McHanhan said:
(If you think the Iphone as a unit is crap, spare me the lecture. It's my view and I like the way it is with its little faults and explosions.)
Wait just one bloody minute - you defend the bloody iPhone, one of the most flawed, overhyped smartphones ever developed, and you want
me to spare you the lecture?
You obviously haven't been on this site long enough -
Nobody gets away with defending the iPhone on these forums when I'm around. [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.155147]
Now, even as a smartphone buff myself, supporting the sales of devices which I consider to be
proper smartphones - in that they can be used effectively as phones as well as mobile computers, and don't lack features which have become standard in the market, including multitasking, which was in Symbian since before it was called Symbian; expandable memory, which was in the Psion Series 3, and which is regularly found outside the smartphone market; a battery that the end-user can change, which has been in mobile phones since the
goddamned 1980s - I don't see the market resting on the success of the high-end of the market any more.
The iPhone and its kin, as much as I oppose them, were instrumental in shaking up the smartphone market, but that technology will make its way down to less expensive units, as we can already see with Nokia's 5xxx series. That's a price range where people are going to be more willing to overlook some of the flaws which are all too present in some of the high-end phones, particularly the expensive and feature-poor iPhone, which can only really sell itself on its interface and its application list.
The smartphone will take over the phone market in time, as features filter even further down into the mainstream, but it won't take the form of the smartphones that we'd be arguing about. My personal opinion is that anything more expensive than a Nokia E71 represents questionable value-for-money, and the only reason that the E71 gets away with it is because of its high build quality and its attention to detail. The Motorola Droids/Milestones and Nokia N900s of the future are really only going to sell to the hardcore technophiles, leaving the market open for less expensive models.
McHanhan said:
So what are your favorite inventions of the last 10 years?.
I'm a big fan of the netbook, personally - it didn't revolutionise the laptop industry, which really kicked off in this decade, but it certainly presented it in a form factor which is considerably more mobile than the previous set of laptops, and gives us a useful computing machine which is capable of fitting in a bag without causing back strain or impeding movement.
Certainly, the Intel Atom processors that most of them use lack computing grunt, particularly as the Atom isn't particularly good clock-for-clock, but ever since the Pentium 4 era, it hasn't been consumer software that's been pushing hardware to its limits, and a 1.6GHz Atom is certainly all that you really need for the internet, office tasks and other general computing programs that the netbook is suitable for.
I'm looking forward to the new "smartbooks", a series of netbooks projected to use the Qualcomm Snapdragon platform, based on a 1GHz ARM Cortex processor. They'll probably be short on power compared to the Atom processors, but the major advantage of an ARM processor is its low power consumption, and if nothing else, it should help push Intel towards making more efficient netbook and laptop processors themselves. I'm looking ahead to the time of twelve-hour battery lives, and if we're lucky, even approaching the full-day mark.
