(Cleaning out my inbox and taking an old troll.) On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 9:47 PM, Linuxguy123 <linuxguy123(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Be my guest. I am not going to buy any more Apple branded stuff. (Well, if Steve puts out a Mac OS X -- not iOS -- ARM box, I'll look at it. Maybe.) This guy complains about "old" Android on cutting edge products. Seems a little impatient to me. But, if Android is Linux, it ought to be possible to buy one of those, install a cutting-edge Android, and help with debugging. Or am I making false assumptions? (Would like to have the time and free budget to be able to check my assumptions. Seen some possibly nice hardware in Osaka recently, if the salesman is wrong about lack of drivers for phone modems on the USB port.)

On 09/02/2010 09:06 AM, Linuxguy123 wrote: Solve that with an FM tuner for $20.00-$30.00 US. All Modern Android phones have very good GPS based apps for in car use, and the Droid X has a nice large screen for it. It would also be a great audio source for your first issue. Again, the Droid X in a car dock is the bomb! The SAMSUNG Galaxy S class phones are available on all 4 major US carriers, and have a screen that can be seen in bright light, and all run Android. Another reason to use your phone for this. When you update your phone every couple years you don't need to modify your car! However, when you do buy a new car, be sure to gee good bluetooth and USB support. Its awesome. The iPad has nothing to offer, and was designed to stagnate the 'PAD' market into a more expensive and easier to control market. All other manufacturers who were about to launc at the same time, withdrew and rethought and redesigned to factor in Apple's horrible pricing model. In the next few months, all of those guys that got scared by Apple will be back along with all those inspired by Apple. The 'PAD' market will explode, as it should have early this year. Its best to wait. You should be able to get at least three times the hardware specs for the price of an iPAD very soon. I almost got the N900 as well. I have an N810 and always wished it had a phone. I held off a few weeks and jumped on the Nexus One and never looked back. I have been recommending Android devices ever since. Just make sure it runs or very soon will run at least 2.2 Froyo. I have personally spent a lot of time with: Nexus One, Droid X, and the SAMSUNG Vibrant from T-Mobile. No, they rushed to market with a really bad product to stall the marketplace. It worked. :( You do know that the bezel was built to hold the Apple Camera, but it shipped without. Why? And don't get me started on USB ports and, and, and ... Both the Apple app store and the Android market are loaded with screen savers and tip calculators. Don't believe that some wild number of apps means anything at all. The vast majority are junk, designed to get a dollar from as many fools as possible. That is what they do, collect dollars, not much else. Just remember what it was like back in the day when you used to ask yourself: "Self, what computer should I buy?" and you answer: "It depends on what you need to run on it." Almost, computing devices like smart phones and other small computers like laptops and tablets are indeed becoming ubiquitous and it really doesn't matter. So why not get your money's worth? Good Luck!

On Thu, 2 Sep 2010 15:12:05 -0400 Paul Cartwright <fedora(a)pcartwright.com&gt; wrote: "Operator friendly" in telcospeak is not normally "user friendly". It generally means things like "can be locked to one telco", "software is not replaceable", "contains DRM", "can lock the home page to .." and the like and (cynical hat on) "no wireless" is also regarded by some telco folks as an important feature 8) I've no idea what the Galaxy will look like, but the words 'operator friendly' can mean some very different things depending which market they addressed the comment at. Alan

Hi, On 09/02/2010 08:36 PM, Linuxguy123 wrote: I don't know about your specific application (ie: A car PC) but as a linux alternative (or rather, more appropriately, an android alternative) to IPad, how about the Infibeam Phi: http://www.infibeam.com/Phi or the Eken M00[1-6] tablets: http://www.ekengroup.com/en/products/index.asp?bid=2 or the Identity Tab http://www.google.com/search?q=Identity+Tab or any of the other android based tablets: http://www.google.com/search?q=android+tablet I know people who have bought the Eken M001 and are fairly satisfied with it as a mutimedia/ebook/surfing ...etc device. cheers, - steve -- random spiel: http://lonetwin.net/ what i'm stumbling into: http://lonetwin.stumbleupon.com/

Linux will run on most PC tablet devices, but there aren't many made - in part because the PC world has long experience of 'tablet' format computers ('pen computers' etc) and despite lots of hyping and rebanding and special software 'pen windows' they've always proved to be a turkey except in a specialist market. Now it's clear from the tech news that of people are looking at the ipad and saying "we want some of that" but I'm not aware of any equivalent PC devices - yet. Apple are the first people to make it work commercially as a mass marketit - whether that's because of its fashion victim value (eg its too big to pocket so you *have* to flash it around) or because the world has changed enough in terms of wireless and connectivity who knows. There are waiters and doers. Almost all the great things in the world we take for granted today were done by people who were annoyed at something so did something about it. Alan

On 09/02/2010 11:06 AM, Linuxguy123 wrote: The iPad is definitely a pretty slick product, as long as you are happy with the way it does things. If you don't like it, you're out of luck. You can't fix it. For example: The ONLY out-of-the-box way to import photos to an iPad is through a connected PC (Windows or Mac, not Linux) running iTunes. You can buy an app to transfer photos from another computer over wifi - it runs a web server on the ipad and you upload photos from the other computer through a browser. It's fairly painful, though. Not elegant. If you tried something like plugging the ipad's usb cable into a linux computer, and dragging photos onto the ipad's filesystem, the photos do get copied, but the ipad won't recognize them! Anyway... Apple locks down the iPad pretty tight, which makes for a robust but very inflexible system. Beware. If you like the freedom of Linux, you may chafe at the restrictions in the iPad. - Mike