tsekh

i have a 80-inch tablet on my lap.

wait, i mean 8-inch.

So…

HP bought Palm, and the open-sourced webOS, with the webOS team either left HP or went to Google.

Job well done, HP.

Unless for some reason you really need quad-core, get the AT&T version. S4 has better battery life, runs cooler, LTE, and is generally faster in day-to-day use (unless you really have some seriously threaded apps)

The AT&T version can be bought for $550 w/o contract. The Tegra 3 version is not cheaper than that. And neither of them works with T-Mobile 3G/HSPA+ anyway.

The only reasons I can think of why one would want to get the Tegra 3 version is the extra 16 GB storage and to avoid AT&T locked bootloader/crapwares. But all the AT&T stuff as well as the AT&T-locked bootloader can be get rid of now.

I did all firmware updates on my M4 typically in the first few days they were released. The Marvell controller may well be good, but ultimately quality control still relies on manufacturers that put the SSD together. And quality control of Crucial sucks. They claimed that every refurbished SSDs they send out had gone through a very expensive testing to make sure that they are OK. That is bullshit. The first replacement drive they sent me was even DOA. The second one they send me kept getting errors when writing to a certain section. I am still without a working M4 after more than a month.

Good luck with your M4 and pray that you don’t have to deal with Crucial warranty department.

But if you want reliability, I’d stick with Intel and Samsung.

It depends on your setup. With a traditional harddrive, definitely. SSD does not guarantee this not happening. On my desktop I have an Intel X25-M G2, and everything just zip through and everything can be used right away. I did experience this “placebo effect” you mentioned on my laptop with a Crucial M4 SSD. I wasn’t sure whether that was due to the M4 not as good as the X25M under heavy load, or the CPU on my laptop is slower (Sandy Bridge Core i5 something, vs Core i7 2600k on my desktop). Then my M4 SSD died, and I replaced it with a Samsung 830 SSD, and bomb, that “placebo effect” is gone and everything is even faster than my Intel SSD (granted, the X25M is a previous gen SSD).

Moral of the story? Not evert SSD is the same. The Crucial M4 is really cheap these days, and benchmarks say it is good, but it just doesn’t perform as well as the Samsung 830 on day-to-day use. Plus, Crucial warranty sucks. They kept sending me refurbished SSD that have problems. I have already exchanged two SSDs with them, both couldn’t complete my backup restore process without error (the first one was even DOA). That’s why I went out and bought the Samsung and life is good since then.

Kinect for “Windows 1.5”?

After all these law-suits, Samsung is still cloning other people’s stuff shamelessly.

Voice control is nothing new, but if you want to do what other people has done, do it in style!

Sasmung will soon be receiving another letter from Apple’s lawyer that begins with “Hi, Galaxy…”

I heard that it syncs with iTunes, as well as having an Apple logo on the back.

you are bias

When I said “this is not what Google does”, I didn’t mean Google doesn’t make revenue off their products by selling them directly. I’m saying that, building OS and selling them is not its core and main business. Google’s strength is building services, free or paid, that is available to a board range of platforms, and hence large userbase, and then make money from them directly (when the service is paid) or indirectly (when it is free).

This doesn’t mean that Google can’t explore new business direction and do something like what Apple’s iOS model. But Google sucks at that. Google is much better at pushing a product out as public beta, and usually full of new ideas but at the same time full of bugs. People complain and Google listen and improve them vastly rapidly. Google is very bad at building a completely private and closed product, release it, and then have everyone blown away by the user experience and thoughtfulness. This is what Apple is good at, not Google. Building a close and proprietary platform is just not Google’s DNA.

Don’t get me wrong. Android the OS is free, but the versions that come with your phones are not. Sense is proprietary, so is TouchWiz is, and even the Gmail app on Android. You are required to buy a license form Google to load those Google apps on the Android phone you sell. Although people are porting these “skins” to various ROMs and phones, as well as bundling Google apps as if they are “free” (as in the sense that they can be re-distributed blindly, not just that you don’t have to pay to use it), HTC/Samsung/Google/Motorola has every right to issue you a C&D and sue you when you redistribute them. Google did actually do that a few years ago regarding bundling Google apps with Cyanogenmod.

Anyway. iOS is more polished because it is made by Apple, not because it is proprietary. The same reason why webOS and WP7 can’t match iOS. They are all proprietary (well, webOS used to be). Google is just a company that is not born to do things this way.

Nope. You misunderstood the concept of open source, and what Android means for Google.

The rapid development of Linux and Android is because it is free. Everyone can contribute to it, and improve it. Of course Google is one of the main contributors of Androids, but a lot of the stuff are developed by other developers as well. If Android wasn’t free and open-sourced, a lot of investment has to be spent on hiring additional developers and man-hour to develop Android into its current state.

Second, Google is not trying to make money directly from Android because, this is not what Google does. By this I don’t mean Google has all the good intention to improve the phone industry. Google’s main revenue is from internet advertising. As internet is moving into more portable solution, Google needs a mobile platform which it has some authority to put its services on it.

Think about webOS. Suppose Google developed Android as an OS like the webOS. It tried to make money from it by (a) sell devices running the OS, (b) license it to hardware vendors, and © from ads running on it. Once it failed like webOS, you lose revenue form all three sources. But by doing what Google is doing right now, because it is free, even though it may never wins the high-end market, say, like the iOS, it will never die like the webOS. And as long as there are people using it, be it high-end or low-end, Google can still make some money out of it.

And it’s not just about ads revenue, it’s also about data collection. You use a Google app on your phone you are basically sending data back to Google to help its improve its apps. These data are most of the time, not something you can buy with money directly.

I’m not saying that running a proprietary mobile OS can’t profit Google. But this just doesn’t fit Google’s business. It is not that Google “have to worry about integrating their services and making advertising $$”, this is Google’s intention from the very beginning. Honestly, it is the Google services available on Android that makes me want to stick with it.

And when you think about it, it is not the existence of ad that hurts the user experience. Rather, it all depends on how developers implement ads into their apps. I hardly recall which Google app is really so ad-intense that I don’t want to use it. The ads-infuse problem won’t go away by going proprietary either. There are still tons of iOS apps that are full of ads that I have to uninstall them right away.

Don’t root it unless you know you need to.

Root means administrative access, which gives you the ability the do lower level stuff that are normally prohibited in order to “protect” users. Of course, if you root it and don’t do anything stupid, it won’t harm your phone.. But unless you know why you want to root it (for example, overlock and unvervolt), there is not point of doing so either.

A typically reason to root an Android is to (1) get rid of crapwares pre-installed by carriers that users cannot removed without root., and (2) enable some Android features disabled by carriers (e.g. tethering). But since you have a Galaxy Nexus, these reasons don’t apply to you (unless you have the Verizon one…).

It looks and feels like a skinned verison of froyo/gingerbread… which is now dated.

But of course, what really matters it what it can do, which remains to be seen….

It worked for me. I use it at CVS, 7-11, and various vending machines form time to time.

I’m glad that that phone did not have 720p display nor LTE, otherwise it would be called Samsung Galaxy S II HD Epic 4G LTE Touch

Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G…. what a name.

They need to stop renaming every .1 update as major update.

4.0.4 gives a significant boost in battery life.

If you are thinking about getting one now, ignore everything anyone says about battery life with Galaxy Nexus running pre-4.0.4 ICS (e.g. stock Verizon Galaxy Nexus).

One has to remember that what situation Apple was in back then. He was talking about Mac OS 9, that’s about the time Jobs went back to Apple and Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. While such idea may seems completely absurd for Apple 2012 to pursue, it could be a potential strategy for them to do back then. They were desperate .

This is an example in which motion gaming went too far.