> Chinese engineers love their superlatives

I wonder where they learned *that* from?

hrm, I wonder...I have noticed on my travels the ubiquity of non-Google Android devices. I wonder if the value of *those* is doubled.

I am, of course, assuming you mean, by 'base Android', the one which is installed on Nexus devices - ie it doesn't have all the manufacturer-added software? If you instead consider 'base Android' to be what is available for free, then perhaps it does indeed add value since it is otherwise quite simple, constituting just a platform.

I think people in 'the west' seem to think Android is only the one that has the Google services/apps/etc, since that seems to be the only one available. In China, for example, I've yet to see such an Android device, and yet there are plenty of non-Google Android devices...perhaps the s/w added by Samsung is adding value to *those* devices.

Of course, that wouldn't excuse them from also adding the s/w to the devices that *do* have Google services/etc...

I'm not sure if my suggestion is actually the case, just wondering.

Yes, but I'm curious why it would make less (or more, even) sense for Intel to 'get into the ARM market' than any other chip manufacturer.

I can think of a reason of the top of my head - ie it might dilute their stance/marketing message that 'IA is best' or something like that, but I'm not sure if that is really true. In fact, I can imagine Intel saying, 'well, this isn't the first time we've made ARM' and that making people say, 'oh, right...ok then...nothing to see here'.

I'm just curious what other reasons the poster was thinking about...

nice response...kudos.

ah, personal insults. that's mature.

I don't think that qualifies as 'know', but it convinces me :)

me too

> unless you're Intel

I'm curious about the arguments for and against for Intel...

It doesn't rule it out either...

How do we know the US didn't just use it for their own weapons? I guess it says somewhere, perhaps the Russians did some 'inspection' things to make sure it was being used for power, along the lines of Iran?

> I'm guessing the third was most likely.

Agreed.

right...stupid apostrophe use again...

Well, yes, in a way...that's why I conceded the point. However, the n950 was not the *direct* successor - there were at least a couple in between the n950 and n900 - one n950 look-alike (I preferred it to the n950) was even labelled 'n9'. It wasn't the same OS or even the same people who developed it (it was done in parallel somewhat) - though the maemo5 guys did join in the Maemo6/MeeGo development later on, once maemo5 was 'done'. Perhaps some of the lower-level guys moved earlier, I'm not sure, and some team leaders/architects too, I suppose.

Of course, there were also several other Nokia phones actually released between the n900 and n950, some of them looking suspiciously like the totally unreleased models we were using for development (the N8, for example).

So, perhaps you can understand my reluctance to accept that the n950 was *the* unreleased successor. It wasn't *the* successor because it wasn't released, and it wasn't the 'unreleased successor' because there were others in between that were also unreleased (and some that were but were symbian). The n950 was in a 'grey area' though, since it was 'given away' to non-Nokia developers....so it is just 'not that simple' :)

*I* was on the engineering team and I have an n900, n950 and n9 somewhere around here - my wife still uses the n9. It was only a successor in that it came after the n900 - it shared nothing much else with the n900, apart from perhaps the base linux was similar, but the middleware and UI were totally different.

Like I say, if you meant to say that it just came after the n900, then that is correct. I took you to mean something more than that.

> the phone is in beta

i was referring to the claim that the n950 was the successor to the n900. I suppose it was if you take 'successor' to mean simply 'the one after', but it was really much more of an n9-with-keyboard-and-no-nfc, than anything much to do with the n900.