Windows (Phone) 8

So I had one of the earliest windows phone 7 models that came out, the HTC Trophy, and I loved it.  Unfortunately I also broke it.  As my employer was tired of purchasing phones for me, I had to get a tinker-toy phone so I wouldn’t have to pay for the next one myself.  This phone did not remotely compare to the HTC Trophy.  A couple of my co-workers decided to go the android route also, and what I can say is that in all areas except number of apps available the windows phone is far superior.  I could send text messages, email, and make phone calls completely hands free.  Completely. Hands. Free.  Let that sink in.  With any android I’ve seen or played with there is always a button you have to click at some point in these processes, meaning I’m going to die taking my eyes off the road.  When sending texts I could just talk to the windows phone “send text to wife…Honey I’m going to be home late”  The phone would reply with “did you mean send a text message to wife, Honey I’m going to be home late, please say send or retry”, and if the speech recognition got something wrong you could go on in this loop until it got it right, never having to touch the thing, and once it did get it correct, you just said “Send”.  And when the reply came in it would notify you, read it if you wanted, and you could then reply or ignore.  Completely hands free.  Almost 18 months later and Android still hasn’t caught the windows 7 phone there.  Android speech recognition doesn’t remotely compare, it doesn’t recognize that I’m talking at all while the car is on, where the win7 phone rarely missed a beat.  My boss just got his windows 8 phone, I looked at it a bit and turned and ugly shade of green.  I can’t wait till my new every 2 is up in 6 months.  I think Windows 8 on everything is going to be a big game changer, and Microsoft is going to jump back on top of the world again with this one.  My desktop, Surface, and phone, and X-Box are just going to work, and work together.  Amen.

Advanced Technology: Smarter cars - Followup

Advanced Technology: Smarter cars

Following up very close to 5 years later, it's nice to see we are actually getting somewhere on this:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328585.300-driverless-cars-ready-to-hit-our-roads.html

I think the legal issues around who's going to be covering a liability claim when the car was driving and hits someone is going to be one of the biggest hurdles.