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?

Decided to have a look at Google Reader for iPhone apps today. First just a note about the web interface: http://www.google.com/reader/i/ It is very good! Obviously has (almost) all the features of the full web version, and is continually being developed as Google learns new tricks with their “mobile touch” interfaces. It is missing the “Send to” menu, and is obviously only usable when online, but it’s certainly very usable.

Posted via email from Computer Monkey

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.

The reason for download quotas is to spread the load. The system couldn’t handle everyone downloading XXX at once, so by giving people YYY per month, you’re encouraging people to self-regulate their usage and spread their bandwidth requirements over a monthly billing cycle.

Why not pay for a set amount of bandwidth? Some people are only going to do light browsing and limited downloading. Give them 5mbps and they could do anything quite comfortably, but you’re at a quarter of the line speed. Give me a plan that offers 5-8mbps during peak time and the full 24mbps during off peak. That’s more than enough for me to play my computer games and check youtube/etc during peak time, and I can download my World of Warcraft patches and other such large, legitimate items of software through bittorrent in the off-peak times when business is offline.

But of course, that would be less money for the ISPs …

One of the things I’ve been after lately, thanks to blowing my download quota last month and being shaped to 64kbps for eight days, is scheduling downloads to run in the 1am-7am “off-peak” time. But this is not an easy thing to do …

Take iTunes. It checks for podcasts, and starts downloading them. But it has no scheduling ability, it just goes for it. You can pause, but then how do you resume? My solution was Quicksilver, and the handy “run at” command. So I queued up all the downloads, quit iTunes and then had Quicksilver re-launch it at 1am and the downloads all kicked off. In Windows, the Task Scheduler will do the same thing for you. I could’ve done something similar by pausing them and having an applescript resume them at 1am, but again it would’ve had to have been started by a third party program. I want scheduling in iTunes, but at least since iTunes doesn’t ask any questions, this is very easy to kick off and leave unattended.

Now take something from Blizzard. They’ve released the teaser cinematic for their latest World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. I wanted to download the HD trailer, and they offer a customised bittorrent client called the Blizzard Downloader specifically for the purpose. Brilliant. I started it up, selected the save location, then once it had allocated the space and created the partial download, I closed it. Now just because I always like to test these things, I had Quicksilver open the downloader again after a delay, just as I would if I was scheduling it for post-1am. It opens up … and asks for the save location again. Fails the unattended check. What’s worse – when I chose the same location, it didn’t resume, it overwrote.

Sticking with the gaming side of things – the Warhammer Online client also requires authentication before you can patch. Perhaps this is because at the moment it’s a beta, and you need to accept the beta test agreement every time you log in, but it’s still incredibly frustrating, especially since beta games patch frequently, and are often relatively large patches too.

Sure, there are other issues at play here. If Australian ISPs weren’t so damn stingy, we wouldn’t be so focussed on off-peak time. But for now, it’s what we have to work with, so it would be nice if software was obliging!