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Comment Re:Zune or Xbox? (Score 1) 712

The Zune music player in WP7 is *terrible*; lacking in so many features it's useless for playing audiobooks or podcasts. Let's look at what it's missing:

- No audio scrubbing. If you're listening to a long podcast you have to hold down track-skip to fast-forward, but it's slow and if you move your finger even a tiny bit it'll just skip to the next track.
- No lyric support
- No option to resume mp3s from where you last stopped listening.
- No bookmarks
- WP7 constantly forgets the last track played.

It's pathetic, to the point that I still have to carry an ipod around in addition to my WP7 phone (for language learning purposes). Zune desktop client isn't any better; the interface is a confusing mess.

Comment Re:Still behind iOS and Android (Score 1) 151

in theory, yes. problem is:
1) Not all developers have implemented this, and even when they have put the extra effort in it's fairly limited (tile just shows a counter with no extra information, or information on the last notification received).
2) User has to pin every app that uses toasts to the start screen. They shouldn't have to - live tiles and notifications are completely different concepts.
3) The android / iOS notification centres give you a list of app notifications received *in the order they arrived*, meaning you can prioritise how you deal with them. No matter how well live tiles are implemented, WP7 apps can't talk to each other so this time-ordering is lost.

Comment Re:Still behind iOS and Android (Score 1) 151

WP7 push notifications (toasts) are fairly useless, as there's no notification cache. When you receive one, your phone vibrates and it appears on the screen for 15 seconds..and then disappears, gone forever. If you missed it, too bad, you'll never know about it.

On the other hand, a toast push message can open an app when clicked by the user, so could be used as a mechanism for initiating an incoming Skype call.

Comment Re:35,000 apps (Score 1) 584

Wait - so figures show there are more WP7 developers paying a yearly subscription fee than there are apps in Windows Marketplace?! Considering most mobile dev companies pump out multiple apps, that means a substantial number haven't released anything. This doesn't make any sense..

Are you positive they're "voting with their wallets" and not being given free subscriptions by MS?

Comment Re:What the fuck is a "Gringotts"? (Score 1) 147

I own a WP7 running Mango, It's a pretty decent device, which is fairly easy to use (i came from IOS). However, it's still a new OS with a few glaring omissions (no way to backup for example) and a not very full app-store. To answer your questions:

- Wifi works fine, though it switches off when you lock the phone. No you cant change this.

Getting pics off the phone is done by syncing with Zune via USB or over wifi. Bluetooth file transfers are not supported in the OS, so forget BT.

My girlfriend can use the phone fine and she's extremely non-techy. However, she finds the IPhone easier to use.

Comment Asian fonts (Score 1) 308

Chrome still can't display Asian fonts correctly. Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Korean Hanja are all rendered the same, even though they're all written differently.

This bug was first reported in 2008 and keeps getting pushed back; I literally can't believe this still hasn't been fixed, it completely breaks Asian support and means this browser can't be .

Oh a related issue; You can't choose fonts per encoding type, which means if you want to read English AND any Asian font, you can make one of them nice and readable but it breaks the look of the other.
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TSA Worker Jailed In Body Scan Rage Incident 352

A TSA worker in Miami was arrested for aggravated battery after he attacked a co-worker for making fun of the size of his genitals. Rolando Negrin walked through one of the new body scanners during a recent training session and a supervisor started making fun of his manhood. From the article: "According to the police report, Negrin confronted one of his co-workers in an employee parking lot, where he hit him with a police baton on the arm and back."
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Google Street View Shoots the Same Woman 43 Times 106

Geoffrey.landis writes "Terry Southgate discovered that his wife Wendy appears on the Google Street View of his neighborhood not once or twice but a whopping 43 times. From the article: 'It seems as if the Street View car simply followed the same route as Wendy and Trixie. However, Wendy was a little suspicious that the car was doing something on the "tricksie" side. Several of the Street View shots show Wendy looking with some concern towards the car that was, well, to put it politely, crawling along the curb. "I didn't know what it was doing. It was just driving round very, very slowly," Wendy told the Sun.' The next best thing to being a movie star — a Street View star!"

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