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Tag: Technology

  • iPhone 5 Camera Comparison vs. Ricoh GR Digital III

    The new iPhone 5 features an improved camera, mainly in the area of image signal processing in the A6 chip, which reportedly allows it to do intelligent sharpening, noise removal, and pixel binning for low-light situations. The lens elements have also been rearranged, resulting in a slightly different field of vision from the iPhone 4S. There’s also the new sapphire crystal lens cover which resists scratches — unfortunately, I already have a tiny speck of dust on the inside of mine, which I’ll have to get them to clean at some point.

    I’m more interested in seeing how the iPhone 5 competes with other point and shoot cameras than with the iPhone 4S. Here are two scenes taken with the Ricoh GR Digital III (my review here), a high-end compact comparable to Panasonic’s LUMIX LX3/5/7 series, and Canon’s S90/95/100 cameras.

    The photos below are direct from camera and have not been fixed or enhanced. The GRD III is something of a prosumer camera, and if handled correctly, i.e. with manual controls and lots of fiddling, is capable of some great results. For parity with the iPhone 5, these photos were taken in fully automatic mode, letting the camera figure things out.

    Ricoh GRD 3

    I had to take this shot twice because the Ricoh chose a very shallow focus, directed on the leaves in the middle, which left the stone duck and foreground leaves blurred out. It’s a little underexposed, but the larger sensor gives some beautiful detail to the fern.

    iPhone 5

    The iPhone 5 analyzed the same scene, and chose to keep a relatively deep focus for a usable shot the first time around. The photo is also noticeably warmer (pleasant, but perhaps inaccurate) and brighter. This photo is good to go without any editing, which is how most users want it. No problems with sharpness in the details.

    Ricoh GRD 3

    The GRD had trouble focusing again, and ended up with a spot in the middle (above and to the right of her nose), which keeps the dog’s legs in focus but not the face. Although what fine details that were in focus got captured with a good amount of clarity, the photo is pretty dull and boring on the whole. Your aunt would not consider this a keeper without a trip to iPhoto.

    iPhone 5

    Again, brighter and warmer. I don’t think the iPhone makes everything warmer, only in shade and indoor lighting conditions. None of the daylight shots I’ve seen so far look overly warm. Sharpness is consistent across all areas of interest, and noise is acceptable for ISO 400. Fine fur details are not as well resolved as in the GRD photo, but this may be down to JPEG compression. Using an app that allows setting lower JPEG compression, such as 645 Pro, may compensate for this.

    For most purposes, I can’t see why the iPhone 5 wouldn’t be an adequate camera replacement. In terms of straight-from-the-camera usability, these photos are astounding compared to the GRD III, which used to cost in the region of USD$500-600 (it has now been replaced by the GRD IV model).

    I’ve gone on a few trips where I ended up taking all or most of my photos on an iPhone 4/4S, with few regrets. Focusing on the 4S was a little touchy, and it tended to take photos before focus had fully locked, if you hit the button too soon; this seems to work the way it should on the iPhone 5.

  • Why Can’t Twitter Be Like Foursquare?

    Turf Geography Club

    I never thought little ol’ Foursquare could lead the way for Twitter, but their approach to the third-party access and monetization problem shows more class and understanding. For the past few weeks now, instead of investing in a user experience that users would choose, Twitter’s stated solution has been to make their apps the only ones in town.

    Thanks to a tweet from @tarngerine today, I discovered Turf Geography Club, a location-based iPhone game built atop Foursquare’s place database, with additional Monopoly-like mechanics for upgrading and defending your property. It stands out from all the other “check-in and own this location” type apps by taking a flat-out fun (as opposed to a utility) approach: retro 16-bit style graphics, a Wes Anderson-inspired aesthetic (evident in the name, video trailer, and writing), bears, compasses, illustrated logbooks, and nonsensical references to an eternal struggle between man and nature.

    What I liked was how I could suddenly start using Turf as my Foursquare client of choice, checking in as I usually do, but also playing this separate, app-specific metagame at the same time. Likewise, I can choose to use Path to document my movements with friends, and share a subset of those actions to Foursquare, for my other contacts to see them. Or I could document something private in Day One, the journaling app, and still check in to Foursquare from there where the location made sense (publicly, without sharing the contents of my journal entry).

    Whatever you think of Foursquare and the people who use it, you can’t deny that this is what everyone would love Twitter to continue being, and what the company seems bent on defying: a confident social platform open to innovative ways of being used.

    Foursquare recently updated their mobile apps in a big way, taking focus away from previous key features such as Mayorships, and emphasizing discovery and recommendations instead. The Foursquare app is now really good at showing you things of interest nearby, in categories such as food, shopping, and sightseeing, based on recommendations from other users. I can’t get those in Path or Turf, but my one-way actions in those apps feed back into the enrichment of Foursquare. That’s reason enough for me to keep the Foursquare app on my phone in addition to all the other ones that offer check-in functionality.

    Twitter’s mobile apps also do a couple of things that third-party apps aren’t allowed to. It shows interactions that your friends have had on the service: tweets they’ve liked, people they’ve recently started following, and it shows supposedly personalized things of interest: local trending topics, and popular links being shared. The latter is where their advertising monetization is meant to happen, and it’s something that no one loves because it’s often dead wrong about what we want to see.

    Imagine if Foursquare’s app showed you places you would never go, or check-ins from people you didn’t know or like. What would be the value in that? Instead, contextual intelligence and expert data mining help Foursquare stay valuable and interesting to users when they want to explore, while their availability to third party apps keeps users active and in the equation. The people at Twitter can’t go wrong throwing everything behind the creation of that value, in the interests of long-term viability, instead of shutting down the future of their service that may come from apps like Turf.

  • Ten Days with Android & the Samsung Galaxy S III

     

    Fulltype7

    I’ve been an iPhone user since the first day it was possible to be one in Singapore. I love the platform, but I’ve been intrigued for awhile now by the larger-screened Android devices that I see every day on public transport here. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these enjoy greater acceptance and penetration in Asia than elsewhere in the world. The comments thread that begins here on an Asymco post are quite enlightening, for further reading on the Korean market.

    The short version of those insights, from memory: the Korean market is heavily dominated by Samsung, which predominantly makes Android devices. Koreans (and other metropolitan dwellers in areas of low urban crime must fall into this category — e.g. Singapore, Tokyo) spend a lot of time commuting on public transport. Large screen phones are more suitable for information consumption than tablets in such situations, where one stands in a crowd and holds a handrail; in some cases a single session may last 1-2 hours. An interesting phrase in one of the comments called Koreans “diligent information sponges”. It’s hard not to imagine a face glued to a large 4.8″ screen, hoovering up the day’s news and social media updates on the way to work. Games and movies are also better — I see many a Chinese drama series being watched on large phone screens whenever I take the subway. My theory is that personal security concerns may deter commuters in some cities from being fully immersed in such devices. I’d love to hear more opinions on this.

    More so than for users who drive or walk or have shorter commutes, where typical smartphone sessions throughout a day are counted in minutes and not hours, the impracticalities of a large screen are tolerated here. Women I’ve spoken to say they wouldn’t mind at all if the next iPhone had a screen that was as big as or nearly as big as the Samsung Galaxy S III (4.8″). They ‘can’t put the iPhone 4S in their pockets anyway’. The Galaxy Note seems impractically big, even to me, but I see many women here on a daily basis who appear to enjoy using it. The difficulty of one-handed operation does not seem to be a deal-breaker for the Singaporean/Korean/Asian user.

    —

    So having managed to resist the urge to buy an unlocked, off-contract Galaxy S II a year ago at full price, just for research, I recently found myself fixated on the idea of getting the new Galaxy S III at a subsidized price as my contract comes to an end. Note that my first reaction to the phone was amusement, followed by dismissal. Their launch presentation was absurd, and had more than a couple of WTF moments (for example, one of the presenters slipping and using the word ‘bizarre’ to describe it). But within two weeks, I’d convinced myself I should get one. I don’t know how this always happens to me. I figured with 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Android was finally ready for prime time.

    —

    It’s been 10 days. Here’s what I’ve experienced.

    Almost immediately, I noticed that battery life wasn’t what it’s been promised to be. Android gives you plenty of ways to break down the battery meter (and plenty of ways to have a nervous breakdown watching stats). You can see exactly what percentage of power consumption is going to the screen, the cellular radios, applications, and so on. I discovered that my phone wasn’t going to sleep when the screen was turned off. It was actively trying to do something, but I didn’t know what. So I shelled out 4 bucks and bought BetterBatteryStats, which promises to identify what those behind-the-scenes “wakelocks” are. If you’re thinking that this is already sounding like more trouble than you want from your phone, out of the box, you’ll know how I felt coming from the iPhone.

    It turns out that it was a problem with Google Backup, a feature similar to how the iPhone will back itself up to iCloud over Wi-Fi each day when you plug it in to charge; except this phone was trying to do it all the time, apparently even over 3G. I turned the feature off, and things seemed to get a little better. The next big battery drain problem came from a background process associated with switching networks to find a good signal in areas of low coverage, except this was happening everywhere. My “Cell Standby” usage was at 30%, when Android users on other phones see numbers closer to 5-10%. Because I’ve encountered this complaint consistently from other Galaxy S III owners on forums, it could be a design or software fault.

    I then spent another day reading up about a feature called Fast Dormancy, which may or may not have been the problem, depending on whether or not my phone provider has optimized their network for it — all of the above a moot point, I eventually found, because Samsung disabled the secret menu option in Android that would have allowed me to turn it off like some American users found was improving their battery life. Oh yes, I spent a few hours messing around with these secret menus too. Remember typing in stuff like *#*#49090** into feature phone dialers, pre-iPhone? That’s still around.

    There also also many apps you can get for optimizing your battery life. Some seem to be nothing more than placebo task killers; others are more intelligent and can disconnect the mobile data network in intervals to save battery life. Unlike iOS, where push notifications are delivered via a single Apple-managed connection that’s probably kinder to battery life, many Android apps have to run in the background and do periodic checks. New tweets and emails, for example, can only be set to come in at 15, 30, 60 minute intervals, depending on the app.

    The built-in keyboard has pretty bad word prediction. You can install third-party keyboards. I’ve tried like four. They all have their own flaws. Don’t like the way the homescreen works? You can install third-party launchers. I’ve tried like four. You can guess they all have flaws. Android defenders point to this ability as a key strength. I’ll admit I had a little fun. I used to waste a lot of time on my PCs futzing around and hacking solutions to problems. But it’s far from optimal for most users. Speaking of touch controls, capacitive buttons are as bad as I’ve heard they are. The “Back” button area is extremely easy to nudge when holding the phone in landscape position, such as when you’re watching a film or playing a game. Even in portrait orientation, if you hold the phone tight, it’s easy for the fleshy bit of the palm under your thumb to creep over the edge and trigger it, exiting you from your current screen.

    Charging: The phone charges via a standard Micro USB cable, but when connected to a USB power source such as a computer, it charges very slowly. I’m talking upwards of 10 hours for a full charge. Online research suggests that for some reason, it only takes in a fraction of the power being delivered to it, if it detects that data could also come down this cable. There are instructions to DIY mod your cable so that it charges as quickly over USB as via an AC adapter. This was just too much for me, so I spent even more of my valuable time tracking down a cable that does the same job out of the box. It’s the McKal MM83A Supercharger cable. You’re welcome.

    After having gone through the things I have in 10 days, where the state and maintenance of my phone has been constantly on my mind, I think the drawbacks outweigh the large and beautiful screen on this phone (quality-wise, it’s not better than the iPhone’s Retina display). I haven’t even mentioned the lack of really solid Twitter applications on this thing, or how Path’s Android app is so inferior to the iPhone version, or how scrolling is still nowhere as fluid or as natural from a physics standpoint as it is on the iPhone, THROUGHOUT the iPhone experience. I believe scrolling can be quite different on Android, from app to app, but I’m not entirely sure at this moment.

    But when I hold my iPhone now, it feels wrong. It feels more like a little camera than a phone (the camera on the iPhone is tons better, as is the selection of photo apps on iOS — I have yet to find a credible, well-designed photography app on Android. There is nothing in the league of Hipstamatic, Camera+, VSCO Cam, Infinicam, Noir, TiltShift Generator, and many others I have happily paid for on iOS. The best ones are the ones that are also available on iOS: Pixlr-o-matic, Instagram, AfterFocus). The screen feels cramped, and it’s a little heavier and thicker than I’d like. I miss having the glanceability of Twitter/Facebook widgets on my homescreen alongside app shortcut icons (something that Windows Phone 7 gets a lot of praise for too). But other aspects of the iPhone user experience are beyond comparison. I don’t want to mess with battery settings and tweaks. I don’t want the ‘freedom’ to spend hours scouring the web for ways to make my phone better. I want a phone made by a solid company that I trust, optimized to the best of their ability in a combination of software and hardware design, so that I cannot possibly believe that I could do better myself. Because that frees me to do everything else. But I also want that phone to have a larger screen.

    Essentially, I’ve been paying to relearn a lesson I already did back in 2007 with the first iPhone. I’ll keep using it for now and see what else I can learn about Android (it’s beneficial for my work, anyway), but I’m crossing my fingers that whatever iPhone comes next will give me every reason to sell this off, and restore my sanity. When someone asks me if they should buy an iPhone or an Android phone, my new answer is “If an Android phone is right for you, you’d already know it.” It’s the right choice for those people, but not most, not the way it is now.

     

     

  • Everpix, The Rise of Centralized Cloud Photos, and The Decline of Flickr

    Everpix-web

    I signed up for Everpix last night and have been thinking about it all morning, even as I’ve yet to get my photo collection uploaded to it.

    In essence, Everpix is an online repository of every digital photo you’ve ever taken, supported by a background Mac utility that keeps it in sync with your iPhoto/Aperture/Lightroom, and an iPhone app that syncs your Camera Roll, and allows you to view your library in the cloud. Crucially, it also syncs with your online photos on Flickr, Instagram, Google+/Picasa, and Facebook.

    Every photo is private by default, and making an album (called a Moment), or part of it, public, gives you an obfuscated URL that can be shared with others. You can also publish photos ‘offshore’ to Facebook Albums, Twitter, and possibly other destinations.

    Philosophically, this is almost everything I want my Flickr account to be right now, but that they are so, so far away from achieving. I signed up for Flickr Pro to have an online backup of all my photos, with the ones I want to share set to ‘Public’ visibility. In the past few years, the internet has moved on, and we now share photos on other stickier social networks. There’s been a fair bit written in the past week about Flickr’s decline as a destination, and it’s because photographers at all levels are getting more views and feedback through Facebook, G+, and even other photo sites like 500px and Smugmug.

    Adobe had a go at cloud photos with a product called Carousel that was recently renamed to Revel (why?), but that effort tried to be an entire workflow, with a desktop photo management app that had half-baked Lightroom editing tools built in. Adopting a product like that involves a complete change of tools. Good for beginners, but bad for anyone comfortable with what they have.

    Everpix promises to meet us halfway. Use whatever you’re used to, and have all those photos in the cloud, with easy publishing to any and all online destinations through beautiful web and mobile apps. All publishing actions take place between Everpix’s servers and the other web service, so the user experience is simply that of instantaneous uploads. It’s the best of both worlds: backup and effective sharing.

    You can tell this is an important facet of the service because one of their core features is “Auto Curation”. Click a button, and the service picks what it thinks are your best photos, with clear faces, even exposure, and other secret sauce traits. Another click, and those are shared online.

    More than just disrupting Flickr, it also shows us what Apple’s iCloud Photo Stream could be, but understandably isn’t just yet. Rolling out free, unlimited storage and access to millions of iOS users would test their billion dollar war chest; the inevitable failures, their invaluable credibility. Everpix is a small startup in beta that I’ve decided to entrust with access to all my photos; I’m hoping their pricing structure, when revealed, will be reasonable enough to pay for.

  • Shadow Cities: The moment a location-based game surprised me

    Seth Schiesel’s effusive review for the New York Times:

    If you have an iPhone, you simply must try this game. Shadow Cities isn’t just the future of mobile gaming. It may actually be the most interesting, innovative, provocative and far-reaching video game in the world right now, on any system.

    I looked up at the sole approaching man, and he looked back at me. I couldn’t believe the first thought in my head: “Could he be one of them?”

    I was walking up the street to my home, and had just been playing Shadow Cities when that moment, an experience of virtual world crossover that no other game had ever produced before, hit me. There are few truly new sensations in gaming each year, and that was a whopper. Giving another person in real life a nervous glance, wondering if they’re a player too, sounds like the kind of crap you might put in an ad (sure enough, it’s in Shadow Cities’ trailer), but there it was, happening to me. Sure, the Nintendo 3DS has its StreetPass feature, but the mechanics there are like a coin toss, and largely irrelevant to the games you play on it.

    Shadow Cities is a freemium, competitive, GPS-based game of global warfare on a local scale. Essentially, all players are divided into two factions. After picking a side in this MMORPG-style game, you see your surroundings in the form of a glowing map; a parallel world of magic. Your goal is to work, with others if possible, to gain control of territory and harvest energy to put your faction over the top. You’re not limited to where you actually are, either. Creating a beacon will allow friends from around the world to temporarily visit your area.

    The side that I picked, the science-based Architects, are total underdogs right now, forced into playing guerilla tactics against a more powerful enemy. All day, my similarly low-ranked colleague (@jeanfinds) and I had been running away from hopeless battles, trying to eke out small victories.

    At the aforemention moment when I was walking home, I’d just placed two towers in the neighborhood that would help generate energy as long as no one disrupted them. I needed to protect them. When I looked up at the other man, I could feel my lizard brain actually priming itself with a fight-or-flight cocktail of apprehension and aggression.

    But I won’t lie: the game has a steep but short learning curve. I installed it last night at a company dinner party at Jean’s suggestion, and only managed to fully understand its menus, unique vocabulary, and mechanics sometime this afternoon with her help. But it’s worth it. Every gamer and designer remotely interested in multiplayer experiences should try it for at least a couple of days. Level up past 5, and play it with a friend or two (I’m going to convince my office to get together and dominate the central business district), and see where the bar is for location-based games on any platform, free or paid.

    There’s a lot of polish in this Finnish game. Unlike other freemium MMO titles, there aren’t long load times between views. It renders its smooth 3D graphics quickly while loading network data secondarily, much like how the iPhone appears to launch apps instantly by going straight to static screens that look like running apps. It’s all quite impressive, and I look forward to getting further with it.

    Visit www.shadowcities.com

  • The intriguing Jawbone UP, which we can’t have in Singapore

    Media_httpcdn2sbnatio_smmzc
    via theverge.com

    Site: http://www.jawbone.com/up

    I’m not the first or fifth person to come to mind when a friend talks about fitness gadgetry; the only time I came close to being a buyer was with last year’s iPod nano. I used the pedometer once. Then with the 3DS and StreetPass, I tracked my walking for maybe a week before forgetting about it.

    The beauty of Jawbone’s UP bracelet, which I’ve been waiting for most of this year, is that you can’t really forget it. It stays wrapped around your wrist, through showers and workouts, sleep and meals, continually recording your movements and interpreting them as steps, calories, games of tennis, and fitful tosses and turns in the night. Every now and then, you plug it into your iPhone, and an app throws you beautiful infographics and logs your activity, even comparing it to friends’ if you so choose. Competition changes everything, but so does have a visual feedback loop that makes you think about your behavior, and optimizing it.

    And it’s just $99.

    I’m sure in 9 months we’ll have an UP+ with Bluetooth 4.0 low-power technology that will work with the iPhone 4S, so everything can be wireless, but that doesn’t change the fact that I want one of these NOW. And because this is a Jawbone product, I can’t. It’s only available in the US for now, and they won’t ship it overseas.

    This reminds me of the circus that getting a Jambox speaker last Christmas was, which ended with my girlfriend arranging a chain of favors through friends that I’m sorry to have inconvenienced. Jawbone distribution in Singapore is the pits. The Jambox, currently USD$180 in the US, hit the local market late and costs SGD$328, or USD$256. The Icon and Era headsets aren’t far off. It’s criminal bullshit.

    They claim it’ll roll out internationally by the end of the year, but I’m not holding my breath. If any kind Stateside soul I follow on Twitter wants to help send me one, I’ll pay by Paypal!

  • Switched from SingNet DSL to StarHub Fiber today. Here are the Speedtest results.

    Singnet-dsl-vs-starhub-fiber

    We never got the theoretical maximum speed of SingNet’s 6mbps down, 512kbps up plan, so I don’t consider it to be a bottleneck for download speeds (even in the best case scenario of a Singapore-based server, it didn’t come up against the 6mbps ceiling). The StarHub fiber plan is capped at 50mbps down, 15mbps up. For international surfing, StarHub says the connection is capped at 15mbps down. I’m just happy that it’s better, and that uploads are so significantly better. It’s going to be great for uploading photos to Flickr.

    I tried out a couple of moderately-seeded torrents and saw max download speeds of about 4 times higher than I used to get with SingNet. Your mileage may vary, but it’s a promising start. I think a 1.5GB image came down in about 15 minutes.

  • Ditching Read It Later for Instapaper

    This evening I made the switch from Read It Later to Instapaper. The latter is by far the more popular service. On the surface, it might be hard to choose one over the other. Their iPhone apps both cost $4.99 (Read It Later, Instapaper), they both have free-to-use websites, they both suck the text out of a web article you’re too busy to read at the moment of encounter, and store it online for later enjoyment. Well, at least that’s the idea.

    It seems grabbing the right text off a page isn’t that easy, and RIL was just letting me down too many times. Quite often I’d have words like Home, About, and Related Articles – clearly bits of the navigational interface missed by the dust filter – appearing before or in the middle of the story I wanted to read. Sometimes they’d be the only words on display: the article itself having been weeded out and tossed aside, 90% of the page’s content or not!
    The RIL text engine wasn’t very smart about pretending to be a normal browser either. Sometimes the policing mechanisms of a website would prevent it from loading the intended content and direct RIL to the front page instead. In the instances where I might only get around to reading the article months later, there’d be simply no way to remember what I was supposed to have been saving. Salon, Edge Magazine, Wired Mobile, and The New York Times all gave it trouble, among others.
    There were reasons I stayed this long, though. Read It Later excels at being social. After reading an item I really liked, I could send it to Diigo for full-text archiving, or Evernote, or tweet it, Facebook it, bookmark it in Delicious, share it in Google Reader, or even email the plain text to a friend who might be interested. The Diigo bit was closest to my heart. But for every sweet feature – a full-screen view and a scrollbar for quick skimming are two examples worth mentioning – there’d also be the disadvantages of being second-best.
    I think the reason Instapaper has such a knack for sniffing out the right words from a page is that dedicated users send Marco Arment emails whenever something doesn’t work right. By his own admission, the system is a pile of hacks, but as far as the end user (me) is concerned, it just works. I wish it didn’t always have to be about Features vs. Excellence, but Instapaper definitely wins the lower-my-blood-pressure challenge. RIL probably doesn’t get enough feedback to develop a comparably intelligent engine, but missing the first paragraph of every article on the New York Times? Come on.
    Also, most apps install support for Instapaper first, and the wait for RIL integration is always long and uncertain. I don’t know if Nate Weiner, Read It Later’s developer, does anything to help adoption of his service along, but like in the case of the new Twitterrific for iPhone, users like me end up being the ones petitioning other app developers to please please please consider adding RIL support. It sucks.
    Plus, in the time since I last saw Instapaper, it’s received a bunch of great new features like a paginated viewing method, and an enhanced presentation with inline graphics. I’ll miss RIL’s sharing features, and hope Instapaper adds just a couple more export options to the current choices of Tumblr & Twitter (Diigo, please!), but for the moment it’s enough that I can bookmark stuff and be secure in the knowledge that they’ll be waiting for me, complete, when I get to them.
    The fact that this blog somehow appears in the screenshot for Instapaper in the App Store has nothing to do with it, I swear!