HD For Indies

UPDATED - see bottom

Joined friends in line at 4:30, had by 7, doodling now.

WOW.

I have one.

Are you in California?

You can't get one yet as of this writing.

As BJ says,

"Suck it!"

No time, must PLAY!

MAYBE a Blogwad.....tomorrow....

UPDATE at 11pm - my articulate self earlier was a wee bit excited, to say the least. Waiting in line w/two geeky friends (BJ Heinley and Charlie Wood), he hung out for a couple of hours, ran over to Whole Foods across the street for sushi & beer, and enjoyed ourselves catching up on a warm but shady afternoon. We all got the phones we wanted (I got 8 GB model), we immediately went back to BJ's house nearby and hooked up, set up, sync'd up, and started to doodle. The UI is extremely elegant and cool, the screen looks good, we just hung out and geek revelled. As one of their wives put it - "You can go hang with your geek friends and beep."

Beep On!

-mike

Saturday Morning Update

OK, NOW that I'm sober and having passed through the giddy Day Zero Hype Factor, it is still cool.

A few things I'm noticing:

1.) They say you have to give the keyboard some time to get used to it. Clearly so - I'm hunting and pecking and missing a bit. Won't be routinely blogging from this sucker.

2.) Had trouble joining my home WiFi network - entered the password a zillion times that I've entered a zillion times before. I'd been on the WiFi at BJ's house no problem. Hmmm. Went in and changed the WEP from 128 down to 40 bit - then it worked. CRAP. This means I have to run my home network in a less secure fashion for the iPhone to work. Hopefully they'll fix that in a future release.

3.) Camera has no video capabilities. Seems like it should be able to shoot videos - would be so Apple. Drat, it doesn't. Maybe next version will have 2nd camera on front for video conferencing. : )

4.) Ringtones - YOU CANNOT LOAD YOUR OWN - there is no mechanism provided. LAAAAAAAAAAAAAME - clearly AT&T holding out for ringtone sales. This is lame beyond all recognitiion - you should be able to use a sound snippet from your iTunes library to do this. SO incredibly lame and frustrating.

5.) The camera - takes surprisingly decent pictures for a camera phone - 2 megapixels even! It doesn't rival my Canon S450, but it beats the snot out of my T616's camera (and what do I do with that inert little brick now?)

6.) The peeps turn out - as we're all waiting in line (I saw 2 other people I knew - my boss from 8-10 years ago (creative director at frogdesign) who had been waiting since 1pm, and Leah, who was an intern at T3 when I worked there in 1995 - fun to see all the geeky folks come out. And those two represent the target demographic - geeky guys and busy Moms (Leah gets double demographic points - she's a busy mom and works in marketing - I ran into her at MacWorld '05 repping my friend Patrick's game Stubbs the Zombie).

7.) iPhone snobbery is an evil, but fun, thing - as we're waiting in line (all 100+ of us at a small AT&T outlet) - somebody walks past the store minding their own business on a sleek little cell, like a Razr or something, and somebody says in a silly taunting voice - "Look at him, he's on a REGULAR cellphone!" and everybody busts out laughing. We're evil nurds.

8.) the unit itself - a beautiful little thing, and MAN you don't want it to get scratched! I thought I'd wait to figure out accessories like cases, but saw a DLO (Digital Lifestyle Outfitters) silicon rubber black sleeve, so I got that for $20. BJ got three different ones to try out since he can return them (he lives about 8 blocks from the store, so no biggie). He got the same rubberized sleeve I did, a clear plastic hard case with a belt clip, and a leather belt clip that completely encloses/encases/protects the unit. He said he has a friend with a Treo or Blackberry that leaves it in a case that has a flip-open top, and it never leaves that - the thing is sealed and protected when not in use. Not a bad idea. As is, the little rubberized sleeve I have leaves the glass front totally exposed - it basically just protects it from a drop (hopefully) but leaves all buttons and ports accessible. But this phone pretty much guarantees I'm wearing cargo type pants. When we discussed this in line, we realized we were ALL wearing khaki cargo pants, t-shirts, and sandals/Tevas. Yep - we're geeks, confirmed. Anyway, my lifestyle is pretty accomodating of large pocket pants, but come colder weather or Client Time, this is kind of a big thing to lug around.

Oh, more on the DLO case - it has a thing on the back to wrap up the headphones (the special iPhone ones with a microphone and call/answer/pause/play button) and it will tidily stash the earphones and the plug for toting around in "normal" phone mode - nice.

9.) The web - yep, it really, really works. Just small and slow. But hdforindies.com works! Just get ready to squint. You can do the pinchy/squeezy zoom in/out thing, and that helps. Turning it sideways for wide view helps too. Flash doesn't work though.

10.) Email - yep - pictures work. Haven't tried QuickTime yet, but I need to.

OK, somebody's coming over to work, more later...

Some pics from the iPhone camera: iPhoned

Notice BJ's pic looks not bad in terms of tonal range. Mine is taken in front of a glaring daytime window, and Charlie's was taken at night in the dark by parking lot lights.

Best cameraphone quality I've seen.

More details:

- you can't read email sideways - drat.

-calendar - NO TO DO ITEMS - EEK!

-calendar events can't be separated by type - you have to see ALL calendar events

-mail - a little funky to figure out what accounts you're reading/sending from - gotta study a bit

-calendar setup stuff - you pick which calendar events are to have been created on your iPhone from in iTunes - a pop-up shows the list. It defaults to Home, I tried to change to Work, but now it only defaults to the third choice, Work Sched, which is the one I least want it to use.

NO SIDEWAYS KEYBOARD IN MAIL! You can do sideways keyboard for URLs (or something, I remember noting wide keyboard mode somewhere), so the code is i there and working, but mail is strictly portrait not landscape at this point in time - that'll be a big 1.1 update feature I hope.

-pictures are scaled down to be about 2x res of the screen - so you CAN zoom in, some, for more detail. But not full rez pics, and that is probably a good thing 95% of the time - would chew up all your space! I look forward to 16, 32, 64, adn 128GB iPhones in the years to come.

-Many, many little details and lack of choices look like they were made in order to cut corners and get it out the door. Not much that feels overtly broken, just not as refined as I'd like. Very few things that seem like they might be unfixable in software (such as can the camera do video), but clearly when they bumped Leopard to October, they STILL crunched to get this out the door and stable, so they cut features instead.

MORE THOUGHTS SATURDAY NIGHT, AFTER USING IT TODAY:

-no copy/paste is a hassle - I had just written there is no easy way to share a link, but WRONG! There is a very nice feature - if you're looking at a web page, click up in the URL field then a "Share" button appears at top left - nice!

ACCESSORY COMPATIBILITY: I already had an iPhone dock charger and a tape cassette adaptor in my car - when I plug in the power adaptor, it puts up a message on iPhone that says something about this accessory not designed for iPhone, do you want to use Airplane Mode, Y/N? (no WiFi/Bluetooth/cellphone/EDGE functionality). Bleck. Worse still, the cassette adaptor in my car makes a horrible clicking/thumping noise about once a second when plugged into the iPhone headphone jack - UGH! Is this some signal that the microphone/pause/answer phone is supposed to respond to? Do I need to plug in a different way, such as through the headphone jack on the car power adaptor? I'd guess so, I haven't tried that.

And as long as we're talking about the headphone jack - it is so far recessed on the iPhone that MANY headphone cables don't go in far enough - such was the case with the one in my bathroom that I have hooked up to some speakers (what can I say, I geek that way - don't YOU crank tunes in the shower? Or at least listen to NPR podcasts, depending on the mood? I'm either childing, a geek, and/or old fogie - take your pick!)

AS A PHONE, THIS IS MISSING SOME EXPECTED FEATURES - my cynical friend David gleefully pointed out that most any decent cellphone over $200 has GPS these days. I don't track the market, but that sounds somewhat viable. No GPS on iPhone, even though we have Google Maps...dammit.

Also, BIG CRITICAL MISSING FEATURE - there is no Profile or Modes, uh, mode on this phone - I'm so used to two-button-press to get silent mode on my phone, and there is no equivalent here - I want Meeting Mode - vibrate only, no "beep" during button presses. I want Movie Mode - total silence at all times, dim screen. I want Outdoors Mode - vibrate AND loud ring from the get-go. There is NO WAY AFAIK to set these things in bulk - you've got to laboriously dig through the prefs and set them one at a time. This is bad Bad BAD!!! EDIT - just RTFM, Mike - the physical switch on the side is ring/silent - nice! But the modality question still lives on.

So...teething pains. The lack of some software features seems eminently fixable with upgrades, the accessory imcompatiblities is annoying, considering this is now my FOURTH iPod I've bought (original iPod (Dad has now), Mini (recently recovered from stolen, hallelujah), Shuffle (died..dammit), and Nano (still going strong jogging w/Nike+iPod widget). Now this one (which I went ahead and got because I heard that engraving wasn't going to be available any time soon). Distraction - point being, I have a bunch of existing iPod accessories, be nice to have good interoperability with iPhone to leverage that investment - I don't want to buy a new car charger, stereo adaptor, etc.

Also, a note on power usage - now of COURSE I am doodling with this thing constantly, but I went through an alarming amount of the battery percentage today.

QuickTime playback from websites - NICE! you get a little blue "play me" icon on any QT movie, and if you click on it, it plays back full screen (or at least, this was how it worked looking at QT's on Apple's on site). You can turn the iPhone sideways for fullscreen playback. This is SUPER elegant and slick and nice and WOW, everything cool about iPhone the way it is supposed to be. That said, some display pixel glitches watching one of Apple's own videos. Confirming on my laptop - is the iPhone playback, NOT the source file - probably a hardware H.264 decoder? I should make a test page to see what kinds of QT files this device can play back - betcha H.264 and not a whole lot else. More testing to be done....

...learning as I go - Apple is, of course, ready for iPhone, and has iPhone specific pages on its site, such as movie trailers - VERY nice! A great demo. Looking at some other pages with quicktime movies, if it is outside of spec, it won't play. Durn. So iPhone optimized pages and QT content matters. Doesn't play Flash video, predictably, either.

SOME ACCESSORIES:

This is similar to what I got but flatter since no cable management:

The Apple Store (U.S.) - Incase Molded Rubber Case for iPhone (Black)


Static cling cover, protects from scratches etc. - this sounds like a good idea since almost all cases leave the front vulnerable. But these are guaranteed to still work w/multi-touch.

The Apple Store (U.S.) - Power Support Crystal Film Set for iPhone

The Apple Bluetooth thing looks sleek and nice (and black not white!) but is absurdly expensive at $129. The Apple Store (U.S.) - Apple iPhone Bluetooth Headset


STRESS TEST - KEY SCRATCHING AND SIDEWALK DROPPING - YouTube - iPhone's first scratch/crash test ever! -iPhone Stress Test

Some of the features may be fixed sooner than we think according to one rumor site:

AppleInsider | Apple planning host of iPhone updates before Leopard release - report: "A true instant messaging client described as a mobile version of iChat, will arrive 'very, very soon' and certainly before Leopard, the designer says. Customized ringtones were also set to appear within the same timeframe.

But fall 2007 is when the iPhone's features are set to expand in earnest, he adds. The iPhone will not only gain a disk mode for transferring computer files but should also receive a full-fledged file browser that lets users store and open documents."

HD video: iPhone interface complete walkthrough - Engadget

Apple - iPhone - Tech Specs

Video Apple - iPhone - Tech Specs: "Video formats supported: H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-Complexity version of the H.264 Baseline Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; H.264 video, up to 768 Kbps, 320 by 240 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats; MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats"

Gallery: iPhone Take-apart - they pry apart an iPrecious...the horror....the horror....

BareFeats analysis - Apple iPhone

Macworld: First Look: Up close with the iPhone, Page 1

For those without, simulate the messiness - Bram.us � My iSmudginator 0.2

iPhone Central: iPhone news, reviews, opinions and more from Macworld's Apple experts - MacWorld's dedicated iPhone blog - quite nice actually! They point out and expand on a lot of the tidbits I found over the weekend - the iPhone specific version of the Apple movie trailers page, the Bluetooth pros & cons (I paired my GPS to iPhone, so I can answer hands free in TWO different ways now)

Also, the Apple Bluetooth doohickey is NOT in stores yet, but is $130 and does come with a dual cable and dual dock (meaning you can charge iPod and headset simultaneously) and it DOES "MagSafe" click in to its charger, which is nice.

Daring Fireball: iPhone First Impressions - actually, this one is particularly nice - his version of this article, breaking down by category his issues with the various attributes of the iPhone.

Just checked - the Nike+iPod transponder does NOT work with the iPhone - you get a message to the effect that this device doesn't work with this accessory or somesuch - no go. But this could be a fixable thing in the future - just a software update. And of course, software updates are likely to occur via iTunes...which you'll be connecting to regularly anyway.

I had a couple of syncs take a looooooong time, and I've "crashed" the web browser a few times where it suddenly goes back to the Home screen. So a little bit of bugginess. But hey - 1.0, first weekend, could be addressed in 1.0.1.

OK, here's one for everybody - if the iPhone is supposed to be the best ever iPod for playing back video...where/how do we play back back video from it on a TV? Where's the cable, etc. to do this?

-mike

Thursday update:

Other notes on iPhone - there is no way to Bluetooth beam or even email your contact info to someone. Feh.

You can't Bluetooth to use the iPhone as a modem for your computer. Double feh.

On the Go playlists either forget themselves entirely or I'm doing it wrong - twice I've spent time putting together playlists, and it is gone later. Grr.

Apple iPhone - Missing Pieces

Some complaints about missing features.

Tops on my list for iPhone 2.0: GPS, 3G, & video.

I'm hoping iChat, Bluetooth modeming, Bluetooth contact beaming, and a host of other issues can be resolved with software updates.

Protective Cover For iPhone : Incase Products - another good protective cover that leaves the front face open, but no cord management like the DLO one I got (Digital Lifestyle Outfitter's Jam Jacket for iPhone, can't find a web page on it as of a few days ago).

Griffin Technology: Headphone Adapter - Use your headphones with iPhone - looks way handy

Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone - thanks to commenter Evan for pointing this out.

Ready for iPhone 1.0.1 update. Can has pleez?

-mike

Labels: iPhone