[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Thu, 14 Jan 2010, tom wrote:
Gordon Henderson wrote:But this is the thing - they're taking standard technology and trying to somehow 'personalise' it - its a bloody PC for gods sake.On Thu, 14 Jan 2010, tom wrote:What bugs me is it seems that the phones are basically £150 worth of PC with £20 worth of coms equipment - this is why I say give me a psion sized PC with an option to put the coms eqpt on the sideI'm not convinced they are £150 though.The cost of developing the technology has to be paid for by someone - so a full year of R&D by a team of people (150+?) to develop the hardware and software platform has to be recouped, and although I suspect a lot if it these days is "join the dots", there's a lot of custom work in there - case, display, battery are typically all custom designed for the product - and there is additional engineering that will go into designing the electronics for low power usage and so on.
Well - I don't think so. It's not standard, and making it standard makes it cheap. Engineering effort has been put into them to make them small, "cute", functional, and it's not just the software either. (Which is free, but you still need to pay engineers to adapt it and implement it)
Why does a desktop PC with 2ghz, 2gig ram etc cost less than £100? - cos its built on a set of standards.
You said it.
If (say) Psion had made their P5 case a little stronger and I could have upgraded ram/cpu/flash/motherboard etc I'd still have it and be using it 24/7. The bit needed to talk to the phone networks is pretty small and could have been stuck on at one end so the whole thing could be dropped nicely into my pocket.
It's not that small - even now, it's a fair whack of the hardware. Here's a quad-band GPRS module:
http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=26&products_id=34 1.75 inches square. Not quite plug into something palm-sized...
But no, the industry and their gullible customers have been building and buying and throwing away perfectly usable hardware that's basically been crippled to STOP it doing things so that you have to buy the next version. If you had twenty PC's at home one for word, one for graphics, one for audio, one for browsing people would laugh at you - but thats what the phone industry (and e-reader idiots) seem to think is the way to go - and as long as people still dont know what a computer is they'll get away with it!
I think you're wrong - have you actually used a modern smartphone? My E90 is now 2.5 years old and it was on the drawing board a year before it went into production - it's not Linux, but it does all what you say above - and can keep all those applciations open at the same time (ie. it's not an iPhone :)
As for eReaders - well, DRM issues aside, they're designed to be eReaders - so let them be good at that. I've tried to read books on my phone and my N770 and they're just too small. I want an A5 tablet for books.
A phone is a computer with a small adaptor to connect it to a network.
Yes it is, but put a good computer on it - one that can run applications like a web browser and it becomes expensive becasue it takes more engineering effort to design and produce.
Gordon
-- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html