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iPhone 4: Cameras, data plans and a Wi-Fi fail
By now you've probably taken in plenty of info on the new iPhone 4. John Moe at Future Tense got into some of the juicier details in his latest blog:
You may have heard a bit about this yesterday, considering the news replaced oxygen as the most common thing in the air. Ars Technica has a good run down. A few top level points: much higher resolution, built in HD video camera, video editing software iMovie now on the iPhone, iBookstore now present on iPhone, more aggressive push into mobile advertising with iAds program, and a video conferencing feature called Face Time that lets you have on camera conversations with someone else (provided they're on an iPhone 4 as well and you're both on a Wifi network and not a 3g data network).
A few surprises I had yesterday:
- Where were the computers? As near as I can figure, Apple still does make home computers. I bought one recently myself. But they weren't mentioned at all yesterday. No new laptops, no updates to MacBook Air as rumored. Even the iPod got a mention in passing.
- Google remains the default browser, Bing also brought on. Apple is going to play this as giving the user the most options, and that's a fair point. But Apple is very much at war with Google and its increasingly popular Android mobile device platform right now. Jobs praised Bing and Microsoft but did not kick Google off the iPhone or even move it out of number one position. As a result, a handful of MSFT loyalists may switch settings but it's mostly a Google experience.
- Nothing on home entertainment. I get that it was iPhone's day but I was wondering if we'd hear about a cloud-based iTunes option or a rebrand/relaunch of Apple TV. Nope.
- Netflix and the data plans. Jobs announced a free Netflix app (Android's getting one soon too) which means tons of streaming movies and TV on your iPhone. This is interesting in light of AT&T's new restricted data plans. You do a lot of Netflixing, that low use plan doesn't seem to cover you quite as well. Follow the money, my friends. Follow the money.
CNET put together some footage of Apple CEO Steve Jobs struggling with the Wi-Fi during the iPhone 4G demo:
And here's our recap of the iPhone 4 unveiling at yesterday's WWDC.
RE: <i>"Where were the computers? As near as I can figure, Apple still does make home computers...they weren’t mentioned at all yesterday. No new laptops, no updates to MacBook Air as rumored." </i>
I think it's important to note that this is the WWDC(World Wide Developers Conference) These guys are all about the code baby. The actual hardware(while impossible to ignore) is means to an end for most developers. This is about the OS as a driving force. Admittedly the iPhone announcement is big news and gets everyone all hot and bothered, but pay attention and you see most aspects of the "iPhone announcement" were centered around the software that drives it, rather than the iPhone itself.
Yes my friend, they DO still make computers,(I trust you are enjoying your newest addition) but lest we forget, they dropped "computers" from the letterhead a while back.
I watched Steve Jobs’ demo of the new iPhone. It’s misleading the way you characterized his demo ‘failure.’ It turns out that at the time he was attempting to access the NYT website on the new iPhone, there were 570 (that’s right, five hundred seventy!) WiFi access points broadcasting within the auditorium, due to all of the reporters that were live-blogging the event. Hundreds of WiFi access points means massive amounts of radio interference. The truth is, any device, made by any company, would have had a challenge with Internet access in that environment. Actual journalism would have resulted in a report that told the truth about the incident, rather than misleading your listeners into thinking that the problem lay with Apple’s new iPhone.
All I ask is that you tell the whole story, even if the whole story is less ‘ironic,’ so that I can make my own decisions about the subject matter.
