The 2-day verdict on the iPhone 4

Upgrading from the iPhone 3G, as I did on Saturday, it is immediately obvious that the iPhone 4 has two standout features. Firstly, the new display is absolutely stunning. Whatever you might think of Jobs' marketing or the argument about the Retina Display, there's no denying the fact that it is an exceptionally good screen, looking for all the world like an illuminated, if shrunken, page from a glossy magazine; it really is that good.

Secondly, iPhone 4 is quick. Very quick. Really fantastically quick. All the little niggles you might have had about apps opening slowly or updates taking a while or the keyboard occasionally being unresponsive (all of which were regular, if minor, issues on my 3G) have been smoothed away by the improvements in iOS4 and the brutal speed of the A4 processor.

There are a ton of other improvements, of course, but if you're looking for reasons to upgrade, those are the biggies; the rest (better camera, FaceTime, industrial design etc.) are nice to have and make iPhone 4 a hugely capable product, but in comparison they are just the icing on the cake.

Conclusion; upgrade as soon as you can.

Fareham's O2 Store, early morning

It's ridiculously hot in here, but they've got iPhone 4s (16Gb only) in stock and the queue isn't too long. With any luck I'll be heading home soon with a new toy.

Acquiring an iPhone 4 - how not to do it

I had a plan, and the plan was sound; get up early on iphone release day, arrive at the O2 store by 8am, buy an iPhone 4. Execution was rubbish, unfortunately, as I just couldn't get up early enough to avoid the traffic and the net result is that I'm still using my 2 year old iPhone 3G.

So what now? The O2 website has a list of stores holding stock (http://stock.o2.co.uk) that updates several times a day. The mix of stores with stock changes at each update so they are obviously receiving a trickle of deliveries; the name of the game is to check the site and head to the closest stockist as soon as possible. That's what I'll be doing tomorrow, 'cos they've got the 16Gb version in Winchester. Tally ho!

Subtle Changes You May (Or May Not) Notice in iOS 4’

Every time Apple release a new operating system they make a host of minor incremental improvements to various parts of the system and iOS 4 is no exception. Nik Fletcher has a list of the changes here: http://nikf.org/post/722500438/8-subtle-changes-you-may-or-may-not-notice-in-ios-4

Apple's Bookstore - Any Good?

iBooks is a great app. Slandered by many, written off as inferior to Amazon's Kindle, it actually turns out to be a really good app for consuming text. Not only that, the recent upgrade to allow PDF reading opens up whole new classes of documents for iPad consumption - technical documents (many companies publish specifications or design notes in PDF), sales brochures, self-published books, work manuals, magazines, newsletters; the list is endless.

The bookstore is not so good, but it does at least appear to be improving quickly. When I first picked up my iPad there were very few titles available (no Tolkien, for example, and almost none of the current authors I like to read) but this is being rectified (Tolkien is now well, if not comprehensively, represented) and I'm almost ready to make my first purchase.

On that note, it's interesting that lots of titles are priced at or above their Amazon price. It might be that publishers are simply hiking eBook prices to hit the early adopters as hard as possible but I wonder also if this indicates extremely low distribution costs for physical books (if a paperback that retails at £7.99 costs only £1.50, say, to print and ship, there's not much room to lower costs for the eBook version).

In fact, is an eBook actually a book at all? Sounds like a daft question, but in the UK books are exempt from VAT, software and online services are not, so it's actually a very important question. If eBooks aren't defined as books by HMRC (who are, I think, responsible for collecting VAT) then they're subject to a sales tax of 17.5% tax that doesn't affect their physical counterparts and might, therefore, explain some of the price difference.

So, are there any bargains on Apple's bookstore? Well, sort of. Peter V. Brett's The Painted Man, for example, is available for £3.99, matching Amazon's paperback price (excluding shipping, of course). Bram Stoker's Dracula is free (and if you've never read it please check it out - it's an excellent example of slow-burning tension and horror) or, if you prefer to pay for your out-of-copyright literature, £4.99 or £5.49. Most books appear not to be price competitive with their physical counterparts so you're paying for convenience; personal circumstances will determine the value of convenience.

Conclusion? It's a good start. The bookstore is reasonably well stocked (much better, it has to be said, than Amazon's UK Kindle store, which is non-existent - you have to buy your Kindle books from the US in dollars) with over 26,000 titles, the prices are high but convenience is considerable and delivery immediate. As new books are added and older texts fall in price, it will become, I suspect, a serious force, especially in the UK while Amazon refuse to play.

iOS 4 applications - looking good

And so, having been able to upgrade the first of my apps to the new iOS 4 version (I chose Evernote) I can confirm that it works perfectly. I therefore attribute the earlier lack of functioning apps to incompatibility with the new operating system. How long till all have been upgraded? It might be worth checking that your must-use apps have been released in a compatible version before upgrading your OS...

First impressions of iOS 4

The first thing you notice is that the upgrade process for iOS 4 (on my 16Gb iPhone 3G) can take a while. After about nine hours, and having interrupted installation of the apps in order to go to work, it is noticeable that I don't have any settings, contacts, music, videos, favourites, photos, texts or, possibly because of the interruption, working apps. What I do have is a working phone running iOS 4 that is currently syncing contacts from Exchange and which I can use, so not too bad.

Any improvements? Folders work really nicely although it is quite easy to drop apps in the wrong place creating strange groupings of apps (reorganising your phone on a moving train might have something to do with this). The combined email inbox is good and now sports "To" and "Cc" icons to indicate direct and copied email. The phone feels no slower and, occasionally, faster than it did running 3.1.3. Text replace work just as well as it does on the iPad.

The next step is to run a full sync and recover my missing media, but that will have to wait till this evening, after which more feedback.

Update: there are loads of application updates waiting to be downloaded as soon as a decent 3G signal pops up. They all list "iOS 4 compatibility" or something similar, the lack of which in my current apps probably explains their failure to launch.

So you want to know what's in iOS 4?

Well, you probably don't, but here are the release notes anyway. Enjoy!

iOS 4 Software Update

This update contains over 100 new features, including the following:

• Multitasking support for third-party apps*
- Multitasking user interface to quickly move between
apps
- Support for audio apps to play in the background
- VoIP apps can receive and maintain calls in the
background or when device is asleep
- Apps can monitor location and take action while
running in the background
- Alerts and messages can be pushed to apps using
push and local notifications
- Apps can complete tasks in the background
• Folders to better organise and access apps
• Home screen Wallpaper*
• Mail improvements
- Unified inbox to view emails from all accounts in one
place
- Fast inbox switching to quickly switch between
different email accounts
- Threaded messages to view multiple emails from the
same conversation
- Attachments can be opened with compatible third-
party apps
- Search results can now be filed or deleted
- Option to select size of photo attachments
- Messages in the outbox can be edited or deleted
• Support for iBooks and iBookstore (available from the
App Store)
• Photo and Camera improvements
- 5x digital zoom when taking a photo**
- Tap to focus during video recording**
- Ability to sync Faces from iPhoto
- Geo-tagged photos appear on a map in Photos
• Ability to create and edit playlists on device
• Calendar invitations can be sent and accepted wirelessly
with supported CalDAV servers
• Support for MobileMe calendar sharing
• Suggestions and recent searches appear during a web
search
• Searchable SMS/MMS messages**
• Spotlight search can be continued on web and Wikipedia
• Enhanced location privacy
- New Location Services icon in the status bar
- Indication of which apps have requested your location
in the last 24 hours
- Location Services can be toggled on or off for
individual apps
• Automatic spellcheck
• Support for Bluetooth keyboards*
• iPod out to navigate music, podcasts and audiobooks
through an iPod interface with compatible cars
• Support for iTunes gifting of apps
• Wireless notes syncing with IMAP-based mail accounts
• Persistent Wi-Fi connection to receive push notifications*
• New setting for turning on/off mobile (cellular) data only**
• Option to display the character count while composing
new SMS/MMS**
• Visual Voicemail messages can be kept locally even if
they have been deleted from the server**
• Control to lock portrait orientation*
• Audio playback controls for iPod and third-party audio
apps*
• New languages, dictionaries and keyboards
• Accessibility enhancements*
• Bluetooth improvements
• Better data protection using the device passcode as an
encryption key* (Requires full restore.)
• Support for third-party Mobile Device Management
solutions
• Enables wireless distribution of enterprise applications
• Exchange Server 2010 compatibility
• Support for multiple Exchange ActiveSync accounts
• Support for Juniper Junos Pulse and Cisco AnyConnect
SSL VPN apps (available from the App Store)
• More than 1,500 new developer APIs
• Bug fixes

Microsoft Docs - iPad Killer?

It's not supposed to be, of course. Docs.com (http://docs.com) is Microsoft's answer to Google Docs but with the added advantage of compatibility with Office. On a PC it probably works really well (don't know, haven't tried because Office makes it redundant) but in Safari on my iPad it doesn't. And I don't mean that a couple of features don't work quite as they should, I mean that Docs.com crashes Safari so hard that it completely stops working and the only way to recover is to close the browser and follow a link to another site from within another application.

I had hoped that Docs.com might be an alternative to Pages and Numbers (which seem a bit limited on the iPad, especially if you want to share documents with a PC) but no, it turns out Microsoft has inadvertently built an iPad killer; "load our site" they snigger "and we'll kill your iPad". Maybe version 2.0 will be better, but until then, or until iWork can share files without requiring iTunes, I'll stick with plain text in Evernote (www.evernote.com) or email and do the formatting on a PC.

Rene Ritchie’s iOS 4 Walkthrough

If you want to know what you'll be getting from iOS 4, take a look at this walkthrough of what's new and what isn't. http://www.tipb.com/2010/06/14/ios-4-walkthrough/

Do we like Apple? I think we do!

Hi. My name is James and I'm addicted to Apple's products (sort of). I invite you to read my blog where, possibly, you'll find the history, the future and the cure for the habit.

Let's address the third part first, since it's the easiest to deal with; I'm going to keep feeding the habit. After all, I enjoy it, it gives my brother something to complain about (he's never really got over Apple's software-eject feature for 3.5" floppy discs on their early Macs) and it keeps me off the streets (where, you may rest assured, I'd be fermenting popular revolt if I had the time).

Describing the history isn't all that tricky either. My first contact with Apple was a university programming course using Modula II on the Macintosh Classic in 1993. That went reasonably well but there was no love lost between me and the Classic; the nine inch monochrome screen seemed like a backward step after the full-colour Amiga 1200 I was used to. I didn't really touch any Apple hardware after that until the wife acquired an iPod (20Gb U2 Special Edition) in late 2004 and I started ripping CDs into iTunes.

Another long break followed as all sort of factors (not least a lack of desirable products) conspired to prevent me from increasing our Apple collection. During this time our music collection moved, via iTunes, from the living room to the computer and use of the CD player steadily declined.

In 2008 this all changed with the arrival of the iPhone 3G. Finally, here was a product that was desirable (to me, rather than to the wife), affordable and practical. In late July, after struggling to find stocks of the iPhone, we splurged, buying an Apple TV (160Gb), an iPod Touch (for the wife) and an iPhone (for me) in a single day. It was an orgy of fruity goodness and it finally killed our use of the living room CD player and signalled the end of the DVD player; silver disc spinners were on their way out.

So that takes us through to 2009, which is a good place to take a break. In a forthcoming post I'll give you a quick overview of the rest of our Apple collection, some hints about where we plan to go in the future and a few comments on third party accessories. It's thrilling stuff, so stay tuned!

Entry one - just testing

As the title says, just testing