Month: July 2009

There was quite a bit of iPhone news this week.  Here are the items that I ran across that I thought you might find interesting:

• Yesterday, Google updated the version of its website used by iPhones.  Now, if you go to www.google.com on your iPhone, you will be given the option to let Google determine your location.  Once Google knows where you are, it will tailor its search results (when appropriate) to show places that are close to you.  I also notice that possible search terms pop up as you start to type, another time saver.  Click here to read more from the Official Google Mobile blog, or just start trying it yourself to see how it works.
• Ryan Kim of the San Francisco Chronicle compares using the iPhone 3GS to take video versus the Flip Ultra HD.  The Flip uses HD which gives it an obvious edge, but the iPhone has other advantages.  If you enjoyed the camcorderinfo.com review of the iPhone 3GS that I previously noted, you will enjoy Kim’s article.
• Macworld identifies the 12 most significant iPhone apps over the last year.
• The New York Times recommends some iPhone apps to help you organize your life.
• Do you remember buying 45 rpm records with a hit on the A side and a lesser known song on the B side?  MacNN reports that iTunes now has Digital 45s for sale, combining one hit and one lesser known song (or sometimes a live version, a remix, etc.) for one price.
• Employment law attorney Jay Shepard asks “What if Apple Stores Billed by the Hour?  Lessons for Law Firms” in this month’s Law Practice Today from the ABA Law Practice Management Section.
• Infrageeks has an interesting article noting an advantage of the iPhone’s virtual keyboard:  the ability to easily switch between international keyboards.  Most of what I type is in English, but I do sometimes type in other languages and it is so incredibly easy to switch keyboards on the iPhone that I find it faster to type in other languages on my iPhone then on my computer with a full keyboard, and that’s not something that I say very often.
• David Pogue of the New York Times has an interesting post on using the iPhone’s VoiceOver feature to make the device more usable for the blind and vision impaired.
• I’m a big fan of Apple’s $79 In-Ear Headphones, as noted in my review.  AppleInsider reports
  
  that Apple is now selling a slightly upgraded version of those headphones, replacing the rubber
  
  plug with a more sturdy plastic plug.  I’ve never had trouble with the
  
  rubber plug, but apparently Apple thinks that the plastic will be even
  
  better.
• Some indie filmmakers in Boston are looking to cast a white male, age 25 to 30, to star in a 15 minute film about a lawyer who is so obsessed with his iPhone that he loses his job, his girlfriend and his home.  I know that there are quite a few iPhone-obsessed lawyers in the New England area who read this website, so if you want an opportunity to play yourself, check out this site for more information.
• Here’s a fun idea: send a real postcard with your iPhone.  The Apple Blog describes how you can use either Postino (free) or PicCard ($0.99) you can take a picture with your iPhone and provide an address and then have the app send the picture to the AmazingMail website which will send a real postcard with your picture on it for $0.99 to $1.99.  This sounds like a cute way to send custom postcards to your loved ones while you are on vacation.
• And finally, wouldn’t it be neat if you taped your brand new, expensive iPhone 3GS to the bottom of a remote control airplane and took some video?  Kids, don’t try this at home, but you can live vicariously through this YouTube video which is appropriately titled “Crazy guy puts new iPhone 3GS on RC plane.”  (Link via Engadget.)

Since the iPhone Software 3.0 and the iPhone 3GS were introduced, I’ve been looking forward to new apps that take advantage of the new features.  I’m particularly curious to see companies create hardware that interacts with custom iPhone apps, something we saw a preview of back on March 17, 2009.  None of those are out yet.

There are a few apps out now that take advantage of some of the other 3.0 features.  Yappler recently listed some of the best of them in this post.  As interesting as some of those are, none of them strike me as something that I want to start using today.  Take a look at the list and see if anything grabs your attention.

As an owner of an iPhone 3GS, I’m also very interested to see what developers come up with that takes advantage of the unique features of the iPhone 3GS.  With the speed of the 3GS and improved graphics capabilities, we should soon start to see some amazing games that use the 3GS to its fullest, but I am even more interested in seeing apps that take advantage of other 3GS features such as video, the better camera and the compass.

Yesterday, the Daring Fireball site linked to one such upcoming app called New York Nearest Subway from Acrossair.  The app, which has already been submitted to Apple and is now just waiting for approval, uses augmented reality to show you the nearest subway in New York using GPS, the compass, and some of the iPhone 3.0 video technology.  The best way to understand it is to see it in action, so here is a video preview:

This is the first 3GS or 3.0 specific app that really makes me take notice.  I lived in New York City for about 8 months after Hurricane Katrina, and this app would have come in very useful had I had it when I was there, but forget the utility of the app—this is way cool technology.  I suspect that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg and there are lots of smart developers working on innovative 3GS or 3.0 specific apps.  It should be a fascinating second half of the year for iPhone apps.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the number of iPhone apps that have been downloaded because, frankly, the growth has been amazing.  (See 1, 2 and 3.)  When Apple got close to selling its billionth app in April of 2009, it held a contest.  Its home page counted the apps downloaded, and the lucky person to download app number 1,000,000,000, got a
$10,000 iTunes gift card, an iPod Touch, a Time Capsule, and a MacBook
Pro.  The winner was Connor Mulcahey, age 13, of Weston, CT and the app that he downloaded on April 23, 2009 was Bump.

Yesterday, Apple announced that more than 1.5 billion apps have been downloaded and that there are now over 65,000 apps available to customers in 77 countries.  There was no similar contest or fanfare this time, but Apple did issue a press release to spread the good news in which Steve Jobs is quoted as saying:  “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up,” an obvious swipe at everyone and their brother who seems to be opening up a new app store almost every day.  (The latest:  Verizon announced yesterday that it has an app store and that all of its phones will be required to include the Verizon app store, and only the Verizon apps store, although customers will be able to install additional stores if they choose.)  Of course, other companies copying Apple is nothing new.  I remember the late 1990s when Apple released the iMac with translucent, colored plastic and before long everyone was selling products with translucent, colored plastic, even George Foreman grills.

Congratulations, Apple, and here’s looking forward to the 2 billionth app, which at this rate I’m guessing will be downloaded around October 1st.

When I bought my new iPhone 3GS, it of course came with a USB power adapter.  I already had one from my old iPhone, so this meant I had two of them.  I put the new one in another room in my house.  It is handy to have an extra charger to keep one in a different location in your house, in your office, in your summer home, in your yacht, etc. 

You can buy a replacement USB Power Adapter from Apple for $29, but Art of the iPhone points out that you can currently get one from a vendor on Amazon for less than $7.  Click here
to get an Apple USB power adapter for only $6.91.  Unlike the one from Apple, it appears that this one doesn’t include the cord that goes from the USB adapter to your iPhone, but you can click here
to get one of those cords from another vendor on Amazon for only $0.43.  Note that for both of these sellers, you will also need to pay for shipping, even if you are an Amazon Prime customer.  Thus, in addition to the $7.34 for the two products, you will need to pay another $9.88 for shipping for both.  But at $17.22, you are still saving a little bit of money over the $29 (plus shipping) that Apple’s online store charges.

By the way, for many of the items that I link to on Amazon, if you make a purchase after clicking on the link here, Amazon pays me an incredibly small percentage as a referral fee.  You have likely seen this before on other websites.  The same is true for items such as apps that I link to on iTunes, although since most iPhone apps are so cheap that doesn’t amount to very much.  It doesn’t cost you any extra when you buy things from these links, and the referral fees to me are very small, but they do help to defray some of the costs for this website such as the $15 a month I pay to Six Apart (who runs TypePad) to host this website.  So if you want to help support iPhone J.D., click on Amazon and iTunes links on iPhone J.D. to purchase products.  And if you want to really help iPhone J.D. whether or not you own that yacht yet, feel free to use this link and buy a few dozen copies of this book.

In my first post on iPhone 3.0 shortcuts, I mentioned that when you are on the search screen (which is to the left of your first home page of app icons), you can easily find and launch an app just by typing the first letter or two of its name.  I also mentioned that this shortcut works even faster if you change the search sort order so that apps come up first in the list when you do a search.  For example, if I want to launch a Twitter client, I can just type tw and I see Twitterific (my current favorite) and TwitterFon:

Friday night, New York Times technology columnist David Pogue posted an interesting tip to his Twitter stream:  because of the search-to-launch-apps shortcut, you can actually install unlimited apps on the iPhone.  iPhone Software 3.0 only has 11 screens to hold apps (up from 9 in 2.x), and with 16 apps per screen plus the four on the bottom of every screen, your iPhone can display icons for 180 different apps.  But David figured out that you can keep adding more apps then that—he got up to around 250—and even though you won’t see those extra apps on any of the 11 pages of your home screen, you can still launch those hidden apps by using the search-to-launch-apps shortcut.  Just start to type the name of the app and the iPhone will let you launch apps that are not shown on a home page.

I doubt that many of you have over 180 apps on your iPhone, but David’s tip underscored for me of the power of the search-to-launch-apps shortcut.  I keep the apps that I use the most either on the bottom row or on one of my first two or three pages, but for any app that I have on page 4 or later, I find that it is much faster to launch the app from the search screen then to scroll all the way over to the app and then have to scroll back to the first home page screen after I am done with the app. 

No matter how many apps you have on your iPhone, if you haven’t started using the search-to-launch-apps shortcut, give it a try for a few days.  You just may find that you like the shortcut as much as I do.

Here are some of the news stories about the iPhone that caught my attention this week, along with a few other tidbits that might be of interest to you.

• Today marks the one year anniversary of the App Store, which opened on July 10, 2008.  Happy Birthday!  Apple is celebrating by posting a list on iTunes of favorite games and non-game apps.  It is amazing how much the iPhone—not to mention the mobile phone industry as a whole—has changed over the last year simply because of the App Store.
• Some people don’t like the iPhone because it doesn’t have a physical keyboard.  John Gruber writes a great essay on this issue on his Daring Fireball website, explaining that “Apple tries to make things that many people love, not things that all people like.”  I agree 100% with what he says.
• Documents to Go by DataViz (my review is here) was updated to version 1.1 on Tuesday.  New features include (1) DataViz abandoned its proprietary copy-and-paste system for the iPhone 3.0 system.  This means that you can copy from a document in DtG, paste into another app, and vice versa.  (2) You can now use pinch to zoom in and out, and the line breaks on the text reformat as you do so, which is nice.  (3) You can now view Word documents full screen, either in portrait or landscape mode, another very nice feature.  It’s a nice update to a great app that every attorney who uses Exchange e-mail should have.
• I frequently talk about the speed of the AT&T 3G connection on the iPhone 3G and 3GS, most recently here.  Glenn Feleishman wrote an interesting article for Macworld reporting that because of the chip Apple put in the iPhone 3GS, the fastest that it can upload data is 384 Kbps, regardless of what AT&T supports.  I don’t see this as a big deal—download speeds are far more important, and that is a reasonable upload speed—but if you upload a lot of videos to YouTube or MobileMe, then you might be interested to know that this is a limitation of the device.
• I got a report from a Miami attorney that his new iPhone 3GS was freezing up on him.  According to this thread on the Apple Discussions, others have had the same problem.  His solution was to bring his iPhone to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store and they swapped it out for a new iPhone 3GS which, fortunately, doesn’t have this problem.  If you are having similar troubles, I suggest you head to your friendly neighborhood Apple Store.
• Have you ever bought an app and then realized that you made a mistake?  I didn’t think it was possible to return an app, but iPhone Download Blog explains that you can get refunds from Apple if you submit a nice request.  Read their post for more info.
• And finally, for those times when you want to get dressed up for a night out on the town, you won’t want to leave home without your iPhone cufflinks from Cufflinks.com.  (Via CraziestGadgets.com, submitted to me by Ernest Svenson.)  These are too funny:

Thanks to a link on Gizmodo, I just learned of a new company called Busted Loop run by Josh Kastelein and Dan Bachelder in Maine.  It’s not exactly clear to me what Busted Loop plans to do; Kastelein’s LinkedIn page says that Busted Loop, LLC was founded in June of 2009 “to create innovative solutions targeting emerging software markets” and the company’s website says:  “At Busted Loop we make things out of information. We invent new
uses for data as a reflex, and materialize those ideas every single
day. It’s what we do for fun and profit.”  Well that clears it up. 

The one currently visible portion of the new company is the company’s blog, and the last ten posts or so have included some interesting data and conclusions about iPhone apps.  For example: 

• As of July 7, 2009, there were 55,977 apps in the App Store, the largest category of which is games at between 10,000 and 13,000.
• Only a small minority of iPhone apps are free, around 12,000 of them, but a large majority of the most popular apps are free.  No real surprise there since many of us download lots of free apps just to see what they are about, but we don’t download a paid app unless we think we might really want it.
• “Most paid apps fail,” selling just a few or no copies.  This is an interesting counterpoint to the stories you sometimes see in the media about a few lucky iPhone app developers making buckets of money.  There are a whole lot of app developers who barely see a dime.
• The most expensive apps in the App Store tend to be medical apps.
• If you want to buy every single app in the app store, it would cost you about $144,326.00, an average of $2.59 per app (or an average of $3.34 an app if you don’t include the 12,538 free apps).
• Look at the chart on this page and you can see which app developers would make the most money if you bought every single app.  Some developers are near the top because they have a ton of apps.  Brighthouse Labs has around 1,600 apps on the app store for about $0.99 a piece.  On the other extreme, Lextech Labs has only four apps, but iRa Pro (a surveillance camera app that I discussed here) is one of the most expensive at $899.99 and iRa Direct is $499.99.

Thanks to the guys at Busted Loop for these interesting numbers.  Hopefully the product that they are working on is as interesting as their analysis of the data from the App Store.

In my review of the iPhone 3GS yesterday, I noted that one of the features I really like is the ability to record video.  I just ran across a website called The Automatic Filmmaker which is published by Steve Ellington, an independent film director from the U.S. who currently lives in Switzerland and who knows a thing or two about video.  He recently posted this great article that includes a lot of information about recording video on the iPhone 3GS, including tips on using focus, how the auto exposure works, etc.  He even has an educational video that shows you exactly what he is describing.  If you plan to use your iPhone 3GS to record video, you should definitely take a few minutes to read his post and view the video.

While you are there, you might also want to take a look at what he says is the first music video shot on an iPhone 3GS, titled Technologic Overkill.  

Yesterday, I talked about how difficult it can be to hold the iPhone 3GS steady while you are taking video.  At least two companies have announced products to compensate for this.  Both seem a little over the top to me, but I love the creativity, and I’m sure that many will consider these useful and worth the money.  

First, Zacuto, a company that sells and rents professional video cameras and equipment for filmmakers, has announced the Zgrip iPhone PRO, an adjustable and quick releasable handgrip system for shooting professional, stable video using the iPhone 3GS.  Here is what it looks like:

The Zgrip iPhone PRO is for professionals, and the price reflects that:  $295, plus you can add extras like a $40 ten inch rod that allows you to get your iPhone 3GS up above the crowd for taking shots and a $50 tripod mount.  If that price is too steep for you, a consumer version is coming out “soon” that will be cheaper but offer fewer options.  Here is a video that shows you more about this product:

Second, a company called Optical Widgets for Life Enhancement (OWLE) has announced a product called BUBO.  It is a gadget with two handles that surrounds the iPhone 3GS and adds a widescreen lens (to which other filters or lenses such as a telphoto can be added) and an improved microphone.  It looks like this:

The BUBO is in production now and will be released later this year for between $30 and $50.  The best way to see what the BUBO can do is to watch this video from one of the developers of Qik, an iPhone app that allows you to stream live video from your iPhone to the web.  At least, that is what they want to do.  Right now, Apple and AT&T are holding up the approval of this app, presumably because of concerns about how much pressure this would put on AT&T’s network.  The first few minutes of this video are recorded using a BUBO, and the quality is quite good.  Then, around the 4:30 mark, they remove the iPhone from the BUBO and you can immediately see and hear the difference. 

Thanks to Engadget for the post that first informed me about these two devices.  I’m sure that they are the first of many video-related add-ons for the iPhone 3GS.

Over 40 million people owned an iPhone (or an iPod Touch) before Apple released the iPhone 3GS.  Because you are reading this website, chances are that number includes you.  Should you upgrade to a new iPhone 3GS?  It’s a big decision, and one that I tried to focus on as I have been using my iPhone 3GS over the past week.  If you are a heavy iPhone user and if you are eligible for the discounted price, I think you will really appreciate the upgrade.  Here is why.

How much will it cost?

If money was no object, everyone would want to upgrade.  For example, virtually every iPhone owner should upgrade to iPhone Software 3.0 because it includes great features and it is free.  But there is a cost, and that cost depends upon your particular circumstances.  AT&T has this page describing its upgrade policy for the iPhone 3GS, but here it is in brief:

1. If you own the original iPhone, sold from June 29, 2007 to July 10, 2008, then it is virtually certain that AT&T will let you take advantage of the discounted prices that it offers new customers, especially if you bought that iPhone in 2007.  For you, an iPhone 3GS will cost $199 for the 16 GB version or $299 for the 32 GB version.  By paying this price, you will lock in to a new two year commitment with AT&T.
2. If you own an iPhone 3G, sold from July 11, 2008 until today, then the formula becomes somewhat more complicated.  You can purchase a new iPhone 3GS for the discounted prices only if (1) you purchased your iPhone 3G during July, August or September of 2008, (2) you have been paying your bills on time and your account is in good standing and (3) you pay AT&T over $99 a month.  All AT&T iPhone owners must pay $30 for the data plan, but if you have the minimum 450 minute $40 voice plan, then you are only at $70 (or $90 if you add on the top $20 unlimited text messaging plan) so you are not over the $99 threshold.  But if you have the 900 minute or higher plan and/or have text messaging on your account, then you are over the threshold.  Even if you have the minimum minute plans with no text messaging, you may still be paying over $100 a month if you have a family plan.  This was the situation that I was in; although I have the cheapest phone plan and no text message plan, my wife also has an iPhone, so AT&T views my total account as an over $100 a month account because of my wife.  (Thanks, honey!)
3. If you are an iPhone 3G owner but don’t meet those three requirements, then you cannot take advantage of the discounted price.  You will likely than have to pay the Early Upgrade price of $399 for the 16 GB / $499 for the 32 GB.  Ouch.
4. Any customer always has the option of paying the No Commitment price of $599 / $699 which gets you the new phone without a two year commitment to stay with AT&T.  Of course, you cannot (legally) use your iPhone with any other carrier in the U.S., so this option will appeal to few people.

What are the new features?

Compared to the iPhone 3G, here is what is added:

1. Speed
2. Better camera for still pictures
3. Video camera
4. Voice Control
5. More storage: 32 GB in the higher end model, 16 GB in the entry model
6. Compass
7. Slightly better battery life
8. The included headphones now have volume buttons (and you can now use the volume controls on the Apple In-Ear Headphones)
9. Support for Nike + iPod, which you can use if you have Nike+ shoes (or a shoe-mounted pouch) and the $19 Nike Sensor for your shoe
10. An optional battery percentage indicator next to the icon at the top of the screen showing remaining battery life.
11. An oleophobic coating on the screen which helps to resist fingerprints

In my opinion, the first five features are real reasons for iPhone 3G owners to consider upgrading.  The remaining features are nice, but unless you have special needs (perhaps you run with your iPhone and would really appreciate the Nike + iPod feature, or you are a boy scout leader and really want a compass on your iPhone) the remaining features are unlikely to be worth the upgrade price.

Thus, I will focus the rest of this review on those first few features.  Having said that, I do encourage you to read some of the more comprehensive reviews of the iPhone 3GS to get all of the nitty gritty details on all 11 new features.  The brand new website gdgt has lots of great information on the iPhone 3GS, including this helpful page which links to around three dozen iPhone 3GS reviews (although it misses some good ones, especially Andy Ihnatko’s review in the Chicago Sun Times).  To narrow down the list for you, I think that these are the best reviews to read if you are trying to decide whether to upgrade:

• Macworld
• Ars Technica
• iLounge
• New York Times
• Engadget
• Wall Street Journal
• Chicago Sun-Times

Speed

There is no real question about the #1 reason that I am happy that I upgraded to the iPhone 3GS.  Apple says the “S” in 3GS is for speed, claiming that the iPhone 3GS is twice as fast as the iPhone 3G.  I haven’t tested the speed myself—and some people who have done so find that the 3GS is even more than two times faster—but what really matters to me is the responsiveness of the phone.  The 3GS is much more responsive that the 3G.  Launching apps is so much faster.  Switching apps happens very quickly.  The typewriter is much more responsive, and not once have I seen a key freeze for a second as it raises while I am typing, something that my old 3G did from time to time.  Web browsing is so much faster that when you are on 3G, you will think you are on Wi-Fi, and when you are Wi-Fi, you will think that your bandwidth somehow increased.

The increased responsiveness makes the iPhone much more pleasant to use.  My calendar and contacts have tons of entries, but on the 3GS they pop right up with no lag as I scroll.  Safari on my iPhone 3G was a great experience because Safari does a great job of rendering web pages, but Safari on my 3GS is an excellent experience because pages jump up almost as quickly as they do on my computer.  And it is no longer any bother at all when one of my apps (such as a Twitter client or an RSS reader) wants to open another app (such as E-mail or Safari or YouTube) because it all happens so quickly.  Also, because part of the speed increase comes from more internal memory on the iPhone, [UPDATE 7/8/09:  see here for more on this] games that are memory hogs run much much better on the iPhone 3GS.  For example, I have a game called Guitar Rock Tour which, on my
iPhone 3G, would sometimes have the flying notes get ever so slightly
out of sync with the music, which is frustrating in any Guitar
Hero-type game.  The game doesn’t have that problem on the 3GS, nor
have I seen the game crash once.

I realize that part of the charm is that the iPhone 3GS is new.  We all know what it is like to get a new computer and have it feel so fast, but a year later the speed just seems “normal” and by two or more years out that same computer starts to feel slow.  Perceived speed is relative.  There will surely come a time when the speed of the iPhone 3GS will start to feel normal, but even then I suspect that I will still appreciate having a very responsive device in my hands.

In sum, the added speed to the iPhone 3GS is really great.  If you are a frequent user of your iPhone, then you will find yourself appreciating the increased speed every day, throughout the day.

Better camera

The 3GS camera is better in two ways.  First, it is a 3 megapixel camera versus the 2 megapixel camera in prior iPhones (2048 x 1536 versus 1600 x 1200).  That alone makes pictures look better.  Many of the iPhone 3GS reviews have done an excellent job of showing side-by-side pictures that compare the 3G to the 3GS.  For example, look at these pictures in the Macworld and the iLounge reviews.  Those examples do such a good job that I haven’t set up any side-by-side tests myself, but I can definitely tell that my pictures are better.  For example, here are two pictures that I took this weekend  Click on each picture to see the full size, unedited pictures.

As you can see, the picture quality is actually quite good when you are in daylight.  But even more than the increased pixels, what really makes this a better camera is the improved ability to focus.  Just tap on an area of the screen.  A box will go around whatever is in the image where you touched and the iPhone will adjust not just the focus, but also the exposure and white balance. For example, in the first of these two pictures, I tapped on the desk, and on the  second picture I tapped on the face of the watch.  Again, you can click for full-size versions, but even from the smaller version you can see that the difference is dramatic.

With the ability to control focus, the camera on the iPhone becomes much more powerful, and this is often the difference between having a usable picture or a useless picture.  For example, in the past, I have tried to take a picture of a page of handwritten notes on a legal pad, and the results were almost always terrible.  But with the iPhone 3GS I can use the manual focus feature to get images that are very readable, saving me the trouble of taking home a note pad when I just want to have quick access while I am at home to what I scribbled down during a meeting in the office.

Let’s be perfectly clear:  the iPhone camera is still just a phone camera.  I own a great digital SLR camera (a Nikon D50 with an amazing 18-200 mm lens) and for times when I want to take good pictures, there is no question what I will want to use.  But for those times when you just want to take a quick picture, having the iPhone 3GS with you means that you can take decent pictures when the light is good, and often a merely decent picture is fabulous when the alternative is no picture at all.

Video camera

Another key new feature is the ability to take video. Much like with the still camera, when the light is good, you can get decent quality video.  For example, here is a quick video I shot of one of my son’s games.  The quality of what YouTube is showing you seems a little worse than the original file on my computer (the original is a little sharper and less jerky), but this gives you an idea of what you can get with an iPhone 3GS.  The colors are actually quite good.

One problem with using something like an iPhone as a video camera is that it is very difficult to keep the iPhone still, resulting in video that can cause motion sickness.  You can see this in the video I posted above:  watch the pattern in the carpet during the video and you will see it jump all over the place even though I did my best to hold my hand steady.  But if you have a Mac, one nice feature of the built-in iMovie software (the current version, iMovie ’09) is the ability to stabilize video.  The software zooms in slightly to do this trick, so you lose a little around the edges, but the results are quite good.  Here is that same video, stabilized.  You can click play on both this one and the above one at the same time to easily compare the difference:

The point is that even though hand shake is one of the major problems with a video camera in a device like the iPhone, it is easy to correct this on a Mac.  (I don’t know if there is anything as cheap and powerful as iMovie for the PC, but I presume that there is software out there that does this same trick.)

Another problem with the video is that you have little control over the focus.  Just like with the still camera, you can tap on an object to tell the iPhone to focus on that object.  But then on
ce you start taking video, that focus point stays the same and cannot be changed.  Since videos inherently involve motion, this can be a problem as the subject of the video moves.  For example, here is a short video I took of a streetcar passing through the Garden District in New Orleans.  I’m not sure what the iPhone was focusing on at the start of the video—I guess something across the street or maybe a passing car—but when the streetcar passes, it is not in focus.  Note that this version was stabilized using iMovie to save you from feeling nauseous due to my hand shaking:

Enough about the negative, let’s focus on the positive.  The iPhone 3GS takes 640 x 480 video at 30 fps.  This doesn’t compare to an HD video camera, but it is better than then the VHS-C video camera that I used from 1995 to 2007, and I created a lot of great memories with that old video camera.  And that is really why I love having video in the iPhone 3GS.  Often, the quality comes not from the number of pixels but instead from the content.  The video quality of the iPhone 3GS is good enough that you will pay attention to the content.  Perfect example:  while playing around with the video functions this past weekend, I took a short video of my son while my wife and I were playing the board game Candy Land
with him.  The video is great, even when viewed on a large 57″ TV screen, because my son said a lot of funny things that were captured in the video.  I suspect that years from now I will find myself watching the video again to remind me of the the funny things that a three year old can do and say.  I would have never bothered to go and find my HD video camera, but my iPhone 3GS was there, so I used it, and I’m glad I did.

One of the more interesting iPhone 3GS reviews is by camcorderinfo.com, a site that—you guessed it—reviews camcorders.  They prepared an exhaustive, 17 part review of the iPhone 3GS the same way that they would review any other camcorder, humorously throwing all of the other features of the iPhone like phone, e-mail, apps etc. into the “other features” category.  While obviously not in the same league as any HD video camera, they found that the video camera on the iPhone 3GS is actually quite good, concluding:

Apple-haters, you may want to look away. The iPhone 3G S performed very, very well under our battery of tests. The color
accuracy rivaled that of camcorders in its class and better, including
the high definition Flip and Sony Webbie. The low light performance was
impressive, making it a good choice as a party camera, considering its
diminutive size.

                            *    *    *

In short, the iPhone 3G S is a surprisingly capable camcorder.
It’s at least as good as the standard definition Flip Mino,
and offers an exceptionally intuitive interface that far exceeds the
typical, labyrinthine experience of a full-featured video camera.
Lacking HD, it falls short of being a complete replacement, but we are
very impressed with Apple’s first time out on the field.

Speaking of HD, I have to think that just as Flip and other manufacturers of tiny video camera started out with SD versions and then came out with equally small HD versions, Apple will one day have an HD video camera in the iPhone.  In fact, I’ve seen reports that the iPhone 3GS can technically handle HD 720p video, but presumably Apple is not enabling that feature because, among other problems, it would severely drain the battery.  I wonder if the June, 2010 version of the iPhone will be called the iPhone HD and add HD video and better pictures?

Voice Control

Hold down the Home button on the iPhone 3GS and you jump into Voice Control mode, where you can talk to your iPhone to have it call someone or play music on the iPod app.  Helpfully, the possible commands that you can say float by in the background when Voice Control is on.  In my experiences, sometimes this feature works great, but other times it misunderstands me and reminds me of that classic clip from the Simpsons that makes fun of the handwriting recognition on the Apple Newton.

Because it sometimes doesn’t work, and because I don’t find that I have much of a need to use Voice Control, I really haven’t used it very much this past week.  And I was tempted to tell you that Voice Control isn’t a good reason to upgrade when I ran across this post from my friend and fellow New Orleans lawyer Ernie “the attorney” Svenson.  I respect Ernie’s opinions quite a bit, and he believes that Voice Control is the “best new feature” of the iPhone 3GS.  He demonstrates why in this part of his post:

1. Hold down the middle button (equivalent to the ‘Home button’) until Voice Command announces
2. Say “call John Appleseed [short pause] mobile’
3. Wait for confirming announcement, which if correct means I just wait for the phone to start ringing.

Ernie makes a compelling argument, and I suppose I’ll have to give Voice Control more time.  If you are trying to decide whether to upgrade, this feature might be an important consideration.

Increased storage

There isn’t much to say here.  If you find that your current iPhone is often full, then you can use more storage.  If not, then you don’t need this feature.

I was frequently running low on space on my 16 GB iPhone 3G, so I appreciate the increased elbow room on the 32 GB iPhone, but it all comes down to video and music.  If you don’t store a lot of video and music on your iPhone, then you probably won’t need extra storage space.  With few exceptions like this one, it is rare for iPhone apps to take up much space, and you would have to have an insane number of e-mails, contacts and calendar entries for that data to take up much space.

…and the rest

Although I don’t consider the other six new features of the iPhone 3GS important enough to justify the upgrade, they are certainly nice.  For example, the compass makes it quick and easy to orient yourself in the Map app.  I don’t like the feel of the included iPhone headphones so I use the the Apple In-Ear Headphones, but on either headphone I love being able to change the volume on the headset without having to touch the buttons on the side of the iPhone.  And the oleophobic coating really does work, helping to resist fingerprint smudges and making removing smudges on the screen as quick as a simple swipe on my shirt.

Recommendation

If you use the first generation iPhone, now is the time to upgrade.

If you use the iPhone 3G, and if you consider yourself just a casual iPhone user, then I probably wouldn’t worry about upgrading.  Most of what is great about the iPhone 3GS is also in the iPhone 3G.  Wait until next year and you can take advantage of these 11 new features plus presumably many more.

But if you are a more serious iPhone 3G user, one who uses the iPhone every day throughout the day, you will want to give serious consideration to the five new features I outlined above.  There is little question that the new iPhone 3GS would make you happier, and if you are eligible to take advantage of the $199 or $299 price, then for you it may well be worth it.  For less than a dollar a day over the next year, you can have a much more enjoyable iPhone.  It was well worth it for me.  But it would have been a much harder decision if it would have cost me $499, so if you are in that boat, then that’s a tough decision and you have my sympathy.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the iPhone 3GS, including why you did or did not upgrade and, if you did, what you like best about the 3GS.  If you have a moment, share your views in the comments.

Following up on my last post on this subject, here are some additional tips and shortcuts that I have come across in iPhone Software 3.0.  You might also want to check out this post and this post from last year regarding shortcuts in the prior version of the iPhone software because many of those shortcuts still work today.

Search, ASAP!  The iPhone has long had a shortcut to bring you back to your first home screen.  When you are on one of the later pages of your Home screen, press your Home button once to jump to the first page.  That shortcut still works today.  Additionally, with 3.0, if you press your Home button when on your first home page, the iPhone brings you right to the search screen.  You could do the same thing by just swiping to get to that screen on the left, but I find it faster to press the physical button.  And when you are on the search screen, you can press the Home button again to get right back to the first home screen.

Ellipses.  I recently wrote about how you can hold down the hyphen key for a second or two to have the option to make an em dash.  There is a similar shortcut for and ellipses.  You can always just type the period three times … for a makeshift ellipses, but if you want to make a proper ellipses with the dots even closer together, you can now hold down the period for a second or two and a menu will pop up that allows you to insert a single character ellipses, such as …

E-mail pictures at highest quality.  If you take a picture with your iPhone and then tap the icon on the bottom left of the photo, the iPhone gives you the option to E-mail the photo.  That button makes it easy to do so, but note that the iPhone will automatically scale down the photo to 800 x 600 if you do so.  To send the highest quality version of the photo, go to the camera roll and hold down your finger on the thumbnail of the photo until the Copy menu pops up, which you can tap to copy that one picture.  (Or alternatively, tap the icon at the bottom left of the camera roll, and then tap multiple pictures that you want to send and then tap the copy button at the bottom to copy them all at once.)  Then go into an e-mail, and paste the photo(s) into the body of the e-mail.  This will send the photo at full resolution, which is 2048 x 1536 on an iPhone 3GS, and is 1600 x 1200 on an iPhone 3G.  Most of the time that I send a picture via e-mail on my iPhone, I’m just looking to send a “hey take a quick look at this” type of e-mail so I don’t really mind the scaled down 800 x 600 photo, but if you want to send the highest possible quality version, this is how.  (Thanks to Jon Martin and his Geek Stuff website for this tip, and to Daring Fireball for the link.)  Note that pictures in your iPhone’s Photos app that were synced to your iPhone from your computer are already scaled down (such as 640 x 426 format), which is just a slightly higher resolution than the iPhone’s 480 x 320 screen, so it doesn’t much matter whether you let the iPhone e-mail the photo directly or if you copy-and-paste into an e-mail.  Either way, you will be sending a scaled down version of the original picture.  So this tip only makes a difference for pictures that you take using the iPhone that are still in your camera roll.

Hold on links.  In Safari, if you hold your finger down on a link, you will get three options:  (1) open the link (which is the same as just tapping it), (2) open in a new page, a handy way to look at the linked item but keep your current page, and (3) copy the link URL.  Very useful.

Share contacts.  There is a new “share contact” button at the bottom of each individual contact on the iPhone.  If you tap it, it loads the contact info into a vCard and attaches it to an e-mail, which you can then send to one or more friends.  You could even share yourself — make a nice contact entry for yourself with all of your addresses and numbers, and then send it to your friends.  (Thanks to Ernie Svenson for this tip.)

Share text messages.  You can now forward an individual text message.  Just tap the edit button and tap on the
text message you want to forward.  You’ll be given the option to delete
that individual message or forward it.  The message arrives without any
indication that it’s being forwarded so you’d have to alert the
recipient of that fact in a previous text message.  And, obviously,
this process allows you to delete individual text messages, which I don’t
believe was an option before.  (Thanks to Ernie Svenson for this tip.)

Flick to select.  Apple has done a very nice job implementing cut, copy and paste.  One little detail that I noticed is in the text selection.  Double tap on a word and you will see the lines with blue dots indicating the end of the selection.  I’m sure that you know that you can tap and drag a blue dot to extend the selection, but one neat feature is that you can just flick a dot in a direction and the dot will keep moving until it hits the end of the word.  This shortcut can make it faster when you are selecting text.

Shake to undo.  [UPDATE]  I have previously noted that shake to undo is a feature of the 3.0 software, and I should have included it in this list of shortcuts.  Thanks to Jerry for reminding me by posting a comment to this original post.  In my prior post on 3.0 shortcuts and tips, I noted that I personally don’t like the shake to shuffle feature.  But shake to undo can be a time saver, not to mention it is sort of fun. 

If you have any other iPhone Software 3.0 tips or shortcuts, please post a comment or send me an e-mail so that we can share the tips or shortcuts with others.