iPhone 4: Impressions

It's a small iPad :-)

The screen resolution is ridiculous for this size.

Upgrading from an older iPhone makes it feel like my iPhone just got really fast overnight. By that I mean that since all of my contacts and settings were automatically applied to the new phone, the final user experience is like someone upgraded my hardware, but it's still MY phone. The experience is unlike any other phone upgrade.

The camera performs really well in good lighting. The video at 720p feels like cheap video but is still of a high resolution. By that, I mean that I was expecting a more film like quality, but it is still quite good. The film like aspect can probably be coaxed out by changing the frame rate down to 24 fps in post production.

The multitasking implementation is good enough if the apps support fast switching. They don't all yet.

The front facing camera will be useful once Skype updates to use the new hardware. I haven't made a facetime call yet, but I can certainly say that the camera quality is far cower than the back camera, according to my preliminary camera tests.

iPhone 3G for sale

If anyone is interested, I'm selling my old iPhone on eBay, since I've upgraded. Get it for cheap!

Ebay listing

iPhone 4 came in a day early

The last phone I got was the iPhone 3G two years ago; now I have got the iPhone 4! It came in a full day early. Its kind of an incremental compared to the 3GS, but coming from the 3G, its huge. As always, I'll try to post some impressions tomorrow.

Google TV: First Impressions

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/announcing-google-tv-tv-meets-web-web.html

Damn, looks cool. Doesn't blow me away, yet. I'll have to see the tech demo of one in action.

If it can integrate your regular TV option (Cable, OTA, or Satellite) with web, and make it all searchable, I'd say they have a winner. It seems like any old HTPC (or any PC for that matter) can give you web content on your TV; its the integration with the standard TV options that will make this thing awesome. And they'll have to get the UI really slick and seamless when going between TV and web. Maybe couple it with a DVR that records all your shows (maybe every show for the past few days?), make them all searchable too, so that everything is kind of "on demand". Otherwise, it seems like you'd have two classes of content, one that starts whenever you like (web), and one that is "live" and can only be accessed during broadcast.

iPad Jailbreak: What doesn't work

NES - a NES emulator crashes when you open it

iMobileCinema - Flash movie decoder doesn't seem to work with iPad Safari

This list will be updated as I find stuff.

Spirit Jailbreaks iPad (and all other iDevices)

New jailbreak is out for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touches. I think it works with all models and all new firmwaress. This appears to be a userland jailbreak, so its FAST; one click does it, and my iPad rebooted, jailbroken in about 30 seconds.

Get it here: www.spiritjb.com/

Now to test out what Cydia apps work, and which ones will make me crash hard :-)

Daniel Lyons: Say What?

Daniel Lyons is missing something here...

An Apple spokesman says Flash is "closed and proprietary" and that Apple supports other development tools that are "open and standard." But banning Flash also pushes customers to buy movies and TV shows from iTunes rather than watch them on a free Web site. It pushes developers to write apps that get distributed through Apple's App Store, rather than through a Web browser.

This is ridiculous. If you were using flash before to serve free content through a browser, you'll want to stick to the browser and just use the standards in question (HTML5 and H264) to serve free content to the iPlatform now. The user isn't forced into paying for otherwise free content, it'll just come down the pipes in a standard format, and Apple is the pressure forcing developers to use these standards. Look at all the companies who have been rolling out free, standards based (read: non-Flash based) video options like mad since the iPad was announced. To quote Steve:

YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Agreed.