Jonathan Birge

iPhone maps

Last Friday (through means which I’m too embarrassed to publicly discuss) I got an iPhone 3G. Here are my initial impressions after using it for a couple of days.

Screen. Visually, it’s near perfect. Bright and with sufficient field of view. The only problem I have with it is that sometimes my finger just won’t slide over its surface. I don’t know if I’m just some sort of physical mutant, or if I’ve got weird finger chemistry, but sometimes it’s just unusable as a touch screen as my finger sticks to it, especially if the screen has just been cleaned. It seems that the screen was designed to work best when covered by a thin layer of grime from you fingers. I just don’t get why everybody loves this so much, but I guess I’m just weird. This problem was solved by getting a matte protective anti-glare film for the screen. The display isn’t as sharp, but its finally a pleasure to use the touch screen. I recommend you play with the iPhone in the store for a while and actually use it (try scrolling and dragging) to make sure you like dragging your finger across polished glass a million times a day.

3G network. This is a bit of a disappointment. As many many other people have found, the 3G reception is poor, and a huge battery killer. With 3G turned on I can’t get through a full day without having to recharge. Where I live in Cambridge the signal is so bad that calls will degrade and occasionally drop. It fluctuates between zero and three bars. Cambridge ain’t exactly the middle of nowhere, however, and I expect AT&T’s network is better than the iPhone’s performance would indicate. From what I’ve heard, this is a problem with the iPhone; an AT&T 3G phone from another manufacterer will often have five bars sitting right next to an iPhone with one.

I will say this, though: when it works, it’s quite fast, and I usually see speeds of around 1 Mb/s. Fortunately, you can disable 3G from the phone settings, but unfortunately there’s no way I can disable the $10 a month extra I’m paying for it. From all my previous experiences with Apple, I knew I was asking for trouble by buying the first batch of anything. Apple brutally punishes early adopters like no other company.

If there’s an excuse for this poor performance, it’s the near engineering miracle Apple had to pull off to get everything to work. In one tiny package, the iPhone contains GPS, multi-band 2.5G, multi-band 3G, WiFi, and Bluetooth radios. That’s a lot of RF going on in one place, and they all have to share antennas. I’m kind of amazed it works at all, frankly.

Data integration. For now, the iPhone only integrates natively with iCal (on a Mac), Outlook and Exchange. Fortunately, if you use Google calendar, there is a wonderful solution available from www.nuevasync.com. The folks at NuevaSync have essentially built an Exchange server that can pull your contacts and calendar from various online services (Google and Plaxo, for now) and make it available from the industry standard Exchange protocol. A brilliant idea, and a very timely one given the release of the iPhone 2.0 software which allows for Exchange integration and push. When I (or my wife) edit a calendar item online, it instantly appears on the iPhone.

App Store. As everybody predicted, there is a plethora of putative social networking revolutions, with trendy names like beepo and blue lemmingster, etc. But there are some surprisingly good apps available, and it seems the best ones are free. Some highlights: Bloomberg has an app gives you access to beautiful stock charts and a live news feed. AOL Radio provides dozens of live streaming radio channels across several genres, and it works over the cell network.

As Apple opens up the API more and more, I think the biggest impact of the iPhone will be as a new development platform for connected mobile applications. The most powerful applications of the phone are those which use the wireless broadband to connect to remote information and computing resources. It’s very satisfying, for example, to be out walking around outside and yet have access to the terabytes of satellite photos in Google Maps. On a more frivolous level, there is Shazamm, a program that will tell you the name and artist of virtually any song based on a 15 second sample played into the phone. One of the most interesting examples of the mobile-to-cloud computing paradigm is Jott, an app which will transcribe dictated notes. It records and compresses your voice at the iPhone, and then sends it to India where it is transcribed by a person and then sent back to your phone as text. I’m looking forward to seeing what other kinds of applications are enabled by having a computer in your pocket with an always-on broadband internet connection. The iPhone isn’t so much a phone in this context as it is a rich mobile interface to remote supercomputers.

What’s missing. Cut and paste, for one. Video conferencing. Live mobile TV, such as AT&T makes available on some of their other cell phones. Flash support in the browser. The ability to read PDFs anywhere but within an e-mail attachment or from a webpage. Push Gmail.

What’s just plain bad. The third from worst design flaw I’ve seen is that turning off the sound doesn’t actually turn off all sounds. Music can still play through the speaker in certain cases, and not all apps respect the mute setting. The second worst is that when you unplug the headphones, the phone sometimes turns on whatever music you were last playing in the iPod software (it fools the phone into thinking you momentarily hit the play button on the headphone remote). The absolute number one design flaw is that the second and third worst flaws can combine, so that you can end up blaring music in the middle of a lecture just by pulling out your headphones. I presume Apple will fix this in an update.

The 2.0 software feels like an early beta. The interface is often unresponsive, taking a few seconds to do something as simple as open a field for editing (the contacts program, of all things, is the worst offender). The browser crashes fairly regularly, and I’ve even hung the phone one or twice trying to watch a video podcast. It’s the first phone I’ve ever owned that crashes more than my laptop…

The battery life is rather poor. I haven’t gotten the phone to make it through the day yet, though a lot of that maybe that I leave the WiFi on. Regardless, I have no idea how Apple can claim five hours of 3G usage. Maybe that’s if you’re standing on the top of a cell tower.

Summary. Were it not for some of the aforementioned issues, it would be a truly remarkable piece of technology, especially in terms of the wonderful interface. It’s more enjoyable to use than a computer for most small tasks like checking e-mail. While I really love the iPhone in many ways, I have to admit that it’s clearly not worth the money when you factor in the plan. Of course, I’m kind of loath to return it at this point. It’s a kind of irrational psychology that is probably responsible for most of Apple’s revenue, I suspect: In the end, it’s just cool, and it would be hard to go back to klunky, even if klunky gets the jobs done for half the price. Look-and-feel counts for more than anybody (certainly I) would like to admit. Steve Jobs is a genius for being so cynical as to truly plumb the limits of this. So, I’m gonna stick with my heavy, big, overpriced, crashy, no-battery-life, embarass-me-in-meetings iPhone. Because it’s just so goddam fun to scroll around with a flick of your finger!

It sounds too good to be true. Write once, run everywhere. (Where did we hear that promise before?) Alas, it is. I’ve been working with REALbasic for about a year, now, and my conclusion is that it’s not ready. Given that they have been working on it since 1996, I suspect it never will be. As a language, it’s amateurish. Threads are not native, and are actually cooperative as opposed to preemptive. Kind of like the Mac back in the 1980s. Worse, threads hand over control not at regular intervals, but at each iteration of a loop. Who came up with that horrendous kludge? It’s hard to believe they have the gall to actually release a version of their software dubbed “Professional.”

But being merely amateurish wouldn’t be enough to warrant a blog post. I’m warning people off of this piece because it’s so buggy as to be almost unusable. I’ve had problems with bugs in their semaphore class not actually protecting resources from all threads. (Apparently they really have a problem with this thread thing.) Most problematically, however, the IDE itself is highly unstable. Sometimes, under Linux, it gets confused and when you hit “delete” in an editor window, it actually think you want to delete the whole method, not just the current character. That’s obviously a problem, especially if you don’t catch what it just did, and accidentally hit save. Restarting fixes this. Right now, whenever I set a breakpoint, it crashes with a segfault upon reaching the breakpoint. Running without the breakpoint works fine. Clearly, they need more work.

Maybe in another ten years they’ll be ready, but for now I suggest anybody considering REALbasic learn a real language instead. BASIC can potentially be a great language, but in the hands of these guys, it’s open mike night.

Twice now I’ve had it hopelessly corrupt a file on me. (What is it they say about “fool me twice, shame on me?”) Saving isn’t enough with this ungodly piece of shit. You need to run ten minute backups of the file you’re working on so that OpenOffice can’t kill it. The latest accomplishment of this pig astounds me: I opened a document and had OO open up a second window, so I could edit one part while looking at another. At some point, I close the window in which I was editing. Poof, the changes I made in that window were erased. You probably think I accidentally deleted something, right? Nope. Going back through the undo history, my changes just weren’t there. Things I’d done before the changes that were lost were undoable, so something fishy clearly happened. You also probably think I stupidly opened two windows using two different instantiations of OO, so that one overwrote the other. I didn’t; I used the “New Window” function. I suspect there is some bug with how OpenOffice handles two windows on the same document.

If this stupid blog does one thing useful, it will be to save just one person from using the complete waste of space that is OpenOffice. I can’t tell you how much I’d be willing to pay for Microsoft Office if I could go back in time and use it instead of OO, but I can tell you it’s a lot more than Microsoft charges for Office. What’s really embarrassing is that using a “community developed” version of office software is exactly the kind of stupid, false economy for which I railed against desktop linux.

It bites.

I switched to this camera from a Canon A610 that died on me. The first thing I noticed with this camera is that the picture quality on my $200 Canon was better or equal than this $400 camera. The dynamic range is poor, with skies often washed out to white. Like many “super-zoom” cameras competing on specs, it makes up for noise and dynamic range limitations in its small CCD by over-processing, and the images show signs of heavy noise reduction filtering, washing out details. Granted, this isn’t a DSLR, but this isn’t a cheap camera, either. It appears that they really pushed the boundaries of the CCD to get 8 MP, and used too small a CCD for this resolution.

This problem appears is common to all recent cameras in this market segment, such as the Canon S5. They are pushing the pixel counts so high, and the zoom ranges so far, that optical quality is suffering significantly as a result. (See this post for an example and more explanation of why.) So, you get a 18x zoom. Is there really any point in zooming in on a bad picture?

I’m sorry to offend Olympus fans, but Olympus engineers can’t violate the laws of solid state physics, and smaller pixels means less photoelectron capacity, and that means less dynamic range. Smaller pixels also means less signal to noise, and it shows. The fact of the matter is that they have pushed the pixel count too far for the size of the CCD, and you will get better images from a camera with fewer pixels, ironically.

Another issue I found is that the autofocus algorithm is rather slow, especially at long focal lengths, and it often has difficulty with any scene movement. Worse, it will sometimes tell you it focused successfuly when it didn’t. Part of this is the zoom, I’m sure, but my experience in this regard is backed up by some very in-depth reviews on dpreview.com.

Aggregiously, they have disabled the use of panorama shooting for any non-Olympus branded data card, which is completely unneccesary and a brazen shakedown of their own customers. After paying $400 for a camera, it is an insult to be forced to buy an overpriced branded card to utilize full function of your own purchase.

On the bright side, the build quality is generally quite good. Much better than the Canon S5, which I also considered. The camera has a nice heft and a very solid feel in the hand. The materials are high quality all over, the one exception being a cheap and annoying rubber cover on the USB port. They also made the poor choice of using a non-standard USB cable, so you cannot use your existing set of cables. In addition, I’ve found that the physical USB connection at the camera is not very secure and will reset the connection upon even the slightest movement of the cable.

A true high point is the zoom and image stabilization. The 18x range is exceptional, and essentially gives you everything from a wide-angle to a medium telephoto. Unfortunately, the cost of this is a lens that does not perform well at the extremes: at wide-angle its highly distorting, and at all lengths there is significant chromatic aberration (color fringing) off center.

In summary, Olympus made a mistake by following the crown (maybe in fact leading it) by putting way too much effort into specmanship, and less into making the right engineering decisions. They clearly wanted to have 18x and 8MP printed on the box, and considered image quality a secondary concern. This may be endemic to all the brands of super-zoom cameras, but it doesn’t change the fact that you don’t truly get your money’s worth where it counts with this camera: image quality. This is a huge shame, because in most every other aspect this is the one of the nicest cameras I’ve ever used.

My advice: if you need the resolution afforded by 8 MP, you need to just suck it up and buy an SLR. Only they have large enough detectors to handle such resolutions adequately, and use different technology than found in a consumer camera. Otherwise, just get a $200 5 or 6 MP camera with the largest CCD size you can find (avoid the smallest pocket cameras). The images will be just as good, if not quite a bit better, and you’ll save a lot of money.

The sound quality is quite good, especially for an amp of this price point. However, this unit (and probably others in HK’s line, I imagine) has a flaw that will especially affect those users that rely on over-the-air TV (either digital or analog). Somehow, despite (and to the detriment of) their reputation, HK failed to effectively shield the digital electronics in this amp, and as a result it creates a tremendous amount of radio interference. They allude indirectly to this on their website FAQ, in fact, in warning cable users to use properly shielded cables. You know you’ve got a serious interference problem if you have to warn cable users about interference. God forbid you should actually try to get a digital over-the-air broadcast; apparently HK forgot about those users. Over-the-air users have no way to shield themselves from the interference coming from this unit, unfortunately. In my case, whenever I have this amp turned on, I lose digital TV reception. Given that I’m living within 7 miles of the transmitters, this suggests the 247 is quite a naughty little electromagnetic neighbor.

Perusing the net a little more thoroughly than I did upon my initial search, I find that others are having similar problems with various HK receivers, so this appears to be a problem across their recent line of receivers.

Even if most people have cable these days, this is inexcusable for a company that makes AV receivers. While HK was once a great manufacturer, they have clearly gone downhill in quality in some respects. The sound on this unit is good, but it may very well wreck your TV reception unless you have cable.

Forget about the video functionality. It crashes often, and even when it works it’s so small as to be pointless. But the sound is fantastic. Sound quality is a variable that’s often forgotten when shopping for MP3 players, but quite a variable it is from experience. This player has better sound than my ipod, and much better sound than my Insignia player. Just because MP3 players are digital doesn’t mean the quality can’t vary. Clearly they used good components in these, and the sound is crisp and without distortion. (I’m listening on a pair of high end in-ear phones.)