Wow. I guess I respect their decision, but I have to admit I'm a little disappointed. I don't think anyone would have faulted them for holding their event.

I'm curious to see how do you spin this negatively, Bruno...

Now they're saying October 27, with an announcement to be held in London. Assorted leaked specs say this will be a CDMA/GSM world phone with support for LTE, at least on Verizon.

Negatively? The only thing negative is that they didn't say why they were canceling until they were asked about it.

I think it's an amazing show of respect for Steve Jobs.

Sorry, just a natural reflex for me with you

Is it possible for a mod to split this discussion into its own thread? I'd like to talk about the Prime more.

So what do you folks think the final specs of the phone are going to be? I keep seeing rumors go back and forth on this, hearing phone is either dual-core 1.5GHz with an 8MP camera or it's 1.2GHz with 5MP. It also seems to vary between ~1750 and ~1850 mAh batteries.

Clearly I'd like to know what kind of optics are in the camera, so the MP comparison is a little difficult, but I'm drooling over the idea of a 1.5GHz CPU in my phone, and naturally I'd like the longest lasting battery I can get.

In case you haven't seen it, there's a supposed video showing the phone in action.

I'm a little skeptical. The person taking the video never turns the phone, doesn't speek, only shows the home screens and application launcher, and cuts the video off JUST as they're launching the camera. I'm not sure what to think about this one...

The exact specs are, of course, a subject of much speculation. Frankly, I don't care if it's 1.2 or 1.5 GHz. I just want good battery life. I don't care if the camera is 5 or 8 megapixels. I just want it to take decent pictures (versus the total crap that is my 8 megapixel Droid X camera).

We'll just have to suck it up and wait a few more weeks.

That or they don't want all their thunder stolen.

Ooo, pretty boot animation:

I really doubt it. I think they'd like to let a little time pass before talking about this stuff again. At worst, they might want to remove the obligatory lines from their presentation that target their iOS competition, fearing it might seem a little gauche.

Boot animation: I have to admire Apple on this. I don't need a boot animation. Just enough of a logo to know the phone is on and booting. And rather than a seizure-inducing video, maybe just a thermometer to say how far along it is. (Or, maybe just do the hard engineering work to get the thing to boot faster!)

Google/Samsung announcement date: I imagine the announcement was originally to have had a lot of "we're blowing away iPhone with new features X and Y" and they're probably reworking things so they don't beat up on Apple as much. Of course, for all we know, there was some feature on the edge that was originally to have been cut that's now back on the hot seat.

Or even more admirable: Startup and shutdown of the iPhone are silent. Vixy's Samsung Android phone has to play a goddamn melody every time it starts up or shuts down. Haven't these phone manufacturers ever attended a concert or a movie?

"Please turn off your cell phones. Unless you've got one of those annoying phones that plays a melody when you turn it off, in which case, please just leave the building and quietly smash your phone on the sidewalk outside."

It's one of the reasons I have just rooted my phone, it's the only way to stop HTC phones doing that.

It's kinda of ironic that the HTC logo says "quietly different" as it blares the unsilenceable jingle.

Really? You feel the need to actually turn off your phone at that point? Isn't that what the silent switch is for?

I don't know about other phones, but on the iPhone the silent switch does not guarantee that the phone makes no noise. In particular the alarm, timers etc still sound with the silent switch on. So yes, I turn my phone off in the cinema.

And even if it did, a vibrating phone can still make enough noise to annoy the person sat next to you.

Okay, then we're back to talking about the differences in the phones, because when I put my phone on silent it doesn't play sounds.

So I think this debate is a wash...

So if you use it as an alarm clock and you accidentally leave it on silent it won't wake you ?

I just checked, and that's exactly what happens. I guess this is also a personal preference, and I can see the downside and can imagine that missing a wake up time is worse than a little embarrassment in the theater, but I prefer it the way my phone does it. I'm sure you prefer the iPhone way, and that's cool too.

I'm also fortunate because the buzz from the vibrate IS my alarm sound That's more than enough to wake me up!

Lastly, this is the reason I use an app called Shush!, which turns the ringer/volume back on after a preset time, so I don't have to ever remember it.

Exactly. I think the silent-switch on the iPhone behaves correctly: It silences rings, SMS message notifications, etc., but doesn't silence a wake-up alarm. If I go to sleep, I don't want the phone to ring or SMS-beep while I sleep, but I certainly want its alarm to wake me if I've set an alarm.

Not that I'd have an alarm set to go off during a movie. For me, the silent switch is enough for a movie or a concert. I'm just saying, for the general public, there are some people who do need to turn their phone all the way off for whatever reason. Maybe the "silent" buzzer is still distracting to them or their neighbors. Maybe they feel the buzzer and are compelled to check their messages during the movie, thus annoying their neighbors. That sort of thing. I'm just saying that it's very mean of cell phone companies to make the phone play a non-defeatable melody when the phone powers on or off.

And while we're on the subject of the silent switch, I love the fact that the iPhone has a flip switch for that purpose, that I can feel with my fingertip without removing the phone from my pocket. Brilliant.

FWIW, on my Moto Droid X, if I have the phone in vibrate mode, then it will shut down and start up silently. (It will buzz, though.) This seems to be the only way to defeat the otherwise-piercing scream it makes, mid-boot, when it discovers the SD card. "Oh, an SD card! Hurrah!"

Also FWIW, our 2005 Acura TL is dead silent about its Bluetooth handling. There's a discrete icon on the dash to tell you it has a paired phone. For contrast, our 2008 Audi A3 has no discrete icon. Instead, it will interrupt the stereo for two seconds to play a loud chime when paired and another loud chime when unpaired. If there's a way to defeat this, I haven't found it yet.

(And neither car supports A2DP audio. I was recently in a series of rental cars and was deeply impressed by Hyundai. Pairing was easy. A2DP audio just magically worked. I was less impressed with Ford Sync. Pairing required me to type a 6 digit PIN into the phone (*). Then, every time the car started, it somehow started up my DoubleTwist music player, even though I really would rather have been using Pandora. I'm not sure whether to blame this one on my phone or on the car for saying "hey phone, start playing.")

(*) Security wonkery: I understand that the PIN is a feature to keep an interloper from pairing with your car. However, the simple Hyundai system relies on the fact that it's only actively willing to pair with a new phone when you select the menu item in the car. So far as I can tell, you can't just walk down the street and pair with a random Hyundai that's driving by.

Agreed. Besides, everything uses 0000 for a key anyway

If anyone wants to follow news on the Prime, I recommend Google Alerts, which isn't what I'd hoped for when looking for an alerts system, but it works. I'll stop posting about the phone.

It's the phone I believe or maybe a diferent Sync version. My rental experience with Sync and the iPhone 4 had two differences. I didn't have to type the PIN, simply verify the PIN was identical on both the Sync dashboard and my phone. No idea how this is secure to send out the PIN though. And when it resumed, it resumed what was last playing from whatever app. I had it resume local music, streamed podcasts in the iTunes store app, and streaming shout cast radio via a 3rd party app. This seems to match the behavior when the iPhone is being told to stop or start playback via headphone control buttons.

If I set my HTC Desire to vibrate, it doesn't play the jingle; it just vibrates. This is with the stock HTC firmware.

That said, I have recently rooted my phone, but that was just to get more storage space on the phone (i.e. get rid of some of the HTC crapware).

Processor speeds continue to be a bad indicator of performance.

Apple's new iPhone 4S apparently runs at "only" 800MHz yet benchmarks well against the best Android devices clocking in at twice that speed. Without knowing exactly how Apple tweaked the A5 chip, I wouldn't be surprised if they've got a better cache. They've certainly spent a lot of effort on the GPU.

Of course, what really matters in the mobile universe is power consumption. If Apple could ship enough load from the CPU to the GPU to enable them to run the CPU slower, that probably enabled them to use a smaller battery.

For contrast, Android 2.x and earlier did all their UI rendering on the main CPU. This was apparently entirely rewritten in OpenGL as part of Android 3.x, which will presumably be trickling down to phones in Android 4.x. Consequently, while it will still be comparing Apples and oranges, at least they'll both be following the same general approach to splitting CPU/GPU computation, leading to more even comparisons.