Okay so...

...how many have actually caught fire!? Three? Four!?

Not that I make a habit of defending businesses, but all this recall crap perpetuates more of this nanny society bollocks and the like.

Its the same as when news sites talk about the 'dangers' of exploding Lithium Ion batteries. Gimme a break. Its fair to say that these ultimately quite rare cases could be down to production failures, or equally to undisclosed negligence on the part of the customer

OLED Tech?

Isn't this somewhat misrepresentative of OLED tech as a whole?

Sure TVs to some are most important, but in fact of equal importance, surely, is the awesome rise of OLED tech in a much smaller footprint - that of the smartphone. Sales of OLED panels, be them only around 4 inches, must be through the roof in relation to 30"-50" OLED panels.

I have kept an eye on the rise of OLED tech for years and years, have been looking forward to it for just as long, and since getting my Galaxy S2 phone last year, I will now probably never buy a phone with an LCD screen ever again.

As for the next step in tablet displays, future Samsung and Apple revisions are looking more and more likely to move to OLED tech, therefore 7"-10" panels muscles in on OLED sales percentages too.

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These figures being for TVs only is fair enough, but surely falls well short of the whole story, and in fact may mean OLED tech takes off for TVs much sooner than is anticipated in that graph. If ever there is a reason for OLED tech not hitting TVs sooner than later, it can only be artificially due to manufacturers stretching more life out of LCD tech and keeping OLED TV prices high. But that would never happen, would it!?

Wow

Nice, I loved Carmageddon!

Perhaps this time they can keep the frame rates reasonable. The games always ran terribly on quite powerful systems in the day.

Even if the fps was on average high, there would still be areas which would slow to a crawl.

This is assuming it is designed for, and released on PC.

Surely...

Surely the vast majority of sales didn't come via the channels into shops, Apple preferred or otherwise.

Given the evidence doing the rounds on the day, most sales came via Apple's online shop, as people realised that buying from a shop is a huge waste of time having to stand in line.

TNT and co. went utterly ballistic on that friday, having to fulfill hundreds of parcel deliveries per driver for the iPad, and I'm informed by TNT that they couldn't fulfill them all on the first day and had to spread it over to the Saturday.

My iPad was returned to base in the TNT warehouse whilst the telephone operators told me it was still out for delivery. A subsequent phone call showed it was sat in their very offices awaiting personal collection! So in anticipation I went up to collect it - in some ways similar, if more costly in petrol, than having to stand in in line at a shop for one! :-(

I still don't know if the driver was just being downright lazy, because he returned to base with his remaining stash of iPads earlier than he was meant to return that day.

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So, the channels mean sod all if most initial sales are transferred to customers via TNT!

Prophet?

Didn't prophet essentially die at the start of Crysis 2? The main protagonist got called prophet enough times, but its not him.

Whoops, spoiler! ;-)

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As far as I'm concerned provided it's set mostly in a jungle environment and they remove the dumbed down console feel then I'm sold!

Protestations

I 'preordered' so to speak an RPi on 3rd march, now just this weekend Farnell get back to me and say it'll be in my hands August / September.

So reading this article has been one great laugh!

Fail icon for the RPi foundation AND RS / Farnells wonderful handling of the situation over the last few months.

Incroyable!!!

As for e-ink watches, on my wrist right now is a Phosphor WorldTime watch, which has served me well for well over a year and four months without the battery failing, and is of course continuing to work.

So you can imagine the prospects of having a watch that requires charging every 7 days being a bit of a disadvantage - its questionable whether its worth the (very cool admittedly) extra features...

..

I have been following all sorts of KickStarter projects for quite some time now (shame it's US projects only, IndieGoGo is the way to go then) and have never seen a project pull in over a million dollars in the space of 28 hours! Just amazing, and the project shows it too.

Very very well done, very well polished and presented too. The Casio's and Timex'es of the world have an awful lot of catching up to do.

Birdemic!?

Blimey, only four votes so far for that abortion of a film.

Never heard of it until I went looking after seeing this list. It is truly abysmal and plausible to think the director truly thought he created a masterpiece. It is utter trash even for its meagre budget.

Apparently he drove up and down hollywood boulevard promoting his film during the sundance festival or something, played annoying sounds from the film and had crappy bird graphics adorning his car, he spelled the film wrong on the crudely written banner!

The rest of the movies on the list (with a few exceptions) at least had slight redeeming moments such as interesting action sequences or watchable sfx. Birdemic is all out unintentional comedy.

P.S. How come no movies that have shown on Sci-Fi UK Channel are on here? They're bad in a really bad way too.

Suspension of Refunds, Exchanges?

Isn't that against our statutory rights as consumers?

Store credit and the reward card suspensions is also tantamount to outright theft on their part.

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...not that I've bought anything there in years but I'd imagine there must be tens of thousands in outstanding credit at least, due to consumers all over the nation.

Paranoid Android?

Call me paranoid...

Each of those apps require some combination of these Android permissions -

-Read Phone Status and ID.

-Services that cost you money (make calls, send SMSs).

-Read contact info directly.

Fair enough its conceivable why an app might need access to your contacts, even to make phone calls for you, but the question to ask is whether it makes calls without you even knowing, perhaps at 4am, to their premium rate number in thailand!!??

Quite why such an app would need access to your IMEI or phone numbers is beyond me save for some kind of info gathering and selling scam - something to do with them being free?

And I should apparently check the ratings from thousands of people who have interest only in how the app performs to see whether its safe or not? Yeah right.

For all of Apples many *many* failings, at least you don't have this problem.

Hummm

If they'd have stopped production on the franchise after just Robocop 1 then yes, I'd be more on their side...

Still a bit mad though!

Great fun!

English to Spanish test - it got most of my spoken sentence correctly, resulted in this -

"Por favor, ?me podria dirigirse hacia el cercano bar de tetas"

Although I've no idea if its a decent translation or not, I'm sure the sentence can be mostly interpreted provided the recipient has some semblance of a brain. Can't wait to try it out!

Not s/w people

If Sonys hardware dev team have proven anything over the last decade or so is that they're extremely poor at developing software, specifically the OS, and in areas of security and OS lockdown, not to mention consistency.

-A random number gen seeded with a constant 4 every time!?

-The PS3 has multitasking simply patched into the firmware, thereby making it so background tasks are extremely limited.

-Removal of the Other OS feature mostly only because it presented an 'attack vector' to the hackers - a slap in the face to those loyal customers making good use of it.

-Charge people an arm and a leg for old content on the PSN and screw everybody around.

-PS Home was just a laugh, a social networking system that demanded a three hour wait time getting between zones, of which the zones are very small, with very little real substance. What substance it did have was charged for - the PSN equivalent of your crazy frog ringtones and graphics.

-Apple devs typically charge anywhere up to a fiver for a game title on their mobile gaming systems (mostly the touch, but includes all the iOS devices). So how much do Sony charge for their wares? And how much will they add on top for PSP2 titles? Didn't PSP1 titles originally retail for £30-40

-Much like how Windows Phone 7 took nearly a full year to arrive since announcement, by the time PSP2 comes out, the technology won't be anywhere near as impressive as it sounds today.

etc. etc.

Then onto their handling of the situation - take the people to court! Fantastic!

For how it should be done, look at how Microsoft recently treated the team who opened up the WM7 platform, essentially open armed.

Basically Sony failed to spot that having a more open platform means more people buy their hardware. It happened on the PSP, and will happen all over again by the end of this year.

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So how will Sony treat the implementation of the PSP2, they've got less than 12 months to go about improving pretty much everything they do, and how they go about doing it, and charging a lot less to do it! I'm not holding my breath.

*FAIL icon at the top but I'm sure it'll be a runaway success as the drones buy it in their droves.

This whole story stinks of damned lies

Odd fact 1 - Got in a cab with no money, Questionable.

Odd fact 1.5 - Leave a £500 phone as collateral! Questionable.

Odd fact 2 - Got home, went in for money, brought out not enough cash. Questionable.

Odd fact 3 - Returned to find the taxi driver had gone. Questionable.

Odd fact 4 - No mention of any distinguishing features on the vehicle, such as a Taxi ID or anything. Questionable but feasible naivety.

Odd fact 5 - No mention of any particular cabbie company, no checking of license plate or anything.

Odd fact 6 - Contacted the nearest news organisation for self exposure rather than carry out your own investigative legwork, eg. call the various local cabbie companies up and question them about the driver, etc. No just leave it to the cops to do nothing about.

Nobody, just NOBODY should use a cab flagged down in the street - call a cab company (I'm guessing area code + 111 111 or 222 222 or 333 333 etc) on his iPhone and get them to turn up where you are instead of having to stumble to the nearest taxi rank.

I lost count of the amount of things the kid did wrong there! Sure we're all a bit naive at that age, but this is mental.

No, no no, its all just a bit too smelly to me.

All about range!?

Why does it all have to be about range?

Of course they are PR stunts but travelling from London to Edinburgh is one of the least likely scenarios for target customers - it always falls down to the demographics.

I doubt the journey would have been at all practical during the period of the earliest petrol cars either.

Look at my situation, I live four miles to my work place, which is in the same city as where I live. Now I can imagine an electric vehicle allowing me perhaps two weeks up to a month on a single charge at a miniscule fraction of the cost of my current Diesel expenditure.

Surely short commuting, shopping, and light travel duty, perhaps to the nearest large city are utterly perfect for the electric vehicle.

I just don't want to hear about pissant journalists and their London - Edinburgh electric car journeys.

Sod that.

I think I'd much rather have the improved battery life, that sounds like the reason they did it.

Apple had better not satiate the -vast minority- third party hardware crowd, thanks very much.

Yay!

Another technology that we wont see (or will only see on smartphones or iPod Nanos) for a decade or more.

Didn't they say the same thing about being able to print OLED TVs on substrates cheaply and easily without changing the LCD production process significantly five years back now? We're still waiting on cheap OLED tellies.

At least we can now drool over the tech as it emerges, and we have a cool new acronym. yay.

Huh

Easily solved DSG...

...just lower your extortionate prices a bit.

Don't try and convince us that you can't do it!

Summer?

When I moved into my new house it has way better insulation than my mums place, I believe her house was built in the 1890s and hasn't been well modernised.

I now feel very hot in summer time as a result, when the sky is pure blue and the sun is blazing up to 30+ degrees C.

So how does an AeroGel insulated house fare in the hot summer?

If my improved insulation is anything to go by, then I'd imagine with the best insulator in the world it'll be somewhat unbearable, but at the same time if a derivative is used in the re-entry tiles for the shuttle, then it'll be keeping the heat out too, ambient temperatures then dominate, and that'll make it too hot?

works on the iPhone 3GS AND on the website

Just tested this on my iDevices. You activate your non-me.com account via the Find My iPhone app. Accessing the app I successfuly located my iPad AND iPhone 3GS with 4.2.1, despite claiming only to work on iPhone 4. Very nice!

Quote - Of course, that's as useful as tits on a bull if you only have one of these iDevices, so we hope Apple will also make the service accessible through the web, as MobileMe is.

You can actually log into www.me.com with your iTunes login and can track your devices (both iPhone and iPad in my case) on the website, no iDevices needed. Fully tested. Very nice again!

A very rare halo Steve Jobs icon presented!

Huh?

Still no built-in calculator, clock, stocks, weather apps, and most importantly the voice memos app!? I mean these (most?) were even present on the iPod Touch, and they couldn't be arsed to build them into the iPad!

I'm basing this on the latest betas of iOS 4.2 for iPad. If they've added them for the actual release, then YAY (doubt it though).

The worst thing...

...about the stupid apps is that there ARE people out there who are stupid and common enough to like them, so utterly helpless that its a real laugh for them and their likeminded mates. Chavvy teenagers, I point at you. Which is why the stupid apps make quite a lot of money for their lazy assed developers.

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Apple should have a tat cleanout, as its becoming difficult by the second to find the good stuff amongst the shit, I only learn about the decent apps via site articles like this one.

Innacuracy in the very first sentence!

Garbage Collection has been around way longer than Java, its accredited to a John McCarthy in 1959 regarding Lisp, and I find it hard to believe he didn't think about the various algorithms and efficiencies within them.

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I personally became familiar with how horriffic GC can be with an old language on the Atari ST, called STOS Basic (AMOS on the Amiga) back in 1988. It used to slow the program down to a crawl depending upon what you're dealing with!

True origins???

I looked into this myself, its not readily available in the UK, chances are you will end up paying closer to £150 because of import duties from the US site (at least implied that they're in the US). Plus I wouldn't trust them to send me it, check out some of the feedback for them available on the net. Plus for some reason, the top UK distributor RED5 stopped selling them a while back, possibly down to poor supply.

One point of note, which leaves me totally unsurprised as to its physical design and lack of decent UI design (if you attribute user interfaces to watches), here is the contact page for the company -

Headquarters:

Art Technology Limited

Unit 11, 7th Floor, Grand City Plaza No.1

Sai Lau Kok Road, Tsuen Wan

New Territories, Hong Kong

T: +852.2553.2662

F: +852.2580.1661

They're supposedly and primarily marketed out of the US, its actually a piece of far eastern tat!! If you could speak Chinese, chances are you could pick it up for £50 from a shop in HK.

All in all, they're somewhat suspicious, a big disappointment for something so promising.

Its odd too that they never considered fitting a small LED light to illuminate it in the dark for a few seconds, same as on LCD watches for decades!

platform design

Hummm, TiVo in relation to Sky+ or V+.

From personal experience (Sky+) the software is terrible - if I rewind and ffwd too rapidly, the box can get confused and literally destroy the time buffer, or, it more frequently pauses the playback in such a way the only way to unpause it is to re-rewind for a second! Furthermore the box does need the odd power cycling now and again.

Sky push out updates every so often that screws around with the setup, and I see all sorts of varying symptoms too month in month out.

I also know two different people with V+ boxes and they too report various reliability issues, and the V+ menus and EPGs don't really look all that polished and neat.

So in my opinion, given Virgin (and Sky) are apparently incapable of fixing the issues with their kit, I very much welcome the TiVo return provided they don't charge a premium. And although I can't see it happening, Sky should also consider the same move.

TiVo is a much much more mature system given its popularity in the US for ages, and although I have no personal experience with TiVo gear, even if it reliably handles straight forward FFWD and rewind, and at speeds higher than 30x (which isn't 30x in actuality) then I'm sold already!

Plus, 1TB, fantastiche!

Humm

Oh how quickly we forget the stories - specifically about the US high-school, taken to the cleaners for illicitly recording video from the webcams built into laptops lent to its pupils!

Thanks Moz, for creating yet another easy to use opening for hackers! More functionality, more functionality ... oh right, forgot about security again. Sorry.

Sheesh!

The great Wiki tells me the worlds population is approaching 7 Billion. Does this mean that 2.1 Billion (28%) of the worlds population are perverts, murderers or general miscreants!?

Lets hope 1 db record != 1 real person

Tee hee

I hate the proliferation of idiot apps as much as anybody, but the last one linked to made me laugh - "Fart works soundpad HD".

Needless to say it will never grace the flash memory of my iPad.

skies were clear!

Skies were mostly clear where I was!

<--- me fail

Still, I set my Nikon D90 to a 30 second exposure at a wide angle (10mm), and kept snapping away, all I got was one 'eventful' photo - can only be described as a sky 'anomaly', a meteor I'm sure, but it has a very short trail, as if the lump was heading directly towards me, plus it burst into flames and died out too quickly, producing a blob, no trail to speak of.

Thats the best result out of about 100 shots, yes I was there for about 50 mins! This was in the city, there was plenty of light pollution - I couldn't be arsed to drive out the city and stand around in a field with all the rapists and murderers ;-) instead shot them from a bedroom window.

From what I could figure out, I could only see the most pyrotechnic of shooting stars in the city light, and I'm not sure the camera was on the right settings to capture them, and I think I only saw one or two over the entire 50 mins anyways.

What is it? high ISO, wide aperture, thousands of short exposures, or should it be long exposures, low ISO, wide aperture? The D90 is crap for taking continual shots, without buying an intervalometer that is.

Been around for a while...

...various sites offer you downloads implying to be unavailable elsewhere for free, but of course they rely on the fact that people haven't heard of it before, and are too lazy to do a quick google search.

One key example was the SysInternals BSOD BlueScreen screensaver. I'm sure hacked and trojan'd copies of that made the rounds quite a bit.

Ever more ironic is the fact that the author of the screensaver, a certain Mark Russinovich, who became a MS employee after SysInternals was dissolved into the MS website, is a bit of a low-level Windows expert and quite up on security issues too!

script kiddies getting the boot-in undoubtedly.

Surely this is just a...

...MiFi adapter wrapped up in a bulky iPod Touch case? Am I missing something?

<<<<<----- Need a question mark in an upside down warning triangle icon.

No fone calls, no SMS texts, 'cos apple wouldn't allow it anyway. Does it work only with Jailbroken phones, comes with some custom software to provide a phone/sms facility, if at all?

Guh?

Only London?

I can't be sure the Met Police are involved with the whole country, do they govern the rest of the countries forces too? Either way, I'd like to know that the West Midlands Police chiefs are having the same issues shoved down their throats every Police Authority meeting too. The same for Police authorities all across the country.

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Its interesting that the heavy handed tactics of the police in these hi profile incidents are seen as being out of hand, as you've got to remember that they have to deal with the lowest scum holes the country has to offer on a daily basis, I wouldn't want these shits treated softly, no sir. But at the same time, shouting down a 16yr old for taking shots at that public event is waaay too much.

Any evidence...

It would be interesting to see if theres any evidence that they've changed the hardware in any way to improve reception, etc. Apple would never admit to doing this unfortunately.

You mean it was...

...all a gimmick!? Never! ;-)

Would be interesting too to see the 3DTV sales figures in relation to normal sets.

iPad

I think in terms of use, the iPad is a fun little device, most certainly lacking in business capabilities - just try to load a reasonably sized spreadsheet into iWorks Numbers. However a reasonable fast replacement is Documents2Go.

It brings a freshness to using a computer and shows its 'consumer' oriented leanings a bit too much. However for NetBook duties, its pretty faultless save for certain unfortunate web technologies being missing - Flash is 99% Adverts and I generally hate it, but when you really feel it lacks is in support for embedded videos beyond that of Flash or Vimeo. The BBC news website for starters, and the half hearted iPlayer support - just go looking for the movie shown on saturday night - 'The Incredibles' on the iPad - its not there, but is on the full fat version (A BBC responsibility of course).

Aside from that, its a pretty decent, functional enterprise email and PIM device, although these are just as good on the iPhone with a smaller layout.

iOS4 on the iPad should help the situation a lot too.

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I'm intrigued about what sort of computing jobs or activities people would attribute to a netbook that they are objectionable to doing (or just can't do) on an iPad, as I think the iPad and AppStore cover all the bases pretty well. One admitted annoyance though is finding the gems in the AppStore as its a pain in the arse trawling thru the store, finding japanese and other foreign language apps all the time. Should only show English language apps by default. iOS4 must have a better AppStore app.

HP 320LX rival!?

Great article, I never even held a Newton myself. Can't really say I ever pined for one either.

Sorry for bringing up an equivalent much criticised (the OS at least) rival, but the Hewlett Packard 320LX was a very early Windows Mobile device that I owned around the same time as the Newton was around. Extremely well built, clamshell design, very small, I would say smaller than the Newton but I can't be sure based on the photos - it looks chunkier!

I always recall that the Newtons were most certainly devices aimed at the serious business PDAer, confirmed because of how expensive they were! My HP320LX was a lot cheaper I seem to recall.

Oddly enough the same thread of OS is still in operation today, in WM6.5!! Although they were split between professional and standard versions, and between horizontal keyboard equipped devices and vertical 'pocket PC' devices. I think it had Windows CE v1.0 in it, but I did order the OS upgrade ROM kit to v2 (or something) but it didn't change anything significantly!

At their heart from the very early days, right the way thru to 6.5 is an OS that simply takes most or all of the same visual elements as the full-fat Windows and plonks them uninteligently into a mobile device, wholely unsuited for it! 6.5 devices today only look different because they are substituted with UI elements added by the third party device manufacturer, HTC TouchFlo for instance.

It had a 640x240 display, which made it look really high-res for a mobile device.

I stuck with CE devices for years after owning that, mainly because of the amount of freebie software appearing (dotted around because of the lack of an AppStore equivalent) for the OS. At one point owning the rival 'i' device, the Compaq iPaq, then stuck with the same OS and form factor when HTC started building them into mobile phones, specifically the earlier HTC PDA brick like devices. PDAs and mob phones mixed really well I thought, the merging was a no-brainer.

Oh the early days of half arsed designed mobile computing, what memories!

Ha!

Call Mulder and Scully. Sh'yeah right.

It's one of his neighbours going outside and chucking a lump of red hot coal onto his roof. I mean, how easily wound-up can some people get!? Far too easy a target for international humiliation.