Walt Mossberg’s iPhone review is now live on WSJ.com.
Among other things, Walt claims that the on-screen keyboard takes a few days to get used to but after that is a non-issue and that the biggest shortcoming is iPhone’s availability only on AT&T.
Watch his video review:
Apple has sent an email out to everyone who signed up to receive iPhone updates.
The email offers tips on organizing things now so that one can get a new iPhone up and running quickly once they are out. Among the services and software that iPhone will support:
The body of the message reads:
iPhone arrives on June 29. iPhone features an amazing mobile phone, is the best iPod we’ve ever created, and puts the Internet in your pocket with desktop-class email, web browsing, searching, and maps. And iPhone makes it all easy to use with its revolutionary multi-touch user interface. iPhone syncs with your PC or Mac just like an iPod, so organizing your content now will help you start calling, texting, emailing, surfing, listening, and watching even faster when you get your iPhone. Here are a few suggestions to help you get ready:
Making a call with iPhone is as simple as tapping a name. You won’t need to re-enter all your contacts because iPhone syncs with the address book you already use on your computer—Address Book or Entourage on a Mac, or Outlook or Outlook Express on a PC. If you keep your contacts on the web using Yahoo! Address Book, iPhone can sync with them, too. To get ready for iPhone, organize your contacts in one of these applications and make sure they’re up to date with the latest phone numbers and email addresses. If you don’t have contacts on your computer, don’t worry. You can still enter them directly into iPhone.
Using its built-in calendar, iPhone lets you check your appointments with the flick of a finger. iPhone uses iTunes to sync with the calendar application you already use on your computer—iCal or Entourage on the Mac, or Outlook on a PC—just like it does with your contacts. If you don’t already use one of these applications to manage your appointments, now is a great time to start, so you’ll be ready to sync when your iPhone arrives. If you choose not to use a calendar program, that’s OK. You’ll be able to enter appointments directly into the iPhone calendar.
iPhone is the first phone to come with a desktop-class email application. So now your phone can display rich HTML email with graphics and photos alongside the text. iPhone will even fetch your latest email every time you open the application and automatically retrieve your email on a set schedule, just like a computer does. iPhone works with the most popular email systems—including Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL, and .Mac Mail. If you’re not already using one of these services, now would be a great time to get an account. iTunes will make email setup on iPhone a breeze by automatically syncing the settings from email accounts stored in Mail on a Mac or Outlook on a PC. Don’t worry if you’re not on one of these email services; iPhone also works with almost any industry-standard POP3 and IMAP email system.
iPhone has a 2-megapixel camera and a gorgeous 3.5-inch display, so it’s a great way to enjoy and show off your digital photos. iPhone uses iTunes to sync your photos from iPhoto on a Mac or Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Photoshop Album, or any picture folder on a PC. You can carry thousands of photos on iPhone, but you can start by creating an album or two with 50 to 100 of your favorite photos, so that when you first sync your iPhone, you’ll be ready to quickly show off some of your best shots.
iPhone is the best iPod ever. Its beautiful, 3.5-inch widescreen display allows you to easily enjoy the music, TV shows, and movies you have in your iTunes library. If you already use iTunes, you can start getting ready for iPhone by creating a playlist of a few hundred of your favorite songs. If you don’t have iTunes, now is a good time to download it and start a music and video library. That way, when you sync your iPhone with iTunes, you’ll be able to take your favorite music, as well as a few of your TV shows and movies, with you wherever you go.
To set up your iPhone, you’ll need an account with Apple’s iTunes Store. If you already have an iTunes account, make sure you know your account name and password. If you don’t have an account, you should set one up now to save time later. To set up an account, launch iTunes, select the iTunes Store, and click the Sign In button in the upper right corner of iTunes. Sign in and you’re ready to go.
Apple has rolled out their first three launch date commercials for iPhone.
The ads show off music and movie playing, maps, photo management, reading email, browsing the Web, and using the phone to make and receive calls. Click below to view the ads.
Never Been an iPod ad:
How To:
Calamari:
Read more about the June 29 iPhone launch from MarketWatch here.
Canon has announced their new PowerShot TX1 which will pack 7.1 megapixel stills and 720p HD video recording into an Elph-sized form factor. TX1 builds-in optical image stabilization and a 10x optical zoom as well.
Read more on Engadget or visit Digital Photography Review for the spec list.
Though I don’t particularly care for the styling, the tech in this digicam is impressive. I’m a long time Canon Elph user (currently on my fourth Elph, having given older models to family members as I upgraded over the years). I’ve also recently begun looking for a worthy, HD-capable, HDD- or SD-based replacement for my aging Sony MiniDV camcorder.
I can’t wait to try the TX1 out!
There have been a lot of so-so and a few really great articles on iPhone in the week since it was launched. What follows are my favorite blog posts, articles, and videos covering iPhone in week one.
David Pogue published an early first pass in his “Some Hands-On Time With the iPhone” after spending about an hour hands-on with an iPhone prototype the day Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced it at MacWorld. He followed that up with answers to a wide variety of reader questions in “The Ultimate iPhone FAQ” and “The Ultimate iPhone FAQ list, Part 2“.
Time covered iPhone’s development with “Apple’s New Calling: The iPhone“. Doubt after reading that one that Jobs is a bit paranoid? Read Fortune’s piece on “How Apple kept its iPhone secrets” to assuage yourself of that misgiving. Bogus prototypes to mislead employees and disguised software to hide the interface from development partners. You name it, and Jobs and company probably did it to keep iPhone hush hush the last couple of years. Good thing or bad thing, you be the judge.
What about the negatives of the device itself?
Lack of third generation wireless (3G) has been picked at by Nokians and others. Read my take in “WiFi is more important than HSDPA for early iPhone success“, which was picked for the Carnival of the Mobilists carnival #58.
Alan Reiter did a great job slicing and dicing the (lack of) imaging capabilities in his “Apple iPhone might be revolutionary, but definitely not for wireless imaging“. 2 MPix cellcam support, average at best. No flash or lens cover, argh. No video, OMG! One of my biggest disappointments with the first iPhone model.
And that leads naturally to my other really big disappointment: Lack of developer support.
As Jobs put it to the New York Times:
We define everything that is on the phone
Oh Steve, does your hubris have no end? Wait, I guess it doesn’t, as NYT reports Jobs continued with:
“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”
What about the hundreds of millions of Java ME handsets running mobile apps, Steve? Don’t most of those devices work on a regular basis? Would the mobile Java ecosystem have been possible if it’d been “a more controlled environment”? No way. Open wins in the end.
If you agree, consider signing the iPhone Third-Party Application Support Petition and blog your take far and wide.
Looking for more reasons to dislike iPhone? Check out “10 Ways the Nokia N800 is Better Than Apple’s iPhone“. Or if you’re just looking for more about iPhone and don’t know where to start, visit “All Things iPhone” for a running commentary of what’s known, unknown, and speculated.
Perhaps Stephen Colbert summed up our first week love-hate relationship with iPhone best in giving Apple a “double wag of the finger” while stating:
You can count me out as a customer, until you send me one for free
Watch the video for the true word from week one:
Only one week in, and it’s already been an interesting ride!
Apple has launched their official site for iPhone.
Their splash image gives you a better feel for size and layout:
The speculation and rumors and leaks were basically right:
Steve Jobs has announced the Apple iPhone. (Click here to discuss in the BillDay.com iPhone forum)
Discuss here. More deets to come. More images from the keynote below.
[Tip o' the hat to Engadget's keynote coverage]
I was recently contacted by Victoria at NowPublic about them using one of my Flickr photos, of moonrise over Lake Tahoe, for a story on a fault line lurking underneath Lake Tahoe.
I was very happy to ok the usage. Strangely enough, clicking the link to ok the use took me through an account creation process. This got me started thinking: Was this request to use my photo really new-user-trolling in disguise?
I realize that because of NowPublic’s model, creating a new account to ok usage probably makes good sense. But it appeared that that was the only way for me to ok usage. In other words, everytime anyone gives their ok to use a photo or video, they become a new member of the NowPublic community. Tick one more in the “user” column for the site.
This has me wondering how many other business models in the Web 2.0 world might have hidden agendas, even if NowPublic’s doesn’t. A whole new outlook on the virility of social networking…
Anyone else been asked to share a photo or other resource and had similar thoughts? Well, whatever the motive, it’s a great photo if I do say so myself… 
I like to travel and take pictures in my gratuitous free time.
Sun and Nokia didn’t give me a lot of free time, but they did give me travel. So I did my best to squeeze in a camera or two and take as many pics as possible while out and about in the big beautiful world.
I’ve been meaning to blog the best of these pics for some time now, but just haven’t found, you guessed it, time to do it. Fear not, though, because today I finally allow the small but mighty Flickr badge to fulfill its promise on top of my sidebar, thus ensuring my latest and greatest pictures are available for all to see. Thank goodness for Web 2.0!
Up next on my to do list: Find the time to take more pictures. Blog about a photo now and then. I promise I’ll try, I really will.
PC Magazine and others have picked up Nokia’s “Top photographers spearhead Nokia Nseries See New Competition” press release.
The gist: You can submit up to five cellcam pics that you’ve taken using a megapixel+ camera phone to the contest. Judges include five widely known photographers who will help pick the best snaps of the lot.
Get picked, and you can win a Nokia N90 or other cool handset, time on a photo shoot with one of the pros, and have your pic featured in various media including future Nokia handset wallpaper the world over.
Yes, this is all obviously a blatant marketing maneuver to sell more Nseries phones, but who cares if you win, right? I’m going to enter some photos right now. (I guess there’s another perk from my job change last fall…)
I try to get outside for a 2-3 mile walk every day. This gives me a chance to clear my mind, get a little exercise, and enjoy being offline and out in the wilds for a little while.
One of the best things about these walks is getting to watch as the seasons pass from one to the next. Plants sprout, grow, flower, and fade.
Squirrels are born and grow up to put away nuts for winter as the first leaves wither and begin to fall.
Through it all I think about how everything, even storms and misfortune, fits together. It helps me keep ahold of what’s really important versus all of life’s distractions. Get out and soak up Fall to see what I mean.
Everybody’s been blogging about the Palm+Microsoft lovefest so I thought I’d cover two other new devices that might be important and more widely used in the long run.
Both Motorola and Nokia announced 2 megapixel cellcams yesterday. They both support memory cards and various digital audio formats, promising to be good cellpods as well as phones and cameras.
Motorola Razr V3x has fixed a lot of the Razr V3 shortcomings I blogged about previously. No mention of whether V3x will support at least EDGE if not WCDMA, but I’m guessing both since the lower resolution of its two cameras, an inside-the-flip VGA cam, is meant for video conferencing. It supports a 2MPix external camera with LED flash, hopefully of good enough quality so that I can finally check off “quality cellcam” from my must-have list. It doesn’t appear to support WiFi, and I think I’m dreaming if I really hope to see FRS in a handset, but the TransFlash memory slot allows you to expand storage up to 512MB. This should allow for more digital music and photos by far than Papa V3.
Nokia 3250 launches Nokia’s new XpressMusic line of digital audio player oriented cellpods. According to the press release, XpressMusic guarantees a phone will provide:
Dedicated music keys, use of a standard 3.5mm jack, and USB 2 support are all spot on. I’m not sure I like the rotating bottom which swaps keypad for music controls, but I’m willing to wait til I hold one in my own two hands to pass final judgement. Other 3250 features include Series 60, the previously mentioned 2MPix digicam, stereo FM radio, GPRS and EDGE, the very cool ability to share playlists using SMS or Bluetooth, and support for microSD cards up to 1GB in size. (Note: I believe this makes 3250 the first announced Nokia handset to use microSD instead of RS-MMC.) Details can be had from the Nokia 3250 presentation, 3250 data sheet, and the XpressMusic backgrounder.
It appears that both Nokia and Motorola are finally getting their acts together with higher resolution cellcams and standard, expandable memory. It will be interesting to see if those trends continue across other new as-yet-unannounced handsets from the dualing duo. And if the audio quality of 3250 is as good as promised, Apple+Moto may need to innovate new ROKR’s in double time.
Below are a few more of my photos of Rita that didn’t make it into last night’s post.
Today Rita’s cloud cover has moved east and we have sunny skies here in Oklahoma. People in Texas and Louisiana are assessing the damage and talking about the Texodus and what needs to be done better next time. Further north and east Rita’s squally remnants are dumping rain and causing severe weather as she continues to weaken.
Let’s hope the experts are wrong and Stan’s not headed our way anytime soon.
Hurricane Rita hurled clouds across much of the central US today as it weakened into a tropical storm, then a depression. Where I was in northeastern Oklahoma (marked on the Google Earth image at right with a pin placemark) the cloud cover provided a spectacular, fiery sunset (see bottom picture). Click on either picture to enlarge or leave comments in my Flickr photostream (subscribe via RSS or Atom).
Additional pictures and video of Rita continued pouring in from around the Web:
This has started me thinking about better ways to represent geolocation where a photo is taken or video is recorded both in the metadata of the picture or movie file and also on the Web and in 3D applications such as Google Earth. I’m going to delve into the possibilities of geoblogging future photos via Flickr.
And that reminds me, somebody really needs to start selling a high end consumer camera with integrated GPS so that pictures can be automatically “location stamped” just as they are already date stamped. Another blog entry for another time, I suppose.
With Hurricane Rita making landfall in Texas and Louisiana tonight, I’ve been scouring the Web for everything and anything to shed more light on what’s going on this instant. Thought I’d share some top picks for tracking the storm and its effects in case others in Net land were in the same proverbial boat.
The National Hurricane Center and Accuweather provide some of the greatest detail and most up to date information available. Go there first. If you’re looking for a reliable site year in and year out for hurricane updates but find NHC and Accuweather a bit difficult to parse (both are very data dense), try CNN’s Hurricane site. It provides fairly up to date news and tracking information. Just about everything you find on air on CNN, you can find on their site. A bonus feature: A “storm names” section at the bottom of the main page which shows all Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific (i.e. possible US) named storms.
Next up, WeatherServer.net’s Hurricane Center is providing live video from TV stations and audio from fire scanners in the landfall areas (Houston, New Orleans, etc.).
Examples: Click here to watch three Louisiana stations simultaneously or here for Houston ABC affiliate KTRK channel 13. If you want the latest, on-the-ground developments, this is your one stop shop.
Prefer to track things in your aggregator or feed reader? Ask and ye shall receive:
Finally, in the “truly amazing even if you understand how it works” category, I’d highly recommend checking out the latest imagery, predictions, sea temperatures, and more compiled and overlaid on a 3D Earth from the hard working members of the Google Earth Community. Visit the Community’s Current Events board especially the Hurricane Rita data compilation post. Power user Frank Taylor has collected some of the best Google Earth Rita links in a recent blog post. Get Google Earth if you don’t already have it, then click here to load Taylor’s compilation. Be sure to experiment with turning the various Rita tracking info, satellite photos, and other layers on/off, clicking on the many embedded links for additional information, etc. Truly an incredible tool!
Wherever you are and however much attention you’re paying to Rita coming ashore tonight, say a prayer for the people in southeast TX and southwest LA. And then visit Redcross.org in the coming days to find out what help, if any, is needed after the storm.
I’ve been reading the deluge of reports and press releases from the 3GSM World Congress 2005 which wrapped up yesterday in Cannes. Expanding upon last year’s limited Sun and Intel & Nokia 3GSM posts, I thought this year I’d summarize the major wireless developments via links to various 3GSM bits from around the Web.
Starting with the official site and then jumping around per my whimsy:
Please let me know what I’ve missed via the Comments link.
Reuters reports on the photo industry’s predictions that US digital camera sales growth will slow in 2005.
While sales increased more than 30% per year in each of the last three years, the industry expects 2005 sales growth to be around 13%. It’s still growth, mind you, but the hockey stick is apparently starting to flatten out. Other stats to note:
No specific mention of the cellcam effect on any of this.
I’ve been using the LG L1400 for the last couple of months and I’m longing to have a Series 60 or at least MIDP 2 powerhouse back as my main mobile.
Stacked against the L1400 for developers:
You can’t test any ideas you might have for Nokia’s new Python implementation. No MIDP 2 support severely constrains MIDlet hacking, too. Worse than that is the lack of socket support, which means none of the open source J2ME SSH clients you might normally use to firefight on your server will work. The lack of USB or Bluetooth synching makes installation of MIDlets much more painful, especially for a developer who needs to install fairly frequently. The limited memory size (somewhere above 61KB but below 85KB based upon MIDlets I’ve tried to install) renders many potential MIDP 1.0 installs impossible.
Comparing the L1400 to Nokia’s latest Series 60 MIDP 2 handsets wouldn’t be fair, but heck, even my trusty old Nokia 3650 beats the LG in most of the above areas, and the 3650’s been available for a couple of years now!
OK, so that’s the bad news for developers. The good news for consumers:
Verdict: Non-developers should consider buying the L1400 if it meets their requirements. Developers, there be dragons here, enter only to better understand what your average US mobile user can and cannot do with their phone. Hackers, steer clear.
No doubt about it, Neven Vision is on a media roll lately.
Wired featured their facial recognition software for cellcams in its December 2004 issue, and now TheFeature interviews namesake Dr. Harmut Neven about his plans for “Hyperlinking the World”, visual Google style.
If Dr. Neven and his company have their way, we’ll all soon be sending cellcam pics to Neven Vision powered visual search servers. Example: Snap a photo of a painting and MMS it to his server. The server responds with information about the painting, maybe an audio-visual narration. TheFeature delves into some of the difficulties with constructing and searching a world size visual database, while the Wired piece focuses more on the biometric and security applications of the technology.
Whatever comes of this, I can’t help but think that the issue of whether or not we non-celebrities own our “public image” is about to be forced. I’m a big cellcam fan, but I don’t know if I’ll appreciate it when any cop or TSA employee (or city worker, or man on the street?) can snap my picture and within a few seconds know everything public there is to know about me. Privacy is about to take on an entirely different meaning.
Am I paranoid? Or concerned for good reason? Let me know what you think by leaving a comment.
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