I’ve finally had the opportunity to spend some time with an iPhone 4. I’ve got some quick initial impressions on the device coming up after the break. (To find in-depth impressions and run-through of the software — iOS 4 — click here).

• Since the exterior of the phone is made entirely out of glass and metal, it really does have a higher quality feel than the plastic iPhone 3G and 3GS. That said, the metal and glass give the phone an unexpected heftiness. While the iPhone 4 is a smaller than previous iPhones (particularly in width), it is not any lighter, which makes it seem surprisingly heavy for its size. The weight won’t be a problem for those used to the previous iPhone models, but those coming to the iPhone for the first time may need to adjust to carrying a heavier phone.
• The phone is really thin. Apple says it’s the thinnest smartphone out there, and while that may or may not be true, it’s more than svelte enough to fit into narrow pockets. It’s not as astonishingly thin as the iPod Touch, but, then the iPod Touch doesn’t have to fit cellular antennas inside or include as large of a battery to make them run. Without a doubt, the iPhone 4 is extremely attractive and sexy device.
• The iPhone 4 has an amazing screen. The clarity, resolution, and brightness surpass any display I’ve ever seen. Everything is spectacularly sharp — it makes the screen on my iPhone 3GS look fuzzy and pixilated by comparison. Having a screen like this makes using the phone a real pleasure, since text is easier to read and everything on the phone just looks fantastic.
• The new 5 megapixel camera seemed to take really nice pictures. That said, the iPhone’s screen will make any picture look good, and I never had the opportunity to load pictures onto a computer. But, there seems no doubt that the iPhone 4’s shooter is a nice improvement over the fairly mediocre cameras of the previous iPhones. Video looked good too, and played back smoothly and stutter-free on the phone.
• After reading the reviews online, I was expecting Facetime to produce crystal clear video calls. My expectations probably shouldn’t have been so high — after all, the resolution of the iPhone 4’s front camera is VGA so the quality can only be so good. In my experience, calling from one iPhone 4 to another in an Apple store, video looked compressed and pixilated and often stuttered and froze. This was true when using both the front camera and the rear camera, though the rear camera was, as you would expect, better. For comparison, the video and audio performance seemed of comparable quality to a medium to low-quality Skype call — not spectacular, but certainly usable, and making out the image of the other person and their surroundings isn’t a problem. However, it definitely does not compare to a high-quality Skype video call using nice webcams and high speed internet connections. It should be noted that Facetime performance will likely better over a faster and less-crowded wifi connection than that found in the Apple store, but in the real world people are often going to be making Facetime calls from mediocre wifi connections like those found in coffee shops, airports, and hotels.

Keep in mind, these are all first impressions, and I reserve the right to change them once I’ve gotten to spend more time with the device. After I’ve had a chance to use an iPhone 4 at length (which may not be for a week or two), I’ll do a more in-depth post about the device.

Related Posts:

• iPhone OS 4.0 (iOS 4) — Run Though, Impressions, and Tips
• The Dark Sides of iOS 4
• Apple’s Long-Term Strategy for the iPad

Yesterday, I wrote an extensive run through of iOS 4 that was very positive about the new operating system. I found that my phone ran faster and could do more with the new software, and said so. My phone is still running smoothly, but now that the OS has been out there for a day and a half people are reporting issues, and some of the dark sides of iOS 4 are starting to emerge:

Battery Life:

Multitasking definitely causes battery life to take a hit. This shouldn’t be too surprising — it’s the reason Apple was reluctant to implement multitasking in the first place. After just an hour or two of running apps in the background (mostly Pandora) while using other programs in the foreground, my battery was down to nearly 50%. That said, the battery life doesn’t seem to have changed for instances when I’m not running things in the background. So, my battery life isn’t actually worse with the new software — iOS 4 is just allowing me to take actions that I couldn’t before and these are more battery intensive.

Privacy:

Upgrading to iOS 4 requires accepting a new privacy agreement from Apple, which carries a few alarming clauses in the fine print. One is that Apple can now monitor your phone’s GPS and track your “real-time geographic location”. It also reserves the right to sell that information to partners and licensees. The company says that it will only sell the location data anonymously and for location-based services only, but it is still frightening to know that you have agreed to let Apple keep tabs on your movements.

You have also agreed to allow Apple to monitor your browsing habits, so that they can serve you targeted advertisements using their iAd platform. iAd hasn’t been launched yet, but starting in July should be featured in a lot of apps. Targeted ads are nothing new, and it can be less annoying to see an ad for a product you are interested in than one that is irrelevant to you. Nevertheless, it can be disconcerting to know that information about the web sites you’re visiting is going to Apple. Fortunately, there is a way to opt out of this — using Safari on your iPhone (or iPod Touch), go to http://oo.apple.com. Unfortunately, most people won’t know about this, but at least you can keep your privacy intact if you prefer.

Lots of People are Having Issues:

My phone is running fine, but many people are having serious issues with the new OS. This Engadget poll shows that thousands of their readers are suffering from problems which range from random crashes to contacts getting deleted to an inability to connect to data networks. I know from the search terms people are using to find my blog that my readers are suffering from the same issues, which include “os 4.0 issue with 3g network” and “ios 4 freeze crash on phone call”. Unfortunately, not having suffered any of these issues myself, I am unable to offer any advice on how to troubleshoot or solve these problems. However, this serves as another reminder of why it is so important to back up your phone before making an upgrade. You never know what’s going to happen, and it’s critical to have your contacts backed up somewhere should your phone annoyingly decide to delete them all.

Related Posts:

• iPhone OS 4.0 (iOS 4) — Run Though, Impressions, and Tips
• Apple’s Long-Term Strategy for the iPad
• The iPhone 3GS: My Impressions

This morning, I downloaded the latest major software update for the iPhone and iPod Touch — iOS 4 (renamed from iPhone OS). I’ve been playing with it all day on my iPhone 3GS, testing the new features and exploring how it performs and what it can do. I have an extensive run though, some thoughts and impressions, and some useful tips.

iOS 4 is available now for all iPhone 3G and 3GS users, though original iPhone users have been left out and iPad users won’t get it for a few months. To get it, you just need to plug your iPhone into your computer and hit update, but if you don’t have iTunes 9.2 yet you’ll have to upgrade to that version first.

Let’s run through things one at a time:

General Impressions

It’s fast. Rather, on the 3GS the new OS is noticeably snappier than the previous version (3.1.1). Icons seem to fly around and I haven’t run into any noticeable lag, even when running many apps in the background (which I’ll get to below). That said, reports from users of the iPhone 3G are that the new software is not any faster on that device, but it isn’t purported to be any slower either.

It’s pretty. Not only can you select a background wallpaper for the homescreen (you can check mine out in the post image), but the look of the dock has changed to more closely resemble the one in Mac OS X and some of the icons (notably the calculator) have been made a little more attractive. iPhone 3G users are apparently not able to set their own homescreen wallpaper, but it should be noted that these changes are purely cosmetic.

Multitasking

It’s the big, headline feature of iOS 4, and so far it seems to work as advertised. Multitasking allows apps (or rather, specific features of apps) to run in the background while you are doing other things on the phone. For instance, I can listen to a station on Pandora while surfing the internet, or answer a phone call while using a GPS app without losing my guidance. Apps have to be specifically updated to run in the background, so many or most of your non-Apple apps won’t work in the background right off the bat. The first thing to do after updating to iOS 4 is to hit up the app store to see which of your apps have updates and download them, so you can take advantage of the new features right away. It should also be noted that iPhone 3G users won’t get multitasking – apparently the 3G doesn’t have the processing power to handle it.

How multitasking works: When you hit the home button and the part of an app that supports multitasking is running, it will stay running. So, if you’re listening to a song in Pandora, or are getting GPS voice guidance, and hit the home button, it will keep playing (whereas before it would cut out), even if you open other apps. Other apps that don’t actually have something going in the background will ‘freeze’ in place, so that when you open them up they should be in the exact same place they were before you froze them. This means that you can browse the web a little, go check your email, and come back to Safari without fear that you’ve lost your webpage. For that matter, you could start a page loading in the background while you go and check something else.

To see which apps are frozen or running in the background, you double click the home button. This brings up the app switcher, which pops up from the bottom of the screen and shows you the icons for those apps. Clicking an icon takes you directly into the app — this means you can move from one app to another without having to bounce to the home screen first. If you have more than four apps open, swiping to the right will take you to the rest of them. In my experience, once you open an app for the first time it will appear in the app switcher, with the apps most recently being those furthest left.

A few app switcher tips:

Swiping left on the app switcher will provide playback controls for whatever music player you are currently using/were using most recently (such as iPod or Pandora). You will also find an icon there for locking the screen orientation into portrait mode, which could be useful in some instances.

Multitasking performance is remarkably good. Switching apps happens really fast (with a neat little animation), and streaming music in the background did not seem to affect the performance of other apps. In fact, even as I opened more and more apps, I did not notice the phone slowing down at all. Now, I haven’t had the chance to use a really heavy duty app, such as a turn by turn GPS program, but so far the phone has handled everything I’ve thrown at it.

The other big question is battery life. It’s too early for me to tell if running all these apps in the background has really affected the phone’s longevity, since it’s spent most of the day plugged into the computer getting updated.

Folders

Users can now group the applications into “folders”, which allows them to name them under a shared icon. Clicking the icon (which is a box containing a grid of the apps it contains) opens the folder and lets you click any of the apps it contains. To create a folder, you hold and drag one icon onto another, and name it. For some reason, there seems to be a limit of 12 apps per folder, which I found a little annoying. Also, and this is my opinion, the folder icons do not look nearly as good or distinctive as most of the application icons they’re replacing, which can leave your screen looking boring and make it hard to quickly find what you’re looking for.

iBooks

iOS 4 grants the iPhone access to Apple’s ebook reader and store, iBooks. iBooks isn’t automatically included on the phone – you must go into the app store and download it yourself (it’s free). It comes with one book — Winnie the Pooh — and using the built-in store you can buy many, many more. If you have iBooks on the iPad, logging on will automatically sync your library (including your notes, bookmarks, and current location in the books) between the two devices. I will do an entire post with my impressions of the iBooks software — look for it in the next day or so.

Email

Many people are really excited about the new email features, which include threaded email (like you see in Gmail) and a unified email inbox for users with multiple email accounts. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten to use those features since I only have one email account and don’t like threading, but they reportedly work as advertised.

Lots More Tips

Zoom in the Camera: The camera now has a 5x digital zoom. To use it, tap once on the screen while in the camera app, and you’ll see a zoom slider which will let you move in and out. It should be noted that with a digital zoom, you’re not actually zooming in. You’re essentially doing the same thing as cropping the image on the computer — moving in on a portion of what’s being picked up by the image sensor and blowing it up, which will detract from the quality of the image.

There are lots of other small changes to iOS 4. For instance, you can now search your SMS messages using a search bar at the top, use a longer alpha-numeric password to lock your phone, and tether your phone to your laptop once you set up your plan to allow for it with AT&T. I have not gotten to try all these features yet, but several of the ones that I have not touched on can be found at this fairly comprehensive Gizmodo post.

Wrap Up

So far, iOS 4 has more than lived up to its promise. Multitasking, folders, and all the other improvements seem to work, and work well. Moreover, performance is quick (at least on the 3GS), and I have not had the phone freeze, crash, or even stutter in the one day I’ve been using it.

My only gripe is that the iPhone 3G is getting a watered-down version of the OS, and the original iPhone has been left out entirely (despite having the same processor as the 3G). I get that Apple wants people to upgrade to the latest hardware, but it seems unfair to their loyal customers who just want to hold on to their still-functioning phones.

Nevertheless, I feel like my phone has a lot more utility and functionality than it did this time yesterday, and to that I can only give a big thumbs up.

Related Posts:

• Article: Apple’s Next iPhone
• Apple’s Long-Term Strategy for the iPad
• The iPhone 3GS: My Impressions

About a month ago, I posted my last ever article for the Occidental Weekly, a piece about the then unannounced iPhone 4. However, that wasn’t my original idea for my last college newspaper article ever–I had wanted to go out with a bang. My idea was to write a wide-spanning piece about where consumer technology is heading, and offer some concrete advice that readers could use going forward. Unfortunately, that article wasn’t able to get printed in the paper, but I did ultimately write it, and there’s no better place to publish it than right here. Here it is:

In the last four years, there have been astronomical changes in technology. Back in the stone age–2006–nobody had an iPhone, having a flat screen TV was a big deal, and if you used the word “tweet” people would have thought that you were crazy. The idea that you could browse the internet from your phone–or have your mom friend you on Facebook–seemed like a ridiculous impossibility.

Technology is going to keep on changing in new and hard to predict ways, but it is possible to look ahead at what’s coming down the pipeline, and to be ready to adopt or accommodate things as they come. This is my take on where things are trending, and what these changes will mean for consumers.

Ebooks:

Ebooks are going to become mainstream–there are too many big companies with too much money behind ebook efforts for them to fail. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Sony, and even Apple have all gotten into the ebook game. Publishers have the opportunity to avoid the printing costs on books, and electronics companies want to get paid to sell something that costs practically nothing to deliver, so the draw of ebooks to these firms is clear.

The advantages of ebooks for consumers seem obvious–readers can carry thousands of books with them on one device, look words up in the dictionary on the spot, and search the text of the book for the phrase they’re looking for. The problem is, no ebook reader experience really matches that of a physical book. Furthermore, the various and companies each have their own ebook stores that don’t work on their competitor’s devices. For instance, if you buy a book from Amazon’s Kindle store, you won’t be able to view it on any non-Kindle software.

Savvy consumers should wait to see how things play out and which ebook formats and readers become dominant. Otherwise, they risk getting locked into a company’s system that may not survive in the long term, and lose their books in the process. Alternatively, consumers can seek out ebooks that are free from copy protection and are in open formats like pdf or epub that most (but not all) ebook readers can display. Websites like Project Gutenburg feature thousands of out of copyright works (such as books by Jane Austen, James Joyce, and H.G. Wells) for free in these formats.

3D:

Now that everybody has upgraded to HDTVs, here comes 3D to get you to buy a new TV all over again. The very first 3D TVs are just starting to come out, and content is coming later this year, including 3D Blu-Rays (which will require a new Blu-Ray player), 3D videogaming on the Playstation 3, a 3D ESPN channel, and 3D movie channels on DirecTV. The problem is nobody seems certain whether people are willing to wear glasses to watch their TV.

Without glasses, 3D content is blurry and unwatchable, which means that users must be willing to wear the glasses, and will need to buy enough glasses for everyone who would possibly need one. Imagine having a movie watching party and needing to worry about having enough pairs of glasses to go around. Different companies use different glasses technology (though fortunately the TVs all take the same 3D inputs), and many of them are expensive (think $150 for a pair). Further, some people have issues with glasses-based 3D, complaining of eye strain or headaches. All this makes me wonder whether 3D will catch on with mainstream buyers in the near term.

If you have a lot of money, there’s no reason not to go 3D now (in the worst case 3D TVs can act like regular HDTVs), but for everyone else the best idea is probably to wait to see if this technology takes off. 3D will only get better as time passes, and prices should drop as it does. The tipping point will come when the TVs can deliver an experience so compelling and immersive that it is worth the tradeoffs of the glasses for most people. I think that day will come, but we’ll have to see how long it takes to get to that point.

Phones as Computers:

Phones today are as powerful as desktop computers were just a few years ago, with gigahertz processors and hundreds of megabytes of RAM. Phones are able to do more and more of the tasks that were previously only the domain of full computers, such as surfing the full internet, creating Excel Spreadsheets, or editing HD video.

Things are only going to keep going further in this direction as the phone moves to being not only the primary communication device, but also the primary computing device in people’s lives. Already, the new iPhone operating system has been revealed with the ability to run multiple programs simultaneously, and the forthcoming Windows 7 phones will have a desktop-like Microsoft Office suite and can play games on Xbox Live.

This is probably the most fast moving area in tech right now, and phones are going to keep doing more and more astounding things. One of the most cutting edge of these is something called augmented reality. Augmented reality applications use the phone’s camera and GPS to present a live view of the things around you with a layer of information on top of it. For instance, it can show you what the buildings around you are, or the subway lines beneath your feet. They have the potential to provide literally anything you would want to know about the things around you.

The rapid innovation in phones means that they are becoming obsolete more and more quickly, which is frustrating since most cell phone buyers are only eligible for an upgrade every two years (you can buy a phone when not eligible, but it typically costs hundreds of dollars more). But, all this innovation does mean that we’ll soon be carrying devices in our pockets that will be able to do pretty much anything we can think of, and that is really exciting.

Related Posts:

• Apple’s Long Term Strategy for the Ipad
• Article: How Publishers Can Make Electronic Textbooks Successful
• The iPhone 3GS: My Impressions

This is my last article for the Occidental Weekly, so it’s only fitting that it’s a Tyler the Tech Guy column. I discuss the forthcoming iPhone model, including the upcoming software (OS 4.0) and the leaked phone prototype.

Click here to read the story >>

A complete archive of all my writing for The Occidental Weekly, including past Tyler the Tech Guy articles, can be found here.

In an article for the Occidental Weekly, I look at Microsoft’s recently announced Windows Phone 7 Series, which does something unique — integrates Xbox Live into the cell phone. Here’s the article lead:

As a generation, we are fixated on “converged devices” such as iPhones and Blackberries that not only function as cell phones but as mp3 players, internet browsers and GPSs. In order to really succeed in the market, companies are constantly competing to create the phone with the most useful apps and most advanced features. In 2010, Microsoft is set to take phone utility and innovation to a whole new level. Last week in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress, the largest international trade show for cellular phones, Microsoft unveiled its plans for an unprecedented combination: a cell phone with Xbox gaming capabilities.

Click here to read the whole story >>

A complete archive of all my writing for The Occidental Weekly, including past Tyler the Tech Guy articles, can be found here.

My Tyler the Tech Guy column in this week’s Occidental Weekly is a variation of my post about what Google’s new free GPS software will mean for the GPS market, but with a key difference — I focus on what Google’s offering will mean for consumers (aka us).

Click here to read the story >>

A complete archive of all my writing for The Occidental Weekly, including past Tyler the Tech Guy articles, can be found here.

…is to install software on it (a 2G model) meant for the iPhone 3GS. Now you know for sure: If it says “iPhone 3GS only”, don’t install it unless your phone is a 3GS. It seems like common sense, but it can be tempting nonetheless (and it didn’t stop me!).

Here’s what happened: After the software installed, when it came time to boot the phone, the start up process stalled on the Apple logo and the spinning wheel appeared on top of it (but ironically, didn’t spin). I could not get the phone to boot. Fortunately, I was able to force the phone to power-down by holding power and the center button for a few seconds. I was then able to plug it into my computer and restore it back to health. It’s been a hassle to restore and re-sync everything, but all’s well now.

What do newspapers, music companies, and makers of portable navigation devices like TomTom and Garmin all have in common? They have the same problem — someone is willing to give their product away for free.

In the case of the first two, it has brought about the expectation that these goods and services ought to be free (which is part of the reason that newspapers around the country are failing and the U.S. is so deficient in quality journalism, but that’s another story). In the case of navigation devices, that expectation isn’t here yet, but the GPS and portable navigation device (PND) makers will need to act quickly to make sure it doesn’t happen.

This situation for PND makers comes from Google’s announcement today that they are going to include free navigation software in the forthcoming 2.0 version of their Android OS for mobile phones, which is expected to launch across many new phones in the coming months (starting with the Motorola Droid for Verizon). That’s a lot of phones that are going to have free GPS navigation software, but this by itself isn’t the scariest part for companies like Garmin, TomTom, and Magellan. It’s the (plausible) speculation that Google will shortly bring their software to all the other phone platforms on which Google Maps is already available, such as the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and others. If people can get spoken turn by turn navigation on their phones for free — especially if they’re phones that they were already going to buy anyway — PND companies are going to have a hard time persuading people to dish out the cash to buy a dedicated navigation unit (or pay $99 for something like the TomTom software for the iPhone).

To make matters worse, the Google software looks pretty good. Great, actually. It’s still in beta, but it already incorporates a lot of features that PND companies charge premiums for, like text-to-speech (reading street names aloud), advising you which lane to be in, real-time traffic, and voice control. Plus, it includes data from Google’s satellite imagery and street view. You can see what the streets and terrain around your route actually look like (helpful for when you’re dealing with unmarked streets or unusual intersections), and it will show you each of your turns in street view so you know what the corner or off-ramp will look like before you get there. When you get to your destination, you can compare the street view image to what you’re actually seeing to make sure you are in the right place.

There is one major drawback to Google’s software. It doesn’t store all your maps on the device; instead, it downloads them as you go. This is fine as long as you have a good signal, but if you drive somewhere in the middle of nowhere without WiFi or a cellular signal, you could find yourself without directions. Google claims that the device will cache information on the device for the route you currently have programmed in, which should help if you’re driving through areas of intermittent or spotty coverage, but not if you’re in an extended coverage-less area. To be fair, most places people drive have cellular coverage, but PNDs and most dedicated GPS software have all of the maps and point of interest information on the device’s hard drive, so all you need to keep going is a GPS signal.

Google’s software is a game changer. It’s impossible to compete on price when your competition isn’t charging anything*. Suddenly, starting today, PND companies are going to have to work really hard — and possibly do something drastic — to stay in the game. Otherwise, the standalone GPS unit could go the way of the Palm Pilot, and Google will own yet another market.

*Google is planning to make money by advertising within their navigation software. Garmin or TomTom simply can’t hope to serve up ads like Google can, and this model further increases Google’s incentive to get their app on as many phones as possible.

Related Posts:

• Article: Motorola CLIQ Redefines “Connection”
• Get Around Those Pesky Attachment Size Limits
• Skype Releases iPhone Client

Eventually, social networking on phones is going to keep us constantly connected with all of our friends in real time. In an article I wrote this week for the Occidental Weekly, I talk about an upcoming phone from Motorola—the CLIQ—that will take us several steps closer to that reality. Here’s the article lead:

I am connected to all my friends right now. I’m also connected to them when I’m in the quad or on top of Mt. Fiji. That’s because I’ve got all my social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn – on my phone.

I cannot say whether or not it’s a good thing to be connected to everyone all the time, nor do I know what the larger implications are for a society that revolves around being constantly connected. But what I do know is this – it’s what people want.

The consumer electronics companies know this too. Motorola is hoping that it will save their butts.

Click here to read the whole story >>

A complete archive of all my writing for The Occidental Weekly, including past Tyler the Tech Guy articles, can be found here.