Am I right in that MS would have been fine if they'd just stuck to XML standards rather than trying to write custom proprietary handlers to lock everybody else out of their format?

Pretty goddamn karmic. What goes around comes around.

@Hydra I dunno what hacked roms you guys are using, but the Energy ROM on mine is not what I'd call "slow". It's not as fast as I'd like either but it is NOTHING like the stock ROM. I think you guys still need to switch our your ROM - not all ROMs are created equal.

Honestly, every phone bogs down sometimes. Even the newest ones. With the Energy ROM, the Fuze doesn't really feel much slower than any other phone.

As for the timing, in June it still pretty much *was* the flagship non-iPhone on AT&T's network. I think I got mine in August, though mine's a refurb and I only paid $79 for it. That was considered a steal even at that time. They were still selling them for $299 on the AT&T web store.

I actually love my Fuze. The newest phones are iterative upgrades and none of them really make me jealous; I'm actually hoping that by the time my 18 month upgrade window is up that there will be another phone that I really need to have. It took me 3 years to upgrade my last phone; there was just nothing out that I felt like it was worth spending any money on.

@Nicnac If Ebert's opinion is worth something, then so is the opinion of the other "old farts" in this thread...

We're jaded because we've seen all this before. Those stupid blue and red 3D glasses? They look ridiculous to us *because* they look so old and quaint. To me, they're like something out of the 1970's. Next you'll be writing about how bellbottom pants and disco music are the next big thing.

I don't think there's anything in particular about Avatar that's any better or worse suited to 3D viewing than any other blockbuster film.

Anything fewer than 20 buttons just isn't useful.

@Outsider Yeah, and no keyboard = no sale to me, anyway. I don't see how this is any different than the myriad of other Android-powered touch-screen phones that have cropped up recently that I have also found worthy of completely ignoring. (I suppose Google's name was enough for me to write this reply, at least.)

My next phone will probably be an Android phone, but it'll have a keyboard. There's nothing special about this phone.

@Demo22 "Huge mindshare" is relative to your perception of the size of the market. Ask any random sampling of 100 people (and I don't mean "100 people you know", I mean 100 truly random people off the streets, rural back roads, bayous and corn fields of this country) and I would be surprised if a single one of them had even heard of the Kindle. The Kindle's got mindshare among really early adopter, techy kind of people in some urban areas. That's a very, very small market in the grand scheme of things.

I would almost guarantee you that even a majority of Amazon's own customers have never heard of the Kindle, despite it being pegged on their homepage for like the last 2 years and taking up all the space above the fold. That fact in itself has made their homepage almost useless to the point that I think most people probably just ignore it and go straight to the section that they're interested in, forgetting about whatever they saw on the front page. (Most people do not remember things they're not actually looking for.)

Barnes & Noble, though, has stores all over the country, including malls in rural areas. They're going to have Nooks set up like iPod stations at Apple stores - you're going to be able to pick one of these up and play with it as soon as you walk into one of their stores. They'll have that *combined* with all the same sorts of web marketing that Amazon's doing. They have a huge leg up on reaching average Americans; their stores are a big advantage.

Which is not to excuse shoddy design, but just to explain the mindset that I'll bet took hold at B&N, which is that it matters more to just get the thing in stores and start stealing market share away, then fix any problems the device itself has later. This is going to be most peoples' first experience with any ebook reader, so as long as it doesn't crash and is basically usable, they'll be happy enough with it because they won't know any better. Amazon is going to have a hard time competing with this without their own stores.

Even Apple had to open their own stores to sell their stuff; it's very hard to compete against a big brick and mortar chain only online. The reason Amazon's been successful in general to this point has been that they're selling other peoples' stuff - but trying to sell your own stuff that people can't really try out in advance, while a competitor has stores all over the nation that lets people do just that - that's going to be difficult for Amazon to deal with.

@(Unverified) You only need to turn the page on a real book every two pages. And at what seems to be the default font size on this (and other ebook readers), you're also only getting about half a standard page to begin with - meaning you're doing four times as many page turns.

This is one of the reasons pocket paperbacks are not nearly as popular as they once were. Page turning *is* annoying to heavy readers, and it has *always* been really annoying, but people put up with it because what are you gonna do? It's a book, not a scroll. But there's no reason to have to actually put up with the same thing but *worse* on an electronic device that's supposed to make reading easier and more convenient.

@itchyeyes Every single one of your assumptions is faulty, and way, way too high. For one thing, the power supply's going to be supplying power to the computer whether it's running a screensaver or not. So to suggest that all 250 watts are dedicated just to this wasteful effort is not even close to correct. You're looking at probably about 40-45 watts max vs. what it would be doing at idle.

Second, you're talking about residential rates for electricity usage. Last I checked, a school district is not a house. They don't pay residential rates, they pay much less.

Third, 8 hours a day for a screensaver?? Either you're assuming this would be running overnight (in which case it'd be a lot *longer* than 8 hours), or you're assuming these machines are just turned on and then not used *at all* during the day - in which case there's a lot more waste going on in that district than electricity usage.

I think 2 hours per day would be a safer assumption.

Regardless, I just read the AP article linked above and nowhere does it say anything about electricity usage being the problem. The problem was that the software somehow "bogged down" the systems, and that it will cost "$1 million to remove it" (what?!?). That's ridiculous.

@wartex8 I want you to figure out the kw/h usage and then multiply that by your local electricity rates and tell us all exactly how much money he has "wasted".

I doubt it's more than a couple thousand dollars over the entire time he's been doing this. Which, yes, is a couple thousand dollars more than zero, but I have a feeling you've probably wasted a couple thousand dollars worth of CPU time goofing off on your job and writing replies to Engadget posts. Should you be fired?

The fact is we *all* waste time and money. At least this guy was doing it for a scientific cause. A *school system* should be encouraging this.

I wonder if there would have been the same reaction if he'd been running a screensaver that just endlessly recites the Lord's prayer or the pledge of allegiance. Somehow I doubt it.

@fourthletter a) it's not all or nothing. We don't need to spend ALL of our dollars looking for life elsewhere in our universe, and we don't need to spend ALL of our dollars looking for a cure for cancer.

b) somebody's been watching too many Hollywood movies. It's just as possible that mankind is the most aggressive, warmongering species in the universe as it is that anybody's coming gunning for us. It's doubtful that any species with weaponry that would be as advanced as a civilization who could travel through the galaxy would possess would have lasted long enough to actually venture out into space if they're as destructive as we are.