iLounge

App Store Updates: The Gift That (Sometimes) Keeps on Giving

By Jeremy Horwitz | 07.17.09 | 2 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

Everyone agrees that the release of apps for the iPhone and iPod touch has been a huge net positive, and though the App Store continues to have well-documented problems, it’s great that there’s a central place to search and buy software. Yet due to an unexpected feature—the ability to “Update” apps after purchase—the App Store made a major change to consumer expectations for both Apple and third-party software: no longer is the first software release considered to be “final,” and in some cases, it’s possible that an app won’t even be working fully on day one. Developers have come to expect that they can make fixes in updates that may come days, weeks, or months after the initial purchase.

For users, this perpetual beta approach to software development has alternated between maddening and beneficial, as some developers have used their first release or three as opportunities to charge people while working out kinks, and others have created feature complete 1.0 releases with subsequent updates adding more content and features for free. Reviewers such as us have become accustomed to receiving “but wait!” e-mails from developers: “sorry it didn’t work in that last version,” we hear, “but the new one is just about to go up and fix it.” For obvious reasons, this has become tiresome; users, including us, are actually depending on these apps to do what they’ve been marketed to do without having to wait around for a patch. “It just works” used to be an Apple fan’s mantra; now it’s somewhat of a pleasant surprise.

Thankfully, there have been a number of noteworthy developers who have followed in the prior Apple spirit, taking solid, completely working software and improving it after release, turning the prospect of an update into a treat—possibly a reason to re-play a game again, or recommend it to a friend. Here are a few of the ones that we’ve found noteworthy in recent months.

Zen Bound: Shapes are presented, and you wrap rope around them in an effort to cover as much of the surface area as possible. Secret Exit added a large new collection of stages (the Tree of Nostalgia), bringing the current total to 76, and made visual improvements after the initial release.

Real Racing: Twelve new vehicles, 6-player Wi-Fi, environmental vehicle shadows, and other additions were made in two July updates to this already spectacular driving game.

Zombieville USA: This simple, cartoony zombie-shooting side scroller added melee weapons—a baseball bat to start, and a hammer as an upgrade—plus improved controls in subsequent updates, making the game a little deeper and more fun to play.

Tetris: EA’s excellent version of the classic puzzle game recently added iPod music support, enabling you to create your own playlist from within the game, or select an existing playlist rather than listening to the game’s own tunes.

Unfortunately, not all of the app updates have added features—some of the ones people used to love have slid backwards, or transformed themselves into restricted versions in order to sell new releases, angering past fans in the process. Notably, the free Palringo Instant Messenger flipped out users when it rebranded as Palringo Instant Messenger Lite, setting the stage for a paid version, and leading to one-star reviews with complaints that features such as theme changing and group administration had been pulled to “make a… buck.” Meanwhile, competitors released superior upgraded versions with features such as Push Notification support, and Palringo went from being our IM application of choice to a faded pick within days.

We’re curious: what are some of the most noteworthy updates you’ve seen for iPhone and iPod touch apps in the last three or four months—positive or negative? Do you follow the Updates number in iTunes or on your iPhone/iPod regularly, or do you stop checking once you’ve made the initial purchase? Are you finding that updates are more about bug fixes or feature additions? Share your thoughts in the comments box below.

iPhone 3GS Compass Flakiness: Blame The Hardware, Or The OS?

By Jeremy Horwitz | 07.14.09 | 10 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

Whenever Apple launches a new product, reports of problems with new and old features alike begin to stream in, and the two questions that we always ask are whether they’re widespread, and whether they’re due to user error, software issues, or hardware issues. For instance, iPhone OS 3.0 Wi-Fi problems were so widely reported by iPod touch-using readers that they didn’t seem isolated, and we’ve had the same issues ourselves—clearly not hardware problems because Wi-Fi worked perfectly on the same devices with the prior 1.0 and 2.0 versions of the OS.

We’ve noticed that the iPhone 3GS compass is having some issues, too, though the scope and cause of those issues is difficult to quantify. The 3GS units we’ve tested have showed a fairly obvious unreliability in getting Maps or even their own Compass apps to agree on what the “right direction” is, and appear to have a very high degree of susceptibility to in-car magnetic fields. A week or two ago, we stopped by an Apple Store and put three 3GS units on a counter in the same direction, finding that their compasses all seemed to be pointing in somewhat different orientations that were off by single- or double-digit degrees. Repeated re-tests of something we noted in the iPhone 3GS review—Maps’ tendency to show north-south movement down a street as diagonal motion rather than northerly when the compass is activated—have continued to yield the same results in our test cars.

Now there’s a game out, SurrounDEAD, that optionally uses the Compass for its movement control scheme. It places you in the center of a city filled with zombies and challenges you to turn around and shoot them before they grab you, which they can do from your front, left, right, or back; constant turning is necessary to stop them. With the default control scheme, you turn by tilting the iPhone, which works, but the compass requires you to actually spin around, and all too often doesn’t appear to be properly registering movements. It’s like what we saw when driving around in cars with Maps, only zombies are eating us alive because the compass is wonky.

Our hope is that Apple will correct these issues with an OS 3.1 update, but the question of whether they’re truly software or hardware specific is going to remain a mystery until then. In the interim, such issues do raise a concern that prior “it just works” Apple products haven’t faced for any significant length of time: how many months should users expect to have to wait until a promised feature of the device or software they just purchased works properly? When an iPod touch’s Wi-Fi goes out in 3.0, but works in 2.2.1, should users be expected to downgrade? Has Apple tested the 3GS compass enough in its labs to know that it can correct whatever the issues currently are? We don’t have the answers, but as users, we’re as anxious as you are to find out.

Is the iPhone a Dud for Serious Business Users?

By Jeremy Horwitz | 07.10.09 | 23 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

In an editorial today, Engadget’s EIC notes that he can’t effectively work—as in, do things he would normally do to be productive—using the iPhone 3GS. As someone who used to do a lot of work from his Danger Sidekick, a device far less powerful than even the first iPhone, I’ve found myself on the cusp of writing the same editorial many times. Ironically, that urge has always hit me when I’ve been in the middle of having problems using the iPhone to do any work, and since writing an editorial qualifies as work, it’s been just as much of a pain to try and write the editorial on the iPhone as anything else. By the time I’ve returned to my Mac, there have been better things to write about.

Engadget says, pointedly, that “[a]t the end of the day, it’s nice to stick the ‘we love business users’ line into your PR, but it’s quite another thing to make it real.” It’s an interesting point, and one that we’ve been hearing a lot about in anecdotal conversations over the past 6 or 12 months. Everyone heard the stories of how Blackberry Storm users returned the problematic devices within days of purchase, but the story we’ve heard recently is that business professionals—wooed by Apple’s apps-for-everyone pitch—have been returning iPhones, too, blaming the lack of a real keyboard for their inability to actually get anything done on the devices. Then they buy Blackberries. We understand this, and have been struggling ourselves with the same problems for two years now. Our productivity has dropped a lot, and the iPhone’s input scheme is the single biggest reason why.

Some devices were designed as communications tools first, and media players second; that was the story with the Sidekick, which had a relatively awesome little keyboard that could hammer out everything from articles to e-mails with great speed. The iPhone was designed in the opposite direction, as were many of the apps, which started as modestly updated versions of iPod menu items: back when the iPod touch was first released, for instance, Apple was struggling with whether to even let users edit content on the touch as they could on the iPhone. Originally, the concept was “iPods play things, they don’t create things.” Voice Memos changed that a little back in 2003, and the wall came down entirely in early 2008 as the artificial software dividing line between iPhones and iPod touches essentially disappeared.

Yet Apple’s pocket devices have never been as strong as they could be: whether for games or business apps, developers are always forced to shoehorn input functionality into the iPhone OS’s limited controls. Instant messaging apps are cramped by a keyboard and status bar that consume half of the screen. Games are all but forced to make you put fingers on top of their graphics or turn the devices on off-angles for control. The strength of being able to relabel and redefine some buttons on an app-by-app basis is great, but a proper physical keyboard is a necessary second component. Haptic feedback isn’t going to do it. Buttons are what’s necessary for business users. And we’ll gladly pay for them.

Engadget’s other comment is that multitasking is a glaring omission, and yes, there’s no doubt that it is, even in the wake of push notifications going live. But between the current devices’ 480x320 screen real estate, seriously deficient batteries, and other factors, it’s quite possible that the iPhone OS isn’t quite ready yet for true multitasking. For now, a keyboard would go further towards making the device useful, and it’s time to make it happen.

Time Capsule Postscript: Wow, Even iPhone Synchronization is Slow

By Jeremy Horwitz | 07.08.09 | 9 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

Had our Dual-Band Time Capsule been faster at doing the two simple things we mentioned we were trying to accomplish—(1) transferring a large media library, then (2) merging it with a much smaller library—there probably would have only been one Backstage article on the topic, and it would have ended with great satisfaction. But it’s slow - so slow in fact that we’re now on our third consecutive day of trying to deal with its sluggishness, and have officially decided to give up on using it as any type of iTunes storage device.

Late yesterday, we succeeded in task (2), and had two hours to try and fill an iPhone 3GS with some of the library’s contents. By the end of that two-hour stretch, we’d gotten a grand total of two Gigabytes of content synchronized back from Time Capsule to the iPhone 3GS, and had to basically abandon plans to bring videos over to the device until today. We started that task this morning, watching as the progress meter moved at a snail’s pace to transfer a 1GB video file to the device, and then watched as telephone calls killed the video transfers part way through. Many hours later, we’re still not done. And there are too many other examples of Time Capsule’s slow performance to count.

Our conclusion: we’re officially forgetting all about using the Dual-Band Time Capsule for even the most meager of iTunes-related tasks, and sadly going back to using a wired hard drive. iLounge’s Charles Starrett opines than the device’s single biggest flaw is that it was built and marketed as both a router and a networked storage device, which compromises its performance for the thing people really want—networked storage—in the name of including functionality they don’t really care about, namely replacing their existing wireless routers. While Time Capsule’s appeal for both purposes really is an initial selling point, it’s obvious after using the original and new versions that both have missed the boat; Apple would have been much better off stripping the router features and multiple Ethernet ports, adding a FireWire 800 port, and enabling it to work either as a wired or wireless hard drive for $100 less.

Time Capsule, Part III: Parting Thoughts on Slow Transfers and Wireless Interruptions

By Jeremy Horwitz | 07.07.09 | 10 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

Since taking possession of another Apple Time Capsule wireless hard drive last week, we’d hoped to eventually write an article discussing our eventual success in achieving two long-standing goals that laptop users might understand: (1) migrating a big iTunes library to a networked storage volume, and (2) merging it with a second, smaller iTunes library, one that we’d maintained for the past 10 months since becoming unable to hold everything in one place. The idea was to enable at least one Mac user, possibly several within the same house or office, to wirelessly synchronize and hopefully play back media from the complete 250GB library of music and movies, splintered into two pieces due to hard drive limitations.

We set these goals because of two very real trends in iTunes usage: consumers are shifting from desktop machines to laptops, and growing their iTunes music, video, and app libraries to sizes that laptop hard drives struggle to fully contain. Put another way, last year’s basic laptops shipped with between 80 to 160GB hard drives, and the iTunes Store now sells TV shows and movies that consume up to 2GB of space a piece—far more if purchased in high definition. Yet Apple doesn’t seem to have any game plan for the long-term maintenance of its users’ growing iTunes libraries. For storage, the suggestion is to buy an external hard drive like Time Capsule, and for backups, the option is either Time Capsule or blank CDs or DVDs. As one video file can span three CDs, that’s not a realistic option any more, and even with DVDs, the thought of backing up a 250GB iTunes library with over 50 blank discs is just ridiculous. Until and unless blank Blu Ray Discs become a viable backup solution, hard drives are the only way to go.

So we’ve tried Time Capsule—twice. First, we tried the original model, thinking that Apple might have finally come up with a decent solution: put your 500GB or 1TB of stuff on a wireless hard drive and access it anywhere in your home or office. But it was slow as molasses, so “putting your stuff on it” took a long time, and then getting stuff off of it—videos, for instance—wasn’t totally smooth. Most likely aware of its major limitations, Apple pitched it as a way to handle Time Machine computer backups in the background, not much else, yet many users found that it was sluggish for even this limited purpose.

Then came the Dual-Band Time Capsule, which was supposed to improve network speeds. We grabbed one of those last week in hopes that its new hardware and Apple’s latest software would make things better. There were signs that it might—our 802.11n Macs ran a little faster on the dedicated 802.11n side of the network—and signs that it mightn’t, as when it told us that it needed 66 hours to transfer the 250GB iTunes library from a wired hard disk to its wireless hard disk. That’s 66 continuous hours, as in, don’t do anything that interrupts the network connection for almost three days, or else it gets screwed up and needs to start over again. After trying experiments with three different Macs, we were able to find one—a MacBook Pro—that initially promised to do the transfer via an Ethernet cable in 40 hours. We gave up that machine to the process for a day, and the transfer actually took less time, finishing in roughly 10 hours. Yes, that was ten hours to send files from one hard drive to another that was sitting right next to it and connected via wires.

So goal (1) was accomplished: the 250GB iTunes library was indeed on the Time Capsule. That left task (2)—merging this library with the 36GB smaller “subset” library we’ve kept on a laptop hard disk for times we’ve been unable to sit next to the wired unit. We tried to accomplish this merger wirelessly, but the network connection—normally pretty stable—dropped five times during the transfer process, for unknown reasons, coinciding with using iChat, trying to access the iTunes Store, and other things that might demand some minor fraction of Time Capsule’s wireless network resources. Software? Hardware? Something else to blame? No idea. But it’s 100% Apple equipment from end to end, and after 5 hours of trying to get the 36GB library over in various ways—at once, by folders, and then by individual files—we decided to just give up for now and publish the article as-was, with the process incomplete. Given the network disconnects, we’re wondering whether any of the transferred files were screwed up in the process. We’d bet on it, though there aren’t any error messages to tell us where to look for the damage.

Ultimately, the problem we’ve been trying to deal with is a simple one: having added TV shows, movies, and apps to its prior music footprint, iTunes has become a behemoth, with its media now occupying as much or more hard disk space as any other application on a computer. Today’s most popular brand new computers—say nothing of the older ones most people are using—can’t hold all that media, and the options for storing and accessing that content from a separate backup solution aren’t great. As we’ve said before, an easy, simple wireless iTunes library solution is needed; with users continuing to download apps, videos, and music, that need is greater than ever.

Graphic: Micro-Projectors in iPods or iPhones, Or, Don’t Hold Your Breath

By Jeremy Horwitz | 07.06.09 | 3 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

Sure, Apple could build a miniature video projector into iPods and iPhones, as per the rumors du jour. But the chances of this happening any time soon are really, truly low. Here’s why.

A few other reasons it’s unlikely: the parts aren’t cheap, they’re highly susceptible to failure, and users haven’t been asking for the functionality. This isn’t to say that other companies won’t try, but Apple is not going to be first or even early on this particular bandwagon.

Apple’s Time Capsule Gets a Second Chance, But Really Needs An iTunes + iPhoto Server

By Jeremy Horwitz | 07.02.09 | 4 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

We were genuinely excited when Apple announced its $299 and $499 Time Capsule back in early 2008—so much so that we were amongst the first people to run out and buy one when they hit stores in late February. Soon thereafter, we highlighted it on Backstage since it was technically outside of iLounge’s typical scope of iPod, iPhone, and iTunes coverage, but it was obvious that there could be some overlap. Apple had released a wireless network hard drive capable of serving as at least a backup and at most a shared storage device for our growing libraries of media files, something that we’d been hoping Apple would do for years, and though the price was higher than we’d hoped, we felt that it was certainly worth trying.

Yet one or two days later, we were probably amongst the first people to return that Time Capsule to the store, our hopes for its utility as an iTunes streaming system deflated by its slow speed. Similar comments quickly began to appear elsewhere on the Internet, and Apple subsequently released updated software that somewhat improved the unit’s performance. It also published a technical support document warning users—at least, those who were searching Apple’s support pages for answers after purchase—that their initial backups were going to be slow. “This may take overnight or longer,” said Apple, “depending on how much data you have.”

Part of the problem was inherent in using a wireless network to transfer tens or hundreds of Gigabytes of data, but part was due to the fact that the wireless network might be choked by the demands of various slow devices. So in early 2009, the company debuted a new version of the Time Capsule hardware with another performance-boosting feature: “dual-band mode,” which sought to improve wireless speeds by letting old 802.11b and 802.11g devices occupy one Wi-Fi network while newer 802.11n devices shared another, faster one. Time Capsule’s price was still too high—arguably even moreso than before given that its hard drive capacities were the same while competing alternatives’ prices had dropped—but when we saw that retailers were beginning to discount the 1TB version, we decided once again to give it a try.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the new Time Capsule is very much the same as the one we returned last year, and still has problems that users shouldn’t have to deal with. Even with a new MacBook as the only device on its 802.11n wireless network, the initial backup process remains maddeningly sluggish—it took us something like 8 or 10 hours to create a 100GB Time Machine image—and the software is still flaky. When we tried to troubleshoot some connectivity issues, we found Apple Discussions noting that the latest 7.4.2 software had screwed things up for a bunch of people, and in the absence of a fixed version, they were struggling to figure out how to downgrade back to earlier software. We went through similar issues; it’s a mess, so though the newer Time Capsule has some nifty little features, we’re not feeling entirely satisfied with it even at a discounted purchase price.

But despite these sorts of issues, we still are holding out hope for Time Capsule, because it feels like a missed opportunity for Apple—a product that is desperately needed for and technically capable of doing something great, yet it’s puttering around in the Apple product family doing something else. Put another way, a dual-band Time Capsule has the ability to serve as a multi-user media storage device, but due to problematic software and network connections, it’s been forced to stutter along as a comparatively boring background backup drive.

Nearly four years after the introduction of the first video-capable iPod, iTunes libraries—and users’ media libraries in general—have consequently become out-of-control huge. Even users who aren’t big music, video, or app downloaders no doubt have at least one digital camera, which quite possibly can make short movies as well. One of iLounge’s editors has an iPhoto library that contains only a small fraction of his total collection of digital pictures, and occupies over 30GB of hard drive space, while a larger, multi-year photo collection occupies over 130GB on a separate drive. His pared-down iTunes library, optimized for the lower-capacity iPod touch and iPhone devices, occupies another 36GB of hard disk space, with a full iTunes library requiring over 260GB on a separate drive, thanks mostly to videos. We’re not going to even get into the details of another Editor’s (Jesse Hollington’s) libraries, but suffice it to say that his media collection—and its backup systems—would put all but the most tech-savvy celebrities’ libraries to shame.

These large and increasing storage demands are compounded by a second issue: unless you’re single and living alone, you’re not the only one with media and photos in your home. In fact, there’s probably quite a bit of overlap between your library and a family member’s, and quite possibly you’ve had occasions where you’ve wanted to access a family member’s library to share content for entirely legal purposes. The more content we’ve accumulated, the more we’ve come to understand that having a central wirelessly connected pool for all that content, with separate “personal” sections—stored locally or wirelessly as users prefer—makes a lot more sense than maintaining multiple complete iTunes and photo collections on multiple hard drives. In essence, this would be a client and server-based approach to iTunes and iPhoto, with the Time Capsule server sitting in your home, ready to send audio, video, photos, and apps to whichever devices demand it.

Some might point to a number of possible impediments to achieving this: how would individuals’ iTunes accounts be handled in a shared library? Would an 802.11n wireless network really be fast enough to handle the media demands of multiple users, particularly in large families? And what about privacy concerns—the kid who has music or photos she doesn’t want to share in the pool with her parents, or vice-versa?

The answers are straightforward: iTunes and iPhoto pools would be opt-in, and the programs would continue to work exactly like they do today for content maintained separately and locally. If necessary, joint or family iTunes accounts could be treated as “parents” of individual accounts, letting a master user have ownership rights and the ability to restrict content access to individual users. Users would understand up front that they have the ability to hold files locally on their individual devices—temporarily or permanently—for guaranteed fast access, or take hiccup risks if streaming from the server. And the AirPort software would need to become smarter than it is now, helping a user to clearly, easily check how fast a given device’s network connection to the server is, and intelligently guiding him to take steps to optimize the connection for his actual home environment.

Yes, this would require some extra work on Apple’s part, but frankly, it’s been needed ever since iPods became capable of video playback, and is even more necessary now that iPhones are capable of creating videos and higher-resolution photos. These files are big, they’re numerous, and they’re not things that people want to just throw away. All that new content has to go somewhere, and making it easier to retrieve and enjoy anywhere is the key to both happier Apple users and increased sales of networked Apple servers, say nothing of the clients.

Readers, any thoughts?

Chicago, the iPhone 3GS, and iPods: Your Thoughts?

By Jeremy Horwitz | 06.29.09 | 8 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

Every time we visit a city for fun or business, we take note of the sorts of iPods and iPhones we see—and don’t see—on the streets and subways, as well as the performance of our iPhones as we’re traveling around. We spent this weekend in downtown Chicago for the annual Taste of Chicago, and were frankly very surprised at what we found: a higher density of iPod classics/5Gs than anywhere we’ve seen before, with a considerable number of second-generation iPod shuffles, and relatively few iPhones. New York City, by comparison, seemed like iPhone central even before the launch of the iPhone 3GS, and we saw lots of iPhones in Washington, D.C., as well; we’d imagine that these places must be overflowing with iPhone 3GS units by now.

One thing that doesn’t receive a lot of media attention—for obvious reasons—is the fairly significant variation in iPhone 3G performance from city to city. We were stunned, for instance, to see just how poorly the iPhone 3GS performed in our informal Chicago speed tests relative to the ones we ran in Western New York, which we previously thought was as slow as 3G could get nationally. Our Buffalo-area download speeds were roughly 50% faster than in Chicago, while upload speeds were two or three times faster; speeds and signal strength also dropped considerably indoors. Even more surprising was our iPhone 3GS’s screwy GPS performance in Chicago: the unit is almost exactly on target in Western New York, but our little blue locator dot was literally all over the map in downtown Chicago, frequently off by blocks and exhibiting issues in compass orientation, as well. A first-generation iPhone we brought along seemed to be doing a better job of triangulation without GPS hardware, amazing as that was.

Buggy software? A hardware issue? We’re not sure. And we’re also not sure whether 3G network issues or just storage concerns might have accounted for the huge number of hard drive-based iPods we saw. This may have also been the first city we’ve visited where the number of iPod shuffles we saw in use outnumbered iPod nanos by a wide margin. While our observations are clearly not scientific, we’d like to hear from readers in Chicago: what iPods or iPhones have you seen in heavy use there? Any ideas as to why they’re popular? Are you having 3G network issues? Seeing good 3G speeds? GPS performance? We’re curious.

On Signing 2-Year Contracts To Use Hand-Me-Down iPhone 3Gs

By Jeremy Horwitz | 06.24.09 | 20 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

So an AT&T customer shows up at an AT&T Store with a first-generation iPhone and a hand-me-down iPhone 3G—a common enough scenario this week given that quite a few people are giving up their 3G units for the iPhone 3GS. “I’d like to upgrade the old iPhone to the new one,” the customer says, handing over two phones. “Sure,” says AT&T, “we can do that. But you’ll have to sign a brand new two-year service agreement.” “Wait, what?” the customer asks, “you’re not giving me a phone, I’m bringing my own, so why do I have to commit to two years of service?” “Sorry,” says AT&T, “that’s Apple’s policy.”

Such was the case over the past day as we went through the process of attempting to transform a 2007 iPhone owner into an iPhone 3G user. We were familiar with the obvious upgrade charges—the fees, the $10 additional data charge, and the $5 additional charge for text messaging—and we were willing to pay them to AT&T for a year. The goal was to let the existing customer spend that year using a hand-me-down iPhone 3G, paying $200 extra ($900 total) for faster service, and then switch her over to the inevitable 2010 iPhone. But that plan wasn’t going to work if a two-year commitment was required, and it made almost as much sense to get a brand new iPhone 3G at full subsidy instead.

Interestingly, AT&T claimed that this mandatory contract policy only applies to Apple’s products, not to other self-supplied hardware, for whatever reason. Could the issue be subsidies? No; the old iPhone 3G’s subsidy had been paid off when we upgraded to a 3GS, paid the higher than normal price, the early upgrader fee, the activation fee, and signed a brand new two-year contract. So the iPhone 3G was free and clear, ready to be handed down or even sold.

Since it can’t be handed down, perhaps “sold” is the way to go. Given the choice between signing another two-year AT&T contract, or unlocking the phone and selling it to an overseas buyer for use on a different network, it’s tempting to go the latter route.

Readers, what have you done with your iPhone or iPhone 3G units after upgrading to 3GS? Have you sold them, handed them down, or just tossed them in a drawer? What has your service provider tried to do if you’ve tried the hand-me-down route? We’d like to know.

Postscript: Notes on iLounge’s Comprehensive iPhone 3GS Review

By Jeremy Horwitz | 06.22.09 | 1 comment |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

If you were following Backstage (or our RSS feed) over the weekend, you know that we posted two advance drafts of the iPhone 3GS review with interim testing results so that we could help users get some hard facts and data during the device’s launch weekend. We made the choice to do this because traffic this week surged so considerably due to the launches of 3GS and iPhone OS 3.0 that the site had a very brief outage on Wednesday, which our hosting team resolved shortly thereafter—it was obvious that readers really wanted to know what was going on with Apple’s latest hardware and software.

As a postscript to the now essentially complete review, for which I thank Jesse Hollington and Charles Starrett for their support, I wanted to share a few personal thoughts on the iPhone 3GS experience that are somewhat outside the scope of that article, but might be useful to some readers anyway.

* Would we upgrade to the iPhone 3GS, personally? Mixed answers here. Just as mentioned in the review, the 3GS is going to wow many 2007 iPhone owners, and impress some 2008 iPhone 3G owners enough to make the jump. Our internal statistics:

Every iLounge editor upgraded to iPhone 3G last year, one out of obligation rather than interest. One wife received an iPhone 3G last year, while two others (wife/fiancee) stayed with 2007 iPhones. This year, two iLounge editors upgraded to iPhone 3GS, both more out of obligation than interest, and one fiancee’s 2007 iPhone was upgraded to 3GS. All of the iPhone 3GS users are really enjoying their phones, though the editors don’t feel the upgrade from 3G was a necessary one for non-iLounge reasons. One wife with a 2007 iPhone said that she had no need to upgrade to 3G or 3GS given the $10/month higher data fees and $5+ text messaging charges. Friends and family with original iPhones are all either considering or genuinely excited about upgrades, but those with iPhone 3Gs are not. We’ve been hearing everything from “meh” to “nice, but maybe next time.”

* What do we really like the most about 3GS? There’s no single highlight; it’s just a snappier, more capable version of last year’s phone. The whole “S is for Speed” pitch struck us as a little cheesy, and the new model’s performance doesn’t evoke “wow” moments, but it definitely feels faster and better than before. Being able to switch between camera, phone, web, and map features, and having good to great experiences with each, is definitely great.

* What is especially worth seeing in the iPhone 3GS review? Definitely look at the full-sized comparison photos and the YouTube video clips. We’re posting more, but the ones that are up tell a lot about the iPhone 3GS’s camera capabilities—obviously, pictures are worth a thousand words (or more).

* What do we really dislike the most about 3GS? The battery life. It’s seriously a major issue, with 3G calling and data as the most important offenders, the sharp drain during video recording and GPS/compass-aided mapping as the strongest offenders, and the inconsistent video playback times as a point of continued curiosity. We’re also concerned about more case cracks and scratches after what our well-kept iPhone 3Gs looked like after weeks of ownership. Hopefully Apple has made some quiet improvements to the 3GS shell to stop the cracks, at least.

* iPhone 3G as lame duck? We were surprised to hear comments at certain stores that iPhone 3G inventory—including $99 8GB and discontinued $149 16GB models—was not moving as quickly as expected prior to the iPhone 3GS launch. Normally, the $99 price point would be a real draw for a device like the 3G, but it seems like the drop was overshadowed by the 3GS announcement, and people were waiting to see how much better the 3GS really was. The reports we heard on this were only anecdotal; we’ll see what happens now that 3GS is out.

Is it worth purchasing the 3G given that the 3GS is out and only $100 more? Our view would be “no” for most power users, but “sure” if none of 3GS’s extra features appeals to you. As Charles Starrett points out, “Since the data/talk plan requirements are the same, it seems to make little sense to purchase the 3G—if you can afford to pay for the data service over two years, you should at least be able to afford the $199 3GS.” The extra $100 strikes us as money well spent for the new model’s added capacity and capabilities.

By Request, a Preview of iLounge’s Comprehensive iPhone 3GS Review (Updated)

By Jeremy Horwitz | 06.21.09 | 0 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

When we first created Backstage, we did so for two reasons: to let readers preview articles that might or might not appear on the main iLounge web site, and to discuss topics such as video games, Mac computers, and the like that weren’t necessarily of interest to the broader iLounge readership. Over time, Backstage has shifted more to the off-topic stuff than the advance article previews.

We’ve received e-mails and comments requesting our initial findings on various details of the iPhone 3GS’s performance. Rather than just posting them in a summary table, I had hoped to post the roughly drafted iPhone 3GS review here on Backstage. But due to its 10-page length, posting it in preliminary form on the main iLounge page—with appropriate caveats as to its non-final nature—seemed like a better idea.

So, you can see our comprehensive but preliminary iPhone 3GS review at this link, complete with some very interesting battery, Bluetooth, audio quality, and screen quality findings, as well as notes on compass and GPS performance, photo and video recording performance, and more. Pictures, audio, and video are for the moment linked rather than in-line. There will be a ton more before the review is done. Enjoy what’s there for now.

Updated: The second draft, radically expanded, is available now.

Lightning Review: What Happened to Gizmodo’s iPhone 3GS Hands-On? (Updated)

By Charles Starrett | 06.15.09 | 5 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

File this one under “weird:” shortly after Monday’s WWDC keynote ended—concluding of course with the announcement of the iPhone 3GS—we spotted a group of broadcast journalists huddled around the new device. As we approached from the side, as to not ruin the interview, we were told that there would be no photography, video opportunities, or hands on time for anyone other than broadcast journalists. Okay; Apple’s on-stage demonstrations don’t give these journalists the extended product close-ups they need for television footage. Fair enough.

Thus, we were surprised to find several hours later that Apple had given Gizmodo extended hands on access to the iPhone 3GS, which was written about in an article titled “iPhone 3GS Hands On,” and complete with at least one picture of a new black 32GB unit that was resting face down on its box. Network problems seemed to be making the page load inconsistently, so we decided to wait until later to see what Brian Lam had to say about it. Only that never happened.

It is unclear exactly who made the order, or when it was made, but shortly after the story initially showed up online—including on sites such as Techmeme and Digg—it vanished from the pages of Gizmodo. Searching Gizmodo’s site for the article brings up nothing, and the page isn’t even available in Google Cache format. Only those links from Digg and Techmeme persist as evidence that the link was there, suggesting that incredibly, without any explanation, Gizmodo pulled its own seemingly exclusive hands-on for a product that is no doubt going to be one of the biggest gadgets of the year. Why would a gadget site ever do that?

It doesn’t seem to be for lack of information. Our cache of the story shows that Gizmodo was told how to calibrate the new digital compass (“twisting a figure 8 in the air with the phone”), given an opportunity to record video (“from our initial testing, [it] does so very well. Everything about the experience is fast.”), try voice control (“we tested the ‘dial’ command… as well as the call command… Both worked perfectly—as you can see on the video.”), and even was given an opportunity to compare Safari speeds between the iPhone 3G, Palm Pre, and iPhone 3G S (“Safari on the 3GS is also noticeably faster than the 3G, but also faster than the Pre”).

So what’s the deal here? Is the fix in—another example of Apple buttering up its buddies with early hardware access in exchange for a promise to hold their comments until just before launch day? Or is there another explanation? Whatever the case, it seems like Apple’s representative lied to us about who was getting access—notably, something that happened with last year’s iPhone 3G—or Gizmodo had a friend on the inside who offered an exclusive, then retracted it. Or maybe both. In any case, it appears that Apple wasn’t quite ready for Gizmodo to tell its story, as it all but completely disappeared with CIA-like quickness. We’ve requested comment from Gizmodo and will let you know what, if anything, we hear back.

Updated: Following our Friday story on this, Gizmodo offered and we accepted an opportunity to hear the story behind the retraction of its hands-on, but days later, it still has not been forthcoming. Meanwhile, a reader pointed out that videos of the iPhone 3GS were also posted by Gizmodo to YouTube, and then withdrawn around the same time as the story and photography. Especially in light of the BBC report on Apple’s threatened ‘sour’ relations with certain journalists, we remain curious as to what sort of influence Apple has been exerting over iPhone 3G S coverage.

Flip UltraHD: $200, Apple-style Simple HD Video Recording, With Small Caveats

By Jeremy Horwitz | 06.11.09 | 2 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

There are five or six different ways to measure the inherent value of a device, or lack thereof, but the deliberate simplicity of Pure Digital Technologies’ Flip UltraHD reduces the need for such analysis. It has been designed to do a total of two things—record and play back 720p videos—and do so at a lower price than products that attempt to do more. There are no complex controls to master, batteries to replace, or memory cards to fool around with. Everything you need to make it work and work well is in the package when you open it. And when you’re finished using it, there’s no series of special steps to follow to get your videos off of it, recharge it, or anything else. It is Apple-style simplicity applied to HD video recording, in a boxy package that would not pass Apple industrial design muster, yet has surpassed any Apple device yet released in video recording functionality.

Flip UltraHD measures roughly 4” by 2” by 1”, has a lens on the front, a 2” color screen and buttons on the back, a power button on the left, full-sized USB and mini HDMI connectors on the right, and a standard tripod-compatible screw mount on the bottom. You can choose a soft touch rubber black or white coating for most of the body, with the rest in chrome. Each comes with a hand strap, a rechargeable battery, and a carrying bag. That’s it.

Notable is the fact that Pure Digital’s included battery can be popped out at any time and replaced with a simple pair of AA batteries if you need extra juice. This is the sort of nice design decision that lets users have a great solution in the box—a seemingly proprietary rechargeable cell—plus the temporary, non-proprietary additional power flexibility they need in emergencies. If only Apple could learn from these guys.

Want to record a video? Press the power button, then the big red button on back to record, and hit it again to stop. Point at your subjects and shoot video; your only controls while recording are plus and minus buttons for very limited 2x digital zoom functionality. When you’re done, you can press a play button to watch and hear your recorded video, skip through previously recorded videos with forward and back buttons, adjust the volume of the unit’s integrated speaker, and delete videos with a trash can button.

Apart from initially telling it the current date, time, and your preference for confirmation tones and a light to let people know they’re being recorded, there’s nothing else to do—no focus requirements, filters, lens cap, nothing. Every H.264 video it makes is recorded with the same 1280x720 resolution, 9Mb/s bit rate, and stereo audio format, consuming roughly 65MB per minute. UltraHD includes 8GB of storage space, good for two hours of video recording, and the included battery came out of the box with enough power to record over 30 minutes of video; fully charged, it can roughly fill the 8GB before needing recharging or replacement. To recharge, you simply leave UltraHD plugged into the same USB port you’re using to extract its videos; a pop-out USB arm connector eliminates your need to carry around a cable, and computers treat the device like a plugged in camera for easy file copying.

Pure Digital’s approach obviously has its positives and negatives. On the positive side, it has come up with a device that creates 720p movies so effortlessly that anyone could make them, remove them from the device, and play them back; the only thing it doesn’t include in the box is the mini HDMI cable needed to watch the videos immediately on a TV. Videos are colorful, entirely audible, and more detailed than the lower-resolution ones created by most digital still cameras today. UltraHD’s lens is fixed and not capable of either true depth of field or close-up macro videos, but it creates entirely acceptable videos of its subjects at distances greater than a foot or so away. Color balance is handled automatically, and quite well under normal indoor and outdoor lighting conditions. There’s no need to convert the videos in order to start watching immediately on a Mac or PC, via iTunes or other software. (See video samples here and here.)

But on the negative side, for whatever reason, once they’re in iTunes, the H.264 videos can’t be viewed on an Apple TV without conversion, despite Apple TV’s support for both H.264 and 720p video playback. They also need to be converted if you want to watch them on an iPod or iPhone. iTunes will handle both types of conversions for you, slowly; Pure Digital includes free Mac and PC FlipShare software right on the device, as well, capable of creating DVDs, YouTube and MySpace videos from its own files, but nothing specific to Apple’s devices. Whatever else might be said about the iPhone 3GS’s comparatively low-resolution 640x480 video recording capabilities, at least the video files it creates will be immediately viewable on all of Apple’s increasingly popular portable devices. Similarly, editing has to be handled with separate software such as FlipShare or iMovie rather than on the device itself.

Finally, it goes without saying, but should also be mentioned that the UltraHD’s videos are not going to blow away users of conventional or high-end HD video cameras. Lens limitations aside, they’re also subject to the sort of graininess, slight fuzziness, and diminished low-light quality one would reasonably expect from a low-priced video recorder. Videos made on a year-old, consumer-grade Canon HD camera that cost three times as much were sharper and cleaner, benefitting from optical zoom, higher bitrates, less grain, and user-selectable resolutions. But of course they were better in those ways; what’s noteworthy is that some of Flip UltraHD’s videos were at least as nicely color saturated—some would say even better.

There’s no dispute or surprise in the fact that users can spend more money and get complex, powerful HD video cameras these days. For $200, Flip UltraHD enables a person with zero technical expertise to create high-definition videos that look quite good on a computer monitor or HDTV—much better than lower-resolution ones—and offers praiseworthy convenience of playback, connectivity and recharging, besides. If you’re looking for an affordable way to create simple HD videos, it’s certainly worthy of consideration, unless you’re looking for a tool to create immediately iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV-ready content. Perhaps Pure Digital has something up its sleeve for that purpose, as well…?

Why’s My Mac Slower & Running Its Fans After Updating iTunes?

By Jeremy Horwitz | 06.04.09 | 8 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

Back when we were Windows PC users, there was a standard protocol to be followed after adding or updating software to the computer: run Norton Disk Doctor. Or SystemWorks. Or some other third-party program capable of fixing all the damage that was accidentally or thoughtlessly done to the computer’s registry by an installer when something new was added. It was a mess, a pain, and one of many things we were thrilled to be without when we switched to Macs. We were even more impressed when we saw our Macs taking an extra minute or so after certain installations to optimize the hard disk: that one minute delay reduced countless potential future slowdowns.

But in recent months, post-installation blues with Apple software have created problems for our Macs, too. We didn’t write about the last one, the screwy Mac OS 10.5.7 update, because we’re not a Mac OS-focused site. For that one, two iLounge editors saw their aluminum MacBooks stuck in blue screen loops after trying to upgrade from 10.5.6 using Software Update. Ugh—it was a throwback to the Microsoft days. But the latest one is iTunes 8.2, QuickTime, and Front Row-related: install them and you may notice that your Mac’s running slower, its fans are constantly spinning, and its battery is draining faster than it did before.

To be completely fair, this isn’t the first time that iTunes, QuickTime, or other Apple software has done this sort of thing, but the problem has become a fairly serious one: why should users have to suffer for days, weeks, or longer with lower battery life and hotter machines after installing all but mandatory updates to core applications? Thankfully, there’s a fix, a solution that is free, easy to use, and will almost certainly improve your Mac’s performance. It’s called Disk Utility, and it’s hidden in the Utilities folder on your Mac—a folder that’s tucked into your Applications folder.

You can find the program with Spotlight at the top right of your Mac’s screen, but we’d advise adding the Utilities folder to your list of Places (see screenshot) by going into your Applications folder, dragging the Utilities folder into the sidebar, and having it there for reference whenever you need it. [We also use the more powerful, free third-party application Onyx, which hasn’t been updated yet for 10.5.7.]

Disk Utility does a number of things, generally (but not always) quickly and well. Here, the only things you need to know are to select your hard drive from the list on the left of the window, and press the button called “Repair Disk Permissions.” This starts an invariably harmless process that goes through and fixes screwy file information on your Mac. After five minutes, it will most likely have found a bunch of Apple programs with messed up “permissions,” which it will fix instantly. Apple’s most recent iTunes and QuickTime updates led to over 60 permissions errors, all found and “repaired” by Disk Utility. Then you can restart your Mac, and you’ll most likely find that it’s running cooler, quieter, and faster.

But not always. When we ran Disk Utility a second time to take additional screenshots for this article, we were surprised to discover that some of the problems had persisted, and Disk Utility “repaired” them again. We’re not quite sure how or why that would be happening, but it did, and iTunes, QuickTime, and Front Row were all listed as being to blame. The same thing happened a third time, too. Amazingly, we’ve found ourselves back to where we were in the Windows and Norton days, running applications just to keep our Macs them running properly, and not always succeeding. Here’s hoping that Snow Leopard and the next iTunes release bring things back to the way they should be.

On Lessons Learned, or Why iPhone OS 3.0 Will Hit Before Next-Gen iPhones

By Charles Starrett | 06.02.09 | 14 comments |  tell-a-friend |  digg this story

On July 10, 2008, Apple prematurely released iPhone Software 2.0, setting in motion one of the biggest launch flubs the company has ever seen. The following day, as the iPhone 3G went on sale and many current iPhone and iPod touch users began downloading the new software—which required activation, just like a new phone—Apple’s activation servers ground to a halt, causing enormous delays at Apple and carrier stores around the world. Amazingly, the server failures left some new iPhone 3G customers with useless handsets, unable to revert to their prior, working phones, but also unable to use their new, expensive iPhones. It was a PR catastrophe for the company, that, when combined with early MobileMe and App Store issues—both of which launched that same day—took the company weeks if not months to completely clear up.

This experience is why those of you anxiously awaiting the release of iPhone OS 3.0 for the iPhone and iPod touch should expect the update to become available sooner rather than later. After enduring the problems that a simultaneous launch schedule caused last year, we’re expecting that Apple will get 3.0 out the door well ahead of the next-generation iPhone, in hopes of getting as many users as possible migrated to the new software prior to launch day. Yesterday’s release of iTunes 8.2, which is required for iPhone OS 3.0, only lends further credence to the notion that Apple does not want to deal with another mess like the one it had on its hands last July, and a staggered release for the new OS and new iPhone seems like one of the most obvious ways to ensure that this year’s iPhone release goes as smoothly as possible.