Apple’s new iPhone 4S touts an 8-megapixel camera sensor capable of recording HD video at full 1080p resolution.
As an experiment, Robino Films recently posted a video comparing HD video shot with the new iPhone against video from the $2,400 Canon 5D Mark II. The two devices were mounted side-by-side on a camera rig, with similar exposure settings, shooting 1080p video at 30 frames per second.
“This test is really only to show that the 4S is coming close to the 5D but in NO WAY is it better,” comments Robino Films. “The iPhone is a great 1080p pocket camera and shows us where technology is heading. Give it two three years and we should see some interesting micro high performance cameras.”
ETCentric staffer George Gerba comments: “Add a professional connected app for news production and the white iPhone 4S might be more like a white news van than a phone…”
Steve Jobs had plans for a full-fledged, integrated Apple TV, The Washington Post learned after reviewing the authorized Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson.
“He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant,” wrote Isaacson in the book, available today.
“I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,” Jobs told the author. “It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”
Rumors have persisted that Apple might launch a television by the end of next year. Details have not been available, but if it “offered users a la carte programming with integrated Web surfing and access to Apple’s iOS platform, it could upend longstanding industries in telecommunications and entertainment,” suggests The Washington Post.
Recent speculation has suggested that Apple will produce an “iPad mini” to compete with the $199 price tag of the Amazon Kindle Fire, but many analysts doubt the possibility.
For one, if Apple is looking to compete with the Kindle Fire — which it has already denounced as a threat — it would have to compete in price, not size. A recent study showed that two-thirds of consumers want 10-inch devices while only 9 percent want a 7-inch tablet.
“We expect Apple to maintain its premium price point on tablets,” wrote Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps. “Apple will not allow Amazon to dictate the terms of competition — Apple makes its own rules.”
Additionally, the new size would complicate the development of apps, which have been specifically designed for the 3.5-inch and 9.7-inch displays of current Apple devices.
And the final reason: “Steve Jobs emphatically stated that 7-inch tablets are too small for a pleasant touchscreen experience,” writes Wired.
According to The Wall Street Journal: “It turns out that Siri, the new voice activated personal assistant for Apple iPhone 4S has a dry sense of humor.”
For example, when asked “Who’s your daddy?” the phone answered: “You are” in an authoritative tone — and in response to “Beam me up,” the phone reportedly responded: “Sorry, Captain, your tricorder is in Airplane Mode.”
The article adds that in response to “Open the pod bay doors” (a reference to Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which also features a “talking” machine), users say the iPhone responds in a frighteningly slow voice, “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Consumers are reacting to the artificial intelligence by asking the iPhone outlandish questions as websites dedicated to the concept are already emerging. The “personality” of Siri’s software could very well be the first step in driving consumer adoption.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak likes the excitement of a new product release and tries to be first in line, despite the fact that Apple will ship him products.
He was #1 on line at the Apple store in Los Gatos, California and stayed up all night tweeting about it.
TechCrunch interviewed “Woz” (on iPhone video) as he discussed his enthusiasm for Siri: “This is the way I want all mobile devices to be in the future.”
“I’m so tired of pushing buttons, tapping things to get the right things done on a phone,” he added. “I just want to talk my thoughts to it.”
He also notes that he no longer wants to be sent somewhere that might have answers: “Google is known for search engines. I say search engines should be replaced by answer engines.”
Geek.com writer Will Shanklin believes Siri’s capabilities would be enormously expanded with access to third party apps. Currently, “Yelp and Wolfram Alpha appear to be the only ones in that elite group.”
Third party apps could enable users to play music among different streaming services, quickly use music ID, combine data from multiple services (“How about a combination of Netflix and IMDb data?”), get real-time navigation and a range of other convenient possibilities.
Siri access to Facebook could expedite posts, messages and notifications and quickly get information from friends’ profiles.
“As much as you might be blown away by Siri’s capabilities now, we will likely look back at this as ‘Siri 1.0’ five years from now,” writes Shanklin. “In much the same way that the first iPhone’s single-paged homescreen – with no third-party apps – looks primitive now, this introductory version of Siri will pale in comparison to where ‘she’ will be then.”
Google is expected to roll out its own music store in the next few weeks.
It will reportedly tie into the company’s Music Beta service that allows users to upload and store their music collections.
Music Beta was announced after launch of Amazon’s unlicensed service, Cloud Drive. Also worth noting: “Apple got licenses for iTunes Match, which will instantly link a user’s songs to Apple’s master collection.”
“Its earlier negotiations with music companies, for a so-called smart locker service — a Web storage system that lets people link their digital music collections to a vast central database — broke down over financial terms and the music companies’ complaints that Google was not doing enough to curb piracy,” reports The New York Times.
If consumers take to the new virtual personal assistant technology Siri, featured in Apple’s iPhone 4S, we may see significant change to other devices such as the TV remote control.
Norman Winarsky, VP of ventures at SRI (involved in the development of Siri), told MIT’s Technology Review that, “within a decade, virtual personal assistants would be ubiquitous, integrated into the fabric of many devices,” and that their value could hike into the 100 billion dollar level.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to finally do away with the remote control, a device that begins to look so clunky and antiquated in our era of iEverythings?” asks Technology Review. “Apple has not announced any plans to bring Siri to devices other than the iPhone 4S, but the idea doesn’t seem so farfetched. It’s quite possible that the next refresh of the Apple TV could use a speedier A5 dual-core chip, speculates Cult of Mac — which would give the device the processing power necessary to run Siri.”
According to the article, Siri offers much more than just voice recognition: “Siri is good at parsing the words you say, but more importantly, its impressive artificial intelligence is able to discern their meaning, and take appropriate actions… As smart TVs become a next battleground for Internet-connected devices, let’s hope our remote controls get smarter, too.”
New research from Rice and Duke universities challenges conventional wisdom by suggesting that the removal of digital rights management restrictions can actually decrease music piracy.
“Marketing professors Dinah Vernik of Rice and Devavrat Purohit and Preyas Desai of Duke used analytical modeling to examine how piracy is influenced by the presence or absence of DRM restrictions,” explains the press release. “They found that while these restrictions make piracy more costly and difficult, the restrictions also have a negative impact on legal users who have no intention of doing anything illegal.”
“In many cases, DRM restrictions prevent legal users from doing something as normal as making backup copies of their music,” said Vernik, assistant professor of marketing at Rice. “Because of these inconveniences, some consumers choose to pirate.”
According to the research paper, copyright owners don’t necessarily benefit from less piracy. “Decreased piracy doesn’t guarantee increased profits,” Purohit said. “In fact, our analysis demonstrates that under some conditions, one can observe lower levels of piracy and lower profits.”
The press release includes a compelling statement from the late Steve Jobs: “Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy.”
Apple’s much anticipated iOS 5 launches this week and will require an upgrade to iTunes 10.5 in order to download.
According to TechCrunch, the new version of iTunes includes integration with iTunes Match: “For $25 a year, iTunes Match will give you legal digital access to any songs you own (be it through legal means or not). Match won’t actually launch until late October, but support is built into 10.5.”
The updated iTunes also “patches a number of Windows-specific security issues,” offers “Wi-Fi syncing support (when paired with iOS 5)” and provides “purchase history (for books, apps, etc.) through iCloud.”
While Android has so far trailed Apple in enterprise adoption, GigaOM reports that Motorola’s subsidiary 3LM, “has finally launched its security, management, and remote access platform for Android devices” that will enable:
“Device encryption of full memory and SD card data; selective encryption of corporate applications; remote wipe capabilities and whitelist/blacklist of applications; and control applications’ access to corporate resources.”
“Enhanced security and control of device, OS, and applications; remote installs of critical enterprise application; device tracking.”
“Secure remote access to enterprise resources and device health and status checking.”
The post also indicates that AT&T has announced “Toggle,” which allows Android users to separate professional and personal use by creating two different modes. This will help keep personal data private from IT managers.
Apple has made gains in the enterprise with iPad and iPhone integration, but this news suggests that “with better management tools that augment what already exists on Android, it may help boost Android’s acceptance in the enterprise…”
Launch day pre-orders for Apple’s iPhone 4S have already reached capacity, according to Verizon, AT&T and Apple. The only remaining model that is available for pre-sale is Sprint’s 32GB model.
In just 24 hours, the iPhone 4S pre-orders reportedly beat the one million mark, despite disappointment regarding no announcement yet for the iPhone 5.
According to Forbes, people aren’t waiting for the iPhone 5 for five reasons: 1) Users just want the latest technology now and aren’t going to wait; 2) “Many believe that the iPhone 4S really is the iPhone 5” and that Apple simply decided to misname it; 3) Sprint users can now join the iPhone club; 4) The 8 megapixel camera; and 5) “People really need a personal assistant” — while Siri may not be a “revolution,” many consumers are interested in the voice-recognition software.
The iPhone 4S will be available on Friday. The new model will be available to purchase in-store on October 14th, but limited supplies ensure that they will sell out as well. Apple itself has already referred to the upcoming launch as “the most successful iPhone launch we’ve ever had.”
In order for Amazon to stay competitive in the cloud computing market, its S3 (Simple Storage Service) and EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) could take some notes from Apple’s iCloud (launching October 12).
Seamless integration “provides iCloud with huge scale advantages over Amazon,” suggests Forbes, by wirelessly storing content from iPhones, iPads, the iPod touch, Macs or PCs and automatically pushing content to all devices.
“Consumer-centricity” makes cloud-computing user-friendly with targeted features like iTunes Match. “This feature prevents the need to painstakingly upload music into the cloud as iTunes Match itself creates a library matching the user’s existing playlist.”
And pricing. “While the iCloud provides free 5GB-worth of storage for documents, mail, and back-up for iOS 5 users, Amazon’s S3 service charges users for even the first gigabyte of storage space.”
The article points that little is yet known about Amazon’s other competitor, Google’s GDrive.
Google has a relatively small patent collection, with most of its patents related to fundamental search algorithms and technologies.
Looking to expand into the mobile sphere, Google purchased Motorola’s cellphone business and by extension its patent portfolio to “better protect Android from anticompetitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies,” Google CEO Larry Page said.
However, IPVision, a patent-analyzing software company, says, “the 1,029 patents that Google bought from IBM in July contain little that the company could use to either attack its competitors or defend its own products.”
Google will most likely need to expand its patents into mobile software. “It’s common knowledge that Google is patent poor,” says Hoo-Min Toong, co-founder of IPVision. “Not only does it need to gain patents in their own product areas, but also in defending themselves against other claims.”
UC Davis researchers have determined how to transform the iPhone camera into a microscope with details up to 1.5 microns using a 1mm ball lens that offers 5x magnification.
The team “has one-upped the competition by making the iPhone into a 350x microscope for very little money,” reports TechCrunch. “Now you’ll be able to send people Instagrams of your blood cells.”
“The field of view is very small and there’s distortion to deal with, but by combining the in-focus areas of several pictures you can get a clear enough image to identify cell types, make counts, or even take spectroscopic readings,” comments the article on the image capturing process.
The post includes compelling side-by-side images comparing a commercial microscope with the iPhone camera set-up. There is also a link to the UC Davis paper, “Cell-Phone-Based Platform for Biomedical Device Development and Education Applications.”
“It may not be a mobile clinic, but in areas where money and electricity are hard to come by, an iPhone could be a valuable diagnostic tool,” suggests TechCrunch.
