4S camera no longer a shot in the dark

Written by Chris Oaten Sunday, 13 November 2011 18:13

Having recently entered a contract with Telstra for a 24-month plan with an iPhone 4, the 4S's features are of no real consequence to me, or so I thought. However, having now shot some video on a 4S, the temptation to pursue an upgrade is a good deal stronger. More about that in a moment.

The iPhone 4S release sure caused a stir, didn't it? I found it a bit of a laugh, actually. Some of the reporting was the worst I've yet read. Can anyone tell me how one "fails to live up to rumours"? How is that done, exactly?

Here's a rumour. Let's call it Rumour X. And it's been picked up by some media outlet, let's say Spews Limited, and presented as a "likely new feature" according to an expert insider who knows someone who works at Apple but can't, of course, reveal their name. So it could be anybody. Or nobody. When the 4S is released and the "new feature" isn't there, then according to Spews Limited maths, it just don't add up. Thus, Apple failed to live up to rumours.

Is that how the logic goes? Could someone help me out?

Another of my favourites was "New iPhone 5 is only half what you expected". Let's break that one down. It's not an iPhone 5. And, er ... no, hang on, that's it. The fact the people who made it call it an iPhone 4S should be a reasonable indication it's not an iPhone 5. Mind-boggling stuff.

(As a matter of disclosure, I was one of those who reported on the 3G when it was released in Australia. I was working for a newspaper at the time and the editor informed me there was a page three in it. That's the penultimate big deal in newspaper reporting. That's the editor saying he thinks it's big news — but not so big that it would knock the Pope dying off the front page. For a tech reporter, back then, page three was your call to the major league.

Fair enough, too, because the iPhone's first Australian release was a big deal. It would be the device that changed the smartphone landscape, that would get people to take notice of what a pocket-sized, phone-enabled computer could do for them. So, you might imagine, the report was a bit on the breathless side. Combined with a fancy layout with diagrams and a breakout, it was quite a splash.

I'm a little embarrassed now about how I wrote that piece. I remember the editor walking past on the day of publication, saying: "Well done, mate, you stopped just short of gushing, which is just how I wanted it".

I was also taken down a peg the next day by a critic writing for Crikey, who placed the importance of the iPhone's release in stark relief by pointing out the newspaper ran a story on page 17 about a murder on the north side of town. Page 17. Apple device trumps local murder, by 14 pages. I still think there's something disturbing about that.

But the point I'm trying to make here is that while my iPhone report had a bit of fanboy flavour about it, I can proudly tell you that its contents were based entirely on what actually did happen.)

When the iPad 2 came out, it so happened that I was trying some Android tablets: Motorola's Xoom, Samsung's Galaxy, and Acer's Iconia. I didn't care much for the Android OS, certainly not on a tablet, but what I really liked about each of those tablets was the camera. The camera on each of them really blew the iPad 2 away and I decided there and then I would wait until iPad 3.

It was a comfort, therefore, to see the quality of camera Apple has put into the 4S. If at least its equal is not in the iPad 3, I may well go postal. Although, given some of the decisions that have come out of Cupertino of late — yes, Final Cut Pro X, I'm looking at you — one could be forgiven for thinking that any crazy stuff could happen.

In any case, the video capability of the 4S is a very welcome improvement. Coupled with iMovie or a third-party video editor such as Splice, the 4S is now a viable consideration for vloggers who value mobility and accessibility over the features and multi-stepped workflows that go with shooting with a "real" video camera. I believe that with an iPhone 4S you could maintain a series of high-qaulity video snapshots of a holiday, cover a news event, or shoot a how-to video. Pretty much most simple video tasks. And do it with panache.

On the down side, there's no zoom in the 4S's camera, so if you are going to cover a news event, remember what famed war photographer Robert Capa said: "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough". Also bear in mind that getting close enough can kill you, so use some judgment on that one.

How good is the video quality of the 4S? Better than an iPhone 4 camera? Pfft ... yeah. Better than a Flip HD? Yep (just). Better than a Nokia N9? Yep. Better than a DSLR — such as, say, a Canon 5D MkII? Now, there's an interesting comparison.

A video went up not long after the 4S was released comparing it to the Canon 5D MkII — the camera that started the DSLR video phenomenon. It compared some very average scenes — and by average I mean scenes that didn't really test the resolving power and clarity of the 4S's lens and sensor combination — shot on a 4S and a 5D MkII and presented a comparison that was very favourable for the 4S. However, what it didn't show was the 4S's negatives.

The 4S may be able to adjust exposure to suit a darker scene but at the same time it can't allow for control over colour temperature changes, so if you shoot some ducks in full light and then some ducks floating into a shady part of a pond, you get a clip from the shady shot that's cool and bluish. Put the warm, full-sun clips next to the bluish clips and they look ugly. The touch focus is pretty good but will hunt for the subject in high-contrast lighting. Also, it's too easy to slip your finger over the lens.

The jelly effect is still there, too. This is the distortion that happens to the geometry of the image when you jerk the camera suddenly. Avoid handheld shooting to minimise this effect.

With all that said, the 4S can produce some very satisfying video if you shoot within its limitations. And it's much smaller thatn an EOS 5D MkII.

In all the discussion about what the iPhone 4S is not, cannot to and does not deliver, not to mention what the number on the box isn't, some things were overlooked. Not the least of which was what it can do as a still and video camera — something actually worth reading. Some of the media outlets reporting on the device's lamentable lack of being called "iPhone 5" actually wanted you to pay for the privilege of reading it.

Like that's going to happen.

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1996: the year of the comeback

Written by Matthew JC Powell Sunday, 06 November 2011 22:19

For various reasons I've been thinking a lot about Steve Jobs lately. In particular I've been thinking about the eulogising of him as an industrialist alongside Ford, an inventor alongside Edison, a creative genius alongside Da Vinci. It occurs to me that it wasn't always that way.

In his book Walter Isaacson recounts how shortly after Jobs's sacking from Apple the then-President of the USA, Ronald Reagan, held a dinner for 500 top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Steve wasn't invited. 26 years ago, Steve Jobs wasn't considered one of the top 500 people in Silicon Valley with whom the President ought to rub shoulders. And that hurt him deeply.

But when Barack Obama invited him to a far more select dinner, he held out on accepting because the invitation hadn't come directly from the President. Even after he accepted, he fussed about the menu and almost backed out when he learned there were going to be others there.

You might think after the Reagan snub that he'd have been enthusiastic to find Presidential acceptance later in his career, but no. His stature had changed dramatically, and he knew it. Indeed he wanted Barack Obama to know exactly which one of them held the upper hand.

26 years ago Steve Jobs had already been the wunderkind who founded Apple, who virtually created the personal computer industry (to a point) and who had brought the world the revolutionary Macintosh. All of that was behind him, but no invite. No Edison, no Ford, no Da Vinci.

I mention this because I think some folks reading this might not remember what it was like in 1996 when Apple bought NeXT. I think in retrospect it's imagined as a kind of thunderous charge on mighty stallions with trumpets and cannons and whatnot. It wasn't. I was there. I remember.

What you need to recall is that at the time NeXT was essentially a vanity venture that Apple picked up for what would be considerd pocket change by the scale of just about any corporate takeover ever, and Pixar — while well-loved — had not yet gone public so no-one really knew how much it was worth. Steve Jobs was basically the guy in charge of a bunch of toys.

Apple was a bigger thing even then than either of those companies, and it looked for all the world unsalvageable. The guy who made the NeXT Cube and Toy Story? He's gonna turn it around somehow? I don't think so.

Well, I didn't think so. And neither did a lot of people. The ousting of Gil Amelio was the catalyst (among a number of other factors, but it was the last straw) that saw Macworld and MacUser merge into one magazine. Apple's dumped another CEO — they're gone. That was the thinking. Honestly. I worked for Macworld at the time, so I know these things.

Let me give you another little bit of context, from my own perspective. in 1995 The Beatles released Anthology. The rarities and alternate takes and stuff were all well and good, but the big thing was Paul, George and Ringo all working together again to "finish" two unfinished John Lennon songs.

I may have mentioned over the years that I'm a bit of a Beatles fan. I don't make a big thing about it, but there it is.

I was beside myself with anticipation. I was, for a short time at least as we all knew it was a one-off thing, going to live in a world where The Beatles were a current group. I was going to hear a new Beatles song on the day it was released. This was going to be huge.

I don't know if you will recall "Free As A Bird". It was, you know, OK. Had a cool video. But I was hoping for a classic, a world-changer, a meisterwerke. It was, you know, OK. "Real Love", the second single from that project, was much better, but Lennon had also finished it much more, so there was less for the 1995 Beatles — The Threetles as fans called them — to do.

Anyway, the big Beatles comeback was something of a disappointment for me. So by the end of 1996, when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, I was primed for disappointment.

I went to the Worldwide Developer Conference in 1997, at which Jobs gave his first "real" public presentation as an Apple employee again. It wasn't part of the Conference, it was a side session — "A Fireside Chat With Steve Jobs". There were microphones, so developers could ask him questions and he'd chat. It was incredibly informal, and rightly so, given Jobs at the time had no formal role at Apple.

You can watch it on YouTube, of course — these days everything is permanently accessible — but at the time it was pretty cool to be there in the room with him. I didn't ask any questions, naturally, but a few people did. Including one fellow who gave Jobs a withering put-down about "what have you personally done for the past seven years". It was harsh.

Steve Jobs was respected by the people in that room, but he was not revered. To his credit he took the barbs well and responded respectfully. I doubt very much that the Steve Jobs who nearly snubbed Obama would have done the same.

Anyway, my point is that 25 years ago Jobs wasn't revered, and even 14 years ago at the start of his tenure as Apple CEO he wasn't treated with anything like the awe that he later commanded.

He turned Apple around. He took a business that was as dead as they get and turned it into one of the biggest companies on earth, with unprecedented reach and influence. He ushered into being some amazing devices and services that radically altered the way people buy and handle media content.

All of that was since 1998 though. Really, since 2001 and the iPod, since the iMac was cool and all but didn't really change anything. So the reverence with which Steve Jobs was thought about at the time of his death was based, really, on ten years' work.

It was good work, of course, and it's made people go back and re-evaluate what he'd done before. Retrospectively, Apple was insane to have forced him out. The NeXT Cube was amazing and ahead of its time, and did you know Tim Berners-Lee invented the web on one? Gil Amelio was an incompetent lunatic who was driving Apple into the dirt and thank goodness Steve, the Greatest CEO Of All Time, was there. History is often improved when you look at it through the lens of what came after.

Then again, the reverence with which The Beatles are treated — with which no less a personage than Steve Jobs himself treated them — is based on only eight years' work.

But Steve's comeback was better.

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Open letter to Tim Cook

Written by Matthew JC Powell Monday, 17 October 2011 23:14

Note: I wrote this shortly after the "Let's talk iPhone" event, but given the events immediately following that, I elected not to publish it. I think enough time has elapsed now. I've updated it accordingly. — MJCP

Dear Tim,

May I call you Tim? Steve never seemed to mind being called Steve, but he was a counter-cultural type and you're a bit more — how can I put this — "button-down". I don't know if the first-name-basis thing is going to be your style. Even so, you're the CEO of Apple now, and your customers would like to think that, in some way, they're your buddy. Comes with the job.

I watched you "talk iPhone" and, to be entirely honest with you, I was a tad underwhelmed. Not with the products, mind you — I think the iPhone 4S looks pretty cool and all those disappointed people should pin their hopes on rumour sites a little less. No, I was underwhelmed with the presentation.

This was, as you said, your first gig as permanent CEO of Apple, and a great many eyes were on you. The pressure must have been huge. In hindsight, I expect there was a possibility you knew how dire Steve's situation was, and that contributed to a sombre sort of mood. That's understandable. It's human, and one of the things that has always separated Apple from the rest is its humanity. Don't ever lose it.

You've been given one of the toughest jobs in the world. Not the management of the world's most valuable publicly-listed company with tens of thousands of employees (though that's no doubt tough) — you're the guy who has to follow Steve Jobs. Particularly since his passing but even before that, you must have known that you will quite simply never be compared favourably to him. That's no reflection on you, it's just reality. He's on a pedestal now — the superhuman "Saint Steve", greatest genius of our time. He's Edison, Einstein and Da Vinci rolled into one. You're in his shadow, and it's unlikely you'll ever get out.

Most incoming CEOs have an opportunity to stamp their authority on a company quickly. Usually, this is because the last CEO was golden-parachuted out of there or resigned in disgrace. The new guy can come in and say "the era of that schmuck is over, everything he planned is cancelled and we're doing things my way now" and investors respond favourably to the new "direction" even before it's necessarily been set.

You don't get to do that. If you do, you'll terrify millions of people and it won't be long before you're the CEO of something that is not the most valuable publicly-listed company in the world anymore. Rather, investors want you to do the things Steve would do, to maintain the course Steve set. They want you to be as much like Steve as possible. With that in mind, I have a few bits of advice to give you.

First, be as much like Steve as possible. I don't mean turtlenecks and 501s — that would be creepy. I mean for your public appearances and addresses like "Let's Talk iPhone" you have to be what Steve was — intense, focussed and above all enthusiastic.

Steve had a talent for seeming like he was seeing the stuff he was showing off for the first time. He was the ultimate insider, yet he was also one of us. When something impressed him, he let it impress him. When it was exciting, he let himself be excited. His joy at seeing a new product unveiled was the template for the audience's joy.

The way you drawled about how excited you were practically snapped my brain — it was that much of a contradiction. I accept that you're from Alabama and that imposes certain limitations. That's OK, we just have to work within those. You're never going to have Steve's staccato. But Alabamans do get excited, right?

Now, I don't mean you should manufacture enthusiasm — look on YouTube for videos of Steve Ballmer to see how badly wrong that can go. I do mean that what you say and how you act need to be more in alignment. If you're not excited, don't say you are. Steve wouldn't.

Also, Steve was brutally unsentimental. If something didn't work or didn't fit his vision of where the company and the industry ought to be going, he would kill it without regard to how much had been spent on it already, or how much a part of the company's history it might be. He lived in the future.

I'm told, possibly unreliably, that Steve left plans for the next few years for what Apple ought to get up to. Stories range from "he left ideas for four products" up to "he mapped out a timeline of the next twenty years". The truth is probably different, and you needn't tell me. It was wise of Steve to plan like that — any CEO should have long-sighted plans, especially one who is aware he might be leaving soon.

You have to be brutally unsentimental with those plans too. Maybe Steve was a brilliant visionary genius who actually did anticipate what the entire industry would do in the next decade and exactly what Apple should do to shape that. More likely he had a few good guesses and got some things wrong. The last thing Apple or the rest of us need is for you to cling to those plans because they were Steve's. If it turns out that the best plan for Apple five years from now is entirely different to what Steve planned, ditch Steve's plan. Steve would.

My other bit of advice is don't be like Steve. I know, it's a paradox. Bear with me.

From before the iPhone announcement, but for the past few years in particular, Apple seemed to be very consciously putting other faces up in front of audiences as much as possible. You, Phil, Scott and so on. This was smart, because there had come a point where Steve and Apple were seen as synonymous, inseparable, like Steve was the one toiling away through the night coming up with amazing gadgets for the rest of you to sell. That was bad, because it hung far too much of the company's fate on the performance of one person. That makes investors nervous.

It was very prudent to show the public and investors just how many smart, creative people there are at Apple. They may not get exactly what it is all those people do, but they know that they exist and they work in Cupertino making Macs and stuff.

The problem is, few people outside the technology industry know what a Chief Operating Officer does. For that matter, few people inside the industry do. As far as a great many of your customers know, you're a numbers guy who never invented a single thing before being handed Steve's job. (And a lot of Apple old-timers will remember that last time Apple's COO got promoted to the top job it was Michael Spindler, and that was ... well ... sub-optimal.)

You have to fix that.

Where Steve had to break the "creator myth" you need to create one. Where Steve could sit back and act more as an MC to recent Apple presentations, and indeed needed to, you need to be the guy out front as much as possible. You have to give us the impression that every device, every application, every OS update is forged in the sweat of your very own brow. We must believe that every single nut and bolt, every curve and every line, has met with your approval. We must start to believe that you're the guy toiling away inventing stuff.

Don't sideline Scott and Phil, though — they're good presenters. But when someone else is showing off their products, you still have to be on stage watching while we watch, judging the presentation just as we do. And just as we're judging you.

And the last bit of advice: don't be a bozo. Back in 1998 when Steve was maintaining the pretense that he was heading up the team searching for a new CEO rather than becoming the CEO, he said that once before he'd left his company in the hands of a bozo and he didn't want to hand it over to another bozo. Apparently he didn't find anyone who wasn't a bozo — anyone who he could trust to be Apple's CEO.

So he made one. He spent over a decade building the company, including recruiting you mentoring you and making you into the person he could see as the next CEO. I don't know what lessons he taught you, or what qualities he saw in you that he nurtured and which qualities he trained out of you. That's between you and him. I don't think that he "made you in his image" as someone suggested — that's a bit demeaning and disrespectful to your contributions. But I do believe he invested in making you the best Apple CEO you could be.

He trusted you not to get so focused on one thing that you ignore everything else like Sculley did, nor to pursue so many cool projects at once that nothing ever comes together into a coherent plan like Spindler did, nor to treat Apple like it was just any other business the way Amelio did. Those men were bozos of the highest order and under their leadership Apple stood still for a decade. Steve trusted you not to stand still.

I have every confidence that you will not disappoint that trust. I wish you every success, and hope that you will take my advice in the spirit in which it is intended.

Your pal,

Matthew

RIM can still win

Written by Matthew JC Powell Friday, 15 April 2011 00:34

I had a hands-on play with a PlayBook yesterday — RIM's answer to the iPad, a BlackBerry tablet. It was a pre-production unit with not-yet-final software, so hardly the stuff of a review, but there was some interesting stuff there. Most interestingly, it gave me an insight into how RIM could still come out on top in the smartphone race.

Most observers, particularly Jim Dalrymple of The Loop, don't rate RIM's chances of success very highly. Seven months after announcing the PlayBook the company hasn't shipped a single one, despite announcing several enhancements coming in future versions, and that has to give one pause. Odd statements from the company's two CEOs in various interviews have only added to the impression that RIM doesn't really have a coherent strategy for the tablet market.

(By the way: two CEOs? What the heck is up with that? The C stands for "Chief" you know — you can really only have one of them. Look it up.)

A week short of the product's debut in the North American market (Australian release has not yet been announced nor even estimated — think months not weeks) the company got some pre-release units into the hands of journalists, and I was lucky enough to be among them.

Spec-wise, it's not bad. The screen looks nice, bright and clear. It takes decent photos and videos (though it crashed when I tried to take 1080p video — pre-release remember) and the processor feels snappy enough. Switching between applications was smooth, video played well, even a Flash web site that has been the undoing of many a mobile Flash implementation I've tried before gave it no issues.

I like the screen, actually. It's a capacitative touch screen, just like on the iPad (though it's rather smaller of course). It sometimes lost track of whether I was trying to swipe or pinch on a photo (pre-release remember) but RIM has rather cleverly made the entire screen, right to the edge, sensitive. That means certain functions like quitting apps can be achieved by simply swiping out of the display area. I have to admit I liked that bit better than the iPad, whose bezel is numb.

The device can run apps written for BlackBerry, or HTML5, or Flash, or (in future) Java and Android, so developers will have many opportunities to fill in its blanks. Like, for example, there's no native email client, contact manager or calendar. There are, however, a number of cool games available, and the media player —

Woah. Hang on, big fella, back up a bit there. No native email?

Let me tell you something about BlackBerry. before there were iPhones or Android or Treos or anything anyone called a "smartphone" BlackBerry was doing mobile email. Really, really well. In all the amazing advances that have happened over the past four years in smartphones, no-one has yet surpassed — come close to, even — the capability of BlackBerry for mobile email. It's what a BlackBerry does better than anything else, and it's what RIM does better than anyone else in the industry.

It's what's known in the business as a "core competency".

A decade ago, when a BlackBerry was a pug-ugly lump of plastic with a tiny little screen, it was a huge success. One of the hottest gadgets on the market — not because it was beautiful, but because it gave people what they wanted: truly mobile messaging. You could sync it to your desktop computer, but you didn't have to. Apple talks about the "post-PC era" as if it's just started, but RIM's been there for years.

So when you buy a PlayBook — a BlackBerry tablet — you might not be blamed for expecting that it would be able to do mobile email. You would, however, be wrong.

To do email or manage your contacts and calendars, you connect the PlayBook via a secure Bluetooth connection to your existing BlackBerry smartphone. The PlayBook affords you a larger screen upon which to do these things, using an app called "BlackBerry Bridge". Your email, contacts and other sensitive info is all cached on the PlayBook temporarily while you're using it, but as soon as you break the connection with your BlackBerry — your other BlackBerry, I should say — it all vanishes.

RIM touts this as an enterprise security feature. You lose your PlayBook, you don't lose your sensitive information. Except of course whatever sensitive information you've got in word processing documents and spreadsheets, which the PlayBook can do on its own, but no-one will be able to see your upcoming appointments. And if your PlayBook is in the same briefcase as your BlackBerry when you leave it in a taxi, well, it doesn't help.

This restricts the market somewhat for the PlayBook. It might sell quite well to enterprises that want to deploy tablets to their employees who already use BlackBerry. It may even find some friends among individuals who use BlackBerries and want a tablet that integrates. RIM hasn't made huge strides in the consumer space of course, but those it has got now have another product they can buy.

And that's about it. The PlayBook does some nice stuff, but it doesn't do it so much better than a Samsung Galaxy Tab or an iPad that you'd buy the PlayBook instead and do without email. And it's not such a brilliant thing that you'd buy a new smartphone just to go with it. Not on the basis of yesterday's demo at least. The final production version may be a thing of beauty such as to make the angels weep. Hard to say.

As it stands, the PlayBook may bring in some revenue for RIM for its existing customers, but I can't see any way that it's going to expand RIM's reach.

Except ...

If BlackBerry Bridge can be written for the PlayBook, why couldn't it be written for Android or iOS? Is there any reason why iPad users couldn't link to BlackBerry smartphones and use the most mature and fully-functional mobile email system that exists instead of the somewhat amusing excuse for an email client currently in use on the Apple tablet? An iPad is good enough that if it could link to BlackBerry email, people might buy BlackBerries to do just that.

But let's go further. Blackberry is, at heart, a service. The hardware has always been secondary — glorified pagers really, that only started to look like phones around 2006 or so. And for all of the PlayBook's niftiness it's pretty clear that making the best multimedia experience on a smartphone or tablet is not RIM's core competency.

What if RIM went the whole hog and made BlackBerry email available to owners of iPads or iPhones or Android devices or even Windows Phone? If I had the option to pay $30 a month for BlackBerry email on my iPad you'd be hard-pressed to stop me. I'd abandon Apple's mobile mail "solution" faster than you can say "eleven benevolent elephants".

(OK, there might be some problems getting it through the App Store approval process, but other platforms aren't so tightly controlled and you never know when Apple might be reasoned with.)

I'm not suggesting that RIM abandon hardware altogether. Of course not. There's some money to be made there, certainly. But just as Amazon sells its own Kindle hardware and also Kindle reader apps for any platform going, hardware doesn't have to be the be-all and end-all and there's money to be made in services.

BlackBerry email is the best. It just is, and everyone else is quite some time behind that level of maturity. RIM's hardware isn't the best, and doesn't really look like becoming the best soon. The promised compatibility with Android suggests pretty strongly that RIM doesn't see the BlackBerry platform itself attracting much developer support, so why be an also-ran hardware maker? Why not be the gold-standard provider of email and let the customers choose the device?

That way, however the Android/Apple/Windows/Symbian war comes out, RIM wins.

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