Be Excellent To Each Other

I guess it'll be slightly more natural to look at, with a better viewing angle (on one side, at least).

Perhaps a bit comfier to hold, too.

Most of all, it's different, which is probably no small thing in the smartphone market at the moment.

It's certainly different, but I suppose that's my point: it seems different for the sake of being different rather than because there's a genuine argument for it's existence. The viewing angles thing I don't understand because it means there's always at least one part of the screen you're not looking at straight-on which is surely a bad thing? And it might be comfier to hold but you don't hold the screen, you hold the casing, so the same thing could be achieved by shaping that rather than the screen.

I dunno, maybe there's some real advantages that'll come clear with the official announcement but on the surface it just seems like an odd way to further fragment their already large line-up.

The casing is shaped too, though.

Also, it's a way of getting a little extra screen width without increasing the physical width, I guess.

I'm not sure I'd want one, though.

Yeah, but my point was that if having a curved back makes it easier to hold you could just shape the casing and leave the screen flat so that's not an argument for a curved screen; if you see what I mean.



That's a fair point I hadn't considered though. Hmmm.

I wouldn't be a great deal, though.

It depends what you're charging of course, but I think you do yourself a disservice to assume you'd never be worth it.

I don't like it name. It's not round, is it?

Unless you hold the phone 1 inch away from your eyes, I can't see how it is supposed to make everything look straight.

It fits in your back pocket easier.

Maybe for you, bubblebutt...

Anyone else getting submit buttons stopping working in Chrome? Closing the tab and reopening it is the only way I've managed to fix it.

Sometimes, I also get it choosing the wrong link unless I scroll the page after hitting back, it's as if it thinks my finger is an inch away from where i'm pressing.

Interestingly, the wrong link thing only happens on beex, but as I don't really use my browser for much other than beex on my phone, it's not a great sample to go with

Nothing like that for me. Is that a recent thing?

Submit button is recent yeah. This week certainly.

Just on Beex or on all websites?

All websites. I was getting the 'click here, it clicks a link an inch higher' just on beex, but that stopped a couple of weeks back

I mention this mostly for Grim's benefit but other's might have adopted it too: kor.im is shutting down so time to find another tracking app. I've used Prey in the past but don't know if it's still good.

I've got lookout now, and the Google apps one.

Another day, another bonkers Samsung phone. Granted this is likely to be a China-only model and I think quite a few companies do different offerings for that market but still; a cutting edge Android flip phone's not something I thought I'd see. It would almost make sense if they'd put a QWERTY keyboard in there but a dialpad's a very odd choice.

That is weird.

I just noticed in the article as well a reference to dual screens; it's not easy to tell from the picture but I think the top part of the phone has a screen on the front and the back.

I'd buy that. Much prefer clamshell phones and I think that looks pretty nice.

That's a tasty looking phone. I'm not reading one dimensions: if its screen is normal smartphone size, the unfolded dealy must be insane!

Desperate for a curved screen on your phone but disappointed that the Galaxy Round picked your least favourite axis? LG have got you covered with the G Flex.

What is the point of that? Have they learnt nothing from the Walkie Talkie laser?

Didn't one (or more) of you guys unlock an HTC desire s? How did you do it? The process seems a fiasco at the moment, none of the guides I have found even work for my phone beyond point 3 of any list!

I wrote a piece for TUAW with my impressions of the Nexus 7.

Nice article
The way I use widgets is to have both my home and my work email on my home screen, and also my work calendar. I find it very useful to be able to see at a glance what I'm supposed to be doing, and being able to scroll through my email directly from the home screen without having to go into an app is nice.

But "math" singular? You've changed, man.

He really hasn't. The 'Wood was using Americanisms the first time I spoke to him back in 2007/8!

US pub, so US house rules. I actually think my draft has "maths", plural, and my editor changed it.

They call them bars.

Bloody Swiftkey have updated their keyboard, and completely changed the layout with no way of reverting it. Why would you do that? That's a hell of a lot of muscle memory to unlearn. Wankers.

Oh, the memories!

But yes, wankers.

A bit like how I have been using Ubuntu for years, and suddenly they yank the good old Gnome 2 shell away from under our feet and replace it with a hideous monster with no practical way of avoiding it. And since I have a Macbook these days, Linux can now gtf.

I was going to ask you what you thought about it (both the hardware and the OS) as I was really curious what you'd think of Android coming to it 'clean' so this made for a really interesting read. A couple of random thoughts from reading it:

• I totally agree with you about the light levels, my Nexus 10 is the same in that even at the lowest setting it's still bright enough to sometimes annoy a sleepy Mrs B.
• I spent quite a while looking for a calendar app that did exactly what I want as well and finally settled on Touch Calendar so give that one a shot if you haven't already (there's a free version available as well as the one I linked to). There are still things that annoy me about it but it's usable enough and the full screen widget is handy for checking upcoming events at a glance; although the fact it's not scrollable is an annoyance.
• Even without using any kind of iOS device in anger I'm aware that the gaming selection is relatively paltry and it's the only aspect that would make me actually consider an iOS device. If Apple ever brought out a six inch iPhone I'd have a serious decision to make. Current recommendation: Ittle Dew, which is also available on iOS mind you.
• Emulator stuff does work well technically in my experience but the interface can be a ruiner in some circumstances. Any SNES games that use the shoulder buttons a lot are close to unplayable and similarly any NDS games which require you to move between the control pad and touch screen are just a nightmare. I haven't tried out any Professor Layton games yet but I'd expect them to work okay and the amazing Wario Ware is touch screen only so comes highly recommended.
• In terms of widgets, the one I found that uses the whole concept the best is the National Rail app widget. You tell it your work station and your home station and it uses GPS to know which one you're closest to and then gives you the list of upcoming trains to the other one (if that tortured explanation makes any sense). The widget refreshes whenever you view it so you can stick it on an otherwise unused home screen and just flick to it when looking for train times. I find it invaluable but I suppose that's assuming you've only got one home and one work train station; if you're getting multiple connecting trains to get to That London it's instantly less useful, though still a brilliant idea I think.
• The other widget that's invaluable to me is the GTasks one. It means that I can have a list of current 'to-do' stuff right there on the home screen every time I switch it on and the high visibility of that list is the reason I get half of it knocked off. If I had to remember to launch an app to look at it I'm pretty sure most of it wouldn't ever get accomplished.
• Final widget thought: remember you can resize them. You probably already know that and I only mention I don't think the vanilla UI makes this feature as obvious as it could do so it's possible you didn't realise.
• Reading your later comments about having to reach for the iPhone to access you and Danielle's shared to-do list; I recently started using Wunderlist with Mrs B to host a shared shopping list we could both view and update. It's available on iOS and Android (and has a nicely scrollable widget I've just noticed) so I mention that just in case it's useful to.
• The Back button can indeed be a mixed bag depending on how it's implemented. I don't know if I've just got used to it or am 'lucky' with the apps I use but I find it pretty rare it doesn't do what I'd expect; although, as you say, very jarring when it is an issue. In the main I like the fact that it's always there in the same place and provides a consistent, muscle-memory accessible way to go back rather than needing to check through the custom UI of every app looking for the place a particular developer has put their own back button (if it even exists). Although if app developers on iOS adhere to design standards I suppose the on screen back button would always be in the same place which might solve that? I dunno, this is now just a rambling train of thought on my part so I'll shut up now.
• The iPlayer nonsense with the separate app needing installed is specific to that one app (in my experience anyway) and yeah, agree that it's really fucking stupid.
• Camera-wise I can recommend giving the photosphere thing a shot. You will absolutely feel like a tit doing it (though less so with the Nexus 7 then the 10) but you can get some excellent images out of it in my experience. You need to choose your scene relatively carefully as it understandably doesn't stitch as well when you've got a lot if 'stuff' close to the camera but I really like the stuff I've got with mine.
• What's the difference with the text selection stuff? I've only done that very briefly on an iPad but I didn't notice anything massively different about it i.e. tap and hold to get initial start/end selection bars then drag them around to define the block of text.

I'll look into it. For now I'll be keeping my main calendars on iOS only, I think; pending what happens when I get to Google (like, will I start using an Android phone).

I only really have a fairly passing interest in this, but I really would like to play Advance Wars again. Just that specific game.

Sounds neat (the iOS app for thetrainline does the same sort of thing, though you have to launch the app of course). Not much use to me at the moment though.

We do use a cloud syned dedicated shopping app already -- OurGroceries. For todos, switching apps would mean I lose the ability to create tasks with Siri, which Siri is actually really useful for. So not in a rush to do that. Noted your recommendation though, cheers.

It's basically almost always in the top left corner on iOS, so yeah, no need to hunt.

Ta, will try it. The camera software seems fine, its just the physical camera on the Nexus 7 that was mediocre. But that doesn't bother me at all.

When I'm editing text, I get very frustrated at anything slowing me down; the problem with the text selection is it's not 100% identical to iOS and that's enough to enrage me! You need to keep your finger below the line when positioning the cursor, for example, whereas on iOS you put your finger exactly where you want the cursor to go (with the popup magnifying glass showing you what's under your finger). It's not worse, it's just different.

So, it seems that Google have baked their entire new launcher (i.e. what the Nexus 5 runs) into their Search app so if you've got the most recent version of that you can enable the Google Experience Launcher just by installing an APK file. After doing that the GPE launcher is available to select as your default just like any alternative launcher. I've just given it a shot on my One Max and it worked just as advertised.

I'm not convinced I'll stick with this simply because Apex has more features and gives you a lot more control over stuff but it's nice to play around with. One compelling aspect is that by God is it smooth when you scroll around. I’d always thought that smoothness came from it somehow being tuned for Nexus hardware or something but it seems not.

The One Max is already out? I'm being left behind.

I got 4.3 on my S4 yesterday. It's a big fan of popping up a notification telling me my Internet connection is unstable. Which naturally leads to me spending a lot of my time telling my phone its mum is unstable.

Wait, what? I've never heard of that 'feature' before and certainly neither my phone nor my tablet have ever done it.

Maybe you have a stable internet connection.

My tablet got the update the other day, and now it has the "are you sure you want to turn your volume up" box, rather than the old "ooh, you shouldn't turn your volume up that high, but I don't care, carry on" one.

Have you got the setting turned on to switch to 3G if the wifi connection is weak? If you have, it won't do the notification.

I'm sure that's the case, I was just remarking at having never heard of this feature or encountered it. I realise now my post was perhaps worded in a way that implied I didn't believe Cras or something, but I didn't mean it to come across that way.

You shouldn't believe him - he's a lying twat.

's true.

Or a better mum.