WrkInProgress

Interesting product. What's "in it" for the mentors? The seem to be an integral part of your value prop.

Yes, that was their online sales revenue in 2019, unless you think giants like Wal Mart (with nearly 400 supercenter stores in Canada) and Costco are doing only 1 billion in brick and mortar sales.

These numbers are readily available in their financial statements (Wal Mart doesn't separate out Wal Mart Canada's numbers - I happen to be in the industry.

Your Canadian Tire anecdote sounds unbelievable unless it was many years ago.

Canadian Tire is one of the few Canadian stores in 2020 where can check store stock/inventory online down to the aisle of the store. They had already started implementing pickup lockers in their store before covid.

I've placed a few online orders with them and have never had any issues (including in store pickup). FYI, they did close to $600 million in e-commerce sales in 2019.

Walmart, Loblaws, etc process same day grocery pickup online (and they did this before the pandemic).

The Canadian e-commerce experience is not some backwater that you proclaim it to be.

Amazon.ca and Amazon.com accounted for about 10% of all e-commerce sales in Canada for 2019.

I wish i had some stats for the raw # of total packages/shipments, because that's where I think Amazon's marketshare would match the picture of "50% of every package"

That's a bit of hyperbole.

Walmart, Costco, The Bay all did more than a billion in revenue for 2019. Home Depot, Canadian Tire, Best Buy, Home Depot had more than 500 million and less than a billion.

They wouldn't be doing these numbers if the state of e-commerce was as "eye-watering awful" as you make it out to be.

These numbers are for the Canadian market which ended with about 40 billion in total "e-commerce" sales for 2019.

I'm in Toronto, so we have Skip (Skipthedishes) instead of GrubHub along with UberEats and Doordash

1.) Skip doesn't allow the restaurant to jack up the price, so to the customer the total cost is the same 2.) These companies toss out tons of coupon codes and referral codes that bring the overall cost down (sometimes even cheaper than ordering directly from the restaurant) 3.) In dense urban centers, a ten minute "drive" is way more challenging/time consuming/effort than it would be somewhere else. In fact, these services use bicycle couriers in these areas.

I'm curious as to how a basic app could replace the on demand delivery logistics / handle the volume that a platform like UberEats sends to restaurants ?

Maybe my urban area is different but restaurants here are doing 10+ orders per hour across all delivery channels. The bottleneck becomes the # of delivery couriers available and smartly assigning them to deliveries.

Condominium in Ontario (Toronto is in Ontario) is a form of ownership, it had nothing to do with the physical form of the home.

You can own a condominimum townhouse (a row of single family homes with front yard, driveways, garage attached by common walls) or a condominium apartment (in say a 30 storey building with 10 parents per floor)

And yes, you can rent out a condominium apartment. Approx 60 % of the rental units in the Greater Toronto Area are condominium apartments.

Well they did bring fibre to the two existing developments in the Canary District. And for a far better price than than Canadians are used to with the big 3. I don't really see a lot of innovation, they were just able to sign a 10 year contract with Beanfield.

The Canary District is far from finished, so perhaps some of that infrastructure will be built out when it is completed.

Also, a lot of the developments they mentioned have yet to be completed (Monde, Waterfront Innovation Centre, Tridel's Aqualina/Aquavista) and aren't even in the "Canary District".

One of these just started occupancy.

I had no idea this Google Express app existed (It's not available in my region of the world).

It's a shame they force you to use it, over just adding to a shopping list in Google Keep.

I was considering getting the Home Mini but now I'm not so sure (grocery list, weather check, and general help (timer/conversions) while cooking would have been my main usage)

I've used maybe 15 Android devices since it's inception. HTC, Samsung, Sony, Motorola, and "Google" (two Nexus devices and 1 Pixel).

If I had to choose I would take stock Android in terms of aesthetics, ten times out of ten.

However, over time Android has indeed taken MANY features from HTC, Motrola, Samsung and other OEMS and added them to vanilla android.

I know I'm forgetting a lot more but off the top of my head:

- multi-app support - always on displays - readibility - night mode - smart gestures - Stamina mode which is now Doze on stock Android - voice commands - even things like Google Now (minus the smart assistant) to the left of the home screen, were actually provided earlier by OEMs (as a method to differentiate) like HTC's blinkfeed - heck, the first stock Android devices, didn't even have smart dialers (HTC added that as part of their Sense dialer)

Samsung's Touchwiz looked terrible until the most recent incarnation (it's now called the Samsung Experience) and it did contain some bloat, namely with duplicate apps but it's always been much more feature packed than stock Android. Some of the features were not so great but a lot of them were and eventually Google copied them. You can say the same to a lesser extent for HTC, Sony and Motorola.

Tap to wake usually either requires more pressure than an accidental bump or requires a quick double tap.

That is how it has been implemented in the Android phones I've used so far.

This is nothing new and Microsoft has had programs like this in place from time and time (including trading in old versions of Surface / Surface Pro).

As someone pointed out, it's just a re-branding of am existing third party "trade in" company.

Here's one for the Xbox https://microsoftconsoletradeca.cexchange.com/online/home/in...

A couple of counter points

1.) Design is subjective. I for one think while the Model S looks great, the X and 3 do not look that attractive.

2.) I really don't think "faster" really means much when are you talking about the majority of the mainstream automobile market. Top speed is low on the list of priorities for the average consumer.

3.) Cheaper is not free. I would save about $70 (based on today's gas prices in Ontario, Canada) per month in gasoline costs, but it would still cost me about $60 a month in electricity costs to do an average of 20,000 km a year.

4.) Production capability, supply chain and support network can not be overlooked. Tesla struggled to get 50,000 cars out last year. BMW sold north of 2 million cars in 2015. I recognize Tesla is growing day by day, but 50,000 to 2 million is a big jump.

Just curious, when was the last time you used a Samsung device ?

A couple of points as I used to share your opinion, but I recently purchase a Edge Plus which changed my views (which while not as extreme were aligned with yours.

1.) For the most part, I do prefer stock android in terms of aesthetics and some key apps (dialer, etc).

2.) Samsung has really toned down their over the top "colourful" aesthetic on phones. They are increasingly following Material design guidelines.

3.) Depending on the carrier variant (and this could be killer), Samsung bundle apps are not as critical anymore and they definitely do not cause weird breakages when disabled.

4.) Having used both a Nexus 6P (considered the cream of the crop when it comes to stock Android experience) and there is very little performance difference between the two.

5.) Samsung (and other OEMs) have always been ahead of the curve of stock android when it comes to features that were co-opted into later versions on Android. They were the first to have quick access toggles in the notification bar, lock screen notifications, etc. So there were always some trade-offs.

6.) Even without getting into third party launchers, etc that can completely ape stock android in looks - Samsung has finally included proper theming support for their devices - so even a novice user can download a "Material Dark / Material Light" theme.

One perfect example that is still relevant to this day is the multi-window option that I use daily on my Edge Plus, which would not be possible on a Nexus device (just yet).

I'd argue that they aren't "so much further" ahead of almost everyone of the dimensions you listed with the exception of:

1.) potentially performance (as I'm not familiar with the true technical benchmarks of something like the A9 chip vs the latst Snapdragon, Exynos, etc)

2.) Apps - only if you include true "tablet" apps as well, as Android has done a terrible job with their tablet apps (basically glorified phone apps for the most part).

Your tablet analogy doesn't hold true for the high resolution screens in phones.

Android's most popular devices (Samsung and Motorola/Droid) prior to Apple's first "retina" display had higher resolution displays than the standard 320 x 480 that Apple had for the first few iPhones.

Except half your list is not accurate.

High resolution displays were around long before the iPhone 4 moved from their standard resolution. "Retina" is a branded term for a high resolution display from Apple. And in the current phone space, the iPhone 6S Plus lags quite a bit behind in terms of PPI and actual native resolution.

Similar arguments can be made for fingerprint scanning, personal assistant, 5 Ghz wifi and the waterproofing.

It works ... after you let it load and everything reflows accordingly.

Terrible first experience.

Except the new XPS 13 is made out of aluminium and carbon fibre. And the $1299 model has a 13" screen with touch and a higher resolution. And it has an i5 processor versus a Core M.

It will be interesting to see how much RAM the base configuration of the new Macbook will ship with, because the XPS 13 at $1299 comes with 8 GB.

I actually started watching the live stream after they demoed Cortana but going back now and seeing Belfiore demo Cortana:

- He added a show to his queue in Hulu but it stayed in the app - He said "what's up with Terry Meyerson" and it went straight to Terry's facebook profile.

And I realize that FB has some deep integration within the OS (just like Twitter)

They just did a demo of exactly what you requested for sending a new tweet.

Conversational style instead of pre-defined phrases and it just sent a tweet instead of opening the twitter app.

I have the HTC One X (International Version) apart for the horrible thing that is HTC Sense 4 (apart from the camera improvements and certain dialer improvements), I've been able to root and load custom ROMS on my phone without any issues.

HTC even set up a site to make it easy to unlock the bootloader here: http://www.htcdev.com/bootloader

If they ape the Windows 8 snap view completely, it won't work in portrait.

It will be interesting how they deal with installing phone apps on the tablet. They might just allow carte blanche or might require a developer to opt in to avoid issues with phone specific apps being unusable on the tablet.

Windos 8/RT has multiple user accounts.

Android 4.2 on tablets also has multiple user accounts.

It will be interesting to see how well they can market the benefits of a 4 MP camera over 8+ MP cameras on other smartphones.

I know that more pixels does not always make for a better camera, but I think the perception from the general public would be that higher = better.

Quite a bold move on their part.

I don't always agree with Thurrott but I think he is spot on here.

Google Now is the killer app/feature for Android.

And from the 4 players in the mobile space right now, only Microsoft is really in a position to challenge something like Google Now.

And I don't hold out much hope that MS can get their act together to pull it off.

Sometimes that's all you need.

To be to fair to them, they have added analytics, social integration, SEO optimization, etc.

Disclaimer: I'm working on a service (but targeted at a specific industry) that will offer something similar as a feature but is not the core product/service.

Their own website doesn't work in portrait mode on my Android device (HTC One X using Chrome) and the logo doesn't load even when I rotate the phone into landscape mode.

Can you expand on why it was such a flop with merchants ?

I have a Surface RT. It was a gift. I also have an iPad, that I paid for. I use both quite often.

Is it a good device ? Yes, I think so. Would I recommend the current Surface RT ? No, not yet anyway.

Here are my key issues:

a.) The app store has to get better. I know it has a full featured browser (spare the IE jokes), so there isn't a need for as many apps as a traditional tablet, but I still think the RT's usage is set up for touch as often as possible and using IE10 in desktop mode just don't cut it for touch usage.

b.)It can stand to be a bit cheaper (at least bundle in the keyboard for $50.00)

c.) MS needs to get their act together because the built in apps are very bare bones and in fact are at times worse than the apps they replaced (i.e. Xbox Music vs Zune)

d.)in terms of hardware, the only real issues I have would be the screen (quality is great, but I think the next iteration should bump up the resolution); and the cameras which are god awful.

All in all, despite the criticism, I like the direction Microsoft has taken with Windows 8 and the Surface line. In typical Microsoft fashion, it would have helped if the different divisions had got their act together, so they could have released a more refined, coherent product.

It always baffles me when I see incredulous posts on Hacker News that can't seem to grasp the benefits of a device like the Surface RT or the Pro. I think devices similar to the Surface Pro are the future of mass computing.