Be Excellent To Each Other

Um... You're aware that you don't have an iPhone, right?

I dreamt I owned an iPhone last night. It was lovely. But then I had to investigate witches who were stealing body parts while I was trying to find Sainsbury's and it all got a bit silly.

Yes.

Have you been watching to much supernatural?

I've had a MobileMe account for years and years, so decided I may as well give the 'Find My iPhone' dooberry a shot. It does actually work rather well - it shows you the approximate location of your phone on Google Maps and allows you to display a message and play an alarm sound on the phone regardless of whether the phone is locked or in silent mode.

I can't see it stopping hardcore thieves from swiping iPhones but it would come in handy for when you lose your phone - particularly if you think you've left it somewhere.

And if your phone does get nicked, you can at least perform a remote wipe so that all your contacts, photos, videos, settings etc get completely wiped off the phone the second it appears online.

Never seen it.

It's a very neat idea. It's not worth subscribing to MobileMe for though, and it's useless to corporates because it's tied to MobileMe. Another example of Apple simply not caring about the coporate market; I know Craster loves that shit.

It's galling, is what it is. I've grown accustomed to vendors crawling on hands and knees over broken glass to sell me shit, not saying "Yeah, whatever - buy it or don't".

Fuckers.

No, it defintely isn't. To tell the truth, the only reason I'm still subscribed to MobileMe is that I'm:

a) too lazy to cancel the subscription
b) too lazy to find a new email provider
c) too lazy to tell everyone my new email address

I'm actually lending the 20GB webspace to a mate's brother, since I've had no real reason to use it in years.

First look at the iPhone 3GS camera.

Verdict: pretty awesome, for a phone camera. They got their shit together. Spot metering!

Not only that - spot metering which you can adjust in real time using the touch screen!.
That's so obvious now they've done it.

What is spot metering?

Indeed! I've never seen user-controllable metering on a phone before, though admittedly I haven't used my camera phones.

The article says exposure, white balance and focus are all set to where you touch. I wonder if you can separate the functions and control all three manually with separate touches. I often don't want to meter from my focus point.

It's when the camera uses a significantly smaller portion of the sensor to help determine exposure. Often a camera (particularly phone cameras with no control) can get confused by extremes of light, as it tries to make an overall 18% grey shade from all available light in the scene. So in snow, for example, the abundance of light would make the camera take in less light and produce a grey tone in your supposed-to-be-white snow.

With spot metering, you get a much finer degree of control* over where the camera should think an 18% grey area of the photo is, so no extreme balancing — you can force it to blow highlights and lose the blacks to give your subject the correct exposure.

*typically a spot 3% or so the size of the sensor, ish.

I didn't understand a word of that, but it sounds exciting!

I'd assume you can, from that mention about HDR..
Brilliant stuff, I was skeptical about them squeezing a better camera in there, and this is dramatically better, no doubt about it. Should be able to read barcodes too.

This is a third feature (the other two: on-the-go upload to flickr etc and GPS tagging) in which the iPhone camera kicks the shit out of almost every single digital camera going. Why on earth we're not getting high-end point&shoots with touchscreens and GPS chips, I have no idea, they seem like obvious upgrades to me. The cellular connection is harder but they could fit WiFi chips. With camera manufacturers scrabbling to differentiate themselves now the megapixel race is over you'd think someone would have made some strides in this by now.

Apparently the 3G S's photo metadata even includes, not just GPS position, but which way you were facing (courtesy of the new compass).

Quite brilliant. Especially for taking a quick snap of something lovely, then knowing exactly where and when it was taken so I can go back with my proper camera if need be.

Heh. It's really difficult to explain, especially when you can't seem to articulate anything.

There's a decent short article here if you fancy reading it.

Not to mention that photo organisation is difficult for consumers and "show me the photos I took on holiday" is trivial if they are all GPS tagged.

But none of this was new when the 3G did it a year or so ago. It's hardly something to get excited about.

No, sorry. That's an extension of my "why don't all cameras do this" rant.

I suppose it's exciting now because you'll be able to have decent pictures geotagged, rather than blurry low-grade ones.

I think the difference is that the 3GS's camera is now decent enough to use for more than just webcam grade snapshots, so those features will actually become used and useful, if it's your main camera.

edit: what myp said.

Do we actually know what hardware changes they've done to the camera?

None. It was all crippled from birth like the iPod bluetooth.

What would be rather nice would be if it STOPPED FUCKING ASKING IF IT CAN GEOTAG MY PHOTOS.

Hah. I forgot you suffer the same annoyingly problem I do.

Penile vomiting?

Do we know how good? Is it N95 good?

Is it k800i good?

Proper flash?

It's 3MP and it has an autofocus, automacro lens. And the CCD has video support -- that's a hardware change, not just software.

The pics look great. It's still two megapixels less, of course, but 3MP should be ample for 6x4 shots unless you need to crop.

Well I assume it's a whole new camera from a different manufacturer, as they mention a new and better sensor (still 3Mp, but that's plenty), and the autofocus which goes right down to a decent macro.
And it'll do video at reduced resolution.

No zoom on it of course.

I don't want flash. Flash that close to the lens ruins pictures if you have no control over its power, and 99.9% of people don't have a clue when and when not to use a flash.

The number of people I saw in the aquarium flashing their shitty little cameras straight at the glass was worrying.

edit: yeah, sounds like a completely new camera there. 3MP is absolutely fine, if not over-kill. The current one produces photos of bigger size than I've ever needed from a phone. I don't need to print phone photos.

I really had convinced myself that replacing the entire OS might fix the issue. Silly me.

There must be a fix for that.

New phone instead then! Yay.

Have you tried a chisel?

You mean you can't, because they're not good enough. If they were taking good enough pictures, I'd be more than happy to print them out.

Only completely disabling location awareness.

Yeah. But I'm not convinced I could be happy with prints from a camera with a sensor the size of a pea, and optics practically sitting on top of it. The hardware just doesn't really allow decent quality.

I'm with Grim.... I rarely print photos, admittedly, but a good pic is a good pic. I don't want to be unable to print phone pics, if only because the best camera is the one you have with you, and that's often your phone.

The short version, of course, is that I'm a picky snob. I'm happy to be proved wrong though.

Apart from not wanting the best camera on your phone?

with my SEk800i i printed many photo's as i got it (deliberately) when my son was born, great quality, i even had one canvassed 60x40 cm

Could someone with codey skills basically create a user generated Google Street View by stitching together everybody's iPhone photos and the embedded info? Assuming people took photos of locations, streets, landmarks, etc. and not their cocks.

well, this excellent article http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/06/17 ... lkthrough/ *, shows that it is in the wifi settings, which is far nicer, just wonder if it thinks all the kpn hospots i use it with (free with my dutch t mobile subscription) are the same, so i can use wifi at most trainstations

more importantly: in the amisterdam arena, 3G is horrible (probably due to 50000 hip phones trying to access it), so wifi is essential to follow other scores (using e.g. my football), there's a kpn hotspot but typing that horrible password/username often discouranged me, or got me more busy logging in (because hotspots often kick you out when not doing anything) then watching the game.

copy and past the jailbreaked way worked lovely for this (as it had 5 thingsyou could keep in your copy/paste base, so i made sure the username & password remained in there), os3.0 copy paste less it think..

* other similar articles
http://www.ismashphone.com/2009/06/how_ ... one_3.html
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articl ... e-os-30/P0
http://www.ismashphone.com/2009/06/acti ... os-30.html

When I flew to Menorca I took a picture of Jersey out of the window with my k800i and sold it for £250,000 to Google Maps.

I am talking myself in a 16Gb PAYG 3GS.

I'll get £17 cashback via Quidco (4% on the Apple Store), can sell the PAYG SIM card on (although despite the seemingly-valuable 12 months free data/wifi they only fetch £15 on ebay; WTF?) and Mazuma Mobile would have my cosmetically challenged 3G for £200. Which is a little below eBay prices of £250ish, but with a lot less messing about and the minor perk that I get to keep my existing charger, which is a plus. You can never have too many chargers and sync leads.

So total cost of upgrade is about £225. Hmmmm. My friend Nick, a CPW store manager, is playing with a demo one right now. He says it really is fucking fast.

Ditto. 16GB has been plenty so far, so I'm doing very well in resisting the 32GB model. I'm still finding it hard to resist a £440 phone though, but like you I can get rid of my 16GB 3G for a hefty chunk.