h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Devonseaglass.


I'm subbing your smartphones entry at A73111222.

I've two problems with it.

1. There's some sort of a formatting problem so that the prices come out as "between £300 and £600". That's a capital A with a circumflex before a pound sign. What did you intend to write? Pounds, Euros, Dollars, other?

2. Entries should be written to be self contained, with links to extra information. The sentence "See a smartphone comparison" requires the reader to go to a different site to find out what you are talking about. Would you mind providing a quick two or three sentence summary of the findings of that comparion, please? I'll incorporate them into the entry.

Other than that, it is great.

Gnomon,

1. The currency should be in pounds. Don't know why it has that strange symbol.

2. Since this was written Apple has released its iPhone4, so it's probably better to use this in the comparison. The relevant link is now http://www.esato.com/phones/compare.php?phone=604&cp=622

The salient points are

Physical; HTC larger screen, slightly larger overall but weighs less than the iPhone.

Battery; iPhone battery cannot be replaced except by Apple.

FM radio; Only on the HTC phone.

Second camera: Only on the iPhone.

Expandable memory; Only on the HTC phone.

Both phones offer similar Internet access, with the touch screen feature, and telephony features. (The iPhone has been found to have a problem with its antenna being interfered with by the user's finger position, corrected by fitting an insulating ring to the phone).

(If you don't mind bad language this is a more robust comparison between the iPhone 4 and the HTC Evo, very similar to the HTC Desire, but probably not for the Edited Guide; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg )

Thanks

The character-encoding used on h2g2 is a old one which doesn't include the pound sign. When you enter a pound sign your browser doesn't know how to send that to the server, because the text-encoding of the page doesn't allow for pound signs. Different browsers will do different things in this situation. Some will send the UTF-8 pound sign (UTF-8 is a Unicode encoding, and includes all letters from all alphabets).

In Latin-1 (the encoding of h2g2), the UTF-8 pound sign comes out as two letters. The first is A-circumflex. The second is undefined, but it's one which is often used for a pound sign in other encodings, so most browsers will make a guess of it and call it a pound sign.

That's what happened.

In GuideML, enter pound signs as £. Modern websites should use UTF-8, and then we wouldn't have any character-encoding problems. In the meantime, we'll make do with what we've got.

TRiG.

Oh. Thank you for that explanation. I used to do Boolean logic design, and it was fascinating, but didn't pay the bills.