Verizon Best Network Close Up
Simple, clean, bold. An effective advertisement in my opinion.
This is an intriguing situation, because there are no major consumer-relevant differences between the iPhone 4 on Verizon and the one on AT&T
In the case of the iPhone 4, they’re forced to compete in the areas of network quality, plans & pricing and after sales services. The handset has been taken out of the equation.
iPhone 4 name nitpicking
I know that this is nitpicking of the highest degree, but could we please stop calling the ‘CDMA iPhone 4’ the ‘Verizon iPhone’?
Verizon’s deal with Apple isn’t exclusive, which means that not only could Sprint carry the CDMA iPhone 4 in the USA, but other CDMA-based carriers in South America and Asia will most likely get it, too.
I would have preferred the white colour and even though I’m not getting one once it ships — I am a believer — some news on the whereabouts of the white iPhone 4 would be nice.
Whither the whitePhone? - Ars Technica OpenForum
Picture by iconmaster @ Ars Technica OpenForum
Collection of Beautiful iPhone Homescreen walls — Round 2
Another set of nice walls for the iPhone’s homescreen.
Really worth a click if you’re one of those people who like to change the curtains every now and then.
Watching HD TV Shows on the iPhone 4
… is bliss.
The Retina Display really makes 720p material shine, and the capability of playing back AC3 Dolby Digital 2 audio streams gives me great sound wherever I am.
Whether I watch shows I have iTunes season passes for, or ones ripped from my DVDs (anamorphic picture setting), I find myself sitting back with the small device and my favourite earphones (Westone UM2) just as often as watching them on my big monitor.
[EDIT]
It turns out that the iPhone cannot handle AC3 audio streams. Media with this audio component will show up in iTunes but won’t sync to the iPhone.
It can handle surround sound (Dolby Surround, Dolby Digital 2) in an AAC stream, though.
[/EDIT]
The are some things that Apple is really good at; designing functional and eco-conscious packaging is among those things.
I received the free Bumper for my iPhone 4 from Apple this weekend and noticed that Apple only used glue on the outer rim of the Bumper’s plastic packaging, not on the inside.
I’d bet that they save a couple of thousand dollars on glue this way and it makes the Bumper easier to extract.
Gorgeous Retina Display optimised wallpapers
This post just showed in my RSS subscriptions. Great stuff in there.
my iPhone 4 and the antenna
Today I’ve owned the iPhone 4 for exactly three weeks and I wanted to voice my experience with the device, more specifically the reception.
I’ve had no problems.
By bridging the gap between the WiFi+GPS+Bluetooth-antenna and the UMTS+GSM-antenna, I can make the iPhone loose two, sometimes three bars (depending how good the reception in the area was to begin with). I have yet to drop a call or data transfers when touching this particular spot.
What really made an impression with me, was the fact that I was able to place calls and use the internet at a bar that every other cellphone looses its signal.
In this bar all other cellphones are basically electric paperweights.
Solution for my iTunes-Aperture problem
Yesterday I posted about the dilemma of having multiple Aperture libraries and synchronisation with the iPhone through iTunes.
The solution was obvious, but unfortunately the process requires many manual steps (perhaps I can use Automator to alleviate this problem):
- Install iPhoto and create an iPhoto library.
- Advise iTunes to synchronise with iPhoto.
- Optional: Choose between synchronising all events from iPhoto or just selected ones.
- Select pictures from an event in Aperture that you want on the iPhone and create an Album (name aptly).
- Select all pictures from the album and export* to a folder, name folder according to the album name.
- Drag the newly created folder into iPhoto, an event will be created, named like the folder.
- Sync you iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad using iTunes.
I opted for using events, not albums in iPhoto and there are good reasons for this: iPhoto will do the sorting work (by date) and events on the iPhone are sorted by date, while albums are not.
In order not to have wallpapers get lost amidst all the other events, I changed the date of the images inside it to a point far in the future.
* I chose to export the work copies to JPEG with a high quality setting but a maximum height/width setting of 1440px. For this I duplicated and modified one of Apertures built-in export settings. That way I get image files on the iPhone 4 that I can zoom into.
On a side note; I switched to using Aperture 3’s built-in backup system, in favour of using TimeMachine to backup my library files. Again, it demands for a few clicks more on my side, but I find it to be more flexible.
Aperture 3, iTunes and multiple libraries
I’ve been happily using Aperture 3 for a couple of months now and everything worked fine for some time. A few weeks ago I decided to split up my one giant (~80GB) database file into smaller ones, to reduce the load on the CPU and RAM and the load times.
While this house cleaning had the positive effects I had hoped for, it also has a snag; you cannot synchronise the iPhone with multiple Aperture libraries through iTunes — or iPhoto libraries for that matter.
Since I do like to have wallpapers for the iPhone, a selection of my favourite LOLcat pics — don’t judge me — and quite a few photos with me at all times, I’ll have to find a workaround.
Rejoining the Aperture libraries is out of the question, which means that I’m going to install iPhoto again and use it to synchronise pictures to my iPhone. It means I’m going to have to export all photos that I want on the device to iPhoto first, but maybe this separation isn’t such a bad idea.
This is a quick preview of Camera+ version 1.2 for the iPhone.
The app, which came into being through a collaboration of the talented photographer Lisa Bettany and the programming geniuses of tap tap tap, is the best one I’ve used so far and now it’s being improved even further:
The video shows the ability to separately set the focus and the exposure of a shot on the iPhone. As of right now, the point of focus, is also used to determine the exposure of the scene, which can be detrimental sometimes.
To some it may look like overkill to add a feature like this to something that is essentially a snapshot camera, but to me it is very welcome.
via marco:
AnandTech on Apple’s iOS 4.0.1 signal-strength meter adjustment. Seems sensible. Click through for more great explanations and illustrations.
I highly recommend reading this article, if one wants to be able to discern fact from fiction in this ongoing debate.
Email conversation regarding the iPhone 4’s antenna issues posted on BGR
I just read the alleged email conversation between a iPhone 4 user and an Apple engineer and Steve Jobs.
I would urge this youtube-ishly blunt reader, to carefully read the iPhone 4 review posted on AnandTech. The reviewers of this particular site give a very good and unbiased explanation as to why the reception problems exists, what Apple did wrong and what they did right.
