Armwood Technology Blog: iPhone 4

Showing posts with label iPhone 4. Show all posts

Monday, September 13, 2010

The iOS 4.1 Update Fixes Most Things, Breaks a Couple | MacNews

Image by k-ideas via FlickrThe iOS 4.1 Update Fixes Most Things, Breaks a Couple | MacNews

I was VERY HAPPY to see the iOS 4.1 update hit the streets last week. Although I had already had my iPhone 4 replaced for the yellow photo white balance issue, I was still having annoying proximity sensor issues and sometimes people would complain that my voice was very garbled while talking on my bluetooth headset. iOS 4.1 really hit the spot in a big way. First off, for most people it corrected the "taking an indoor shot coming out all yellow problem". I did some tests with another iPhone 4 here at my house that hand't been replaced and I took a shot while it was running iOS 4.0.2 and then took the same shot after applying the iOS 4.1 update and well, see for yourself:

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Wednesday, September 08, 2010

iPod touch (fourth generation, late 2010) Review | MP3 Players | Playlist | Macworld

Image representing iPhone as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBaseiPod touch (fourth generation, late 2010) Review | MP3 Players | Playlist | Macworld

You know the story by now. For many, the iPod touch is the iPhone without the phone and GPS features—no cellular voice calls, no texting, and no EDGE or 3G wireless service. The remaining features that the two have in common (or lack) is often how the iPod touch is judged. In the case of the fourth-generation (4G) iPod touch—available in 8GB ($229), 32 GB ($299), and 64GB ($399) capacities—the two come closer to feature parity than ever before. (Even more so this time around as all three iPod touch models have the same features, unlike with the previous generation of touches.) This, for many people, makes for a compelling iPod. It does for us as well.

Thin as the iPhone 4 is, the 4G iPod touch is thinner still—two sandwiched 4G iPod touches come very close to the thickness of the iPhone 4. It’s also a little less wide and lighter than the third-generation iPod touch () that preceded it. Its edges are also more angled. This angling is sharp enough that owners of iPhones and previous iPod touches will have to train themselves to search for the volume and Sleep/Wake buttons near the back edge of the iPod rather than the side and top, respectively.

Unlike previous iPod touches, the 4G iPod touch lacks the small black plastic patch on the back’s top-left corner that covered the Wi-Fi antenna. That corner now holds the iPod’s built-in omni-directional microphone and its high-definition rear-facing camera (like the iPhone 4, the 4G iPod touch also has a standard-definition front-facing camera).

Thanks to the built-in microphone, you have a way to control the iPod touch hands-free. Press and hold on the Home button until the Voice Control screen appears and tell the iPod what you’d like it to play using the same voice commands you’d use with an iPhone. (Learn more about Voice Control in Talk to your iPod: Inside Apple’s Voice Control.) Voice Control works only for playing music, however. You can’t use it to initiate a FaceTime call (more on FaceTime later in the review).

In addition, the 4G iPod touch has a dedicated speaker port, which you find just to the left of the dock connector port at the bottom of the iPod. The second- and third-generation iPod touches also had a speaker, but sound emanated generally from inside the iPod rather than from a dedicated port. Whether it’s the quality of the speaker component inside the iPod or the existence of the port, the 4G iPod touch’s speaker is much brighter than previous touches’. This is welcome as the previous touches’ speakers managed to be tinny and muffled at the same time. The speaker on the current iPod touch doesn’t have the quality of the iPhone 4’s speaker, but it’s a definite improvement over the previous models.

The combination of the microphone and speaker means that the iPod touch becomes a better device for Skype/VoIP calls. In the past you could use VoIP apps with the iPod touch (Wi-Fi only, of course), but, because those iPods had no built-in mic, you had to use a headset that included both headphones and a microphone. With the new iPod touch you can make such calls without a headset. Even though the mic is on the back of the iPod, it's sensitive enough to pick up your voice. And the speaker is audible enough to carry on a conversation.

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Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Summary: Apple kicks off fall with iPod, Apple TV overhauls | iPod & Entertainment | MacUser | Macworld

Those plans include a revamped iPod touch that adopts many of the features of its iPhone 4 counterpart—including front-and-back-facing cameras and support for Apple’s FaceTime video chat technology. The fourth-generation touch also sports the Retina display technology introduced to the iPhone line this summer.

Available next week, the touch comes in 8GB, 32GB, and 64GB capacities, priced at $229, $299, and $399, respectively.

As for Apple’s other iPod offerings, both the nano and shuffle have undergone radical redesigns. The latest iPod nano now features a touch-interface on a chip-sized device—it’s 46 percent smaller and 42 percent lighter than the previous nano.

The interface of the new nano will remind users of the iPhone and iPod touch—it features multiple Home screens capable of holding up to four icons each that users can scroll between.

The nano may come with a new design, but it’s lost some capabilities from previous generations. The video camera Apple introduced to last year’s nano offering is gone as is the ability to play back videos.

The nano comes in seven colors and in two capacities—a $149 8GB model and a $179 16GB model. It ships next week.

The shuffle also gets a radical new look. A circular playback control returns to the music player, which also retains the previous versions support for multiple playlists and VoiceOver capabilities for announcing artists, albums, and songs. Apple added support for Genius playlists to the shuffle, which now offers 15 hours of battery life.

Available next week, the shuffle comes in five different colors. The 2GB music player costs $49.

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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

iPhone: Great Device, Lousy Telephone? - PCWorld

Image via CrunchBaseiPhone: Great Device, Lousy Telephone? - PCWorld

If you have an iPhone, this experience may be familiar: Your phone shows only a bar or two, and either you can't make a call or the call you do make is so scratchy and garbled that the person you're calling can't understand what you're saying. Meanwhile, right next to you, someone on a different AT&T phone connects without a hitch and chats away happily. I decided to informally test whether there's a solid basis for that common gripe. My findings: The two iPhones I tested had lower rates of connecting successfully and had poorer voice quality in AT&T low-signal areas than did two non-Apple AT&T phones that I tested under the same conditions.

I tested four phones on AT&T service in two cities over three days. I drove around San Francisco and Los Angeles comparing the performance of the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3GS against the performance of the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 and the Pantech Impact in voice calls placed at roughly the same time from areas where coverage from the AT&T network is less than optimal.

What I found was surprising. Calls on the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS failed to connect or dropped in midcall far more often than did calls on the other two phones, and the iPhone calls that connected successfully sounded marginally worse than calls placed with the BlackBerry and Pantech phones. More...

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I have noticed a significant call in drop call quality since my daughter switched from a Blackberry, which broke, to a new iPhone 4

John H. Armwood

Thursday, August 12, 2010

From the Desk of David Pogue - Three Unknown Features of the iPhone 4 - NYTimes.com

It seems as though Apple dodged a bullet. Ever since the Steve Jobs press conference a couple of weeks ago, in which Apple offered free carrying casesbumpers (or full refunds) to anyone whose iPhone 4 exhibits the signal-drops-when-you-hold-the-phone-a-certain-way problem, the jeering and mockery online seems to have gone into hibernation.

Meanwhile, enough time has passed, and enough millions of people have been playing with their iPhones, that a critical mass of tricks and tips have started to pile up. Here's a look at three cool iOS 4 features that nobody, including Apple, seems to be talking about.

* Unified Contacts. The iPhone (and iPod Touch) can sync up with different accounts. The Contacts app might list three different sets of names and numbers: one stored on your phone, one from a MobileMe account, and a third from your corporate Exchange server at work. In the old days, certain names might show up in the All Contacts list two or three times, which isn't helpful.

In iOS 4, the iPhone displays each person's name only once in the All Contacts list. If you tap that name, you open up a Unified Info screen for that person. It includes all the details from ALL of the underlying cards from that person. All of the phone numbers, for example, are tidily rounded up into a single list.

To see which cards the iPhone is combining, scroll to the bottom of the card. There, the Linked Cards section shows you which cards have been unified.

Here, you can tap a listing to open the corresponding card in the corresponding account. You can also unlink one of the cards. For that matter, you can manually link a card, too; Tap Edit, tap Link Contact, and then choose a contact to link to this unified card -- even if the name isn't a perfect match.

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Sunday, August 08, 2010

The Man Behind the iPhone 4 Has Left Apple

Image via CrunchBase

The Man Behind the iPhone 4 Has Left Apple

The person in charge of developing the hardware for the iPhone 4 has abruptly left Apple. Mark Papermaster's departure comes in the wake of a widely publicized problem with the design of this smartphone.

The device suffers from what's been called the "death grip" after users discovered that holding it in just the wrong way can greatly reduce wireless performance, in some cases cutting off phone calls.

The issue is bad enough that Apple has been forced to give free cases to everyone who has an iPhone 4 or purchases one for the next two months.

It's not clear is Papermaster has resigned on his own, or if he was pressured to leave.

He was originally hired away from IBM several years ago. IBM objected in federal court on the grounds that its former high-level executive knew proprietary trade information. After a long delay, Papermaster went to work for Apple in the spring of 2009.

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Wednesday, August 04, 2010

AppleInsider | iPhone 4 owners report fewer dropped calls than iPhone 3GS

Image via CrunchBase

AppleInsider | iPhone 4 owners report fewer dropped calls than iPhone 3GS: "By Neil Hughes Published: 11:10 AM EST A new survey of iPhone 4 users has found that owners of Apple's latest handset have experienced fewer dropped calls than those who own an iPhone 3GS, suggesting the real-world impact of the iPhone 4 antenna issue is a non-factor.
ChangeWave Research on Wednesday released the results of a new survey conducted between July 19 and 28 of new iPhone 4 owners. The company waited until a few weeks after the handset launched to allow the impact of the device's antenna controversy to set in.
The survey of 213 new iPhone 4 owners found that users claimed to experience fewer dropped calls than those who own an iPhone 3GS. A June 2010 survey of iPhone 3GS owners found that 6.3 percent had experienced dropped calls. But in July, just 5.2 percent of iPhone 4 owners said they had dropped a call.
'Despite all of the issues surrounding the antenna, in actuality iPhone 4 owners reported experiencing fewer dropped calls on the average than iPhone 3GS owners,' said Paul Carton, vice president of research with ChangeWave.
Those numbers are actually different from the data that Apple reported last month at its iPhone 4 press conference. There, Chief Executive Steve Jobs revealed that the iPhone 4 drops slightly more call, at a rate less than one call per 100 greater. Jobs said he believes this is because there were not many cases that fit the new form factor of the iPhone 4 available when the handset launched in June.
Respondents were also very satisfied with Apple's response to the antenna controversy, in which the company will give away free cases to all customers through Sept. 30. Users can select an Apple branded 'Bumper' case, or a number of other third-party options."

Friday, July 23, 2010

Apple - iPhone 4 - Case Program

Follow these steps to apply for a Bumper or case.

Download the iPhone 4 Case Program app from the App Store.

Launch the app on your iPhone 4 and sign in using your iTunes Store account or Apple ID.

Select your Bumper or case.

For iPhone 4 purchases made before July 23, 2010, you must apply no later than August 22, 2010; otherwise, you must apply within 30 days of your iPhone 4 purchase. To qualify for this program, you must purchase your iPhone 4 by September 30, 2010.

Read terms and conditions

Apple starts taking free iPhone 4 case orders, by app | Accessories | iPhone Central | Macworld

Image via CrunchBase

Apple starts taking free iPhone 4 case orders, by app | Accessories | iPhone Central | Macworld

If you’ve been awaiting the free case for your (non-white) iPhone 4 that Apple CEO Steve Jobs promised last week, your wait is over. Well, your wait for asking for a case is over—of course you’ll still have to wait for the case to wing its way to your door. Apple on Friday released iPhone 4 Case Program, a free app—that’s right, it’s an app—that allows you to place an order for your free case.

After you download and install the 0.8MB app, you’ll be prompted to enter your iTunes or Apple ID password, after which you will be presented with a list of cases to choose from. More...

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