I have an HTC Desire and I'm really happy with it.
Recently, the Google Maps Navigation has been activated here in Italy (with voice search, which I thought was available exclusively on the Nexus One).
Last week HTC released an OTA update with android 2.2, which also added an app for tethering over wifi (tethering via USB was already available) and 720p video recording.
I'm with you on this. It's basically the Nexus One hardware, with some quite minor differences and some HTC-specific Android customizations. It was already pretty darn good, but with last week's OTA-upgrade to Froyo, i'd say it's an excellent smartphone.
The main hardware differnce is that the Desire has real buttons (back, home, menu etc) wheres the Nexus One has soft buttons without the same level of touch feedback.
A: There are no patents on the 555. Signetics did not want to apply for a patent. You see, the situation with patents in Silicon Valley in 1970 was entirely different than it is now. Everybody was stealing from everybody else. I designed the 555 Signetics produced it, and six months, or before a year later, National had it, Fairchild had it, and nobody paid any attention to patents. The people at Signetics told me they didn’t want to apply for a patent, because what would happen if they tried to enforce that patent, is the people from Fairchild would come back with a Manhattan-sized telephone book and say “These are our patents, now let’s see what you’re violating”. It was a house of cards – if you blew on it, the whole thing collapsed. It took about ten years to change. I guess it was some new companies that didn’t have ancient history and did have a strong patent, and started enforcing, and that changed to whole situation. It is very intense now. The same thing – I have a patent on the phase locked loop, and that would have been a very strong patent, but no enforcement.
Just after releasing a phone that uses a metal ring all around the chassis as an antenna (which is something that perplexed every engineer living outside of the reality distortion field as soon as they saw the first pictures of the phone), they discovered that they've always used the wrong algorithm to calculate the signal strength.
Not really a coincidence: users are much more likely to complain about this problem due to the new antenna design being so prominent in the marketing. If Apple never said that the antenna was the metal rim (and assumingly are telling the truth here) then people would not be forming these theories.
It's interesting to me the language calling it a "metal rim" and "metal band", when Jonathan Ive says it's a solid slab of metal, that the groove is machined in. The iFixit teardown makes it appear that the groove is machined in as well, and the metal you see is all part of a slab.
I contrast Ive's comments and iFixit's teardown with the Keynote presentation, and think someone's simplifying something in the explanations.
From what I've seen, on the right hand side, the groove is effectively 'fake' - designed to create a symmetrical look. One part of the rim is small (3G), and the other is larger, (WiFi) and has the 'fake groove'.
Well, the dB to bars transformation does have some peculiar bar widths, http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/apple/iphone4/ba... , (some might even say intentionally misleading). But they chose to tempt antenna fate by putting the antennas in electrical contact with the user in normal operation. That was a design choice most other manufactures don't make, and, according to Anandtech's review, it has had real and measurable impact on the performance beyond the "holding-it" factor for other phones. They still aren't copping to their choice having added that extra performance hit.
yeah. what they were saying is that AT&T's suggested method to calculate bars is better, but that they went ahead and displayed more bars in week areas to give the illusion of signal strength.
By gaining access to these accounts you can do a lot of damage (eg. steal money from people accounts or destroy a label presence on last.fm).