"The first phone to beat the iPhone"

Finally, on the 11th of July 2008 - 4 weeks after it's announcement - the new iPhone 3G was released. It promised a quicker 3G Internet connection, GPS, 3rd Party applications and much, much more... but is it really worth going out and spending (an announced price of $199-$299, £100-£150, but actually) almost $600, £300 (including 18 month contract) on what is essentially, a smartphone? I shall give my verdict...

Good points:

The original iPhone was a superb piece of tech but there were a few issues with it like slow interwebs and no 3rd party apps (unless you Jailbroke it, but that would be going against the holiness of Mr.Jobs). However these problems have been solved. Good points of the phone are:

Hardware:

Design: The new iPhone looks virtually identical to the first iPhone, however the newer has (8Gb & 16Gb) a shiny black plastic back or (16Gb only) a shiny white plastic back. The newer is also a tiny bit lighter, but apart from this the phones are basically the same. The new phone still features excellent build quality and, with a bevelled back, actually feels a bit thinner.

Inside: As with the old iPhone, the new one is available in either 8Gb or 16Gb (with most probably opting for the 16Gb). A major change in the new phone is the introduction of 3G, which means faster data speeds when connected to the Internet (3G coverage can be found in most major cities in Britain, but not in the countryside). Another big change is the introduction of GPS, with a dedicated GPS chip, capable of identifying your position within a few feet.

Smaller changes: Improvements in call quality have been made with the introduction of a new speaker and microphone. Improvements in reception quality have also been made. Battery life, even though the new phone has GPS and 3G is about the same as the original one.

Software:

2.0 software: This is pre-installed on all iPhone 3Gs and can be downloaded for free for existing 1st gen iPhone users ($9.99, £5.99 purchase from the iTunes store for iPod Touch users). This adds the feature of being able to download 3rd party apps from the App Store, including games, IM apps and many other utilities. All you have to do is open iTunes, browse to the App Store and then download any app you want. (Some are free and some need paying for, depending on the developer's decision).

This also introduces support for MobileMe (the .Mac replacement). This allows to synchronise contacts, calendar and email over the air, and allows a Blackberry-esque  push email experience. Over a 3G connection, syncing with MobileMe will be very quick and much easier that using an EDGE connection with the original iPhone.

Apps and MobileMe are the major software changes, but there are other minor ones including Contacts search and a scientific calculator (which I found quite exciting...)

Bad points:

Nothing's perfect... and the new iPhone 3G is basically what everyone expected - an iPhone which is 3 times as fast and has GPS, however there are still a few concerns with it.

3G network coverage is entirely dependant on where you live, so make sure (if you want to use it, which you probably will...) to check if your area is covered.

No MMS Support

No copy and paste (even though you can save pictures now... I would have thought this operation could have been adopted for copying and pasting)

No Bluetooth stereo audio

No support for Flash (!?)

2MP camera (not exactly under par, but not up to the standard of phones like the Nokia N95 with a 5MP camera)

No video recording (although this can probably be solved by software, by taking many pictures at once e.g. 24 pics/sec = 24fps)

Cost:

Up front, the new iPhone is extraordinarily cheap at $199, £100 (8Gb) but with an 18 month contract prices are actually slightly higher that the original phone

Contract	£35 $70	£45 $90	£75 $150
8Gb iPhone	£99 $199	Free	Free
16Gb iPhone	£159 $299	£59 $120	Free
Minutes	600	1200	3000
Texts	500	500	500

(Unlimited Data included)

Final thoughts:

Even though the iPhone 3G has a few problems it is still a wholly brilliant phone, and certainly worth buying. The original phone was a great phone and the new one certainly lives up to its expectations.

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Cewebrities... Yes that's right - Cewebrities

This is sort of a continuation of the rant in my last post "Does the iPod age really know anything?". Again it was thought up at school and after some hardcore eavesdropping I've realised that people are not only "hardwarely"/"softwarely" inept, but that they also don't know anything about the new age of celebrities - cewebrities.

As you have probably noticed from the name, cewebrities is a hybrid word that comes from "celebrity" and "web", i.e. People who have or are doing something interesting, solely on the interwebs. I like to refer to cewebrities as: People who are famous but aren't. If I were (again) to go into the street and ask people who Sarah Austin, Leo Laporte, Smosh or Alex Albrecht were, I would guess they wouldn't know. (But maybe they're too busy idolising the newest "Big Bro" star or struggling to hold back the insatiable need to read Heat magazine).

It seems that once someone hears the words Internet or computer in a sentence, they switch off, or they just have an automatic reflex which causes them to talk about shopping as soon as these words appear. For example, I was talking to a friend about how I was IMing Wil Harris (from ChannelFlip, a web based Internet TV channel) however my friend didn't want to listen to a word of it:

Me: "Guess what?"

Him: "What?... This better not be about Mahalo Daily"

Me: "Noo - something even better!"

Him: "Go on..."

Me: "I was talking to Wil Harris - you knowm the guy who does that interne--"

Him: "-- Wow, look at that seagull out there!"

I think that people should be educated about these new stars, as you will be probably watching or using something that they have made, in the near future. To be honest - I would much prefer to learn about this than how tectonic plates move...

I think that sites like Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Plurk and edopter are helping to discover new cewebrities through the power of following updates - or if you prefer, stalking. Cewebrities aren't as arrogant as celebrities and, personally, I find them more interesting. (Why do I need to know that Wayne Rooney paid several million pounds, that he earned by kicking balls, for his wedding?)

Hopefully there will be an increase of the number of cewebrities helping to expedite people's understanding of the general interwebs and new technologies. (But I certainly hope celebrities don't try and be Internet stars. If Jade Goody joined the Internet revolution I would have to eat my iPod as well as my hat).

del.icio.us Tags: calacanis,cewebrity,channel flip,edopter,plurk,pownce,jaiku,twitter

Does the iPod age really know anything?

This idea came to me after a Technology lesson, when many of my classmates were baffled and surprised at the fact the teacher had made a (truthfully adequate) tutorial video to show them how to use ProDesktop. They were all like "Wow - how did you do that!!", "That's amazing, that man must be a genius" and "...woo!". Frankly I wasn't so impressed.

It occurred to me that many of these people claiming they're all in the "cloud" and are Facebook/MySpace junkies don't actually know a thing about the general interwebs and technology. If I were to go out and ask a person on the street who Jason Calacanis or Kevin Rose was, I can bet that they wouldn't know who they were. (By the way - Jason Calacanis is the CEO of Mahalo.com: Human Powered Search and Kevin Rose is a head honcho behind Revision3.com and Digg.com). Similarly, if I asked someone what Twitter or Plurk is, I suspect they wouldn't know. (Twitter and Plurk are both sites where you can tell people what you're doing/what you think of stuff.)

The same goes for hardware. I can easily slip into a conversation about graphics cards or processors, and continue talking about them for some hours. However when someone comes up to me and asks for help - either with software or hardware, they are usually unable to explain, there and then what is wrong -

Classmate: "Err the thingy-magigy that makes words appear on the computer screen doesn't work",

Me: "You mean the when you type on the keyboard, the words don't appear on the VDU?", 

Classmate: "Ahem... err... doesn't matter - I think I can sort it out..."

--or--

Classmate: "You know...hehe... I have Windows Vista - the best operating system ever!

Me: "Ever heard of Mac OSX Leopard??!"

Classmate: "Who?"

Also when I see people with iPods and phones I know they don't actually know how to operate them - they just read the manual and learn the basics. I see a couple of older students with iPod Touches and they don't know that a new 2.0 Firmware upgrade will be coming out in July meaning they can play 3D games on their Touch, they are the kind of people who complain and leave something just because they haven't upgraded and got the new features.

Overall I think that many people, especially teenagers, are seriously "backward" in terms of the new age of the Internet and the cloud (I know many older bloggers like Scoble and Dvorak who are more up to date than most of my classmates).  I think many need to read up on new things and move away from their hubs and cliques on Facebook and Bebo and explore the world of the interwebs. After all, when many of them were born they had hardly any of the opportunities they have today - No Google = no easy search, no WikiPedia = no easy research, no iTunes = no easy music downloads and no MSN/GTalk/AIM = no IM or Email. In fact one of my classmates is so stup.... obtuse that they think WikiPedia is called "Wilk-a-pedia"... My point proven.

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Voodoo who? (Evolution of Graphics No.3)

So what went wrong? Unfortunately, riches begat the want for more riches. As is today, with nVidia and ATi, 3DFX only licensed the chips - they didn't manufacture them. When the Voodoo 3 arrived 3DFX had other plans - in 1998 they bought up STB Technologies, a large card builder of the time. The plan was to directly sell the highly anticipated (but, it turned out, disappointing) Voodoo 3 and rake in the cash. Unfortunately, this decision annoyed many third party manufacturers, who decided they would no longer buy future Voodoo chips. The combination of this, 3DFX's retail inexperience and the superior feature set of nVidia's RIVA TNT2 card caused major damage to the firm's value. nVidia added insult to injury with the GeForce 256, whose performance literally demolished the Voodoo 3. 3DFX's answers to the first GeForce, the Voodoo 4 and 5, came too late. The enhanced GeForce 2 and its new arch rival, the ATi Radeon, had already arrived and Microsoft's Direct3D API was proving to be more developer friendly than Glide. Faced with bankruptcy, in 2001, 3DFX agreed to be bought out by nVidia.

One secret of nVidia's and ATi's success was hardware transform and lighting. Before T and L, a 3D card would dramatically speed up the rendering of textured polygons - however this really didn't do anything to the resulting 3D scene. Light and controlling the polygons was still left to the processor, which to be honest already had enough on its plate, with AI and physics etc. The first GeForces and Radeons took this effort off the processor meaning there was one less restraint on a game's performance. The expensive GeForce 256 was seen as a performance revelation but it took quite a long time for hardware T and L enabled games to make it onto the market. When they did, the superior GeForce 2 series was in swing - most noticeably the very affordable MX "flavour". This itself was a turning point. It was the real beginning of today's dreadfully confusing 3D card line ups to hit every possible girth of wallet. All told, eight different models of GeForce 2 stuck out of nVidia's doors. Meanwhile, ATi was offering similar variants of its new Radeon range.

Both the early GeForces and Radeons made faltering footsteps into pixel and vertex shaders, which were probably the last real concept shift in 3D cards before they solidified into the current trend of refinements upon a theme. It was, however, the GeForce3 - and later the Radeon 8500 - programmable pixel and vertex shaders that definitely made the difference - partially,  because the were the first cards to be fully compliant with Microsoft's DirectX 8, which by that point almost entirely ruled the API roost.

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Glide and DirectX (Evolution of Graphics No.2)

Usually game developers want a system where they only have to code for one standard rather than several ones - and in the late 90s this became true. In this period, however, the first DXes were very inefficient and suffered much criticism. Glide might have only communicated with Voodoos but it did it directly to them meaning it was faster. This, in conjunction with the cards raw performance meant the Voodoo was irresistible to gamers and due to this, the whole industry incorporated Glide. Glide was a major modification of OpenGL, another neutral API that predated and went on to rival Direct3D. It was created by the high end workstation manufacturer SGI and was expanded by a number of hardware and software developers - OpenGL was the closest you could get to an altruistic 3D API. Even though it continues to operate today, if it had been more successful in fending off the supreme power of Microsoft, we wouldn't be stuck with the issue of having to buy the error ridden OS that is Vista to play the best looking games (FSX, Crysis, Bioshock etc). Another 3DFX achievement of the late 90s was the custom MiniGL driver which meant OpenGL games could harness the power of the Voodoo - specifically the then new game release, Quake. The card's close relationship with the game that popularised online deathmatches and true 3D gaming - unlike Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, which adopted a 3D viewpoint when facing straight ahead - only reinforced the card's must have "cred".

As 3D gaming expanded, 3DFX's rule seemed less assailable. The Voodoo 2 was a refinement of the first chip, and made some image quality forfeits like no 32-bit colour support and no 800x600+ resolution support - however, it still offered unrivalled raw performance. The Voodoo Rush was able to cope with both 2D and 3D rendering, although there was a noticeable decrease in 3D performance, the Rush was an appealing upgrade. SLI - before nVidia had even got to it - had established the hardcore gaming enthusiast. 2x Voodoo 2s in one PC meant more FPS and ultra sharp 1024x768 resolution.

Final article to be continued...

del.icio.us Tags: ballmer,directx,gameplay,games,gates,microsoft,opengl,tech,technology,vista