I guess google is going after budget conscious. No LTE is ridiculous and their excuse that they don't want carrier interference is lame. Does Apple have to deal with carriers interfering with deploying LTE? Please, the real reason why they don't support LTE is the Nexus is not a big seller. So it makes little sense to create multiple sku's. Gotta love that Google spin.
Anyone who's been paying any attention knows this is no conspiracy, Google is not happy with Verizon AT ALL. Wallet/ISIS is only a small component of that.
Painting this is something else is just inaccurate.
Wow thanks for that cool analysis. It's not like their feuds with Verizon and Wallet are well known and documented. Surely you're baseless accusations of... what exactly... are right on.
I wasn't accusing anyone of anything. Unless calling you delusional is an accusation.
So let me get this straight. Google's entire reason for not supplying LTE is global availability, and yet, one barely used feature on one carrier is apparently what stopped them from shipping it? Oooookay. Verizon and Wallet have nothing to do this with decision. Zero. Verizon doesn't exist outside the US, just so you know.
For any Android fanboy to not decry the lack of LTE is hypocritical at best. The wholesale cost difference between a HSDPA part and a LTE part is negligible at best. There's zero downside to providing a LTE part because it's also a superset of 3G/HSDPA/etc.
There's maybe a technical reason for not including it, and instead of the BS justification that Google are trying to sell us, I'd love to hear it. It'd be far more believable than the current "you don't really need it" reasoning being thrown about.
So yes, you're delusional. You're attempting to justify why LTE isn't included in a flagship phone in Oct 2012. Good luck with that.
Read the article on the Verge. They left out LTE to stay out from under the thumb of Verizon and their track record of delaying updates to the previous Nexus Phone.
This looks like Zune all over again. Let's go over some points. First the UI has been around for a few years on phones and has yet to catch on at all. Market share has actually shrunk even with positive reviews from the technorati. Data point 2: I'm seeing lots of comments on how the pricing is "worth it" because you get a full computing experience... err no, the RT model is ARM based so it will only run native metro apps. The fact that geeks reading tech sites get this wrong should be a huge warning sign for MS. Think of how confused a normal customer will be when trying to figure out what runs on what? Point 3: MS office Touch enabled as a throw in for free, great until you actually try to use it. Instead of re-imagining from the ground up for a touch interface (Apple Style), they decide to hack on a touch mode and call it a day. All reviews have been deservedly scathing. The silver lining if your a MS fan is this will be the end of Ballmer. I assume the reviews should be out within a week, should be interesting.
Anyone with half a brain knows that that is not the reason. Microsoft came way too late to market with a 1.0 version product while everyone else was 3 or 4 revisions deep.
edit: a few more thoughts
The mobile phone industry had become an echo chamber, then Apple came in and made a clean break, dropped the cruft everyone else was clinging to and pushed the envelope. Apple changed the mode and completely shook up the market, Google was the quickest in responding while Microsoft was clearly caught completely off guard and is finally putting its best foot forward, but they are very late to the party.
The sudden success of the BlackBerry and the iPods also had something to do.
Sony Ericsson was in the right path with their P800-P900-P910 line of smartphones running Symbian OS. Big Screen, behind a 'normal' but removable phone keyboard.
After the iPad success, Sony Ericsson abandoned the P line to produce walkman phones.
After the BlackBerry success, all smartphones were abandoned to make BlackBerry clones.
That's the echo chamber you mention. Thank his Steveness Apple had something else in mind.
Microsoft was busy with Windows Mobile 6.5(1) which after many years of revisions was complicated to use and in dire need of a complete reboot. Motorola was living high off the Razor (which I purchased at launch at $300) creating a million different versions of it until they watered down the brand name.
Apple even teamed up with Motorola to do an iPod phone(2), which I think stands as the poster boy of what was wrong with the industry at the time, the echo chamber I refer to, everyone was so caught up with refining the innovations of the past that they ended up blind sighted by the original iPhone and scrambling to catchup; Many say that Google was finally able to do that with the Jelly Bean release of Android, the much more polished look of the OS combined with Project Butter for an overall very refined experience. In Microsoft's case it's clear Windows Phone 7 wasn't what it need to be necessitating another reboot of the mobile OS, maybe the shared Windows kernel, Direct X, native SDK and product integration Microsoft is promising will be the push it needs.
The funny thing is I think Apple as of late is falling into the same trap the mobile phone industry found itself in before the original iPhone. Most everything out of Apple lately is iterative and not innovative; it's very difficult if not impossible to keep an innovative streak going and not get bogged down on endlessly refining the original innovative product.
From the wiki (1)
"Ballmer also indicated that the company "screwed up with Windows Mobile", he lamented that Windows Mobile 7 was not yet available and that the Windows Mobile team needed to try to recoup losses."
I agree with many of your points, but want to point out that Apple's goal was not to introduce the iPhone and then continue to innovate it, it was to perfect it; which they are very close too. Furthermore, Techies want innovation, general consumers want design and function that works and looks good, period. They don't give a crap that you can touch your phones together and transfer a playlist, or "innovation" as some would call it. My prediction is Apple's next innovation will not be in the phone or music industry and it may not come for a while.
When did 8.9 = 9.7? Is the writer using republican arithmatic?
And the answer is yes, it's worth 200 more for the apps alone. The nexus 7 hardware is nice, android tablet apps are horrible. But then again, if all you knew was android then it would be OK.
Downvoted for "republican arithmetic". (I very strongly dislike the Republican Party and what it has come to stand for over the last few decades, but the world has enough political arguments already without injecting them into technical discussions like this one.)
I disagree, if your going for the value play, you can always get the nexus 7. MS has to differentiate by showing how cool office optimized tablet version is. However, it looks like MS has dropped the ball again if the reports of office on the tablet being a half assed port are true. Using the Nexus 7 just shows how crappy the app experience is relative to iPad.
I wonder if i'm the only one that finds Gruber annoying to listen to after knowing what kind of person he seems to be. I guess i'll swing by DF weekly instead of daily...
There's a simple solution since this will be a freemium game. Have every Tiny Tower player download the Zynga junk and rate it 1 star. That'll send a clear message to any players and give a nice middle finger to Zynga. We can call the process go daddying an app. A more amusing tactic would be for Nimblebit to offer tower bucks to do the deed. That would be a lot of 1-star reviews...
Talk about too little too late. 90% of my gaming is on iOS, with the remaining 10% reserved for blockbusters on 360 or ps3. Nintendo is the next RIMM in terms of company direction. The Wii U will officially usher in the next "Gamecube" era. Sad times for Mario fans.
I think Nintendo has three advantages in the mobile-space (Nintendo 3DS vs. iOS/Android). #1, Nintendo-branded games. They're the "Disney" of video games, and have a large loyal following.
#2, dedicated gaming controls. Certain games need D-pads, analog sticks, and tactile buttons. Hard-wired controllers allow for more accurate control, and are essential in some "twitch-based" video games. Touchscreen's are phenomenally good for some types of games like board games and Angry Birds, but terrible for others like platformers and FPS's.
#3 is price. $40/$30 for a new game is extremely expensive for iOS games, but not 3DS ones. This may attract bigger budget games to the 3DS since developers/publishers could potentially make more on the 3DS than on iOS/Android. This can be considered a disadvantage too, since consumers may be deciding between one $40 3DS game, or 40 $0.99 iOS games. 3DS games will have to offer more perceived-value to justify premium pricing.
Currently I see #2, controls, as the biggest problem in the mobile-phone gaming space, which is why you're seeing 3rd-party solutions (iCade, 60beat GamePad, etc). Since 3rd-party solutions are not widely adopted and will result in high fragmentation, it'll probably require Apple or Google to design and release an "official" controller of some sort (ideally built into each device). If this never happens, there will still be a clear distinction between "portable gaming system" and "portable mobile phone/tablet".
Another of these "this thing is dead" pronouncements. Those tend to turn out wrong.
RIMM? Really? So you think Nintendo's new market strategy is to run around suing everybody over questionable technology ownership claims? Because that's RIMM. I'm not getting the comparison.
EDIT: wait, RIMM, wrong company in my head. I would still disagree with the comparison though.
Too little too late? Is that in general or just for you? Because I don't assume to guess the future of the market based on such a small sample size.
I think Steve Jobs will be right again, Dropbox is a feature, a great feature to be sure, but still just a feature. iCloud works fine without it and eventually as Apple typically does, once more features are added, the need for Dropbox will lessen.
I'm still not sure how much of an advantage that is to the average user. To people on HN it's a huge plus, but to real world users...
Regardless DB should be able to carve out space where cross platform is important, but I can see their market size shrinking when Apple and Microsoft really start pushing their cloud storage solutions. Unless of course they get to a Facebook like level of critical mass.
Even you aren't cross platform personally (e.g. you don't have a Mac and a PC at work or an Android phone or ...) Dropbox lets you share files and folders with other Dropbox users. Unless you're confident that you'll never want to share with someone on a different platform (which only sounds realistic if you never want to share at all), that's important even if your personal environment is homogenous.
I'd guess that most Dropbox users share something (though I haven't seen statistics on that) so they are probably less threatened by vendor-specific solutions than you might think. I suspect Dropbox is more threatened by services like Amazon Cloud Drive (especially since Amazon is an infrastructure provider for them) than they are by anything Apple or Microsoft has planned.
"To people on HN it's a huge plus, but to real world users..."
I think the opposite. If HN readers tastes' are similar to the average founder in the Valley, they are vastly more likely to use Macs and iPhones together than the average real world user, who is much more likely to use Windows/iOS or Windows/Android.
But the cross platform advantage means it get's recommended by the type of people that have cross platform needs to the type of people who don't. Would you rather hear, 'if you have an iPhone and a mac' or 'it just works.'
When I was in graduate school, I saved all my documents to my dropbox folder, which was sync'd to my school laptop (OSX), my personal laptop (Windows), a lab computer where the stats software lived (Windows), my advisers computer (Windows), and my ipod touch (iOS).
I wasn't anywhere near the only one who had those kind of cross-platform needs. My program was a real mix of Windows and OSX users with a few linux users for flavor.
Not sure about that. I think in that case it just needs to work, without any configuration, installing etc... It needs to be as pain free as possible. Unless DB can somehow be installed by default on those devices I can't see it making the grade.
Dropbox is pre-installed on many Android phones, for example:
http://geektech.in/archives/6318 (which comes with extra free storage up to 5GB for HTC users).
Pre-installing on PCs is possible, though my quick Googling didn't turn up anyone doing it. Pre-installation on Apple devices is unlikely, of course.
Remember when the iPod only supported Mac? What happens when Apple decides to change the photostream shared folder on the PC into a generic folder to sync all files into the cloud? If Apple decides to roll that out, Dropbox days will be numbered. BTW, I'm a big fan of Dropbox, I just think the future is pretty clear in terms of how easily they can be marginalized.
