"The Seagull went on sale in Mexico as the Dolphin Mini in March 2024. It is available in two variants, dubbed the Dolphin Mini and Dolphin Mini Plus, which are equipped with a 30.88 kWh and 38.88 kWh battery respectively."
The market penetration of the switch makes it harder for Sony to expand into the family/casual gaming space. That forces Sony to stick to the AAA lane (which is where their focus is) limiting their growth opportunities.
If the switch had been a failure, then a lot of households that currently have a switch (only) would have bought a different console and that would likely have been a PS5 (even if they held on to their previous generation console, and waited a couple of years until the PS5 price dropped below $500)
I have a PS4 and a Switch at home. The kids play the switch and occasionally play on the PS4. I can't justify buying a PS5 because there's only so much
gaming time available, and family gaming is covered by the switch and my personal gaming is good enough on my PC. Take the switch out of the equation and that changes.
PS5 is winning the AAA console lane, no doubt. But Sony could have been making more money if they could also own a significant portion of the family console lane.
I don't know that the Playstation 5 really plays in that market when the cheapest version is $450, so nearly $200 more expensive than the switch. Keeping the price down is part of how Nintendo owns that market, on top of their first party game lineup and the like.
It's been more than a decade since I was involved with emergency services, but ~15 years ago there was a requirement (in Australia and elsewhere) that phones must be able to call emergency services from any available network even if the preferred carrier did not have service in that area. I assume that is still the case.
That requirement forces phones to have some degree of special handling for emergency calls. It may have required (or been interpreted to require) that a phone make emergency calls over 3G if VoLTE was unavailable. I can imagine someone deciding that means "lets just use 3G for all emergency calls" because who ever expected a case where 4G was available and 3G was not.
> because who ever expected a case where 4G was available and 3G was not
I'd expect that to be everyone that thought about it for more than a few seconds. Both because eventual replacement was obvious and because sometimes you only have partial coverage.
You may or may not be familiar with some of the use cases here in Australia. 3G coverage was more widespread and reliable for low bandwidth use cases, right up until the end. It was 4G that would have partial coverage, not 3G. 3G was often forced by IoT vendors, or routers using cellular for out of band management, due to its superior ability to penetrate through buildings. Same with ATMs, payment terminals, emergency telephones in lifts or out on the highways. People in regional areas would also force set their phones to 3G, to stop them flapping between a poor signal 4G network and the consistent, but slower, 3G network.
Many DAS/Distributed Antenna Systems, essentially networks of antennas placed inisde buildings to extend cellular coverage indoors, are costly and must be approved on a per-operator basis. Some of the DAS solutions requirements I've seen to provide full coverage for Optus, Telstra and Vodafone in 4G only in a 30 story building or medium sized mall, wanted 18 full racks, 100 amp 3 phase power connectivity, 15kw minimum redudancy cooling capacity, 8 hours of battery backup for all racks and cooling, all located in the centre of the facility to minmize cable runs. As a result, high quality DAS systems don't exist in every large building or campus environment. Even in 2024, we see buildings nearing the end of construction before the developer bothers to consider an appropriate DAS system, and at that point they balk at the space and location requirements, and refuse to understand why a DAS can't just be installed in 4RU in a crammed comms room thats the size of a domestic bathroom.
> It was 4G that would have partial coverage, not 3G.
By the time 4/5G are built out well, I'd expect 3G to win some and lose some, becoming more of the latter every year.
Unless the plan was to switch all the 3G equipment over to 4/5G simultaneously, making 4/5G become reliable overnight?
> due to its superior ability to penetrate through buildings
That's a feature of low frequencies. I don't think 3G does better anywhere if you compare the same frequency. And a bunch of the frequencies are exclusive to newer protocols, aren't they?
Not necessarily, it depends on how the network operators laid out their bands. In theory I suppose it could free up adjacent bands for more network capacity.
> a bunch of the frequencies are exclusive to newer protocols
Depends on where you are in the world. In the US the FCC has been growing out the number of available cellular bands. Cellular technologies can work on just about any frequency, given the handset supports the appropriate bands.
2G/3G tend to be a little bit more power efficient than more modern technologies as _generally_ they require less processing overhead on the handsets. However, LTE/5G do better with error correction and lower signal strength. You also get higher capacity. Stuff like GSM uses a round robin time sharing mechanism which can quickly get saturated in dense environments.
2G is _mostly_ there for legacy applications. The reason why it breaks down for this case is because a lot of older handsets negotiate 2G first before switching over to LTE, and then 5G.
Its presence implies that the company both is capable of and is overcharging the people coerced into the higher price tier.
"Overcharging" is a concept without a precise meaning. The SSO-capable version has a feature that cost money to build and support. That it is sold at a higher price (often alongside other enterprise features that cost money to build and support) is not proof that they are overcharging.
Any company that is tying to recoup the costs of building those features will charge the customers that use those features. The existence of a price differential between the 2 editions does not tell you whether they are overcharging.
> The SSO-capable version has a feature that cost money to build and support. That it is sold at a higher price (often alongside other enterprise features that cost money to build and support) is not proof that they are overcharging.
"Price discrimination" is charging a higher price to one set of customers than another. The premise is that they're really getting the same thing but one of them has to pay more in exchange for either nothing or for something whose incremental underlying cost is far less than the incremental price increase, because the company devised a way to artificially segment the market.
If your argument is that the extra feature would actually cost that much even in a highly competitive market because it costs that much more to provide it, what you're really arguing is that they're not engaged in price discrimination.
You can see that the team did a big refactor of key handling about 14 months ago that required multiple rounds changes to the DSA code.
That's the sort of cost that legacy code brings - it's not about make changing to the DSA feature, it's about the cost of maintaining the DSA code when you make changes across the codebase.
In the original mail, DJM mentions that they'd like to explore a post-quantum signature algorithm. Adding that to the codebase is likely to require some broad changes to key management, and that will be less work if there are fewer supported key types.
It doesn't even have to be a totally "random" (unrelated) motorcycle accident.
If he panicked after the Stuxnet attack, as his family is reported to have said, then it's likely he has behaving erratically and was fearful for his life.
That could easily translate to circumstances where he rides a motorcycle in a particularly dangerous manner - e.g. fleeing from someone he thought was Iranian/Dutch/US/Israeli intelligence (even if they weren't).
Still not US$14k, but not quite the $25k it is in other markets.