I've never been to Detroit, what's wrong with it? Is it as bad as the media makes it out to be? I hear of murders and vacant swaths of previously bustling areas. How much truth is there to this?
It's highly dependent on what area of Detroit you're in. There are some parts of Detroit that are as the media portrays them: high crime/murder rate, abandoned buildings, and generally unpleasant areas. Additionally, the city government has had lots of issues with corruption. Currently the former mayor is being prosecuted by the FBI on a variety of charges. There's lots of problems that snowball into a not so nice living situation.
in one sense, not much - "detroit" as a catch-all for 'detroit metro area' (and in some cases "southeastern michigan") - that's generally fine. Economy is hurting, but suburbs are suburbs.
"Detroit" - the area within the technical city boundaries - it's decimated. It's not quite 100% gone - there are new pockets of activity springing up, but it's extremely depressing to see what's happened. Used to be home to close to 2 million people (IIRC), and now it's 700k, and most of those don't want to be there.
The "downtown" area - about 15 square blocks - is nice - then it becomes a wasteland for several miles until you hit the suburbs.
A giant national park that is likely filled with asbestos, lead, and god knows what other toxic substances they used to use in buildings back in the day. Tearing all these buildings down carries serious environmental risk.
There's been a lot of investment in 'downtown' over the last decade - new ballparks, office buildings, etc., so those alone would probably need more than the $50 million I mentioned, but if you exclude those...
That's exactly it -- low lighting situations are terrible. The year-old HTC Thunderbolt I used to use was better (and also higher resolution). But mostly, if you compare the image quality to the iPhone 4S, it's a no-brainer. The iPhone destroys the GN in image quality.
BTW, brings up another thought: I'm pretty sure Android is more aggressive about JPEG compression by default than iPhone. I haven't thoroughly researched this except to notice the relative sizes of files the two generate at the same resolution.
I'm an American and I've never understood this either. It's been around since the start of our democratic process, but these days it just seems like a counterproductive tactic.
It's weird and kind of annoying, but it's the only real counter against somebody ramming a bill through Congress. Having a perfect Congress would be more optimal, but you know, you make laws with the legislators you have, not the legislators you wish you had.
I think the integration of G+ in the core of Android will do wonders for its adoption. Suddenly the millions of users with Android devices have an incentive to begin using G+.
Normally Android apps (the 'properly' written ones) use the same code base across tablets and phones. Most of the layout is done as xml, with different xml files loaded based on the size of the screen, resolution, etc.
That being said I checked out the Google+ app on my Xoom and it does not appear that they included proper tablet configurations yet.
Yep. I'm aware that you're supposed to scale with size nicely in order to make an app work nicely on all screen sizes. But there should be more than that. My Xoom's camera is far better than my desktop's webcam, but the app lacks the Hangout feature - the only part of Google+ that's really magical for me.
So the 10" tablet app has a layout designed for a 3" screen, ignores the incredible hardware capabilities of the device (two video cameras! no video chat?), notifications that pop up after I've seen them twice already, etc.
It's just no good at the moment, but I'm sure it will improve with time.
I'll do my best to answer your questions, as my girlfriend was the lucky recipient of a CR-48.
1) I don't have a whole lot of experience with this as we were pretty much on wifi the whole time. I do know you have to manually enable 3g in the settings though. Once 3g on I assume it's automatic when there's not wifi around.
2) Unfortunately I don't have a whole lot of experience with this one either. The only pictures we every took with it were the initial user pictures, which didn't turn out all that well (although the newer chromebooks may have better cameras). I would assume you would be able to take pictures through any site that cam make use of a webcam though.
3) Battery life was pretty excellent. My girlfriend would use it all day at school for notes. It pretty much goes into hibernate when the lid is closed.
4) This is the part about the review that confuses me. The CR-48 we had always updated silently. It would update in the background, and then when the laptop was restarted it would install. I don't think I ever saw it prompt for an update.
5) First off, there are no native apps. It's literally chromium on a minimal linux build. The maps 'app' that he would have to use is the full blown maps.google.com. As long as he had a 3G connection I would think he'd be fine, otherwise I'm not too sure how much caching the web version of maps does.
I hope this helps. Sorry I wasn't able to provide more info about some of your questions
> 4) This is the part about the review that confuses me. The CR-48 we had always updated silently. It would update in the background, and then when the laptop was restarted it would install. I don't think I ever saw it prompt for an update.
A forced update only occurs on the first turning on of the machine, presumably in case it's been on the shelf a few months. I vaguely recall having to do the same for my CR48.
