On one hand I think the FB app could use a LOT of advice from Opera's mobile team. I have an overclocked GalaxyS2 running at 1.5ghz...modded to the gills. Nothing on this phone is slow...except Facebook. Every update makes the experience more and more miserable. Opera's mobile/mini browsers are among the fastest and smoothest apps I have ever used. By far. Bar none. On any mobile platform....or any platform ever, for that matter. On the other hand I've been using Opera for over 12 years now. It is my go-to browser and it is the first thing I install on a computer...regardless of OS. It has always been ahead of it's time...often by a very long time (we've been returning to the same multi-tabbed browsing session for how much longer than everyone else?). Anyone I recommend the browser to becomes a lifelong fan. Geeks and non-geeks alike. It's tiny, lightning quick, hyper-compliant and more configurable than anything else.

I know that having Facebook sized development money can be nothing but a great thing for the progress of the browser, but, I'm more concerned with the direction of this development. Also some very obvious concerns with the use of turbo-mode to help FB aggregate more of the world's information...

...I'm going to vote 'I really hope not' on this one.

"Sprint doesn't allow phones they didn't sell on their network, last I knew" Also wrong, and has never been true.
[Citation Needed]

I used to work in IT. When I was in IT I figured the reason we were so generally hated was that whenever we pop up it's to fix something that is broken or to change something that isn't. So either we showed up at an emergency or we showed up to create one...or at least I was sure that's how it was perceived. Most of the time it was to roll out changes of some sort. This never went over well. Add to that the difficulty of grabbing an IT guy for a moment for something small "sorry, fill out a ticket" sounds very cold. Of course if we didn't adhere to that system nothing would ever get done.

As seen from the IT department it's a dynamic issue, and a rather complicated one at that.

Now that I'm no longer in the IT department and have to deal with the IT department I'm pretty everybody hates the IT department because fuck those guys.

this sure seems to reek of obvious. The fact that multiple companies are racing to patent essentially the same thing--which is just seemingly logical extension of an existing idea (reminders)--seems to underscore that.

Do not wait for HTC to release a phone with a better camera. Samsung makes, hands down, the best camera in the Android game right now. The Camera on my Nexus S was really good, but, a little lacking. The camera on my Galaxy S2 is nothing short of phenomenal. I would imagine the Nexus Prime to have the same sensor and maybe better optics.

...I just came from a long line of HTC phones before these last two Samsungs...and I will be getting the Nexus Prime when it comes out. The HTC's have "pretty good for a cellphone" level of camera on the Hero, EVO4G and EVO3D.

But if you are going to jump whole-hog into Android a Nexus device is probably the best bet. They get updates first, they get updates longer, great community support, cutting edge hardware. Also even though all Nexus devices have been built on a nearly-identical platform as other phones (Nexus1= HTC EVO4G, Incredible... Nexus S= Galaxy 1...Nexus Prime=Galaxy 2) they seem to run faster and smoother out of the box.

The EVO4G even had the same sensor as the iPhone4 but the pictures weren't even close, not in the same league...not on the same planet. I wouldn't waste any time hoping for HTC to make a better camera than Samsung.

I may be diametrically opposed to your model but your contributions to technology and even culture (yeah, I said it) cannot be denied. Geek culture and culture*.*

Love him or hate him...love or hate his company...love or hate their products, but, his truly visionary status cannot be disputed.

Enjoy your rest in the big /dev/null in the sky.

Check out the newest version of the Revolutionary tool at Revolutionary.io ...I believe the latest version (v0.4 pre I think?) has unlocked E4Gs that took the GB update a month or two ago.

I'm not sure what the hell is going on over at HTC but not only has Google made every one of their phones easily unlockable, nor do I think they care to, but, HTC also made the very first Nexus (NexusOne). "Fastboot oem unlock" is a mantra among the Android hacking/modding community for that very reason.

Color me confused.

Furthermore, what is the effective difference? Some people have supplemented their "actual identity" with another that may actually be far more known to people....wether the person behind the account known as "Foo" is actually Ralph Smith or not doesn't matter. He is known as Foo.

I grew up in the heyday of the BBS. We would have meetups where we would just call each other by our respective handles. Why? That's how we knew one another. After years of correspondence your real name was effectively irrelevant, not to mention difficult to attach to the name we already knew for years. There are a few of those guys I still talk to and we still call each other by our handles. It's just easier.

So whoever can't stand the idea of no anonymity will create real sounding pseudonyms. Then they will be known as that. At that point what is the difference?

...so far as the police department is concerned any name you have ever used--even variations/abbreviations and misspellings of your real name--is considered an alias. So why doesn't Google just chill the hell out and wait until the local police catch up and document your online aliases as well? It's bound to happen anyway.

I guess my main question is, functionally, what is the difference between an "actual identity" and a pseudonym? Nothing except for the government or other 'official' body...unless there is money to be made, of course.

Oh yeah, and sometimes I don't plug it in for days and when I turn it on the battery is still pretty much exactly where it was....that's a relatively new feature, lol.

As for the actual reason I replied again: Hard-power off = Hold the power button down until it turns off. Locking up your device once or twice is part of the ritual of modding an android device. Just be sure to never do this while flashing. I'd rather let the battery run dry than risk having to fix things the hard way. (Which isn't that hard, honestly, and there are clear instructions on XDA's Nook Color forum for how to fix this)

The SDcard booting is really handy. The performance is slightly lackluster considering the read speed of the SDcard, but, it's still very usable.

The battery life out of the box, well, I didn't get very far in using it stock. The sales rep claimed 10. I browsed a lot for the better part of an hour without a single notch coming off of the battery gauge, for what that's worth. I know that when I set it to stock speed (300min 800max) I get about 4 hours of non-stop web browsing and all that entails (flash ads, opening multiple windows, checking email, gtalk sessions). Disable WIFI and I'm sure you could double that easily for just reading. Now, when I have it OCd (800min, 1300max) I get 2.5-3 hours of non-step web browsing, etc. The same for game playing, though admittedly I only play scrabble and puzzle games. I have tried a smattering of action games and they are all playable but I can't comment on their battery consumption habits. This is all with screen at max brightness, max volume (and then some thanks to DSP manager).

The Bluetooth is also handy for transferring files, though I haven't tried it for playing music.

I use Cyanogenmod7, though some people swear by Phiremod. MIUI was just released for it...it needs a little work still but it's fully functional, it just doesn't 'scream' yet.

...and as far as any Android hacking is concerned get over to xda-developers.com forums. Nook Color is listed in the forums list. Go straight to the Development sub forum. The boot images are all easily accessible and all the tools you need are right there in a sticky at the top with very clear instructions. You can even dual boot from the eMMC. I have a dual boot bootloader that lets me choose which to boot from eMMC (primary or secondary images), SDcard (also with two images) or Recovery.

I can't say enough good things about this machine, especially when compared to other "tablets" in and round it's price range. That gap is closing in the next 6 months I'd imagine as we get into the next generation of tablets, but, for my needs this thing is fantastic. Good luck.

I'm also curious about how CM7 on a nook color was so underwhelming to you...

Granted it isn't a Xoom, but it is $249. I installed it to the eMMC, OC'd to 1.3ghz, performance governor, installed launcher pro and I gotta admit it performs nearly as well as my Evo 4G did. I play games on it and they perform great. The browser performance sucks, but, that's the browser. Dolphin is a bit better, Opera is insanely smooth. I haven't done any modding or even tweaking since the weekend I got it. It really hauls ass. Sure, the battery life isn't as awesome as it was stock, but, it also isn't painful to use...quite the opposite and the battery life is still pretty damn acceptable (unless you need hours upon hours of nonstop screen-on gaming).

But, as usual YMMV...and did...but I'm also curious why and how you had such a dismal experience.

I am scared of that, but, I think the 'pro-sumer' market is big enough to prevent prices from getting that high...and some of these tasks, especially the media centric, are not a ready fit to the latency involved in a distributed type service. Of course that latency will decrease over time, but, so long as some of us know that for a small-to-medium level investment we can nearly eliminate that latency there will be a market for it.

I mean, if we as a society have the capacity to produce an SOC capable of unseating a variety of different industry leaders in a small handful of 'one fell swoops' I'd imagine it would be negligible to produce an 'old school' motherboard, north-bridge/southbridge, cpu, ram, slots, buss, etc type system....of course economies of scale (or lack thereof) would come into play...but...if a place like Guitar Center can sell a brand new Fender brand Stratocaster that to today's standard are garbage but would be a wonder of mass-production when the first Fender Stratocasters were made for $49...(once I bought a $69 case and got a Fender Stratocaster for free), well, I think we'll be okay obtaining reasonably priced PC hardware.

...and the same for (most of the) PC market, and given my recent first (very easy) experience with DLNA the same for most "set top" equipment in general.

Except in special circumstances requiring very heavy lifting (research modeling, professional video/audio production, rendering, heavy duty compiling, etc) I'd imagine our "phones" will be picking up the slack and replacing *everything*...

...at first I was repulsed by the idea, but, while that will nearly eliminate the commodity PC market you cannot eliminate the server market. The "back end" will always need the hardware...and we'll just have to use that. It won't become unavailable, it'll just get a little more pricey...but server-grade hardware never treated me wrong, comparatively.

...and then one day that too will become an app that fits in your pocket...and then we'll revert from the cloud back to individual computing devices...give it 10-20 years and we'll be back to mainframes with a different name...democrats will become republicans will become democrats...disco will return yet again...

Sounds funny, yes, but, as I get older this 'cyclical' thing apparently has something going for it.