Simon’s Blog

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.

They started lining up last night at 8pm. I got to the Apple store at 3:30am and I’m #60 (update now I’m #100 people because were saving spots). Now there are hundreds behind me but employees informed us they have a large stock of iPhones.

Update: There are at least 300 in the reserve line with more pouring in, lucky bastards.

Update: Screw the Reston Apple Store. They are only letting in reserves and spending 10 minutes with each person trying to upsell MobileMe, one employee per person. That’s ridiculous, at Fair Oaks last year they processed reserves and normies at the same time, I got in line at 6am and had my phone at 8:15am. Today I just wasted six hours at the Apple store because they processed 50 reserves per one standby customer.  Employees came by periodically with snacks and lied to us about getting in the store while no one was let in the store.  We are customers to, only a few were able to pre-order or reserve iPhones because Apple’s website was crushed by unanticipated demand.

The Reston Apple store completely failed to provide iPhone 4’s to customers, I can’t imagine a worse failure.  This article sums it up.

Just drove to Best Buy, all units reserved. Called Radio Shack, they have a few extra units, check out the line:

I’m #3 in line, not bad for arriving 20 minutes before opening which was 10am.  The Radio Shack manager who looked like he was 17 said that per Apple’s instructions they can’t hold phones, they must sell them.  He announced at noon he would give away people’s reserves if they didn’t show and I scored a fancy new iPhone.  Glory.

The screen is amazing!  Google Maps has so many more streets in detail, the retina display is the best feature of this phone.  It’s thinner than the 3GS, but not wafer thin like the iPod Touch.  I tried some FaceTime video calling and it’s cool but the novelty wears off quickly because we’ve all used Skype before.  The camera has much better low light performance and the flash makes a good flash light.  I really like how you can spot focus by touching the screen while recording 720p video.  You can spot focus on an object inches from the lens to get an amazingly crisp 720p macro close up.  This will come in useful.

I watch a lot of video on my 3GS and the highest bitrate it will playback is about 1600kbps, which looks great on a 640×320 screen.  Usually I can get away with just a few hundred kbps.  The iPhone 4 spec sheet says it will play back 2500kbps max, kind of dissappointing, I was hoping for at least 3 or 4mbps to pump high quality video to that retina display.

After analyzing the 720p video shot with iPhone 4 I’ve discovered it records at 10mbps! That’s a huge datarate.  10mbps is enough to encode a high quality 1080p video.  So doesn’t that mean iPhone 4 can play back 10mbps h.264 files?  It can obviously play back the video it just recorded.  I’ll test this and report back soon, but it appears the iPhone 4 is going to have no trouble playing back high quality video.  32 GB is not enough on my 3GS and it’s far too little on an iPhone 4 with 4 times as many pixels.

I watched Apple’s WWDC keynote today.  You would think Apple would have foreseen a clogged wifi spectrum and adjusted their presentation accordingly.  Jobs must have been pissed when he couldn’t demonstrate the web rendering speed or smooth video chat of the iPhone 4.  Hey Jobs, why not enclose a wifi hotspot and the demo iPhones inside a faraday cage?  The whole control and isolation thing, that’s your thing, do it.

Likes

• unified inbox
• multiple exchange accounts
• iMovie app
• 720p
• gyro
• 802.11n (not sure if the iPhone could take advantage of the speed though…)
• chassis doubles as antennae

Dislikes

• no mention of game center
• no unified file system for apps
• name is iPhone 4, so boring and un-apple, how about iPhone HD?

I’m installing iOS 4 on my iPhone now, I’ll let you know how I like it.

UPDATE: I like it.  The game center wasn’t mentioned on the keynote but it’s on my phone and it works.

All the app transitions and home screen animations are snappier, I didn’t think even snappier was possible.

You know what’s awesome?  Folders in your dock.  Having a folder with 12 handy apps inside your dock is BADASS.

Finally you can spot focus while shooting video, previously if you focused on some ones face, then hit record, then panned to a distant landscape it would be out of focus.  Now you can spot focus while recording, I’m not aware of any other video camera that allow spot focusing, Apple win.

There are no apps in the app store which support multitasking yet.  TomTom just announced they will update their navigation app to run in the background, they are the first to announce a background capable app.

I’ve had some success getting Apple’s apps to function in the background.  The app state is paused so you can quickly return to a photo you had open in the photos app, and back to the same page of the settings app, but I wanted to experience true background functionality.  I tried all the 1st party apps and found one that works.  Record a long sound with sound recorder, play the sound, then multitask it and leave the app.  The sound will continue to play.  Epic! Epic for Apple at least.

I was really surprised the YouTube app didn’t continue to play the video in the background, it would be nice to continue to hear audio.  At least they added vertical orientation so you don’t have to hold the phone on it’s side, and the video will rotate to both left and right landscape instead of just the left.

You know how when you scroll large distances in the contact list or iPod library the iPhone will speed up exponentially to get you through that large list quickly?  No?  Apple implemented this way back on the very first iPod.  Well iOS 4 brings exponential scrolling to Safari and it greatly speeds up navigating very tall web pages.

Another thing, in the settings app you can see and toggle which apps can track your location.  Sometimes when I get a new app I’m clicking the menu to get started when the “This app would like to use your location yes/no” message appears and I choose yes by accident.  Who knows what the sketchy app is doing with my GPS location, very unsettling.  Now I can easily see what apps are tracking me.

Orientation lock

I can finally read web pages in Safari lying down.

Update: Don’t upgrade to 3.1 yet, it’s buggy and there is no known way to downgrade a 3GS, 3G users can still downgrade.

Finally non-destructive video trimming.

If only Apple would get rid of the useless ’shake to undo’ feature and the annoying coverflow whenever the iPod is turned sideways. I was suprised to see my unofficial tethering still in the settings app, when I tried to connect from my laptop, the option suddenly disappeared from the iPhone’s screen before my eyes. The AT&T profile hack has also been disabled, so no unofficial tethering with 3.1. My first attempt to downgrade to 3.0.1 was unsucessful, iTunes reported my device was not ‘eligible’ for the downgrade.

I can’t wait to arrange apps on my 11 home screens with iTunes 9. The new genius app recommendations show up in the featured section of the app store.

Apple and Google, two great companies who continually innovate new technologies. I could go on and on about how much I love Google and Apple. Google has amazing web apps, Apple has amazing hardware and software integration. And of course I love my iPhone; much of the iPhone’s power stems from the tight integration between the Google and the iPhone OS (Safari, Google Maps, YouTube, Mail). Google even built Apple a flash-less version of YouTube so that it’s videos would play in Safari. However the close relationship is disintegrating, partly due to the fact that Apple and Google are now competitors in the mobile marketplace. Google exec Eric Schmidt has left Apple’s board. In recent weeks, two significant iPhone apps developed by Google have been rejected by Apple.

Google Voice is a feature packed VoIP app. It let’s users make cheap long distance calls, send free texts, get voicemails transcribed to your email, and much more. Apple rejected it presumably because AT&T doesn’t want people bypassing their voice services, but the official word from Apple is that Voice duplicated existing functionality. The FCC has launched an investigation asking for an explanation from Apple, AT&T, and Google. AT&T quickly denied any involvement in the app approval process.

Google Latitude, which displays your friends locations on a map, was rejected because Apple thought users would confuse Latitude with the built in Google Maps application. COME ON, if some one is smart enough to download Latitude from the App Store they are smart enough to know it is not the same as the built in Google Maps app, because they just downloaded it, and installed it, as a new app on their home screen. Hey Apple, why not allow Google to integrate Latitude into the existing Google Maps app like on every other mobile platform.

Android users as well as Windows Mobile, Symbian, and soon Web OS platforms enjoy powerful map layering functionality. They can load up Google Maps and toggle several layers, traffic, Wikipedia, Google’s My Maps, and Latitude. Imagine this scenario. I load up Google Maps on my non-iPhone, I search for and find a hamburger place. Then I toggle on the Latitude layer and see my good friend Rufus is nearby and available for burger eating. Toggling on the traffic layer I see that Rufus is surrounded by grid lock so instead I meet up with some other chick on Latitude. Then I impress the chick by toggling on My Maps and show her a custom map of all the vacation homes I own.

On other platforms, Google is not restricted by Apple’s arbitrary decisions. And that makes me angry, and jealous, with rational anger fueled by irrational jealousy. Latitude can run in the background on other phones, which means your location updates automatically. iPhone users can only use the watered-down web version of Google Latitude. If my Google buds looked for me on Latitude they would see where I was 38 days ago when I last used that web app, it’s pretty useless unless my location is update regularly.

I am torn, do I stay with the Apple and enjoy glorious hardware and software integration among all my Apple devices? Or do I move to Android where data pours from clouds and apps are free to run wild?

It looks like this guy already made his decision.

The Molla store has all the fanciest computa stuffs.

Molla is Albanian for Apple.

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!

Shots of the new iPhone leaked on Sunday. Supposedly it is a prototype of the 3rd generation iPhone, so the body may differ slightly from the final product. The shots look legit and match many of the new features that have already been confirmed.

I am most excited to see the auto-focus camera in action, notice the video/still toggle at the bottom right.

The voice recorder and new landscape-improved stock app were already confirmed, so these shots add to the legitimacy of the leak.

Checkout all the shots at Macrumors to see MMS messaging and copy and paste.