Turkey

I dont understand the appeal of a "dock", you take an expensive device with reasonable audio quality, fill it with compressed audio and plug it into a dirt cheap speaker, its like sticking remould tyres on your Corvette. If you spend serious cash on a dock then thats even worse, like polishing a turd ;)

back on track looks like a nice device, but not sure it really needs android but if it does the job and is free why they heck not.

Saying the US spends more on research and its current system is therefore right misses two points, compared to the Europen countries you are "competing" against you need to work out that research value per capita, more people means more money not an over all better system.... but if these companies spend more they also charge more, and because of the insurance lead system in the US they can charge what they like and its illegal for the goverment to try to force a discount. Its a self fufilling spiral in the health industrys favour not the populations.

There must be a point when the best is too expensive, where is that point? that is the main question as as good as the US health care system is on a technology / drug stand point even with the best cover it could be improved but would cost more, where do you draw this line, and you have to think more on a population level, start with I want everyone to get X, and then work from there, both state and private can work well together its getting the balance, and that is something that I dont think anyone has really got yet. The US has a change to really sort that out and it could be a wonderful thing, but atm its too many ultra rich companies trying to keep their stranglehold.

I have an xtreamer and that is also missing these features, although to be fair as i understand it for both devices the reason its missing as the sdk for the chips its built on supposedly does not fully support it, I think beta releases of it now do so when the next fw releases come out it will be fixed without the need for asus or xtreamer to do any real work.

if you can afford a Dolby Master decoder and really have a 7.1 setup why would you opt for the most budget streamer?

that said and your point may have been that people need to realise HD is more than pixels on the screen and anyone who thinks HD is a 1080P tv playing the content via its built in stereo speakers is a couple of fries short of a happy meal ;) I for one am all up for HD audio, and only totally pissed my amp only accetps 7.1 LPCM :(

the wdtv is a good player, it plays most things you can throw at it, the wd firmware is not bad and fans have customised it to fill in the blanks, like usb to ethernet support.

avs forums dot com had a very good thread on such tweaks last time I visited and if I had a wdtv thats the place I would go.

Scott, they said this uses an infra red camera as well so this should work fine in low light conditions. its probably also alot better at working out distances towards as well as away so it see's you not just as a shadow but as an 3d object.

I guess you never heard the old addage "there is no such thing as bad press".

Most people dont care but will remember the name, in a the last few days people will have noticed the pre mentioned alot, now there is android again to even it out.

£99.99 for a car charger that has a sucker to stick on the windscreen, Tom Tom must think peple where born yesterday you can get a full retail unit with windscreen mount for that.

Time to check your local auction site for a much cheaper import me thinks.

The best ive seen the hero for (and been very tempted) was T-Mobile £15 for the phone, and then £40 a month (bit less as vat is 2.5% less atm) for with something like 600 mins and 500 texts and unlimited data, but on a 12 month contract.

Palm need to step in as they are going to suffer with lackluster sales like this, but I suppose 02 cant risk undercutting the iphone, all in all just looks like a poor decision with Palm going to 02 :(

Microsoft do call it EMEA which is a well known region in business consisting of

E urope
M iddle E ast
A frica

pretty obvious really, there is also the americas and APAC, as the big three.


Sonys not Japan and not North America is rather wishy washy and population wise probably covers over twice the amout of people, so to say this much larger area is only 1 million behind is not such a great bost, but regardless being close to 10 million by any yardstick is good. Admitidly these extra people are not in high gdp countries so that does add weight to their achievement, but often these claims are not of retail units but units shipped from their factory to retail chains and distribution, so you can count all the unsold units as well.

However much you like one side or the other both are doing well enough to survive comfortably and thats all that matters healthy competition to push both sides forward for everyone benefit, nobody likes a one horse race if they have any grey matter. Microsofts enemy is its hardware, sony is itself, selling at a loss always puts you on the back foot, they need to get more games per console sold and thats their issue, total poluation is not really an issue.

With the density its hard to use as 1 the US will have worse coverage based on land mass that other countries based purely on its size, but on population % it would no doubt be right up there possibly on top. Also CDMA has a much large coverage per mast which is why it was chosen, but also why previously the US has had larger form factor phones to cope with the additional radio requirements, all of which does not really come into the cost of ownership.

What I think is more telling is the cost up front to own a phone, as in the US you pay for it, over here its almost always free if you look at the vast majority of handsets in the wild. Ours are being paid for in the contract so really the price charged for our (UK) minutes is not always fairly represented in our contract. Our contract up until recently where almost always 12 months, not so from what I understand across the pond. Another statistic that might also be good to see would be the average cost of ownership compared with the percentage of the population with a mobile phone, all things are relative and tax regimes differ but combine the two and it might show where its relatively cheap or relatively expensive.

It really makes this a very interesting subject as most people believe the grass is always greener, and singling out single facts you could manipulate this either way but the fact is the business models and technological infrastructure is so different that it really is chalk and cheese. Also as youngcalhottie said its about business and making money, the actual cost and what we are charged are totally different and what we are charged is what the carrier thinks they can get as they want profit. I think its a fact that over two thirds of these companies revenue goes on infrastructure purely to be able to do itemized billing, if they where allowed to do a £40 un-metered tariff they would jump at it.