope you were joking when you said what you said above. Even so, I hope this is a joke you dont share with normal people.

If I had mod points, I would award you all of them.

Its easy for some "Younglings" today to criticise what happened then. I personally didn't like IE back in 2000(Active X drive by installs, toolbars, and standards compatibility). Hell, life was bad back then (1997 - 2004) when Nutscrape and Exploder each having their own view of "Standards" (I am ignoring the Mozilla Suite and Netscape 6/7 as both never truly gained critical mass, and were not really for the masses anyway).

Until Firefox was released in 2004, there was no credible standards based browser, apart from the rather good Opera, which was pay ware at the time. Even then it was the surge of appalling viruses and drive by installs on IE, that finally got people to notice Firefox with its better security, and seduced by features such as pop up blocking and tabbed browsing.

Thanks to the efforts by Mozilla, which were then cemented later by Apple with Webkit/Safari, Standards Compliance has become a desirable feature for browser developers, rather than a drag.

Even Microsoft has slowly gotten their act together, and improving their own standards support.

Today we are in a better place, but its easy to forget how bad it was. even though Firefox was released in 2004, it still took a while to overtake IE.

In companies, where they are very much into standard installations and frowning upon installing software, it wasn't until Windows 7 came that IE 6 was eventually replaced together with XP. Therefore coding for the crappy standards of IE6 was the only realistic path available.

Its easy for most of us working in Tech companies to say otherwise, but in other companies like banking, and government, its a different environment.

Then... Slashdot woudl have to change its tag line! (News for nerds......)

I am no apple fanboi, but I bought one of the 15inch retina macbook pros for work reasons.
  It has an lg screen.

Now don't get me wrong, I have a lot of frustration with this machine. Its the only machine in the last 2 years I have had to force turn off by holding the power button due to some weird osx issue. However I have never experienced the ghosting issue? Maybe it doesn't affect all?

There are MANY technical reasons why an android devices cant present itself as USB mass storage. The two MAIN ones are:
- USB Mass Storage (USM) is a block level service which would NEED to be formatted in some form of FAT. Since Android is Linux based, the file system internally is ext4 on recent devices. No windows machine out of the box can mount ext4. (see below for implications on Nexus devices)
IT is extremely difficult, and dangerous to "Simulate" FAT where the device is not internally FAT.
- When a storage device is USM mounted, it has to be unmounted from the host, otherwise data corruption is likely to occur (especially with FAT) meaning that apps which write to that storage will find the storage no longer available, and would need to be cleanly unmounted from the attached PC before removal too.

There are other issues that FAT has no security around it, which is required for many internal and other applications in android.

MTP solves the mount/unmount problems, by presenting a higher level file/directory access that is filesystem agnostic. The computer or any other connected device does not require to understand the file system layout, etc, hence the OS can use any FS it likes internally. Indeed it can even present a virtual directory tree if it wants. It does not require to be unmounted, and can guarantee writes (no caching). It also does one op at a time. This is what makes it seem slow, there is no write caching, nor multi tasking on this.

However, I find that in terms of actual transfer, MTP on my Galaxy S2 is only very slightly slower than the USM mode when transferring large files(>1MB). Smaller files take a little longer, but still not that bad.

The nexus does NOT have a FAT system, and since it only has a single partition, it cannot expose itself as a USM. However, you can use all storage for apps.

The Galaxy s2 partitions its storage into separate ext4 and fat partition, therefore has a (fairly well hidden) USM mode for both internal and card storage. However, it ends up limiting the Application storage space to just 2GB of ext4.

The NEXUS 4 has a single filesystem allocated for the runnign OS.