Saturday, June 12, 2010

iPhone 4 explodes on the scene, but how big a blast is it?

My battery’s at about 8 percent right now, so I ought to just punch up a Lightning Round-style recap of Apple’s WWDC keynote before an involuntary shutdown happens. (And I mean my own mitochondrial battery. Ideally, a technology columnist spends the 18 hours after a major industry keynote in a series of hot dinners and warm baths ... not racing from meeting to meetup before hopping on a redeye straight home.) Substantive comments will have to wait until I’ve had one in my hands for a full week. Until then: it’s a very Apple product. The feel of it in your hand and the interaction between your screen and the organs that interact with it (usually: your eyes and your fingertips) are features, not empty style. It’s thinner than you think and feels more solid…and the screen is worthy of a double-take. At 326 dots per inch, the iPhone’s “Retina display” has more detail than the human eye is capable of resolving, according to Apple. The folks who played with the iPhone in the media demo area tend to agree with that statement. By way of comparison, the Verizon Droid Incredible — my favorite Android phone — offers 240 dpi. But you don’t need to be a falcon to truly appreciate that level of detail. As a general rule, the iPhone 4 doesn’t use those extra pixels to cram more info onto that tiny screen. Text and buttons on the iPhone 4 are of the same size and scale as on an iPhone 3GS ... they’re just sharper and crisper, and the shadows and highlights in the UI are that much more subtle and effective. For now, though, all anyone can say is that in a room with perfect, Apple-controlled lighting, the screen looks fab. Camera Tricks My complaint about the massively-upgraded 8 megapixel cameras on the Sprint HTC EVO and the Verizon Droid Incredible were that the pictures they took weren’t really better then the 5 megapixel camera in the Google Nexus One phone, or even the iPhone 3GS’ 3-megapixel camera, necessarily. The iPhone 4’s camera represents a very Apple-like approach. They don’t care about numbers and feature lists. Their motive, as expressed in the keynote, was to get the iPhone take exceptional photos. So it’s just five megapixels. But Apple promises superior low-light performance and more natural, flattering lighting and colors. The bigger story is the camera’s video mode. The iPhone 4 shoots true 720p HD video. Well, that’s nice ... so does a Flip HD camera. Ah, but the iPhone also has a video light, and a variable-focus lens that can be adjusted even while video is rolling. And the Flip doesn’t have a full-featured video editor onboard, either. Apple has created an iPhone edition of their popular iMovie app. It can cut together video clips with an almost suspiciously-high degree of technical and creative flair, all on the phone itself: cuts, transitions, animated titles, animated maps that glom the location of clips and photos ... Yes, it’s a little ridiculous. You never see this level of polish on a phone app. Instead, the developer picks the features that are most relevant to (say) a guy standing at a bus stop, and builds a mobile app with minimal feature clutter. I won’t have an opinion of any kind on iMovie until I get to play with it for a good long while. I might never use iMovie; I can see myself wanting to wait until I get home and do my editing on a huge screen and a keyboard and a mouse. But at the same time ... video editing is such a drag. It’s a production. Literally. So I can just as clearly see myself spending part of my flight home reviewing the clips I shot on my iPhone, and then having a completely edited 720p video of my whole trip ready to show off by the time I land. It’s definitely bad news for one developer I spoke with right after the keynote. “I was hired by [big famous consumer video company name deleted] to write a video editor app for the iPhone,” he said. “I guess I’m out of a job.” Gyroscopes? The iPhone was already packed with sensors. iPhone 4 adds a digital gyroscope which allows iPhone software to get precise information about the device’s motion through space. Think “Wii.” The sauce for this hardware feature is a new iPhone OS Core Motion APIs, which allow a third-party app to get a very quick and easy fix on how the phone’s being handled. I’m intrigued by how a gyroscope can be exploited outside of its native arena of games. GPS can tell you what room a photo was taken in. But a gyro-enabled camera app can figure out exactly where and how you were pointing the camera and can then stitch together a complete 3D sphere of the whole room’s space, by assembling all of your shots in the right order and with the right spatial relationships. FaceTime: Cool? Absolutely. Open? Mostly. Revolutionary? Who knows. The final demo of the keynote was a demo of the iPhone 4’s forward-facing camera and the Apple software that makes it relevant. In demo form, FaceTime is the simplest videophone/chat software I’ve seen. You place a phone call and you’re video chatting. No account creation, no signin, no setup. But you could sense the excitement curve in the room going minus-delta once Jobs started talking details. It’s iPhone 4-to-iPhone 4-only and it only works over WiFi. Still, Jobs said that FaceTime would be available on 10 million devices by the end of the year. Er ... what? He didn’t elaborate. Later, he announced that Apple would be putting FaceTime forward as a proposed open standard for video calls. At its core, FaceTime is a bundle of existing open technologies for finding, negotiating, and establishing connections between two devices and streaming live audio and video in both directions. But the word “Open” begs for about ten followup questions. It could be “open” in the sense that any developer can support it on the iPhone. Or it could be “open” in the sense that any maker of any phone or any other digital device could implement FaceTime, and that all of these devices could then videochat with each other. I’ll say this: the industry needs a common standard like this one. Existing videochat defies casual use and we need a standard that makes the process as easy as a single button. But to make it into a truly effective cross-company standard, Apple is going to have to convince a lot of committees and companies that the time and the technology is right. Then they’ll move on to the tougher prospect of getting the general public interested in video chat as something more than a simple novelty Oh. I guess Apple has been supporting open software development on the iPhone and iPad all along, and we just never noticed. I thought this was one of the most significant comments of the whole keynote ... and Jobs just sort of threw it out there on his way to a discussion of the App Store. “We support two [software development] platforms at Apple,” Steve said. “The first one is HTML5. HTML5 is a fully open, uncontrolled platform forged and defined by widely respected standards bodies ... and it’s fully open. Anyone can write HTML5 apps and have them on the iPad, the iPhone, the iPod Touch ... and of course the Mac. The second platform we support is the App Store.”
And then he moved on. Interesting. I can’t recall Apple ever referring to HTML5 as a platform for developing and deploying apps. The potential is certainly there. Even Google — which lambasted Apple a few weeks ago for locking developers into a curated App Store in which the company controls the whole show — recently ported Doom II (the classic first-person shooter) to an HTML5 app that runs in any modern browser (Chrome or Safari). And despite the Popeye and Bluto relationship between the two companies of late ... elevating HTML5 to the status of a software development environment dovetails nicely with Google’s initiative towards moving apps off of the desktop and into the cloud. But there it is: a statement that puts HTML5 app development on the same level as building native apps for Mac OS and iOS 4 — Apple’s new name for the OS powering the iPhone and iPad. And incidentally it gives Apple developers reach into Windows app development, thanks to Apple’s multiplatform Safari browser.
It’s tempting to see this as a throwaway line ... something designed to give Apple a response to outside complaints about the company’s tight control over third-party apps. I suspect it’s more than that. Even if all Apple is doing is pointing a certain kind of developer to the vacant acres of scrub bush just outside the glittering city limits and inviting him or her to turn that land into whatever they want it to be ... that’s a positive thing for iPhone and iPad users. The true upshot of all of this — plus iPhone OS 4, which we saw previewed back in April — won’t really be proven until June 24, when the iPhone 4 ships and real-world hands-on experience can final begin. It’ll run you $199 for the 16 gig model and $299 for the 32 gig version, and it’ll be available in both Darth Vader Black and Imperial Stormtrooper White. One thing we know for sure after the keynote: Gizmodo blew it. No kidding: they paid $5000 for this phone under sketchy circumstances. They had this phone in their hands six weeks ago. They even disassembled this phone. And yet they didn’t figure out that the iPhone 4 uses the same CPU as the iPad? They concluded that the back was plastic instead of glass, that frame was aluminum instead of stainless steel? And how did they not figure out that the steel frame itself was serving as the iPhone’s two antennas? All they did was note its three weird gaps. So: they spent five grand. The cops seized all of the reporter’s computers, and Gizmodo might still face criminal charges. Many journalists would consider that an acceptable trade if they’d gotten any actual news out of this whole adventure. Alas, Gizmodo didn’t. If Gizmodo had masterminded Watergate, the burglars wouldn’t have gotten caught breaking in and trying to illegally wiretap the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. They would have gotten caught breaking in and trying to use the DNC chairman’s electric shoe-buffing machine.
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