No. You're not listening.

I converse directly with my friends over long and rambling conversations via email on a daily basis. Obviously, browsing facebook for 20 minutes isn't friendship, but talking, debating, sharing viewpoints and intimate experiences is friendship. I see and talk to 100 people face-to-face every day at work, but they are not friends. Friendship is about how you interact, and not about whether you are in the same room as the other person.

You seem convinced that you are more than an expert on friendship than the rest of us, but the more you write the more I think you have no idea what friendship is.

I guess it depends on what you define as 'friends'. I consider friends to be people with whom I have a shared interest, and to whom I converse on a regular basis so I know what they're doing in their life, they know what I'm doing, and we enjoy sharing experiences and so on. Some might consider that doing it via email rather than in person is somehow a reduction in the value of that friendship; I do not.

One of my best friends moved to Australia from the UK, and I still keep in touch with him on a daily basis via email, sharing photos, stories of what each other are up to, experiences and debate. I consider myself far better friends with him, despite the distance and medium of communication, than people with whom I might spend an evening every week or so. I don't see that as 'dialling down' the friendship experience. You might but perhaps that's because you're more needy of physical interaction in order to sustain a friendship.

Horses for courses, difference strokes for different folks, etc.

You're quite, quite wrong. I enjoy my job, find it interesting, mentally stimulating and exciting. That's why I work the hours I do. But I have plenty of time to have rich friendships outside my working life (not to mention a few excellent friendships as part of my working life).

Just because you're unable to maintain friendships via different communication mediums than face-to-face speech, doesn't mean that other people are so restricted. And just because you do a 9-5 job doesn't mean that other people have compromised their life by doing interesting stuff for longer.

Oh, and as a matter of pedantry, I haven't "decimated" my social life, as there is no way that I'd have 10x the social life even if I had no job whatsoever.

What a load of utter tosh. I'm pretty busy. I work an 11-hour day, with an hour commute at each end. I also have busy weekends. So in order to keep up with my friends I share pictures, comments, etc on Facebook during normally dead time (like commuting). My friends are friends, not aquaintences. And the reason I'm so close to them is because I communicate with them daily or hourly - even if I don't physically see them for days or weeks.

In fact, some of my best friends I've known for 11-12 years, and communicate daily via email. I know far more about them than I do about acquaintances I meet at the pub or at work, etc. Some of them I've only met face-to-face two or three times.

Friendship is almost wholly about communication. Whether I sit in a pub drinking beer and talking, or play sports and talk, or watch a movie and talk, communication is the bit that matters. So communicating via email, SMS, facebook, twitter, etc, is just as valid - possibly more so, as I communicate far more electronically than I would ever be bothered to do if I had to get in a car and go meet people week-by-week.

Amusing, but not relevant. Microsoft makes a phone OS (not a very good one, but, nevertheless...). They also partner with a bunch of hardware manufacturers who make phones that run their OS.

By the same token, you could say that Google don't make a phone, since the Nexus is manufactured by HTC.

RTFA, and you'll see it was a refurbished handset. And the article summary is misleading when it says "is selling phones with". This was one instance, one device.

...and you must have missed the part where it's free for a trial period and then after that it's free forever for http, they only lock down https in the free version. Which seems pretty good value to me.

Or even use EasyTether, which is free and doesn't require the device to be rooted.

So the solution is what - Google should wait 5 years between OS upgrades? In which case people would be complaining that Google never updates the functionality.

Phones are not computers. Most people upgrade their phones annually, and a lot of consumers don't know about or expect an OS upgrade during that time. I think you're over-egging the pudding on this.

And besides, I still use XP despite Vista and W7 being released in the last few years. XP works just fine, thanks. And the same goes for Android - I know plenty of people for whom 1.6 is just perfect. 2.0 would be nice, but it's not essential.

Erm, the SDK usually hits the streets a couple of months before the firmware does (that's certainly the case with 1.6 and 2.0 - SDK was available about 8-10 weeks before the first devices with that OS version were released. And during that time many/most developers were able to test/update their apps to run with the new OS. So, for the example, by the time Cupcake was installed on most phones, most major Android apps had been upgraded to support it perfectly. Same goes for 2.0.

This process is exactly the same on iPhone as it is for Android - the market knows which OS versions an app supports, and devs get the SDK early and can upgrade the apps for max compatibility before the OS is released.

Plus, the SDK allows apps to target certain versions of the OS and use reflection to test if functionality is available on the device before using it (and degrade gracefully if it doesn't). And the Android auto-update meant that phone users were prompted to install the new update automatically. If devs don't choose to use those tools properly, then their app will fail; that's a loss to the developers, not Google, Android or the end users.

So basically, most of your post is irrelevant bunk.

And, of course, if people are techy enough to understand the differences between 1.5, 1.6 and 2.0, and really want the latter, they can just root their device and install 2.0 if they want. It's hardly complicated. Seems like a pretty goo upgrade path to me.

Have to agree. I've had a Magic and Nexus One, and all the apps I want to use work on both (except Google Earth, which requires 2.x).

And besides, there are, what, 3 major revisions of Android - Cupcake/1.5, Donut/1.6, Eclair/2.1. There's a few devices running 2.0, but they have only been around a couple of months and will undoubtedly move to 2.1 very soon. Most providers are upgrading or planning to upgrade to at least 1.6, and many to 2.x, within the next couple of months.

So in reality, within the next 3-4 months we're talking about a handful of apps not working on a handful of devices running older versions of the OS. People make this out to be a far bigger issue than it actually is.

As is "CGI-quality". I guess whoever wrote the article summary didn't actually consider what CGI stands for.

You mean there are women here? :-o

Perhaps you should be more careful? I've had expensive mobile phones since 1995, and never had one stolen, lost or damaged (and certainly never dropped one into a toilet).