Iphone 4.0 official video
apple.com
apple.com
Just like Mac books, the iPhone will have a small market share but will be very profitable for Apple.
Not IPS, but then it is nearly 2 years old. 311 ppi.
There's been a bunch that have been in the 200-300 range but apparently they don't count as 300 is the magic number (assuming you are holding your phone a specific, yet unspecified, distance from your face).
A feature which won't be included in Windows Phone Series 7, and a feature which frankly sucks on my Android phone.
1. http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_One
A 100,000:1 contrast ratio doesn't do you any good when you can't even see anything in sunlight. OLED may give a great contrast ratio, but any direct light (ex: being outside during the day, a common usage senario) means that you can't see anything anyways.
Apple's ideas may look obvious and their decisions my look easy to decide after the fact, however, the same can be said for a winning chess move after its made. This is an easy fallacy to make.
"If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." - Isaac Newton
While many believe that was the sentiment being expressed by Newton in his letter to Hooke, some researchers have suggested that he was actually using the phrase "on the shoulders of giants" as a veiled insult of Robert Hooke, who was a rather short man. Newton had a reputation as somewhat of a petty and vindictive man whose ego clashed with those of his rivals in the scientific and mathematical communities. One of these rivals was Robert Hooke, who had been involved in a long-running fued with Newton over which one had discovered the inverse square law. Although Newton's letter to Hooke appeared courteous on the surface, some historians have concluded that he cleverly employed the phrase "on the shoulders of giants" to ridicule Hooke's lack of physical stature and imply that he lacked intellectual stature as well.
I'll just take your word that it's really shiny.
Don’t know what’s going on with QuickTime – maybe a fallback if your browser won’t play h.264? Does it work on Chrome without QuickTime?
(– edit: Three people [who downvoted me] seem to think that formulating a reasonable hypothesis and asking reasonable questions because of conflicting information is already too much Apple love. Or maybe they just think I’m lazy for not doing the research myself? Oh, well. Check out my other grandkid comment in this thread to see how testing my hypothesis worked out.)
edit: forgot the link [1] http://www.twotoasts.de/
They seem to do some evil browser sniffing (I have no confirmation but that’s how it looks) and indeed use QuickTime as a fallback if you use any other browser than Safari.
Apple, listen: Thou Shalt Detect Features, Not Browsers! :)
I have midori identifying as safari - it works well enough for google to at least not give me crap for using something different, and I still see the "you need quicktime to view this" stuff.
(For me the video was quite low quality, possibly it doesn't fake the bitrate management stuff correctly and just gives you the lowest quality available)
I think that feature is going to be a monster commercial success that every other phone immediately copies.
Will probably be the only point that we hear about on the local news / etc rather than Steve's consolidated 8-points . . .
Second, the first UMTS mobile i got had video conferencing, that's really a long time ago (Motorola V980 btw.) and many UMTS phones shipped with the second camera for years now. Yet, noone ever used it. Atleast i've never seen or heard of someone, although technically i could have done that with most people i know for years.
Is it that this feature was never available in the U.S.? Or why is this news over there?
Also, i've probably overread some feature that distinguishes it from the old UMTS way.
I mean, it's not that hard to pick a contact and instead of "call" press "video call".
Not that I particularly want video chat, and I would be surprised if it does catch on that much. A nice aside every now and again, but it is not going to replace what we have now.
In Europe where wifi is something you have to search for and 3G is something which is everywhere, this renders the feature absolutely useless.
Even so, I'm pretty sure Apple has thought this through, making it quick and easy to discover if someone is online, and even invite them through push notifications.
They did mention that they "had some details to work out" with the operators, which means that we will probably see video calls on 3G at some point in the future.
Except you have to call first to verify that
whoever you are calling is on wifi.
In Europe where wifi is something you have to search for and 3G
is something which is everywhere, this renders the feature
absolutely useless.
Edit: phrasing.
In addition, two of the three carriers offer unlimited Free wifi to these access points with the iPhone plan, even if you're not an ISP customer. So you're doubly covered.
I checked the iPhone plans of the UK and Germany, and they both offer free Wi-fi access with the iPhone plans.
Regarding your other point, I think it was clear from the UI of the phone call that a voice chat icon will appear when video chat is available and you can switch to it at any point.
Otherwise, being able to video chat over wifi -- skype (and ichat, though ichat seems much more picky about firewalls) has done that for years, too. Yeah, true, now you'll be able to do it without your laptop (but still have wifi), but it's not like it's some kind of revolutionary leap...
When they do video calls, why didn't they just enable skype and instantly have a much bigger userbase and also that would potentially include videocalls between all platforms skype runs on.
Edit: Well, ok. The former iphones had no second camera.
Technologies need to mature and reach a level of performance and usability before they go mainstream. This is what's happening with iPhone & videoconferencing now. This is it's time.
So, for those video calls people have to use iPhones at both ends although it would be easy to do that interoperable? I am wondering what the word "open" meant on one of Steves slides sigh
AFAIK, H.264 is an open standard. That it's patented and not royalty free doesn't make it closed, it simply makes it non-free. Another example is the G.729 voice codec, which has lots of open source implementations, but to use it you will have to buy a license. Open source PBX vendors like Digium provide licenses to those that need them. It's not an ideal situation, which is why G.729 is not as popular in the open source world, but it's still better than Skypes proprietary protocol.
I thought I caught them referring to something that wasn't as an "Open Standard" in the keynote but I've not had time to check, but certainly they've been very careful not to previously. (I think the phrasing might have been "open industry standard").
But in, for example, Thoughts on Flash, the phrase "open standard" is used repeatedly to refer to HTML5, CSS, Javascript etc. and portrayed as a very good quality for these things to have but when H.264 is mentioned it is referred to just as an "industry standard".
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Also Skype, along with Broadcom and Xiph, are working on a royalty-free voice codec at IETF and have offered their codecs and patents as the basis for that work. For video Skype use VP7 and Google hasn't made any big announcement but it's clear they're positioning VP8 as a Video Chat codec as well as for Web Video within the WebM container. I see Apple's announcement mostly as a half-hearted spoiler for that, kind of like Microsoft's OOXML versus ODF.
Just look at Skype, it's really popular, also with video calls. Video conferencing for business is also big enough that Cisco bought Tandberg for $3B. It just has to be good enough and easy enough to use that people won't have to think twice about it.
The interesting thing here is that they are touting open standards (SIP, SRTP etc). If this gets traction outside of the Apple-sphere (which must be their intention), it might spell trouble for Skype as a proprietary, closed platform.
If wifi calling "just works", then this, combined with Skype being demoed as a multitasking app, _might_ be a big "fuck you" to the telecom operators. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it'll be interesting to follow.
Apple's pretty good at taking old good ideas that never took off because of poor execution and doing them right.
It had slots and you could turn it into anything you wanted (including a PC-compatible), something you couldn't do with later products but that's another story.
Judging from the videos, the iPhone 4G uses hardware to encode/decode the VGA video in H.264, which makes for low latency and high quality of that part in the processing chain, and by using standards like STUN/TURN, allows for mostly direct (p2p) connections between IP endpoints, thus using the best possible path for the media, with the result being low latency.
It will be interesting to see if Apple can coax the carriers into QoS for the video, once it travels over their 3G networks.
And it's also interesting that Apple chose pure SIP, rather then the IMS SIP that carriers have been trying to cook up over the last (almost) decade.
[EDIT] Digging some more, Apple is working with the carriers to get their networks ready for video calling, which probably means that they will offer QoS, for a price. Prepare to pay for the privilege...
I think video conferencing is a great feature no doubt, but it's largely too intrusive for most people. Certainly making it more accessible and standardized will help some however, even amongst the most savvy early adopters (and MM+ of college students with MacBooks), video chatting has remained a niche.
Old people are slow to change and sometimes never do. As we get old, we've got to remember that the failure of a product to change our ways of behaving is not proof that it will not, over the long run, change everything. Our resistance to change will be solved actuarially.
I do agree about age and change.
Because the camera is located on the display bezel, and not in the middle of the screen where the video window sits, you can't ever make full eye contact with the person you're talking to. It makes the entire conversation feel a little "off".
I've always thought this was a subtle yet important reason computer-based video chat never took off, and was super excited by patents that hinted that Apple was going to put the camera behind the display.
Hopefully the new iPhone 4 camera is close enough to the display to make eye contact possible.
So, in addition to just holding your phone further away, maybe everyone can aim their own phone's camera so that the image of them on the other phone has their eyes as close to the camera as possible. One might just find that people start gravitating to that "off center" camera aiming without thinking about it (since it would minimize the other person's eye-jitter). Anybody reading this done much hand-held video calling? Where are the thresholds on these variables?
So I'd say the iPhone is an improvement, at least.
Anyhow, how long do you think it will take your average female to get ready for a FaceTime phone call? It's for this and other behavioral issues that video calling will always be nice but never necessary. At least that's my prediction for the next 10 years.
ichat's firewall sensitivity and mac requirement means that i have yet to complete a single ichat video call. Skype just works, including video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GuBdvA7Qus
Looks like the squared edges serve a purpose!
Perhaps it's because it's a very obvious statement? Apple routinely purport its products are perfect, that every detail is a facet of the best craftsmanship on Earth, use gaping-mouth words ("sooo perfect") and giggles of joy. Apple markets its products as technology beyond cutting-edge: they are superhuman, perhaps built by aliens and bestowed upon us mortals, things that change our lives and do more than technology is ever expected to do.
I am not trying to exaggerate here for cheap comedic effect. I seriously believe anything less would be very not-Apple.
Is there an algorithm to figure out what will get downvoted? Or is it totally random?
"Company markets Product as if it is a Big Deal that people should Definitely Buy" is hardly an interesting or insightful observation.
In this case "they are idiots for caring so much about something I don't care for ".
It's nothing more than a smug putdown. It's like anti-intellectualism but for anti-quality or anti-effort.
Every time one of these videos comes out, a bunch of guys are paraded out, each one trying to imp Job's style, vocabulary, and delivery, but each one coming across as some guy trying to copy someone else, rather than exude their own sense of style and originality.
To be even less charitable and more cynical, it comes across as a bunch of corporate suits with succession on their minds, all believing that Job's unique style and power of persuasion are necessary to sustain Apple when he eventually steps down, and that the most likely candidate to succeed him will be someone who most effectively recreates those traits as CEO.
But if so, they miss the mark, in that those traits can't be copied. They can't exist if they're not authentic, if they don't originate from the strength of a unique individual's vision, passion, and frame. You don't get those by mimicking someone else in the hope of increasing your odds in the corporate succession game.
Without looking them all up on Wikipedia, I'm sure they are all highly accomplished in their own rights, driven and passionate about what they do, thankful to have amazing jobs at the coolest company in the universe (Google excepted; not taking sides, but that's a debate for another thread), and have even contributed to and influenced Steve Jobs' vision and direction at times.
But none of them is Steve Jobs, and never will be, and the harder they try the more obvious that is. Only Ive comes across as someone with as strong a sense of individuality and frame as Jobs, and that's because of all the execs, he tries the least to mimic Steve, if at all.
He has nothing to prove, having lead designed practically all of Apple's products since Steve returned to Apple, and acts like it. The difference is subtle, but to me, very apparent in videos like this.
EDIT: To unharsh on those guys a bit, they're much more successful than I, and probably 99% of all other human beings are at this point. So /salute to them for that.
But that makes me wonder even more why they seem to feel the need to try to recreate Jobs' style, instead of developing their own. Surely, to get where they are, they have an abundance of talent and a wealth of experience, all of which should contribute to a strong frame, and the lack of a need to copy someone else's.
To reduce Jobs down to the essentials, I think it's really his frame, and his ability to frame Apple's products, that is the crux of his RDF and marketing ability. But there are equally effective ways to accomplish that without aping his vocabulary (pro tip - only Jobs can use the word 'exciting' to describe Baudrillardian consumer products without a hint of irony or corporate BS jargon; no one else should even attempt it).
I wish these guys would realize that and find their own path, be their own person.
Is Ive a possible future CEO of Apple? Job’s successor? Is that at all plausible or possible? He doesn’t get much time on stage, in fact I can’t even remember when and if he ever was on stage last.
Pretty much everyone else you see in those videos is on stage quite often. They are doing ok, better than many execs of other companies would, but I think you are quite right: they are all pretty bland. Except Ive, that is.
Is that a totally stupid idea? Does it make any sense at all? Ive is obviously ‘only’ a hardware guy – but would that matter?
Maybe he is best left as Apple's lead industrial designer, and maybe that's what he loves and wants to do more than anything else.
Or maybe he also has the leadership skills, communication skills, vision, judgement, and business sense to succeed Jobs. I have no idea, and honestly don't ever expect to until years after the succession actually occurs.
I'm not an Apple investor either, so it's all academic to me anyway.
Ives is clearly the Chief Designer. And he's being called out for something.
My guess is that in the absence of Jobs 2.0, Jobs 1.0 is trying to inculcate a design-led culture within Apple, and sees Ives as the most likely successor to keep his particular design aesthetic front-and-centre. In this scenario, it doesn't matter too much who handles the business of marketing, manufacturing, and developing the products -- as long as they continue to be design-led and follow the same basic aesthetic goals. Which is not simply to make high-end PCs or smartphones, but to make stuff that is pretty and pleasant to use.
(Here on HN, we're mostly technophiles. It's important to remember that most of the public are not -- and they prefer beautiful objects to ugly but functional ones. Beauty is an important market, as Apple's market cap demonstrates ...)
If you're looking for the best captain for a ship, the job application should probably focus on abilities that supersede spreadsheet proficiency.
I'm not sure why the others don't seem to have as much of the latter, unless it's because they only managed the team that built the OS or the A4 or whatnot, instead of actually coding or designing it themselves.
Of course, Jobs doesn't actually do that either, but has always managed to talk as if he did.
I have been pondering over this for some time now. I think all companies have a finite time, mainly because i think of companies like dynasties/kingdoms. They are run by a few key individuals. When they fall, the fate and direction of the company can change significantly. It's what happened to Microsoft over the last 10 years and it can happen to Apple. Although a leader with a unique view and style can give the company a new lifeline.
The only exception to this I think would be Google. They seem more autonomous/robotic in some sense. It's really hard to nail down the recent success of the Google with any key individuals.
I'm not sure if they even revealed the previous iPhones were ARM-based in their marketing materials.
I think the interesting thing is where they go from here. Apple being Apple, perhaps we'll have two years of iPhone 4 whilst they get the next OS X ready, plus probably a big rollout of iPhone 4 tech into the iPad next year.
Two years from now, it'd be nice to see displays on both sides of the phone, stereo cameras for free space gesture recognition and some kind of high bandwidth peripheral bus like Wireless USB3.
Now that would be the future!
And if you look at Apple's iPhone Design page, it is devoted to mainly hardware upgrades and the marketing focuses on user-experience benefits of such upgrades. And these improvements just so happen to be in areas that aren't easily replicable by competitors like Google (because their expertise is in software).
I wonder about the contract terms of this device, otherwise for $200 it is affordable, and I will be upgrading.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/07/apples-iphone-4-promo-vid...
I mean, yeah, it's cool that it's on a phone and everything but they are acting like Apple invented it.
Having got that out of the way, the HTML5 spec for the VIDEO tag is a bit tenuous at the moment. Though the API is laid out in full, there are essentially three competing encodings vying for the default: Ogg/Vorbis, MPEG-4, and VP8. Only Mozilla supports Ogg as other parties feel uncertain about its defensibility in a patent war against MPEG-LA. MPEG-4 is not F/OSS, ergo Mozilla isn't supporting it. Google has purchased and opened VP8 in hopes that it will become the open standard, thereby assuaging Mozilla's and the F/OSS' community's fears, though Apple has yet to be sold on VP8's defensibility again MPEG-LA.
To wrap this up, if you do a little digging you'll find that Apple used the MOV container to hold an MPEG-4 video. This is just fine and dandy in the current state of the spec, though it would have been nice for Apple to use a different container format.
Also, both Google Chrome and Opera support Ogg Theora video, not just Mozilla. The only ones claiming to be worried about patents are the well known supporters of open technology at Apple and Microsoft.
Chrome/Chromium and Opera also support Ogg Theora/Vorbis out of the box.
I think you're noticing their production quality more than anything to do with encoding.
Also, there's no indication to when this video will end...
... though the battery is still non-removable, so the ultradurability of the glass is really a moot point.
Their statement implies that with this glass the phone is going to stay usable longer than its existing revision. However Jobs himself said that the battery in the current iPhone is non-removable, because he expects everyone to upgrade before it reaches the end of its life.
Just read what Apple says - "and more scratch resistant than ever" - meaning that this glass is meant to protect against casual scratches, and not against the glass breakage during accidental drops.
The point being that the time it takes to scratch the heck out of 3GS glass is more than a lifetime of its battery. I've been carrying my iPhone in the same pocket with keys, coins and god knows what else for several months now and it still has NO scratches. Hence the original comment - the lack of ultradurable glass is not exactly a problem with existing generation of the iPhone.
The durability of the glass is surely to prevent breakage when you sit on your phone or drop it from a reasonable distance, no?
And I don't understand certain folks' obsession with changeable batteries. You need to have those stupid opening compartment for batteries which always breaks down. I also remember that when my Blackberry used to hang, I would have no choice but to remove the batteries so that I can reset it. The on/off switch has always worked if my iPhone gets stuck up. Says a lot about how solid iOS is.
What? Why do you think I think that?
The iPhone 3G was the most durable phone that I ever owned. I could drop it during a phone call (happened once) and picked the thing up a second later to continue talking. You lose a great deal of 1) internal space and 2) structural integrity when you make the battery removable. Having a non-removable battery means that you can skip implementing all the rails and pieces to hold the door on, the frame to hold the battery, etc... gives you a bigger battery overall and more room for other goodies, and/or a smaller phone overall.