I’m happy I shot some colorful, detailed footage of bumble bees last week because it made great demo material when people asked about the video recording capabilities of the iPhone 4. I am really impressed with it’s ability to focus on nearby subjects. But I didn’t feel like I really pushed iPhone to it’s limit, to get extreme macro shots. Today I shot these bees up close, like in their face close. The minimum focal distance of iPhone 4 seems to be about 4 or 5 inches, and that’s enough to see bee hair and flower bugs.
The internet has been buzzing about problems with cellular reception when holding the iPhone with your left hand, towards the bottom. If your left hand bridges the two separate metal edge pieces reception noticeably drops.
What boggles my mind is Apple released a product with such a blatant design flaw. Cosmetics are
Great but not if it impairs the phones ability to function as a phone. Job’s reaction was essentially “don’t it with your left hand”. That’s 50% of my hands! I’m right handed like everybody but left handed freaks. What if I need to use a pen or grasp an object while using my phone. Did Apple foresee and test this use case scenario??!!!
It’s not too much of a problem in the DC metro area but still, ridiculous.
Here’s another negative. My hands hurt like hell after using it for 10 minutes. It’s so thin and so sharply rectangular that there is no way to hold it comfortably. Landscape is much better than portrait but most 3rd party apps aren’t landscape. I figure my hand muscles will get used to it and I’ll refine my grasping technique. This is a tolerable annoyance because it’s so damn thin in my pocket.
Overall I’m very happy, best phone yet. Another technological achievement of note by Apple. Their biggest product launch ever and then some.
I am very happy with the video playback capabilities. HD movies look great. Apple’s spec sheet says it supports h.264 video max 2.5mbps which is barely enough for HD video. A ridiculous claim because it records and plays back 720p video at 10mbps, plenty of bitrate. iTunes refused to sync anything over 8mbps not an issue as I’d never need more than 4mbps with my badass compression abilities. Despite Apple’s spec sheet h.64 high profile is supported. I’m planning a future post on how to encode high quality videos with small file sizes, chapters, 4 audio tracks and 4 subtitle tracks. I got full length standard def movies on my 3G/3GS down to 100-200 megabytes, my goal is to keep HD iPhone 4 movies well under 1gb.
I love this piece by Chopin, so I’ve decided to share my performance of it played with an iPhone game called PianoMan. The game is glitchy, sometimes the notes get messed up. The one time I play it without missing a note the game glitches on the last note of the first ascent, I was so mad. Also check out my world record breaking performance of Turkish March. I have the #1 score in the world in front of all the Japanese and Korean guys, they hate me so much.
Download UStream Live Broadcaster from the app store for free. Then point your phone at something and click broadcast. A live video stream will be streamed to UStreams website where it can be shared with the world. Quality varies and video size is only 320×240 but hey it’s free live video streaming from your phone. I’ll let you know next time I broadcast a live cat vs. dog battle royal.
I’ve been learning the iPhone software development kit and programming in Objective-C. Objective C is weird. Anyway here are my first apps I’ve written while studying tutorials for a few days.
How’s it done? Here is a video showing how I used the iPhone SDK to make these apps.
Yawesome. When I first got my 3GS I tried to strap it to my RC car, but I have a mini RC car so the 3GS was heavier than the car. Maybe I can strap it to my cat.
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