Once children discover that projectile vomiting leads to a hooky day from school it takes a while to negotiate them back to normal digestion. Especially if they're socially awkward and dislike school and/or are bullied, or a high-stress test is impending. Most especially since it's not acceptable any more to refocus your children with a cattle prod, tazer, paddle or switch. So yes, there is a phase of modern parenting where vomit happens a lot. Buckets don't help any more than hovering over them every moment does: in the latter case they'll just spray you to make their point more efficacious, and in the former they will miss. Making them go to school anyway just ensures they vomit all over the school, in which case the school is required to send them home, but at least you don't have to clean it up. If your children are gapped just right a normal person can enjoy this vomit state for a very long time objectively, or nearly an eternity subjectively.
Vomitology is just a primer for the pain that is Teen Angst.
I think I've earned an off-topic mod here.
Yeah right. It's not as if the iPhone hadn't already demonstrated demand for that form factor.
Yes, iPhone had. OEMs thought that Android was not worthy to compete at that price level. It had to be proven to them before they would move forward. So Google did prove it and they did. If one of them had stepped up without this proof they would now be the the premier Android provider with a leg ahead on 70% of the global smartphone market.
They rode that pony for 25 years. What have you done that's so great?
The last 10 years that cow gives no milk. She's old and dry. It's time for BBQ. She's livestock, not a pet.
Google is an advertising company. I've never head anyone quite so hungry for products that are specifically designed to spy on them and advertise to them.
My whole life the world has been ad driven. Saturday morning cartoons with Underdog and Superchicken on a black and white TV, late nite "Our Gang" interspersed with ads for cereal we demanded our parents deliver if they truly loved us and wanted us to be well... and so on. Now by trying to learn more about me in ways other than my preference for video content the advertisers are actually becoming more useful by delivering ads for stuff I might actually already want, to teach me about things proximate to my interests that I was not aware of. I kind of like that. It's also more efficient to them: offering mutual funds to kindergarten kids is a waste of time. The loss of the wasted mistargeted ads is an increase in both efficiency and consumer quality. I'm OK with the idea that helping people who make stuff I might want find me and let me know about their interesting stuff is a profitable business I don't have to pay for - especially if it drives an economy that gives me increasingly good free stuff on a regular reliable basis, and through the efficiency of only advertising to people who are conceivably interested in the product drives prices down for everything overall and QUITS WASTING OUR TIME with stuff we would never and could never be interested in.
Google itself has already provided detailed instructions for how to dual-boot Linux Mint on the thing on launch day. So that's one worry cleared up. Since there is Chrome for Linux, and you can do anything in Chrome on Linux that you can do in ChromeOS there's no reason not to default boot to Linux when that option gets sussed out. Should only be a few weeks, and Google will cooperate.
I'll bet Linux Mint is a wonder to behold on a 2560 x 1700 at 239 PPI display. Imagine the field photography review potential. The world of professional video editors is probably doing their best to deplete the supply. Of course Mint is a media focused distro so it's got all the goodies available.
Document edit pros can probably use the thing as it is. Google docs gives the power of live collaborative documents that can't be had as well anywhere else, and this device gives the glory of seeing it in full quality with art as it would print, from wherever you happen to be. Add a second 30" 2560×1600 with mini DisplayPort or through an adapter HDMI to an arbitrarily large bigscreen available everywhere. With 3G even, so you don't have to rely on local network.
Sales pros should be all over this too. If you can't carry your product with you because it's too large you need must have the finest portable display to show it on. For these folk price is not an issue. The best of them ask each month "what is the best today?" and then demand whatever that is - and get it. What's a few thousand dollars every few months to outfit a Sales Warrior with the sharp spears he uses to bring in millions in gross profits a year? Just asking him WHY he needs it is wasting his valuable time.
It has the finest display available of any mobile client compute device in the world. That alone commands a premium price. And it's a touchscreen! And it's smaller than a Macbook Air in every dimension. Also it's the Latest Thing all the Cool Kids have.
And then there are the lawyers, doctors, sports pros, the rich, those who want to appear to be rich, and on and on who don't care about this petty amount, to whom high cost is a plus, or will just charge their customers the cost before you even start to talk about why Joe the mechanic down the street would want one. We know why Joe wants one. Mobile HD porn. We don't have to be embarrassed by that. The Internet is for porn. Speaking of which, the devices will be highly in demand in the Internet porn industry as well - which is like most of the Internet.
Of course Mint opens up all the various remote machine management potentials and remote desktop options too. Remote into SIX 800x600 rez machines at the same time (some can be higher) without any of them overlapping on your screen on the device itself - and up to six more with an attached display for a total of TWELVE PCs on your display at the same time (probably at least one local and one VM). And room for other stuff on the screens also, without you even start counting multiple USB-attached slow-mo displays. And it has 3G. The thing's a mobile Nerd Command Center. Did I mention that it's got all of the latest Intel virtualization technologies present and enabled? It does.
Needs more storage. You can get a terabyte pen drive though. That pen drive will, by itself, cost more than this whole beautiful machine.
The Note is a phone that is also a tablet. This is a small professional notebook. Top end phones cost less than small professional notebooks. Although they exist in separate domains, I think the analogy is apt. Would you prefer a car analogy? I don't do those usually.
"The battery, however, was rather pathetic out of the box." General description that pretends Android doesn't have myriad media player options everywhere. "Since the Android security nightmare is so well documented"
I have three of these $89 tabs. The media play - including Netflix, Pandora, yadda yadda, myriad media formats - is freaking excellent right out of the box and more options are available on Google Play. No Rooting, ROMing or odd nerd skills required - just turn it on, log into your Gmail account and go. Still no Hulu Plus though. Battery life is good and with nonstop use since Christmas is holding up fine. With a 16GB uSDHC added storage is just fine too - the Android 4+ versions they come with natively let you offload almost all of the apps to the SD. Security is not a problem if you're not scanning Russian warez sites for a hacked pirated version of an app you could just buy for a buck, or looking on Google play for apps that are clearly sketchy from people who have only pushed 100 downloads ever.
They're pretty durable too. The kids throw them around, step on them, spill beverages and sometimes throw up on them. I was worried about the ruggedness and got the "extended service" plan, but it looks like that's not going to be a problem.
Pushing these "unreliable, insecure, inadequate Android" tropes in the form of a question isn't really what an Ask Slashdot is for. It's more of a "Mohave Project" or "Get The Facts" sort of thing where you pay for placement of your BS, or at least place it with the usual cNET, ZDNet, RedmondChannelPartners and such and run ads against it for the "Amazingly versatile and universally lauded Windows RT Tablet" that you've got warehouses full of that you can't seem to shift despite hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing.
On the
Now not even can
This isn't the ride I signed up for. Maybe the new management has some editorial influence that changes why I come here. This is "News for nerds" and it's also "stuff that matters". If
"Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all"
Ah, as with Seinfeld getting Bill Gates to wag his tail for a commercial, some things are priceless memories of marketing brilliance. They become artifacts of the culture, they are so memorable.
Real Programmers don't eat quiche. They eat Twinkies and Szechwan food.