i find worrying about the native software pointless - i’ll root it an use nova launcher at the very least, so it doesn’t matter too much to me. if it gets really bad, i can always unlock the bootloader and shove another rom on it.

for me, it depends what you actually *get* for that extra $200, though. if it’s only nfc, then probably not. if it’s got twice the battery life, a faster cpu/gpu, more ram, and an sd card slot, maybe it is. but it’s still twice the price, but not twice the phone. it’s a bit like hi fi audio - there comes a point where…

the storm has a snapdragon 615 - still a quad core, but not a mega gaming cpu/gpu, no. but like you say - not really a major thing these days; my phones mostly for playing music, watching movies, reading email/news feeds/websites etc, and stuff like that. i tend to game on consoles, and the games that i tend to favour…

oh, i’ve got plenty in the cloud. the issue is *getting to it*. not sure what it’s like in the usa, but over here in the uk phone networks tend to be unreliable.

it’s all about sales, ultimately. top-end, they’re all trying to be apple who think nothing of charging another $150+ for the equivalent of a $20 sd card. they all think their ‘premium’ phones can get away with. unfortunately, it’s been proven otherwise in the market - hence htc reintroducing them, for example.
the…

and there’s a micro sd slot this time around! i’d never buy a phone without one, so that’s good to see. just a shame about the outdated cpu, really. any mention of whether this one has nfc?
it’s a toss-up between this and the wileyfox storm, really...

would that be the same ford that was criticised for ‘looking too much like an aston martin’ by any chance?
i mean, what a stupid criticism - it’s like criticising your girlfriend for looking too much like monica bellucci.

being amphibious, it’s probably hanging out right on the cusp of the bank, so it’s a sort of schrodinger’s crocodile - simultaneously on the land, but not on the land. at the other end, one presumes it can catch the zeeba without dirtying its claws on the land by exploding out of the water. our interest then wanes…

well, part a only required substituting values into the equation which are fairly obvious from the question (i.e. x=20, x=0)
part b requires you to differentiate the equation, and then solve for when dT/dx=0. that was AS-level maths back when i did it, so you’d expect them to have covered the concept. the ‘gotcha’ bit…

it has to cross the river - the meat is on the other side of the river.

i actually really like the flat display that you’d wear on the inside of your wrist - holding my arm up with my palm facing me mirrors how most people hold their smartphones anyway.

best example for me on that front is with guitars. most people aren’t aware that, for example, ibanez don’t make a single guitar or own a single factory themselves. yet their brand is a premium one. the people that actually make their guitars (for example, cort) also make guitars under their own name - and they’re…

this is why open standards are critical, and the reason that there are so many linux evangelists. linux isn’t a brand, as such, but an idealogy - that we should be free from vendor lock-in, from branding, from walled gardens, and so on. the problem from the outside is that there’s no unified front to brand and market,…

well, i did kinda aim for that with the ‘children’s education’ part ;)

and that’s exactly my point: if you set an artificial test of some sort and scoring high on that test is paramount to successful sales, they’ll find a way to inflate score on that test by hook or by crook.

‘we’re going to tell you how we’ll test so you can score well on the test.’

ah, geena davis. glorious.

very true - i think it’s more a case of picking the visual artefacts that bug you the least when you pick a screen these days. although, that said, most of the artefacts usually come either from the source material or from the on-board processing for the tv.

aside from quality, you need to work out whether you’ll even see the difference in the first place. how big a tv are you buying? how far away from it will you be sitting? i sit about 2 metres away from a 1080p 50” panel, and the difference between sd and 720p content is obvious, but between 720p and 1080p it isn’t…

me too, especially as OLED wasn’t quite there at that point.