Rob. S.

Because "then" a lot happened. In December, this was a different world. I understand everyone's disappointment including mine, but why are some people so unwilling to give a company like Fxtec the benefit of doubt, even in a situation like this? In this situation, we can only hope that they will survive, since they're NOT Apple, or Samsung, for that matter, which, beside their electronics division, even has a weapons of war division that can hardly fail in this day and age. Whether I get my expensive toy two weeks later or earlier is really the least of my problems now.

Perhaps because shipping is the more expensive the fewer devices are shipped in a batch. And while they actually did send out some devices piece by piece when a significantly longer delay had been the alternative, if I remember that correctly, I'm perfectly good with two more weeks if things are really on their way to become normal now. It's not that the 2½ months since the Chinese lockdown could have improved Fxtec's budget.

I'm (not yet on Pro¹...) checking out some browsers again and for the time being I've decided to make Opera my standard browser, as it indeed checks all of my boxes – proper text reflow; allow zoom also when prohibited by the page; adblock; compatibility with the Bitwarden (potentially self-hosted) password storage app. Very nice.

So you use your fingers – but then you always have to have some kind of support to put the device on? Me, I often need to type with the device in my hands, and I wouldn't know how to do it other than with my thumbs, or maybe with one hand holding it and the other typing, which is even less comfortable than by thumb...

In Germany there was an interesting report [heise.de, German] following the 2007 LÜKEX exercise ("Länderübergreifende Krisenmanagement Exercise"), a staff framework exercise in which supply chain communication was tested with different scenarios. LÜKEX is repeated every few years with changing settings. The 2007 setting was "influenza pandemic". Roughly 3000 people took part in the tabletop exercise. "In the most aggressive of three possible scenarios that the Robert Koch Institute set at the time, 21 million people were expected to be ill and the total lethality to exceed 170,000 deaths.

So you never heard about the Samsung Galaxy Fold? And that's just the first example that comes to mind. And advertising never, ever, was honest. In the best case, advertising is about presenting and exaggerating advantages over the competiton while hiding disadvantages. And I cannot see what your marital/family status has anything to do with this, either. This is simply a question of how we deal with mistakes people make. And whether we want to apply even stricter standards of judgement to a small British company than to the largest South-Korean business conglomerate, a small British

From all we've seen here, "cannot get a personal response" is not the rule – although communication errors did happen and probably continue to happen. At least some of them could be solved here in the forums. In your specific case, though, I would have suggested to try and establish something more like a B2B contact very early, instead of just ordering a device as any old consumer. I have no insight in the inner workings of F(x)Tec myself, but I think things might have gone different then... And who was it that "ordered in February 2020 and received it 2 weeks later"? if it happened, it d

...That's even larger than the Pro1! Indeed, but to be honest, those one or two millimeters more probably wouldn't make it a hard exclusion criterion for me, either 😉

@david: Some sellers, say, in the US, only sell in the US, only ship within the US. Those items won't turn up in an ebay search in another country's ebay. If you have the item number, though, and construct a link with it like @EskeRahn did, they'll appear in that other country's ebay, too. You still won't be able to buy the item, though, if the seller doesn't want you to. (I wanted to buy excactly such an item a few weeks ago, the only sample that I found in all the world's ebays, but the seller, who wasn't publishing any contact details, didn't even accept messages from other countries t

Many small goods deliveries for consumers are being delayed here in Germany now, by the way. Amazon Germany gives estimates of one or two weeks now for non-essential stuff which is in stock and would normally take just one day – even things like their own Fire Tablets. (I try to avoid Amazon myself as good as I can, but one of my tablets needed replacing – and then I ordered a Fire 8 HD Tablet because it was unbeatably cheap and a quick research showed there actually is a Lineage OS ROM for it...)

On 03-04-20 21:16 FX Technology Limited wrote: > Hey guys! > > Quick follow up from last week's email. > > Firstly, as Chinese travel restrictions are still in place, the keyboard > delivery we were expecting on Saturday (28th March) was delayed again, > and ended up arriving on Wednesday. We have also since discovered that > certain parts of the keyboards structure failed our quality control > process. This means that we need a replacement batch before we can > continue production. > > Unfortunately things are taking slightly longer than we anticipate

While I agree FxTec perhaps shouldn't have been publicly promising, and shouldn't continue to promise even today, 4-6 weeks delivery time for regular orders while even pre-orders were (are) still being processed, and while I perfectly understand your disappointment about the substantial delay (I'm still waiting for my device as well, ordered on September, 20), the quality of support isn't really a matter of someone's feelings... As far as I can see, most of the few serious issues (i.e. more serious than the software issues which everyone is facing and which we all hope will be fixed by a futur

I have no idea why anyone should "hate" Java (even if we would suppose for the matter of discussion that hatred was a legitimate emotion, which I think it is not), except perhaps when they have to do software development with it, but even then there would many worse choices. And even if someone would have to do Android development, there would be alternatives to Java, too, like Kotlin, or even Scala (which I think is one of the most interesting newer languages around). If he didn't mean java, but the JVM or what Android uses for it (Dalvik or now ART), I cannot really see what's the problem, e

Thinking about it a little bit further, it just reminds me once more of the sad fact that the classic netbook has become extinct, and this device, just as some earlier Planet products, could have become an excellent netbook, while as a handheld it looks like it may my less than optimal. They would just have to make it in 10". With similar specs, and preferably x64-based, I might buy right away.

I definitely like what I see there. Planet surely can be considered a both dedicated and experienced hardware designer at this point, and the sliding mechanism looks both innovative and potentially solid to me. I suspect it will become less ergonomic than the Pro¹'s, though, because the screen part has to be pushed across the device's whole width of 76.6 mm before it drops behind the keyboard and tilts up, and the actors using it in the video (I like the bloke's hairdo!) try but cannot hide the fact that they need quite an effort there and still don't look perfectly comfortable at it. We

I agree! But that could perhaps be because it is considered general knowledge in this day and age. The old saying "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" has, of course, still a lot of truth in it. Then again, there are pathogens which don't give a damn how well you've eaten and exercised and whatnot; when they enter your system, you'll get sick. Your immune system, of course, still has a word to say about how quick (if at all) you'll recover...

Sorry, and no, that's just dangerous semi-knowledge, and it has nothing to do with the new coronavirus whatsoever. On the contrary, the new coronavirus became the threat it now is because of far too little hygiene on the Chinese wet markets, where living wild animals of lots of different species are crowded together, giving viruses a chance to jump between species which never would come close to each other in nature, which is exactly what happened now, with bats being the original carriers, sold on wet markets because there is demand for them in rural cooking. And Chinese rural households aren

On 27-03-2020 12:17 FX Technology Limited wrote: > Hello there! > > We hope you are all well and staying safe at this difficult time. We > just wanted to give you a brief update on the status of your Pro1. > > Over the last week we have really been pushing to try and get remaining > orders completed, however we are still waiting for delivery from our > keyboard supplier which has delayed the process by a few days. We expect > this to arrive at the factory on Saturday 28th March, and from then we > will be able to finalise production units and start preparing for

Thanks! Might be a good thing then that I wasn't able to return mine anymore 🙂

I don't have the Pro¹ yet... but when it will be there, I'll be at a loss just as I am with my current phone as to which browser I should use. Like @elvissteinjr, I use Vivaldi on the desktop, but don't think the mobile version is ready yet. On mobile, I've found only one browser which has a feature that I wouldn't want to live without – ignoring text block widths and inserting line breaks to fit text on the phone's screen, as an option that can be set as default: Yandex Browser. I've had to give it up though, not just because it's a data gatherer, but because it often becomes unbea

Wow, not bad! 🙂

What Happens If the US Does Absolutely Nothing To Combat COVID-19? The Imperial College then ran the numbers for what would happen if countries assumed a "mitigation" strategy and "suppression" strategy. You can read the full summarized breakdown of what happens in each scenario below, but basically the mitigation strategy flattens the curve with an actual death toll at around two million deaths while the suppression strategy has the death rate in the U.S. peaking at 3 weeks with only a few thousand deaths.

In a summary of what Germany's "Heise" IT news portal published today, there are a lot of special offers for software and services available right now, albeit some of them restricted to a limited time of free or cheaper usage. Collaboration: Google G Suite, Lifesize (meetings, videochats), Microsoft Teams, Pronto (also videochat), Teamviewer (free version is normally intended for non-commercial use only, but those who use it professionally during the Corona crisis do not need to fear payment requests. Inofficially it is said anything less than 150 simultaneous connections is tolerated), Z

Which I suppose is exactly what Foucault wanted to express – a utopia for the rulers, a dystopia for the inhabitants. The complete title of the book is "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison", it is about the Western penal systems, and being confined to my home for the next ten days this might be a good time to read it, which I didn't do yet. 😉 Totalitarianism, by the way, is a subject which has even more to do with this current situation than one might think at first glance. If we look at what people in affected countries are still allowed to do and what they aren't, we find th

Which might happen and might not. And if it happens, it still proves nothing. If the virus should come back to China, which everyone hopes it won't, but the rest of the world is already suffering higher infection rates than China had during the height of its crisis, that "guarantee" will immediately prove worthless. Yeah, which of course is exactly the same as building and marketing an Android phone for mass market. You don't seem to "understand" much, actually. We all want our phones and are not happy about the delays, but venting exaggerated (and, by the way, potentially illegal