Big flaw...

It doesn't seem to remember which stories you've read and which you haven't, and there's no indication on an icon that there are unread stories

I never understood...

so perhaps someone could explain? If OnDigital had succeeded, wouldn't it have meant the end of free-to-receive TV?

I mean, they always wanted to switch off analogue. Sky Digital needed a subscription, digital cable needed a subscription and so did OnDigital. Where was the plug in and go option that Freeview now provides?

I had OnDigital and thought it was great. The text and interactive services were better than my Virgin cable box can now deliver... it's a silly example, but I was playing along to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire back when people actually watched it, which cable still can't do...

It's not £20 a month...

My licence fee is £12.12 per month on Direct Debit. So, slightly more than Spotify for original content which often can't come from anywhere else and is considerably more expensive to produce. In other words, if you only watched Sherlock, you still paid less than the DVD box set for it.

I agree with the central thrust of the article: that charging for iPlayer is problematic. I can record a show to my TiVo and keep it as long as I like. But I can't download from iPlayer and keep it more than 30 days, and downloading that same show via BitTorrent and keeping it as long as I like is illegal.

These are things that need to be sorted out. But the answer should be a £20 all the BBC you can eat, from any source you like, not paying a quid a show.

Hmmmm

Out of the entire world of toys, gadgets and tech you manage to choose 10 things that I would divorce over if they were given to me as a gift...

MTP

Google has a download for OSX that talks to Android devices via MTP. Apparently it's a bit flakey (haven't tried it with my Galaxy Nexus yet) but it does work.

Or use ftp

I, for one, would pay...

To get a service as great as Twitter or Gmail with no ads, no spam and full commercial service levels. I'd pay. Not a lot, but they don't need to charge me a lot as it's relatively cheap to run.

Menu Buttons

They'll disappear if your phone has hardware buttons...

Please god

Just ditch the ****ing ribbons

October release still likely

It's normal to announce a few weeks ahead of actual launch day, so October release is most likely

Local TV Won't Work

Most community stations are run on a shoe-string, cobbled together to be just about listenable and struggling through with no cash.

This is no slight on them, as they do some great work. Just pointing out that TV is more expensive to produce, more difficult to put together, takes much longer to make and harder to make look watchable.

Will it really play nicely with mac?

I have a Buffalo Linkstation Pro, which was great when accessed by two windows machines. But since I switched one machine to mac, the NAS backups fail every time on the hidden mac files/folders. It backs everything up, but won't do the next backup until I manually reset it.

Buffalo themselves were stumped and so I'm stuck without having a reliable backup system in place.

The latest version of Android?

Are you sure...?

Frankly, I'm pleased

If we let the public decide policy, we'd end up with no BBC, a privatised health service, no immigration, no council housing, our waste would be all be buried not incinerated, breast cancer drugs would be funded regardless of efficacy, homeopathy would be handed out, and the MMR vaccine would be banned, the welfare state would be dismantled, our aid budget would be slashed, science funding would dry up and Cheryl Tweedy-Cole would be Prime Minister.

"The spec has not been established"

You bet it hasn't given Google haven't yet decided if Gingerbread will be version 2.5 or version 3.0...

Vanilla Android?

Do Acer's phones run vanilla Android or do they add their own nonsense?

In otherwords, could the successor to the Liquid be a future option for Nexus One owners?

Has the author actually used Android?!

There's one market and its just as prominnt on the device as the App Store is on an iPhone.

Indeed, for me the biggest plus is NOT having to connect to a computer, particularly when the experience is as horrible as iTunes. Why the hell does your phone need to be connected to a computer before you can even use it?

You're right about having to define 'success'

Disclosure:

Yes, I hate Murdoch. No, I wouldn't pay for his papers. Yes, I think the price is too high. On the other hand, would I pay 5p per Guardian article or a few quid a month? Maybe. So I'm no hardcore freetard.

The point is, as you mention, that The Times (or the Independent or Guardian) have never made money, online or off. Journalism costs more money than you can sell it for. The greatest journalistic organisation in the world is the BBC, who don't have to worry about profit.

I don't really get why you'd define success as 'making money' in the internet age, because that's not how it was defined before. To many people, success of a newspaper would be better defined as readership, influence, quality and integrity.

If a newspaper is breaking interesting and important stories, is widely read and highly regarded, it's more successful than one that makes a profit but no-one reads. Else Nuts and Zoo would be the high mark of British publishing.

I think the key for the future of news is to use other things to pay for the quality. For the Guardian that means its AutoTrader mothership, which makes a pretty penny. For The Times, that would mean using Sky or the tabloid market to fund something worthwhile further up the chain.

I agree with the Guardian approach - because they're widely read and well-regarded journalistically, and believe that it's wrong to sacrifice readership for profit. Whether it can carry on forever is another matter, but so long as AutoTrader keeps the group afloat I don't see why not.

If newspapers have to turn a profit by themselves, we'll end up with Metro. Bland churnalism with at least 50% of the space given to advertising.

I want some!

I bet it's mind-blowing to hold a material with only 2 dimensions...

I've just cancelled the order for an all-singing new DAB radio

If 6music is going, there's not much to listen to.

What kind of push is the BBC going to give it in the future if it's pulling out half it's digital-only services now?

Will Google Take Kindly?

I thought Google de-listed sites who used metadata inappropriately to gain search hits for content that isn't actually there?

how many chose the first in the list?

Without knowing the reason why people are choosing other browsers, we cant call this a success. If people are blindly installing the first one on the list, this is no better than them blindly using IE. It simply swaps monopoly for dumb clicking without educating anyone as to what the choice means.

And lets face it, if you understand what Opera is then you either use it or have chosen not to.

I wonder...?

How many people could name where to buy music in their town centre? Out of the whole population, I mean.

Which is it...?

Is it a service that encroaches on ground that should be open for the commercial sector, or is it a unique, niche station whose output isn't matched anywhere else?

Can't be both....

I'd go further...

In fact, those users who have the automatic updates patching without them doing anything are the ones who left it on by default. They're the ones who won't know, care or understand what other browsers are for. This is a shitty system, just as they've got used to a new Windows along comes this dialog and messes it up for them.

I hope it re-pins their choice back to the taskbar and imports all their bookmarks and set their homepage WITHOUT PROMPTING, else it's going to cause a lot of problems for low-end users. Most will just want to go back to what they know - and finding it 5th on the list is going to be another confusion. They might end up with Opera, which is a totally different experience to the one they've had.

Hell, even my dad - a retired electronics expert with 40 years work behind him - doesn't know what a browser is. He phoned me last week trying to get a neighbours machine to work. "The internet won't load up". He meant Internet Explorer. When I suggested he put Firefox on, he said that "They use Sky as their internet and that's on Internet Explorer". He meant Sky.com was their default homepage.

I like the idea, but the execution stinks. And it should only be rolled out to new installations.

I have no wish to see the Pervscanners rolled out

But there's a simple way to ensure it's not discriminatory, and one which is used for customs searches around the world.

Each passenger pushes a button, which gives a green light to proceed through the standard arch or a red light to have their genitals laughed at by a sweaty man in a uniform. The machine is programmed to give a chance 50/50 or 20/80 or whatever you want.

Is this *really* good use of public time and money?

And more importantly, would I be charged for making the same joke in the pub?

For once, Orlowski is probably right...

But he also failed to mention another aspect: not everyone WANTS apps. Ok, we're all tech junkies. We've had email on our phones since it was tediously cumbersome.

But my dad has a phone that can do it, but no data plan. He's never really considered it and doesn't have much interest in the mobile web. Same with my mum, who hasn't so much as used the camera on her (my old) N95.

I discovered yesterday that my gadget-loving father-in-law has had an iPhone for a year, but never got around to setting up email on it.

These people simply don't WANT apps. They might learn the benefits of mobile web or email, just about, but they won't bother changing their phones from whatever the default setup is. The smartphone explosion is leaking out of the tech-loving geeksphere and going mainstream to these people. And there's far more of them than there are of us....