Simon’s Blog

It’s been fun. The blog is now over. Or is it?

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This Saturday I went to Six Flags and rode Superman: Ride of Steel. Superman is formidable at 205 feet high and one mile long, reaching 73 mph. It was the perfect opportunity to use the Coastermate iPhone app.

Strapped to my arm, coastermate polls the accelerometer 30 times a second and displays a nice graph I can glance at while riding. It stores a history of all my measuremens and can export a spreadsheet (Download Spreadsheet of the Raw Data).

Here is an Excel graph, the data was a little jumpy but I cleaned it up with a 8 point moving average trend line.

I was impressed with the resulting data, the graph actually makes sense when compared to the shape of the roller coaster.

When I tell people about the iPhones digital compass, most people say ‘meh’.  Then I try to explain how this opens up the fascinating world of augmented reality, which is very hard to impart with words.  Check out these awesome vidoes.

Nearest Tubes locates subways in the UK.  I want this for the DC Metro.

Paris Metro

Pocket Universe shows you a star map.

Idunno about this one, you can see where person’s a located and then call them? Why not just call them? If it’s a person’s realtime location then that’s cool, but it’s probably just their home address.

iPhone 3GS Augmented Reality from Chris Hughes on Vimeo.

Imagine the implications of such ubiquitous AR!!!!!!! Eventually you will perceive the world exclusively through augmented reality optics, the naked eye is for losers.

Where the hell has this guy been?

My favorite new feature so far is the in-line volume controls on the included headset. With only three buttons you can adjust the volume, play/pause, change track, answer/hang up calls, and activate voice control to call a contact, dial a number, or play an artist.

Web browsing is also noticably faster, I pulled down 1.3 megabits with a speedtest app. Due to the increased memory, switching between Safari tabs no longer requires the page to reload.

I don’t know what to think of the digital compass, when I’m in a vehicle it always complains of interference. Here’s a screenshot showing me driving down the highway backwards. To recalibrate the compass you swing the 3GS around in a figure eight, if you see a dude waving his phone around like a moron that’s probably me.

The 3.2 megapixel camera is excellent. You can touch to focus, with auto macro. The picture above of the inline remote was taken with my 3GS. Here is a video I shot this weekend:

Update: When I first took my new iPhone 3GS for a spin I wasn’t sure if the new features was worth the price tag, but the the speed has proven to be worth it. I just saw a crazy dirty car on the highway, snapped a picture and blogged it in about one minute (see above). With the 3G, the camera app would not have opened in time to get the shot, the shutter delay would have missed the shot, and my Wordpress app would have taken longer to compose the post.

6:15am
There’s at least 100 people at my Apple store.

6:45
About 200 people here. All the Apple store employees gathered in a circle around us while cheering, I guess they were trying to hype us up but it was actually pretty scary. But they gave us water and nutri-grain bars so I forgive them.

7:05
People are buying iPhones!

7:40
My new 32GB iPhone 3GS is activated!