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Comment Re:Easy - RIM (Score 1) 222

This report if for MTS retail stores. Unlike US where you buy your phone and contract in an AT&T store, in Russia operators used to sell you only the SIM card. Third-party mobile phone stores have a much larger marketshare, sell contracts and let you pay the phone bill. Operator stores historically have been slow to offer new phone models or lower prices on older ones.
MTS acquired a retail store chain, but still sell less phones that other popular chains. In addition, their iPhone price used to be way above average.
And iPhone in Russia is priced significantly more than in the US - probably the only significant reason of why WP7.5 is winning.

Comment Google Drive is better (Score 1) 492

Google Drive does have some innovated stuff from Docs - it has awesome realtime collaboration, borrowed from Google Wave. I'd say that if you need several people editing a document at the same time, nothing beats Docs.
The only addition Google made to Docs before rebranding it into Drive is the desktop sync feature and bumping up free storage to 5 gigs. I'd say this is minor compared to existing document editing/viewing/collaboration features, which
a) Dropbox doesn't have;
b) Were steadily developed for at least 5 years.

Comment Re:Chrome doesn't offer a choice? News to me (Score 2) 170

I remember the time when IE dominated the web and it was not pretty. Most sites didn't bother testing compatibility with other browsers - when Firefox 1.0 was finally released, a lot of sites didn't work or display correctly. IE6 was synonymous with stagnation (a popup blocker appeared only in Windows XP SP2, 3 years after IE6 was released!). Most feature-rich or banking sites simply installed their own ActiveX controls or used flash because Javascript in IE was so poor.
Futhermore, IE versions for Mac and Windows Mobile worked differently from the desktop version. I'd say it's remarkable that today you can expect 99% websites to work properly on any browser or device - a direct consequence of IE losing marketshare, forcing webmasters to care about compatibility with non-IE browsers.
Although I do admit that IE introduced AJAX before others.

Comment Re:Sounds about right... (Score 4, Informative) 435

let's ignore the fact that there's been practically no marketting and advertising for this brick

Technically, Nokia Lumia isn't yet on sale in the US. And in Europe, Limua phones are heavily promoted - in my area ads for these phones are everywhere, on TV, billboards, radio and mobile phone stores. This is sad because even with this insane amount of promotion they're still having trouble selling the thing.

Comment Re:Apple? (Score 1) 192

I've used WP 7.5 on a Samsung Focus and is was even worse than Android. Rebooted at least every 2-3 days! In addition, Android actually has some very useful features, such as playing notifications and ringtones through the loudspeaker even when headphones are connected - extremely helpful if you forgot to unplug the headphones.

Android does however have issues with sound - if headphones are plugged in during an incoming call, unplugging them doesn't switch the phone to speaker.

Comment Re:not surprising. (Score 1) 364

Windows Phone got updated, but still not as perfect as Apple's simultaneous updates for all phones.
Pre-7.5 updates were significantly delayed (for several months), 7.5 went much better. But still AT&T Samsung Focus rev1.4 got Mango about a month later and all AT&T Samsung Focus phones didn't get internet sharing - even though it's fully supported by hardware and can be enabled with a simple registry hack! Considering how seriously Windows Phone is behind iOS and Android feature-wise, Microsoft can't afford wasting time on catching up with their competitors.

But still this is much better than Google's "leave updates to manufacturers/carriers" approach.

Comment Re:Stick to Nexus (Score 1) 364

Nexus One was a nice phone, but still not perfect:
- After unlocking the bootloader, you can't lock it back. This may be useful if you've done playing with custom roms and want to sell the phone, or want to secure the phone. An unlocked bootloader allows someone with a USB cable to dump all the data without knowing the unlock pin or password.
- Gingerbread was released late, about two months after Nexus S.
- It has some preinstalled apps taking up space on the system partition - like Facebook and Twitter. These versions are usually outdated and if you install the update, the same app will be installed twice! Installing them on the /data partition with the possibility to remove them would be much more useful.
- Finally, as people already mentioned, it's not getting ICS.
In addition, the phone has serious limitations, such as a crappy digitizer (no pinch-rotate, onscreen joysticks cannot be on the same line) and too little flash memory so that mandatory updates for Market, Google Music and other system apps take up all the space.

Comment Re:Microsoft (Score 2) 521

Microsoft was also productive in the early 2000-s. Windows 2000 was a great OS, making NT ready for the desktop, and a major step in finally fixing the constant bluescreens and crashes of the 9x line. Unlike Windows XP, 2000 had no activation crap and had everything needed for everyday tasks. XP just added desktop themes, entertainment apps and Windows Restore.
Visual Studio .NET/2003 and the introduction of .NET were also major steps, this probably killed Borland because Borland couldn't create a competitively priced products or offer something better than Visual Studio. VS2005 was also a great IDE, with powerful refactoring tools and a really helpful debugger. Plus, it also introduced the free Express editions.

It seems that the whole "rewrite longhorn from scratch" thing and the failure of VIsta put Microsoft (at least the Windows team) back a few years and made them more pragmatic, instead technological advances (promises for WinFS, making everything .NET, vector graphics to make UI resolution-independent just to name a few) they're preferring to make GUI tweaks. I'm very interested to see if Windows 8 finally manages to introduce something new.

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