Smartphones: the New Home of Crapware 308
Barence writes "Smartphones are replacing PCs as the new breeding ground for pre-installed crapware, argues Mike Jennings. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro, for example, comes pre-loaded with McAfee security software and other associated apps, four different app stores, and a selection of games and other media management tools. 'And it's not like you can just get rid of this software, either — most of it's there to stay, with hard-coded blocks in place to ensure you don't uninstall any of the tat you don't want,' he adds."
Free and open (Score:2, Informative)
I'm happy with my N900, it runs true Linux, i.e. it allows me to install/remove any app I want, right out of the box, without the need to execute some 3rd party binaries to "jailbreak". But as we all know - most people love to be pulled through the mud (as long as they are made to believe they are being pulled through liquid gold by the hand that pulls them).
Wrong on Twitter, two ways (Score:5, Informative)
iOS 5 is bundling a Twitter app with it
Totally wrong. They are NOT bundling a twitter app.
What they are doing is in fact the opposite of bad. They are adding twitter posting as a system library, that applications can bundle in but do not have to use.
The reason why it's the opposite of bad is that Twitter is requiring the odious OAuth authentication protocol, which requires a number of stages to authenticate. Since iOS includes Twitter access as part of the core, it does all the Oauth stuff behind the scenes and all you have to do is enter a username and password.
That means that any apps that also post to twitter (which is quite a lot of apps these days) will have much simpler sign-in processes for the user to make use of twitter, basically none if you've logged in once anywhere else already (and before you get freaked out about background tweets going out know that the user has to confirm a tweet should go out before it is posted).
On the Mac side, there's iLife which gets bundled with new Macs whether you want it or not.
Which you can also simply drag to the trash?
It's not crapware I'd say if it's actually useful though!
I'd rather be a "hater" than a blind fanboi suckered by Apple's marketing into overpaying for crap hardware.
Funny, I'd rather spend my time using a computer than configuring it, paying about the same for the privileged. But whatever floats your boat.
It's also rather funny you call Apple users "blind" when it's you who apparently can't see with clarity what that are doing.