iPhone 4 – quick stats

• Same storage options – 16/32GB
• Front facing camera (video calls iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 only, and WiFi only until Apple works with carriers)
• Hi-res display, 960×640-pixel resolution at 326 ppi
• 5MP camera, LED flash and 720p video recording
• Gyroscope for more motion control
• Quad-band 3G (includes 900MHz band, which will help Optus!)
• 802.11n wireless
• Steel band around the side is the antenna
• MicroSIM format (saw that coming)

Really, from a consumer standpoint, there’s really not a huge amount here that isn’t coming to the 3GS once iOS4 is released. The new backgrounds and apps (iBooks for iPhone) will be available for the 3GS, the app folders and multitasking will also be brought down to 3GS.

Some of the technology in this is pretty cool though. I really wanna see the screen. The idea of a pixel density so high you can’t actually distinguish pixels appeals to me.

The ability to record 720p video is a very nice addition, as is the 5MP bump on the camera, but it doesn’t really mean much if the sensors don’t improve at low light. The 3GS takes perfectly acceptable photos … in bright light. But in dim or low light, like trying to photograph bonfire day, the camera doesn’t hold up. So I don’t really care about the megapixels as much as I want the sensor to improve.

The most interesting thing is the antenna structure. The case for iPhone 4 is front and back plates, with a steel band running around the sides. The left side and part of the top band is the Bluetooth/WiFi/GPS antenna, and the rest is the GSM/UMTS antenna. Very cool.

The rest is just eye candy which, while impressive, is not having the same effect on me that it might normally given the money I just spent on another Apple product.

Lastly – release date. June 21 for iOS4 on iPhone/iPod touch. June 25 for iPhone 4 in the US/UK/France/Germany/Japan. “July” for Australia/NZ and 16 other countries.

TL;DR version: I like it a lot, it’s not perfect and there are a few apps that need updating before I consider my iPad experience “complete”.

Just so we’re clear: It doesn’t multi-task (yet), it doesn’t have Flash support (neither does my Safari + Flashblock or my Firefox + NoScript) and it doesn’t have a USB port. It’s amazing how much that hasn’t affected my life. I’ve already mentioned the difference between “Doesn’t do what I want” and “is useless” a few times, so we’ll just move right along.

First thing I did was fire up the App Store and start hunting around. I had a few things that were already iPad compatible, so over they came. The first application I bought was Flight Control HD … well worth it, and has had a fair bit of play over the weekend. Stuff like Dropbox, 1Password Pro, Instapaper Pro and the IMDb app all came across straight away and instantly impressed with their iPad interfaces. I still miss the CMD+\ shortcut for 1Password, but at least it’s fairly quick to switch to the app, unlock, grab the password and flick back to Safari.

Two apps missing from the iPhone that are sorely missed: Calculator and, more importantly, Clock. What the fuck Apple? I can honestly think of no reason why these apps wouldn’t be included on the iPad. Perhaps the Calculator interface didn’t scale up well and they didn’t put any time into redesigning it? At least that void is filled very well by PCalc. I really cannot fathom why nobody at Apple thought that the Clock app would be useful. A world clock app is definitely now on my shopping list for my iPad.

But moving along… The screen is amazing. I threw my last 12 months of iPhoto events over to the iPad and it is very, very impressive to look at. The speed of app launches and the like is impressive, although doesn’t really seem to be noticeably different from the iPhone 3GS. The disappointing side of the speed equation though is Safari. Web pages still take a noticeable time to render, especially more complex sites on the “real internet” such as Sydney Morning Herald. The caching of tabs is also not really improved from the iPhone, meaning that my standard desktop model of going to a blog/news site and then opening articles in new tabs is largely useless, since more often than not I have to reload the original tab when I switch back to it anyway. This is particularly annoying when trying to use the iPad for mobile access to my work helpdesk, since individual jobs open in new tabs, but returning to the queue usually results in a reload, and thus having to log in again. Combined with the much-slower-than-desktop rendering speed, it means Safari-based consumption of lots of news/blogs or even my primary work is occasionally frustrating. Apps such as NYT Editors’ Choice and the BBC News app are much more pleasant experiences for going through lots of articles.

Another web-related issue with the iPad is the crapshoot of site versions. Some sites will offer up the “full” version over their iPhone version (SMH), but others will give you the mobile version (Youtube, Google). In some cases it’s a custom iPad specific version (Gmail is beautiful), but in others it’s a bit jarring (Google Reader, Docs).

Back to apps, in this case iPhone apps, running on the iPad. The short version: Don’t. Some apps there is just no viable alternative for, so I’ve installed the iPhone versions, but really, they are not a good option at all. They either sit in the middle of the screen, with so much wasted space, or are blown up to pixellated garbage. Perhaps the most annoying though is that any text-entry in these applications brings up the iPhone-style keyboard. Understandable, but painful to use.

Which leads into typing on the iPad on screen keyboard. I’m assuming that, like the iPhone keyboard, experience will make me faster. Just like the iPhone I have issues with hitting the shift key instead of ‘a’, and also hitting v/b/n instead of space, but I think that over time I’ll lose that. On the whole I like the landscape keyboard, and have not had any lag issues or anything with it, but it’s definitely no substitute for a physical keyboard. Now if only my bluetooth keyboard would work (alas, not iPad related).

Lastly, for now, video. Have I said the screen is awesome yet? The screen is AWESOME. But the screen is also 1024×768 … a ratio that is kinda on the way out, at least as far as video is concerned. As long as you like letterboxing, you’re fine! One of the things I was dreading was making my library of, ahem, backed up DivX files iPad compatible. I don’t know why I never looked into this before, but wow, Air Video. Install a small server on my desktop, and stream to my heart’s content. So between that, a few H.264 encoded / purchased videos and my home-made stand (two pieces of cardboard from a case of beer), video on the iPad is a letterboxed winner!

Okay … I think I’m done rambling around the iPad for a while. At some point I will go through apps and my choices. For now, here’s a few apps that are definitely worth installing:

Simplenote
Air Video
Dropbox
Instapaper Pro
PCalc (the lite version is more than sufficient in most cases)
Flight Control HD
Articles (wikipedia app extraordinaire)
Reuters Galleries (beautiful photography)

Overall, I’m very happy with it. At the moment I am largely treating it as a big iPhone without phone calls, and that suits me just fine. I’m sure that my usage will adapt over time, and I know it will replace my laptop on a lot of the overnighters and small trips I take. It’s a beautiful piece of hardware, the OS is obviously very familiar and easy to jump in to, and the niggles are, so far, not show stoppers, and are mostly just either waiting for the right app to be released, or a small learning curve or tweak in my own processes to shift from an iPhone.

So let’s run through the basics. Apple announced their tablet today, and it’s called the iPad. I think there have been enough feminine hygiene comparisons made today, and seriously, did nobody stop and think about this name? Still, I remember the complaints about “MacBook” and even more complaints about “MacBook Pro” that have since disappeared. I’m sure that by the time iPad is actually released, people will be used to the name. I have to say though, I was looking forward to the slow phasing out of the iMeme.

Looking at the overall view – this is a gigantic iPod touch. Watching the keynote, and the marketing video, it’s a very slick interface. In typical Apple fashion, it’s a very polished design, and the redesign of the core iPhone OS apps for the larger display is very well done. The keyboard, although still virtual (more later on that), is scaled right up, and judging from the demos, looks to be much nicer to type on than an iPhone. The 1024*768 resolution, although a now odd aspect ratio of 4:3, is a very nice size for portable internet browsing, as well as text/email/calendar/etc.

So the problems … It’s just a 10″ iPod touch, with all the negatives of the platform. It’s locked down to the App store. Personally, on my iPhone, I don’t have a problem with that. Partially because I have almost all the apps I could want (on my phone) available. But, at least for me, the transition from “pocket” to “portable” also increases the expectations of what I should be able to do on the device. An example use case for me would be a “couch computer”. If I’m watching something on TV that’s live and/or doesn’t require my full attention, odds are I’ll be chatting on IM, checking twitter and flicking through random websites at the same time. Through push notifications and app-swapping, I can do that on my iPhone, and at the moment, that’s largely what I do. But if I’m buying a new device, which seems perfectly placed to be a “couch computer”, then the idea that I’m limited to a single task at a time is just ridiculous. For all the disdain with which Apple treats netbooks, an eee-pc running Win 7 can quite easily handle browser + im + twitter client on a 1GHz processor.

I was impressed by the iWork apps being ported across to the iPad. They look quite impressive, and the idea of creating a presentation on the iPad, and then running that out into a projector is pretty cool, and makes it sound like this could be a great road warrior machine. But then what kind of road warrior wants to close down Keynote to open up email? Oh, and notice anything missing from the marketing material on the iPad?

And iPad will work with all the popular email providers, including MobileMe, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL.

Compare it to the iPhone information, which features Exchange integration prominently in several locations. While it makes no sense that Apple would have Exchange support in the iPhone OS, and not have it active in the iPad, it is conspicuous in its absence. Here’s hoping it’s just marketing focus and not one of Apple’s famous “arbitrary” feature restrictions.

The 3G version of the iPad raises another couple of questions … Firstly, another data subscription? This is getting expensive. The AT&T plans announced in the event seemed to be met very positively (at least price wise, no comment on AT&T service reliability). It remains to be seen if Australian providers will come anywhere close to this. History says no. Secondly, Micro SIM? From a little bit of research, it seems like Micro SIM is a “normal” SIM card cut a little bit smaller. Of course, it’s not regularly used in Australia (or the US, from what I can gather), making it seem like the only reason to do this is to allow mobile providers to control data plans for the iPad through what chip they provide. Maybe I should take the tinfoil hat off, but I really don’t see why this device needs a different SIM format.

God this is going on, I didn’t realise I had so much to write.

So the keyboard … Apple did something that really surprised me, and announced a dock-connected plug in physical keyboard. While I think that’s going to satisfy some of the people that dislike the virtual keyboard, I was really digging Andy Ihnatko’s rationale that Apple have designed an interface that “doesn’t require” a physical keyboard, and they were strong-willed enough to stick with touch and touch alone. That said, I like the idea of a physical keyboard accessory. What I don’t like is that you are limited to portrait mode, due to the position of a dock connector. To quote Phil Schiller from the presentation … “Keynote runs in landscape orientation, because that’s the way our slides are. Our slides are designed horizontally.” Well I guess Keynote doesn’t work with the keyboard then.

On a related note, there’s no watching movies in landscape while docked, which just seems silly. Sure, you have 10 hours of battery life while watching video, but if I could be docked where I’m watching my movie, I would be. Obviously it’s not a problem if you’re just “cabled” rather than “docked”, but it still seems a little odd in a device with video as a major feature.

I feel like I should mention iBooks, since that’s the other “big ticket” feature of the iPad, and is one of the key features that will pit Apple against the Kindle. So now I’ve mentioned it, and I’ll mention the “iBook store”, and I’ll mention “US Only” and I’ll recall the lag between the US and Australian versions of the iTunes music store and movies/tv.

To me, the one big exciting thing about the iPad is that Apple, presumably aided by their acquisition of PA Semi, designed and built the chip that runs this thing. Apple designing silicon that is tailored to the features and functionality of the devices they make is pretty cool, and something that I will be watching over the next iterations of the iPad / iPhone / iPod lines.

I dunno, maybe my opinions will change over the next 60 days before launch. Or perhaps after it’s launched and I’ve had a play in the Apple store. But I’m certainly not lining up to hand over my money, and at the moment a Win 7 and/or hackintosh netbook is looking a much more attractive option for the niche the tablet would fill. Perhaps the “Apple Experience” will be enough for the segment of the general public that have the money to spend, but I think for me, I want more than a 10″ iPod touch.

Posted via email from Computer Monkey

Unsurprisingly, as release grew closer, the console port became a “still interested in doing it” while the PC version became alpha, then beta quality. So it became painfully clear that my legit Windows 7 licence (inorite?) would have to be transferred off my VMWare install and onto a dedicated partition.

Then started the drama …

I have a late 2006 model Mac Pro. It’s MacPro1,1 for those of you playing at home. It’s got two Core2Duo processors, so it’s definitely 64-bit capable, but being one of the first wave of C2D-based computers that Apple released, it has a 32-bit EFI bootloader, instead of the 64-bit EFI running on the latest stable of Macs. Hurdle number one – my Windows 7 DVD shits itself when trying to boot via 32-bit EFI. Of course, this wouldn’t be an issue if Apple had, gasp, released an EFI update to 64-bit for capable computers once they developed it, but no, that was not to be.

Thankfully, between Microsoft and the MacRumors forums, I was able to find a solution. Of course it involved a Windows utility, making a fresh ISO image and burning a new install dvd, totally convenient, but at least it was a reasonably simple task and meant that I now have a “backup” Win7 install dvd.

Now on to part 2 of my saga. I have four drives in my Mac Pro:

Pegasus 250GB – (wut?) System drive
Oberth 500GB – Software archives and photo duplicates
Constitution 750GB – Music, Photos, random “Movies” in the downloaded trailers, game montage, etc sense and a few legitimate backups of TV Shows.
Excelsior 750GB – Some other legitimate backups of TV Shows, purchased DVD movies and so on.

I had the most free space on Excelsior, so decided that would be a split drive. I resized the partition, added a partition for Windows, and reboot to the (freshly created, 32-bit EFI compatible) Windows 7 install dvd. A few clicks later, an “advanced options” here and a “format” there, and I was ready to go.

To ensure that all Windows features work correctly, Windows might create additional partitions for system files

Oh, okay. You just do your thing then Windows.

Windows totally failed at creating the partition and now won’t install, kthxbai

Niiiiice. A bit of post-saga googling revealed that I may have been able to avoid all this with some partition jiggery-pokery, but I didn’t try at the time. Instead, figuring that Windows was having dramas with partitions and free space, I headed back to OS X, fired up Disk Utility and instead gave the Windows installer a big chunk of unpartitioned space to play with.

Restart, hold down C, go through the “loading Windows files” black screen of interminable slowness and start again. Create a new partition, leave some space on the drive, format, kgo. At this point I would like to refer you to the blockquotes above. Go read them again, I’ll wait.

Done, okay. Now punctuate with a healthy barrage of expletives. Awesome, now we’re on the same page. So I started to put on the dual-boot IT Support cap and thought that maybe Windows was sulking because it had been shunted off to the rather unglamorous disk3s1 address on a GPT partitioned drive. So I headed back to OS X and Disk Utility again to see how I could juggle my 1.3TB of data on my 2TB of space. If you paid attention, you would’ve seen that Oberth drops nicely out of that scenario. Also, as a minor aside, I don’t have an iconified version of the Oberth class starship, whereas I do have a Constitution icon and an Excelsior icon, so, y’know, it was fate. Thus began the transfer of a few hundred gigabytes of data to other drives, trying not to think too much about the space remaining indicators that I was changing from a healthy green to a horrid red.

Once the transfer was done, I hit up Disk Utility and blew away Oberth. Note for reference: Even when you’ve copied your Aperture vault to another drive, changed the pointer in Aperture and done checksums, it’s still FUCKING SCARY wiping the drive that all those photos have lived on for the past year. I decided to leave nothing to chance. MBR partition setup, a 200GB NTFS formatted partition (thanks to MacFUSE) and the remaining 300GB left unpartitioned for the Windows installer to have if it wanted it, or for me to reclaim on the Mac side later.

Restart, hold down C, more loading of aforementioned Windows files. Select the partition and decide that, fuck it, you’ll give Windows EVERYTHING. Delete the Mac-created NTFS partition. Create a new 200GB partition and format using the Windows installer. Click next.

To ensure that all Windows features work correctly, Windows might create additional partitions for system files

Hold breath. Click OK.

The installer … continued. It was installing! HOO FUCKING RAH!

Along it progressed until the bit where it reboots to finish the installation. Awesome, reboot. Hear the Mac chime, grey screen for a second, and then the flick to black that says “I’m about to load Windows, if you were a zealot instead of just a fanboi you’d be crying now” and then … nothing. A black screen with a blinking cursor.

At this point, you’re probably ready to go get a drink or something, and I had an interlude of several highly colourful turns of phrase, and required a refill on my Cointreau, so it’ll add to the realism if you go get a drink now.

A quick google and I discovered this wasn’t a totally unheard of error, and that for some strange reason, resetting the SMC on the Mac Pro was a likely fix. Okay, power down, yank the cable, hold the power button for five seconds, plug the power back in, boot up, let’s go.

There goes the chime, hold down Option. Select the Windows install, here we go. Black screen, blinking cursor. Expletives. Okay, maybe even after the SMC reset you need to do the WHOLE process again. Power down, restart, C key, loading Windows files, follow the prompts, wipe the partitions, click click click, hold breath, installer’s going. Restarting …

OH MY GOD I WAS SO FUCKING HAPPY TO SEE THE WINDOWS LOGO. Seriously. This shit is crazy, I almost CRIED. The install proceeded, and I was soon logging into Windows 7. Awesome. My Mac Pro original install disks came with OS X 10.4.2, so they weren’t much help with Boot Camp drivers. That’s okay, fling in the Snow Leopard install dvd. Windows helpfully offered to run “setup.exe”

Boot Camp x64 is unsupported on this computer model

… At this point the phrase “stabby death” was gaining traction amongst appropriate response actions. Instead I opted for running the MSI files directly, instead of using the setup loader. Cue the first problem that I could really blame on Microsoft. UAC won’t let you elevate permissions on an MSI file. You have to call it from another program that’s already elevated. Oh stabby death indeed. Luckily, I was able to find a registry hack that enables the “Run as Administrator” option in the context menu for MSI files. Run it, hold breath to see if it works, VICTORY.

So, now about 5 hours later, I had a working Windows 7 install, with Boot Camp drivers, running on my late-2006 Mac Pro. It’s been a wonder and an honour having your company on this epic saga, assuming you’ve made it this far.

And as an aside, the time it took me to get this far, was enough time to install Star Trek Online, create a character and to get myself up to Lieutenant 3 and muck around with ship customisations in Spacedock, because thankfully installing Win 7 on the other half’s iMac was nowhere near as painful.

So how did you spend your Sunday evening?

I draw your attention to the red box … I haven’t had to restart my iPhone in almost a month. I consider uptime to be a badge of honour, especially on a device where “restart it” is often treated as the final step of every complex app install.

I now draw your attention to the green box. This is where, until recently, a “free memory” button was present, which is what I attribute to the lack of troubles I have had. Freeing up the RAM in the iPhone is the main reason, from what I can see, that developers and users alike say you should restart your iPhone after app installs.

A couple of days ago, Apple decided to spread the word to developers that this functionality was not approved – they removed a couple of apps from the store, and told the developers of my app of choice, iStat, that they needed to remove the functionality in order for their update to be approved. From what I have read, the way these apps “free” the memory is by requesting a large amount of ram, forcing the iPhone to dump the contents of “inactive” ram, and killing the background processes that Apple allows (usually Safari, iPod and Mail). In some ways, I can understand why Apple would want this removed – it’s a bit of a hack, a “creative use of programming techniques” if you will. But the obvious two questions are (a) why now, and (b) why isn’t there an Apple approved way of doing this?

Freeing up the RAM is the best troubleshooting method on the iPhone. On the 3GS, it’s a convenience that can make things run a bit smoother. On the 3G, it’s basically a necessity for smooth operation of the 3.0 OS. Maybe it’s not the best fit with the “Apple Experience”, but when it doesn’t “just work”, it’s time to either put in a solution or allow the solution that’s already out there.

Oh, and as is likely to happen when you only have 40 staff doing the reviewing (and search&destroy on verboten apps), something like Memory Status is sure to slip through … Not as elegant as iStat, but does the job.

Like the TV shows, which were announced earlier this year, there’s a significant price disparity between the iTunes prices and dvd prices. Or rather, there isn’t. The purchase prices for movies on the iTunes store are $10 for “catalog”, $17.99 for “recent” and $24.99 for “new” releases. Obviously these are just guidlines, since Star Trek: Generations, which I would definitely consider “catalog” is $12.99. That’s better than all the other Star Trek movies though, which for some reason are “recent”, and thus $17.99. All of the Star Trek movies can be picked up for around $20 each in a shop, on a physical medium, in a plastic box, shipped from a warehouse. If you buy them all at once, they come down to $15 each. Yes, I’m aware that there are costs associated with digital distribution, not least of all the bandwidth required, but these movies should be significantly cheaper than their dvd counterparts. I suspect that a large portion of the blame for this lies with the big bad movie studios, who can’t seem to see beyond their short-sighted quarterly earnings reports, but I wouldn’t put it past Apple to put all the blame on the studios while not being overly aggressive in driving those prices down.

But that’s just the start of the financial pain train …

Take my aforementioned example of Star Trek: Generations. That comes in at 1h 57min 54sec (thanks iTunes). This translates to 1.39GB. That’s really not that bad, given how cheap storage is and such. But comparing that to the download limits on some typical broadband plans in Australia and it doesn’t look so good.

Say you buy or rent one movie per week. I presume that’s not an unreasonable target … You’re looking at close to 6GB per month, just on your iTunes movie habit, let alone the music purchases you’re supposed to be making, or any other internet usage. So let’s check what we have to spend with the ISPs to get that.

First up -this is going to seem comical, but please, bear with me – let’s have a look at Telstra.
$40/month will get you ADSL, hobbled to 1500kbps download speed, and a massive 400MB (not a typo) of downloads per month. Wow.
$70/month will get you the same blistering speed, but a 12GB limit, so we could rent and download two movies per week. Slow down!
Of course you could get that 12GB limit for $10/month less … if you slowed down further to 256kbps download. On the plus side, at that speed, you wouldn’t be able to download more than two movies per week anyway, so your limit would be pretty safe.

So we’ll move to the other “big” player, Optus. Not that great either, with $50/month getting you 2GB or $70/month getting you 15GB. But with Optus you’re on full ADSL2+ speeds (or as close as the disclaimer will allow).

Since doing this for even just the major Australian ISPs will get boring fast, I’m going to skip to the ISP widely regarded as the best in $/GB terms – TPG. Ignoring off-peak limits (since I think the majority of people included in this example won’t, or at least shouldn’t have to, rent a movie at 3am) we need to spend $50/month to cover our target, and we actually get 18GB of peak downloads, which means a ridiculous three movies per week, plus a bonus movie per week in off-peak time if we’re so inclined.

Seriously – is this really how we are Building Australia’s Prosperity with our National Broadband Network? Okay, it’s not likely to happen via iTunes any time soon, but is 3 movie rentals per week really that odd? There’s a big problem with the iTunes store selling and renting movies, but this one isn’t Apple.

I’m (currently) an unapologetic Apple fanboi. This has escalated to the point where I am now actually working (IT Support) in an environment that is very heavily mac biased. I do all my home, travel and work computing on Apple hardware, even if I do occasionally boot it up into Windows to do specific tasks. This hasn’t always been the case – I started my computing life on an 8086, progressed through 286 and 386, then used several flavours of Apple / Macintosh during primary school (Where on the Apple ][e is Carmen Sandiego?) and then around the System 7 vs Windows 95 days I shifted, fairly solidly to the Windows camp. I became one of those horrible Windows people, and ranted against macs for a good few years. At about OS X 10.2 I started looking at the mac again, now older, somewhat wiser and much more appreciative of things like UNIX (okay, BSD) core underpinnings and so on. And I was starting to see the flaws in the Windows world. Over the last few years, as XP has continued to be what it was 6 years ago, and Vista has not proved to be the magic pill someone, somewhere was probably hoping it would be, I’ve become a fairly solid believer in the OS X camp.

Still, I try not to be a zealot about it to other people, and I recognise the flaws in OS X and the positives in Win XP (and even Vista). But there’s no doubt about my favoured choice, and there’s little doubt that I’m willing to cut Apple a fair bit of leeway with products and try them out even if they might not be quite what the Reality Distortion Field might suggest.

With that in mind, I was front of the queue at my local Optus store for the iPhone 3G when it was released here in Australia. I knew what I was getting myself into. I was sacrificing tactile feedback, I was getting a fairly ordinary camera, and I was losing MMS. I have an iPod Touch, so I understood about the keyboard, and I knew that wasn’t an issue. Assessing my usage of the camera and MMS on my Nokia E65, I was certain I could do without those 5-6 messages per year, especially since I could freely email things to people who were usually close enough to email access anyway.

Having now had the iPhone for a few weeks, I can safely say that although my typing has been far from perfect, the keyboard is a non-issue. It has reduced my walking emails and messages, which is not really the end of the world, but if I can spare my eyes, there’s no problem with the typing. There is occasionally a bit of lag on the keyboard, and it’s annoying, but it’s not much different to my Blackberry, where I could sometimes type out a full message only to have the BB not recognise any of the (physical) keystrokes anyway.

The shitty camera quality does and doesn’t annoy me. Photo-wise, don’t care. I mean, it would be nice if I could get slightly better photos of my friends doing stupid things indoors to make contact photos, but it’s hardly a big issue. I have a real camera for taking real photos. But on the flip side, who includes a 2MP camera these days? Other phones in this price bracket are pushing 5MP cameras with “brand name” lenses. Okay, sure, they have a sensor the size of a pinhead, but compared to the iPhone camera, they’re pretty impressive. Apple has always cultivated a reputation as pushing technology and taking things that have typically been done badly and drastically improving functionality and marketability. So including a sub-par camera on their “Jesus phone” really seems out of place. Not including the (software) ability to record video seems odd as well, although battery life / processor power arguments can at least balance upright precariously, if not actually stand up to much scrutiny. The fact that jailbroken iPhones can do (crap quality) video without pain begs an answer to why it was left out.

So anyway … shopping around for something to protect my precious shiny from scratches, and I find a silicon case that doesn’t look too horrid. Normally I’m very much a fan of either “invisible” protectors, or a sleeve of some sort that protects in-pocket, but keeps the look of the device clean. But this case didn’t look too bad, and looked very easy to slip on/off as vanity dictated. I like to have my impulses at least told to someone else before I act on them, and it would’ve been so great to shoot off an MMS to my other half, who was not in a position to check her email or wander down to the Apple Store. Fitting, that my first iPhone MMS frustration was in an Apple Store, shopping for my iPhone.

When you read the spec sheet, really, who cares about MMS? It’s not that great, it’s typically overpriced on the networks, and the email argument does actually hold a lot of water, at least in my situation. But then there are those few times when MMS is exactly what you want, and you start to think “Hang on, what reasoning is there for NOT including a standard mobile phone feature?”

Think of the programming involved … there’s already the functionality for SMS, and the functionality for email. MMS would seem to be a no-brainer. Okay, we’ve struck out programming. How about appeasing the mobile networks, something Apple would’ve had to do in some instances, since a mobile phone without network support isn’t that useful. But networks, in a pure price-per-byte argument, are charging far, far more for an MMS message, since they are often capped at 100kb or thereabouts. So network-appeasement seems rather unlikely too.

It’s incredibly implausible that this was an “accidental” omission, since I don’t believe that any company developing a mobile could get to version 2.0 of their mobile OS and not have come across the feature. Which means it was deliberate. Which is frustrating. I am still an Apple fanboi, but this is totally an example of the decisions that they make that seem to serve no basis in consumer reality, but also, and this is the worst bit, don’t seem to even have any “pushing the industry” reasoning driving it.