Also, multi-tasking is [...] limited for technical reasons which you are either unwilling to research or unable to understand.

Then the OS is badly designed. I'm sorry, but that's the truth. Every single one of their major competitors has multi-tasking: Android, WebOS, Blackbery OS, shit, even the horrid Windows Mobile has multi-tasking. And guess what? My Palm Pre and my friend's Droid both get pretty much the same battery life as the iPhone, and are even similarly specced with the 3GS. And they don't feel sluggish when multi-tasking either.

Why are you forgiving Apple for making a poor platform? It's THEIR fault it can't multi-task, regardless of the reason.

Las Vegas was in an arid desert too, what's your point?

Mars is so interesting because of all the rocks out there, Mars would be shit-easy to terraform in comparison. Basically we'd pump out a whole bunch of CO2 (something we're already doing on earth, albeit as a byproduct) until the atmosphere gets a bit thicker. A thicker atmosphere traps heat better. Then we introduce vegetation to convert said CO2 into Oxygen (lots and lots and lots of algae really, that way when they die and decompose, it can be used as soil). Boom, habitable. It will take a while, but the sooner we start the sooner it'll be ready for long term colonization and exploration.

Yeah, may sound a little dumb now, but realize that the Earth's current population is estimated at around 6.8 BILLION people. Currently, many areas are already suffering from over population, in the conservative projection is that we'll reach 9 Billion people around 2040 (though this assumes no major shift in the trend for deaths, such as world changing medical breakthroughs, etc).

So one way or another, if we hope to continue to survive, we're not left much choice other than to expand to other planets/moons. And since Mars is relatively close, has similar gravity, and environmentally isn't much different from Earth (on the grand scale of things in the universe), terraforming it is a very real possibility.

Ok, now try rereading that sentence. Specifically the part where I wrote "current gen smartphones".

HTC is making all their Android phones have a 3.5mm stereo jack starting with the HTC Hero from mid-2009. The Droid and Eris have a headphone jack. The Pre and Pixi have headphone jacks, All blackberries have had headphone jacks for a few years now, I'm pretty sure every major WinMo phone from the past 2 years has a headphone jack... I could continue but it'd just be redundant.

It's one thing to say that normal phones don't have headphone jacks, as you're right, most don't, but then again, what's the point of connecting one of those to your car? That's the point of this particular thread remember? Car connection?

I don't own an iPhone or an iPod Touch and never planned to, but I do own a Pre, and when I want to use it in my car I plug the stereo cable from my tape deck into the headphone jack and put it on the touchstone in my car. The phone's mic is in speaker mode when the 3.5mm jack is connected to something, so I just talk normally and the sound comes out of my speakers. This is not rocket science people. My best friend does the same with his Droid and used to do it with his iPhone 3G as well.

The iPhone may have proprietary car adapters, but try streaming Pandora while using its GPS and see how far you get...

Umm, what the hell are you talking about? Aux in jacks connect using a male-to-male stereo cable to any stereo jack (stereo jacks = headphone jack). What current gen smartphone do you know of that lacks a basic headphone jack?

It's called an aux in jack, and many more new cars have them than IPod docks. On older cars you can even get a stereo to tape converter to give that aging tape deck some usefulness. No one's going to embrace the iPhone because of their proprietary hardware interface. That'll only screw over consumers who inevitably decide to switch.

Apple will lose this fight because they made 3 big mistakes:

1. Alienating the homebrew communities by forcing them to do things like jailbreaking (these communities are rife with potential developers which will often willingly switch to more open platforms)
2. Releasing only 1 phone per generation and forcing a "one size fits all" mentality on people who want different things from their phone
3. Locking themselves into a horrible carrier for years on a network which was already crappy before the iPhone crushed it

As it stands, Android will be capable of gaining a lot of ground in the coming year and dare I say even be dominant in 12 months time as contracts expire. Hell, if Palm can pull some decent hardware out of their asses for their nice new OS, they might even finally be able to gain some ground too.

Save your beer money, because if you don't have this, you will be a social outcast.

I'd rather be a social outcast than someone so desperate for the approval of others that they'll buy a gadget just for the status it bestows.

But hey, I guess you're too ignorant to think maybe the sheer amount of skyscrapers and concrete in NY would be one major cause of insufficient ability to handle calls.

Really? Cause as a NYC resident, my Sprint service works just fine all over the city. I've never dropped a call here when above ground. Neither has my best friend on Verizon (we have the Pre and Droid, respectively). The latter actually switched back to Verizon only a month ago and ditched his iPhone because he couldn't take the crappy service he was getting with AT&T. This is basically an issue with AT&T not having enough towers and repeaters in the city to handle the traffic.

PS - As a Jew, I find the accusations of some of the posts above outlandish. I mean, they've never mentioned the NSA wiretapping thing at our Jew meetings... only the mind control :P

MichaelSmith's quite correct. This is Apple and Oranges, so to speak. All of the iPhone's applications in it's first gen were ACTUAL web apps hosted on a server. They weren't really even apps, just mobile versions of web pages. The Pre's apps are on the phone however, and leverage a TON of the upcoming HTML5 spec to allow them to do things like use a client side db, play video and audio, etc. These were things that the iPhone could not do through its browser. Not to mention that iPhone apps can't play with phone settings, contacts, etc, while the Pre's apps can, since they're not "web apps," they're just written like them.

And how exactly does it "suck"? You haven't actually stated why. Have you ever used it? Or do you actually know anything about it? Or are you just parroting what some iPhone obsessed website said?

Yeah! No one uses Palm platform! I mean, it's essentially HTML/CSS and Javascript, but I mean come on, who writes that anymore? No one knows or cares about html and javascript because it's useless! Nothing uses it and there's definitely no one out there who can make a living off of it.


I do hope my sarcasm tags aren't necessary, given how absurd you sound. Yes, there are plenty of Java devs out there, and yes, I do wish Palm would release a Java SDK for the phone, but the fact is that that's not the developer segment they're going after. They're aiming development for this phone toward the millions of web developers out there. I've tried writing an app for the phone when the SDK first came out, and though I had no experience with the Prototype Framework they use for Javascript, I still had a little VLC remote control app up and running within the afternoon, with a pretty decent UI. They use the HTML5 specs for a bunch of things and I've seen some pretty impressive things done on the phone.

The only major problems are the current lack of low level networking (homebrew coders have written services for the linux backend though, in Java no less, to work around this for things like an IRC client), and 3D acceleration, though apparently they're working on the latter and even hired someone a few months back as a graphics framework engineer for the phone. There's speculation that that's one of the things they'll be talking about at CES.


Now, let me be clear about something, I have a Pre, but I don't think it's the greatest phone or OS in the world. There's actually a lot that I wish it had that Android has, but at the same time, there's a lot that WebOS has that Android doesn't (let's not even discuss the iPhone, as I honestly don't care about smartphone that can't do true multi-tasking). Both platforms still have a ways to go to true maturity though, and keep in mind it's still very early in the game respectively. The Pre's been around for what, 6 months? Android's v1 was pretty bad and many thought it dead till more phones came out and the OS matured. The reason the iPhone is so popular is primarily because it was the only game in town for a long time, and it didn't even have its much touted app store when it came out, or 3D acceleration. The way I see it, the more competition, the better. And the more innovative and creative ways they can all try to pull in both users and developers, the better it'll be for everyone.

Well from my point of view as an American, the Italian legal system isn't that much better...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/03/google-trial-privacy