Android Army
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FLASH DANCE!
The Verge
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Chefgon
On The Verge since Dec 09, 2011
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There is no laptop spec that’s even a tenth as important to me as battery life, so I went with a Windows RT laptop. It’s not for everyone, but for $500 I got a Yoga 11 with 15 hours of battery life and it’s absolutely wonderful.
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I’m currently carrying a Yoga 11 (Windows RT) and a Lumia 800 (Windows Phone 7.8). I’m not necessarily married to having a Microsoft-only solution, this just happens to be what fits my needs (and my budget) at the moment.
I know some people scoff at the idea of having Windows RT on a laptop, but I don’t need any specialized software and Metro apps happen to fill my needs just fine. I’m really in love with the machine because of its excellent build quality and the amazing 13-16 hour battery life. I’ve never once needed to take the charger with me out of the house and that’s pretty amazing, especially for a $500 machine. I mostly use it as a laptop but it does have the flip-around hinge thing that gets occasional use when I’m browsing on the sofa.
The Lumia 800 is fine. I got it for free from Microsoft for submitting an app to the Windows Phone Store. I don’t really need much out of a smartphone since I only use it for a few basic things, and this one does all of those things in a wonderfully simple and intuitive way so I haven’t felt the need to upgrade it.
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If you read the article, he doesn’t appear to be talking about a traditional Office suite at all. They’re almost certainly not building a word processor and spreadsheet.
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I haven’t seen Cars 2, but the original Cars was pretty unbearable to start with. Instead of making sequels and spinoffs they should have put all their efforts into pretending that it never happened.
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I hated Rango, but I’d put How to Train Your Dragon up there with Pixar’s best.
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Sega is a hollow shell of their former selves. They didn’t just lose the hardware, they lost their soul. Do you really think the shovelware Sega publishes these days is really worthy of their history?
If Nintendo could continue developing top notch amazing games like they are now, and they just happened to run on Sony hardware, that would be fine. But take a look around at the Ataris and Segas of gaming’s history and let me know if you really think that kind of transition is possible.
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Number 1 is the only reason you need. If you want to buy an Xbox One it’ll be for the same reason as anyone else who’s ever purchased a game system: to play that system’s games.
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This is silly. I don’t see any reason to believe that third party publishers are going to start implementing their own DRM all of a sudden. Until there’s at least some rumblings or rumors that this is on the horizon then it’s totally fair to look at the PS4 as a system with no internet-based DRM for disc-based games.
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You realize why they can’t do disc authentication, right? If they made disc authentication optional they’d be forced to make it mandatory or else every disc would come with two licenses (the online-authenticated one and the offline one with the disc, which could be used in two places at once), and that would be lame for those vast majority of people who have no internet access problems and want to enjoy discless play.
Also, Kinect being a required purchase is the single most exciting feature of the system. It means that all game developers can count on it being there as a standard system feature. That doesn’t mean that every game is going to be Wii Sports or Dance Central because there’s lots of subtle ways to use it in the background that don’t require jumping around the room. The reason we didn’t see those subtle uses on the 360 was precisely because it was an optional add-on so it didn’t make sense for developers to support it unless they were going all out with a gimmicky Kinect-focused game.
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Nintendo won E3. While everyone else was fighting about technology and DRM, Nintendo was the only one who brought a truckload of games I actually want to play.
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This strategy worked extremely well for them when they relaunched Hotmail as Outlook.com, but they haven’t had the same luck with the Zune to Xbox Music relaunch. I guess it could go either way.
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The UI, mainly. I jumped into it because it looks like something out of Star Trek and I was tired of the endless customization I’d get sucked into with Android. It’s a very simple phone and it does the stuff I need it to do without being cumbersome or complicated, and that’s really what I need out of a companion device like a smartphone.
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I’m not terribly impressed with either of them so far. I already have a Wii U so I’ll probably stick with that for a couple years and then jump on whichever system has the most games I want after the first round of price cuts.
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Justifying a game console is extremely simple. Does it have games you want to play? Everything else is irrelevant.
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There’s no doubt that Metro was designed with smaller screens in mind, which makes sense when you consider the vast majority of the market is running on laptops with 15" or smaller screens.
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I’m not usually big on endless runners, but Squirrel is ridiculously entertaining.
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You’ll have better luck asking for help over at dev.windowsphone.com
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That’s not true at all.
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That’s the notification counter supplied by Windows Phone. It’s actually the ONLY counter supplied by the system. Any third party apps you see using big white numbers like the built-in apps are using a hack to fake it.
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Well, Microsoft has a fantastic line of external keyboards so they’ve proven they can handle that. They make really great mice as well, but trackpads remain unproven.
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Anything’s possible, but I very seriously doubt it. Microsoft has overwhelming majority marketshare in the laptop market already and it doesn’t really require their leadership to stay that way. Microsoft’s end game is transferring their PC marketshare over to the tablet market and making a traditional laptop doesn’t really help them towards that goal.
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Double tapping a capacitive button is a terrible user experience. It’s a little too hard to do on purpose and a little too easy to do by accident.
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And “personalise”
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I feel like Windows and Windows Phone keep going back and forth to one-up each other on Start Menu features. Windows adds resizeable tiles, so Windows Phone adds resizable tiles with a new tile size. Then Windows adds the new tile size and makes the app list sortable, so now Windows Phone makes its app list sortable and throws in a notification center.
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I’m never in such a rush that a fraction of a second is going to make me late, so I leave the animations on for a richer experience.
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Microsoft broke the ability to download music from the store on the Zune HD, but everything else still works.
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I wonder what percentage of iPhone and Galaxy customers know their phone’s screen resolution and core count? I don’t have any data on that, but I’d suspect it’s very few.
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At least it’s not Symbian this time.
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It’s awful in the US too. No matter how fast your internet is it loads slow, and it frequently complains that you have no internet connection even when other apps are connected just fine.
