Pointing a phone at faces is considered rude in many cultures specifically because it implies you're taking pictures. Vast majority of people who use phones point the camera at a downward angle, so all it could take pictures of is people's feet.

But I have to cut it first sir!

I'd go even further. Because of this focus on amount of pixels rather than quality, we're not getting quality content. Modern mobile GPUs could probably push PS3/XB360 quality graphics at 480-720p. We could have had a controller-like phone holder and play previous gen console games on the phones if not for this fetish.

Instead all you get is crap like angry birds, flappy bird and so on. Deus Ex game mobile game was so terrible, it wasn't even funny, and it really, REALLY tried to push the envelope as much as possible with the format - it looked worse than most PS2 games. It's essentially impossible to make a good looking game on mobile today, because if you're going to support the native resolution, you have to make graphics quality awful to make mobile GPU able to play it.

It would be awesome if 480p or 720p would the most popular resolution, GPUs would continue to grow in power and we would have xb360/PS3 games ported to phones because there would actually be enough power to run them without massive changes.

Unfortunately, not for a phone with this kind of a screen.

That is false. You are thinking old people, who with time lose ability to hear higher frequency sounds. Average adults can often hear higher frequencies, and young people can hear even higher ones.

I still remember a case of walking around a certain field in the countryside with an old relative and he was complaining about the fact that there used to be a lot of grasshoppers in this place and now the environmental pollution killed them all since it's all quiet. At the same time, grasshopper noises where everywhere. I didn't have the heart to tell him that it's just his age and his reduced ability to hear higher frequency sounds.

Yet all of the major Western powers are guilty of this. Are we all insane? And when you live in the world full of insane murderers, what good is it to be the only sane person?

As for your strange quip, "subject" is a legal term used to describe those citizens who are subject to laws of the land in certain languages. Russians tend to use very formal language on governmental level. The english term is used in the same way in UK. Essentially you're bitching about a cultural difference, but misattribute it to Putin himself.

Here is an example of the usage of the term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Doesn't matter. They are our stooges. We will stand by them.

Bad news. Putin is not insane. That is the dumb propaganda line meant for the ignorant or those who like to believe that world is simple, and that anyone who has an opposing point of view can only be "insane".

He's logical leader who believes first and foremost in his national interest. We have a lot of same kind of leaders, through they are generally much weaker and less capable of strategic calculations that Putin. As a result, there's absolutely nothing against someone like Bush starting a world war three because he thinks Russia won't reciprocate in kind.

Would you like a picture of my nice nokia 5230 I still use to date?

Most phones nowadays use it because it became obvious that EU would mandate it if everyone didn't play ball a few years ago. Before it, manufacturers were making a mint off chargers.

Sounds nice and all, but I haven't owned a single android device to date.

To clarify - Japanese take the East-Asian concept of "face (cultural concept, not part of the head) over reality" to the extreme in everything, from their ties with other people to the products they buy to their conflicts with their neighbours.

As a result, many things sold in Japan personify this particular aspect. Substance is certainly important to an extent, but style is absolutely necessary to get anything sold. Iphone nails the style and image concepts, and these alone will often sell your product in Japan as long as it's not completely awful otherwise. The extreme popularity of plush toys with adults in Japan and the fact that you must own the current, heavily advertised plush toy and not one that's a year old shows this well.

All of these are essentially the same part of the "image and style is important, substance is optional as long as it meets bare minimum requirements" as those clearly visible in Apple products. There's a reason why macbooks have a backlit apple on the opposite side of the screen, or why apple fights so hard over "curved rectangles" in courts - it wants to be distinct as to reinforce the concept of "apple is more stylish and very distinct from competition".

I'm not attempting to be condescending and simplistic. I'm merely pointing out that apple's design paradigm of "image and style first" align very well with Japanese culture.

The story was hilarious as it showed the sheer depth of incompetence at apple, and Jobs' utter inability to be flexible until reality hit him in the face several times over.

When you think about it, the Japanese market is perfect to iphone's "style over substance" approach. That's how it always functioned, and now just with phones but with many consumer goods ranging from electronics to plush toys (which have a huge adult market in Japan!) Problem is, Japanese have some very specific requirements when it comes to their goods that are typically completely unique to Japan and do not exist outside that country. They need to be made suitable for them functionally and culturally, as they have a very different approach to many things from one we have here in the West.

So initial foray was an unmitigated disaster. People returned early iphones back to stores in droves and the reason was utterly obvious - Jobs' idea for iphone was "same thing everywhere", and Japanese absolutely needed several significant adjustments to their phone, such as integration of certain Japan-centric services and input methods. The crash of iphone in market that everyone thought it would immediately take it by the storm actually got major players like Fujitsu say that Japanese market was so different, Western companies just don't stand the chance.

Then someone at Apple hit Jobs with clue bat hard, "one approach for all markets" paradigm was buried for Japan and iphones sold in Japan were significantly adjusted to match expectations of Japanese public.

Rest was history. While numbers are not quite as silly as this article suggests, Japan today has one of the highest iphone sales per capita in the world, because the general idea behind iphone, the "style over substance" approach is simply what Japanese market and mindset is all about. All it needed was understanding that no, your product is not perfect for all people everywhere and that some important adjustments for cultural differences and expectations are necessary.

In many ways, it makes for a good extreme case study on how products, no matter how good they are, always need to be adjusted for sales in target area.

No such thing any more. If it's a male, he's a terrorist and legitimate target nowadays. If she's a female, she's terrorist's family member and future suicide bomber. Win/win.

GW2 is not a pay once game. It's "microtransaction hell free to play model if you want to play the game with any comfort, but we'll charge you AAA price up front because we have good brand name" game. That's one of the reasons why so many people dropped it - after all the empty promises, they ended up making even legendaries puchasable from auction house with in game money, and in game money purchasable with real money strait from the developer. After spending months telling everyone they won't sell in game money for real money.

On the other hand as FF14 showed, people are fully willing to pay if you have a good game worth paying for. Problem was and still is that most people only pay for one sub at a time, so you need to produce enough quality to make people want to switch from WoW, or FF14, or whatever sub game they're playing. And quality level there is much higher than F2P.

That's the main reason why so many MMORPGs nowadays went F2P. Not that the model is great, but because bad and average games simply could not compete with WoW. F2P let's you release anything from average to shovelware and finance it at least for some time, as long as it's not completely awful.

But great F2P MMORPGs are essentially all P2P nowadays, and will likely remain this way for a while, simply because to compete in that market you need to provide people with consistent influx of high quality content. F2P budgets are simply not sufficient for that sort of thing, as SWTOR showed. When they went F2P, they had to drop the constant new content updates.