On my 2nd wedding anniversary Apple decided to give this fanboy a nice gift: the next iPhone hardware announcement. Unfortunately I was at work, so I could only get the little bits from the live blog, but I have since downloaded and watched the keynote. Here is an overview of the noteworthy things I liked:

New Look

I love the sleek new look of the iPhone. The fact that they made it slimmer is amazing and hard to believe, but it’s true, 24% thinner than the previous generation. I still see this thing being easily scratchable, but adding a case or the Apple “bumper” cases should do the trick, although it hides the coolness of the device. Being flat is a nice design evolution. I like the two button volume control rather than the rocker which I often find I hit the wrong direction while the phone is in the case.

I do worry that the Marware case that I have will no longer fit this phone. It’s very loose now with my 3G due to the wear, that means I’ll have to find a replacement. I also purchased the charging doc for my 3G, and it looks like the new form factor will make that device obsolete. I guess it gets passed down to my wife’s 3Gs.

From the pictures the changes are drastic yet similar (depending on the viewing angle) and I’m pretty impressed. Apple loves to change the design to make the old product look old.

New Hardware

Inside Apple has added their new A4 chip that powers the iPad. Not a surprise here. It will be a welcome update for me given that I have the 3G which I find very slow compared to the 3Gs. 802.11N for the new wireless standard was an obvious update too. I was really excited to hear bigger battery. I can get my phone down pretty far without doing a ton of work on it. Now with the new battery you can get up to 10 hours of video, that is like 4 movies! 300 hours of stand by time and 6 hours of browser time is awesome too.

Adding the gyroscope to allow better movement tracking is very “Wii-esque” and should open up some interesting games and map navigation apps.

New Display

It was hard to tell on the downloaded keynote sometimes, but you could see the much more richer display. It’s incredible with the same screen size they were able to get the resolution they did (960 x 480) which has over 70% of the pixels the much larger iPad has. All the icons and pictures taken with the iPhone did look way better. I’m sure this helps too with the new OS feature to have wall paper on the home screen, should make it easier to see the icons and text. I was a bit disappointed because I was thinking iPad since it came out, now it seems likely if I wait a year I’ll get a better display (and maybe a camera!).

New Camera(s)

It’s been long rumoured that Apple would catch up to other phones and add a front facing camera. While I don’t know for sure what pixel quality is on the front, it is exciting that video conference calls through Skype are now possible, although won’t be available at launch. The video that Apple showed of a Dad keeping in touch with his family through the new FaceTime feature is exactly how I picture this feature working. You can quickly hit a button and it will switch to using the rear camera, a neat way to show somebody on a call something really quick. Unfortunately it’s Wi-Fi only which I think will change once the carriers allow it, and the other limitation is that you will have to have an iPhone 4 to make it work. So that means no other iPhone or the iPad can take advantage of it. I would hope that the iMac and Macbooks could through the iSight, but that would likely only mean through something like Skype.

The beefed up 5 megapixel camera on the back with an LED flash is great. My iPhone is pretty much useless in low light situations and offers grainy photos (the 3GS seems much better) but having this kind of quality at your finger tips is amazing. Add a digital zoom and you have everything you need to capture moments when your DSLR is not at hand.

iOS4

At first I groaned at this, but when you see the demos that Steve Jobs did it actually made the idea of an ad being entertaining and informative a reality. Everything goes through Apple, so the iAd program will likely demand a level of quality to them. Apparently there are tons of ads ready to go and the product hasn’t even shipped, so that has to be great news.

Multi-tasking is something I can’t wait to try. I won’t be able to use it on my 3G, but for sure I will on the 3GS. I think Skype is a cool prospect to now be able to receive calls and keep chat windows (I think?) and calls active while I switched in and out of apps. It works as you expect and appears very fluid, but I would like to understand the limits to how many apps you can have open. We will have to wait to see people fully take advantage of the new background API’s, watch out for location based services and apps that update where you are at all times!

Adding folders will be nice so that I can keep most of my frequently used apps on the home page rather than swiping through or using Spotlight all the time. What I think is missing is add contacts to the home screen.

I love that you can add wallpaper to the home screen, but I need to see if they conflict with the icons and text.

A feature I will use all the time is the unified inbox. I have a lot of IMAP email accounts and having one single inbox to check them all will be crucial to saving me time.

I’m interested in iBooks, the e-book store that Apple has created. I’ve heard that it is very limited for the Canadian market but I assume that will change over time. I don’t know if I would use my iPhone for reading very much, I picture the iBook store being best for me like it was intended: on the iPad. I do like that if I had an iPad and ready a few chapters, that (I guess through my Apple ID) my progress would sync to my iPhone and I could pick up where I left off.  Also, if I bought a book on either device I have access to it on both.

Price and Availability

In Canada we have to wait until July before we even have a shot at this phone. All the big carriers are getting the phones. No details yet on upgrade pricing or how someone like me, who has had a 3G for 18 months or so can get an iPhone 4. One interesting way would be from Apple themselves. They announced in Canada that they are selling unlocked iPhones. That is an interesting option given the advantages of having an unlocked phone: no contract, can switch from carrier to carrier, etc. I’ll wait to find out what the pricing is, and if it’s possible to get a micro SIM from Rogers to pop into the iPhone 4.

I suspect the unlocked phone price to be upwards of $700 and the subsidized version similar to the US prices. I’ll wait and see what Rogers has to say in July!

Leave a comment with your thoughts on the next iPhone, would love to read them!

This post originally appeared on DavidRStorms.com on June 17, 2010.

I’m sure all of you reading this site faithfully love your iPhone and can’t imagine anything better. I find it is definitely integral to my day and I use it for all it can do, from games, remote access, email, calendar, contacts, surfing, GPS, music and podcasts, texting to actually phoning people.

With the 3.0 software and the new hardware, Apple bridged the gulf between other more standard features on competitor phones that they were lacking, such as video, MMS, voice dialing, etc. I think they are going to find it harder to throw more things into this device and keep it slick, simple and easy to use. I do however feel they have a bit of a ways to go before they get there.

Here are 5 features I would like to see up and coming on the future version of the iPhone (in no particular order).

1. Camera on the Front of the iPhone

Type: Hardware and Software

Having a camera on the iPhone is an obvious feature. Having one on the front would enable video calls between camera enabled phones. The first practical use for this would be Skype so that you can [do] video chats. I would see this coming from Apple in an iChat style native app. The burden will be the cell network. Video uses a lot of bandwidth so it would be doubtful with the current infrastructure that cell companies can handle a lot of video calls plus maintain the reliability for phones based apps. Something like this could launch over wi-fi only (like Skype is now) and then expand as the carrier can support it. Probably something like a premium charged service would likely happen. This would be live video chats by the way, not video like messages delivered like voice mail.

2. More Sound Options

Type: Software

I would like to see more native support for changing the ringtones for email especially. I find the dull tone very difficult to hear sometimes and I rely mainly on the vibration to know when I get email. It would be nice if a more audible sound like when you get a text message could be used. On that note, the options for text messages are limited, not sure why.

3. “Single App” Multi-Tasking

Type: Software

How many times have you been playing a game, writing an email or doing something on the phone and get a text message. From a programming point of view, in the iPhone SDK a message is sent to the app that halts it and gives it a chance to do things such as save state or progress so that after leaving the app to answer the text, you can resume from where you left off when you come back in. This is just good design for the iPhone to do this. But often I don’t want to stop to answer the text, I like seeing it but if I hit reply, I have to then go back to where I was, if I hit close I then have to remember to go answer the text, because hitting close removes the “new” and the badge counter on the Messages app. What I would love to see is another option to throw the currently running app into the background. Change the top bar to look the same as it does when you leave a phone call to go to the Home screen. When you do that it flashes green and says “tap to return to the call”. What if something like that can be done for a single app? Apple prohibits background processes because it degrades user experience, but something like this would only allow 1 app to be running. Perhaps it is on a termination timer. But theoretically I could throw the app into the background and launch the Messages app, answer the text, then tap the top bar to jump right back into the app I was running on.

4. Always List the Messages View First When Messaging

Type: Software

I don’t know about you, but how many times have you not noticed the name at the top of the messages app and simply sent something to the wrong person? You can’t blame Apple’s design for this, since it is very clear right up at the top who you are sending the text too, but a lot of the time if you are jumping between messages with different people, or leave the Messages app and go back in, don’t realize the person that is currently selected and send something confusing the wrong person. What I would like is a simple option to always launch Messages in the List view so that you have to pick who you want to type to. If there is only 1 I’m OK with it going to that thread.

5. Recording iPhone Screen Output

Type: Software, Hardware?

We all know Apple can do this because at all the keynotes they demo and have vendors demo their products right up on the big screen. Having the API built to handle this and maybe some kind of hook through iTunes or the Mac OS X itself (or even iTunes) to get video output of the screen would open the door for very high quality product demo videos and tutorials. App reviews will explode and maybe push some more sales. No more would you have to have a dimly lit room and a decent camera focussed on the screen and have to worry about manicures and all of that. There must be some kind of special dev build of the iPhone OS that allows this, making it a core API feature and then providing a product to do this would be a win.

That’s my list for now. I may have more to add later on. I would love to read comments on your thoughts on these features or if you have any yourself.

David Storms is a part time contributor to iPhoneDocked and can be reached at www.davidrstorms.com

I covered in a 2 part series the new MMS and tethering capabilities built into iPhone 3.0. You can find them here:

iPhone 3.0 MMS & Tethering: Part 1

iPhone 3.0 MMS & Tethering: Part 2

In this article I wanted to get more specific and focus on my experience tethering my 3.0 enabled iPhone 3G (note not the 3G S) with my recently purchased iMac (running OS 10 Leopard).

First thing I had to do was turn on Bluetooth on the iPhone. I normally don’t deal with Bluetooth devices so I leave the radio off. Plus it’s a good idea to save on battery life by turning it off. The iMac (which wonderfully has Bluetooth available) wasn’t listed on the devices list, even after I made it discoverable (the iMac that is).

I decided then to go through the device setup wizard available through the Bluetooth configuration icon in the status bar.

On the second page of the wizard there was an option for “Mobile Phone”. I chose that to proceed.

A search page then appeared as it tried to locate (from 2 feet away mind you) my iPhone. It took a moment but it showed up and I was able to select the device to continue. The iMac said that it needed to gather some bits of data about my device (no idea what) but after that I had a code popup on my iPhone which matched a code appearing the iMac screen.

The popup display on the iPhone indicated that a paring was occurring and I had to click OK to permit this. I did. However the pairing came up unsuccessful.

I tried a couple combinations of turning off Bluetooth and back on, switching the discover mode on the iMac to restarting the wizard but I wasn’t having much luck.

I eventually stumbled on the solution (no stopping for directions for this guy!). I had to be on the Bluetooth settings page on the iPhone with it scanning for devices. I then let the wizard attempt to pair with the phone. When the wizard came up with the code, I clicked the OK to permit prompt on the iPhone and then went back to the wizard to click continue.

Success! I could then setup a network connection through the iPhone.

In the Bluetooth settings page (use the Open Bluetooth Preferences from the status bar icon) you will see your paired device and details about it:

All you have to do is click the device and connect! (click the little settings cog wheel next to the minus sign).

So really this is a simple process, and a wireless one at that, much better solution that having to carry around a dock connector.

I did a few connection speed tests to measure the performance (excuse my lousy net speed!)

This is my broadband DSL connection (above)

And here is the tethered test.

About 100 kb/s off on the download, but significantly bad on the download. That is OK with me, since if I was using my iPhone for net access, I would likely really only care about the download speed.

This post originally appeared on DavidRStorms.com on August 10th, 2009

On my last post I talked about the new MMS features with regards to sending pictures in the iPhone 3.0 software update. In this article, I will document my experience trying out the tethering capabilities built right into the iPhone. Now like MMS, tethering technologies have been available on other platforms for years, and without jail-breaking your iPhone, you couldn’t do it previously.

The iPhone is only available on 2 carriers in Canada: Fido and Rogers. I am with Rogers and at launch of the 3.0 update they were one of the carriers that were ready to support tethering. I had to dig a bit to find out what were the conditions of tethering, can I do it now? Will I be charged a ton of money to do it? Do I need some kind of tethering enabled plan?

I managed to find this blurb on the Rogers web site:

So lucky me I already have a 1 GB data plan so I wasn’t worried about incurring charges. And it seems that I have until the end of the year to enjoy this. I haven’t seen anything yet as to what happens in 2010, but I’ll keep digging. A good resource for this is the forums at iphoneincanada.ca where they have a thread on iPhone plans that people can post.

Tethering

This is incredibly easy to do. My first test was with connecting the iPhone to my Windows Vista PC using the dock connector cable that comes with the phone. I made sure wireless was off and the ethernet cable was unplugged and that I had no internet access.

First up is you go to Settings, General and then Network to see this screen:

Click into Internet Tethering to get this screen:

You toggle the ON/OFF and almost immediately are are setup, when you go back to the home screen a nice little blue bar indicates that tethering is enabled:

It’s very similar to when you exit a call to go to the home screen, only not green but blue. When you think about it, it makes sense and is handy to know so that you don’t leave it on and suck up all the bandwidth on your account.

When charging and the phone is locked, you still get the blue indicator:

When I went back to my Vista PC, a new prompt came up:

I choose Home just to get rid of this screen and that was it. I fired up my browser and hit my first web page on tethering:

On the final part I will show the Bluetooth connection with my new iMac and visit a speed testing web site.

Note: this article originally appeared on DavidRStorms.com on August 3rd.

One of the exciting additions to the iPhone in the recent firmware update is the ability to send multi-media messages (pictures and video) the same as text messages. This is nothing new to the mobile phone market, as these features have been staples in products for many years. Could be that these things were left off the release table for Apple until now because it was too much work for them to get it in the phone, or they were planning ahead for future firmware releases and didn’t want to use up everything on their feature list!

Regardless, it is here on the iPhone and it is amazing! Also coming along with the update is the Internet tethering capability which had not been available to non jail-broken phones.

MMS

Unfortunately I wish that I had a 3G S phone so that I could test the video side of this, but alas I only have the 3G, so I will only cover my experience with pictures taken by the camera on the phone.

First thing you will see when you open the Messages app (used to be called a speech bubble called SMS but that wouldn’t make sense now would it!) you will notice near the text bar a small camera. Clicking on that little icon will bring up 2 options:

You can click “Take Photo” and jump right into the Camera app, or click “Choose Existing” and head into the Camera Roll and find the picture you want to send.

When you take the picture, you can optionally choose to Retake the photo, or click Use to have it go into your message.

You can type your text right in the speech bubble. I really like how the image is shrunk down and appears with the message. When you click send, it ends up in its own little speech bubble and the text gets separated into its own bubble:

You will notice a nice addition in 3.0 is that the screen isn’t locked with the sending progress bar anymore. The progress shows up at the top so you are free to start typing the next message, or go back and send a message in a different message thread.

I couldn’t make it happen, but when I first started using this feature I would have failed messages. I am with Rogers up here in Canada so shortly after 3.0 came out I imagine they were a bit overloaded with MMS going everywhere. When failures occur, 3.0 now shows them with a red exclamation point beside them. All you have to do is click that and hit the Retry button when it prompts. This is great because it leaves your messages there, so if it was network congestion with Rogers, I can easily leave the Messages app and come back in later and retry them.

You will notice as I did that with the image bubbles, you lose a lot of real estate in landscape mode trying to read other messages:

Of course if someone sends you a picture, it is easy to grab it. Just click on the image (it will appear as a bubble on the left, just like the senders messages) and you will get a full screen preview of the image. In the bottom left is a little icon that lets you easily save that image into your camera roll for safe keeping:

Speaking of camera roll, if you happen to be in there and looking at images and see something you want to share, there is a new option along with the Email to to send via MMS:

In the next part, I will share my experience with the tethering options found in 3.0.

Note: this article originally appeared on DavidRStorms.com on July 26, 2009 and is reprinted here unedited.

Like many millions of people I downloaded on June 17th the highly anticipated 3.0 software update from Apple for the iPhone. Since I’m not even a year into my contract with Rogers, this review will be based on my 3G. I think this will make a more accurate review of the software itself without confusing 3.0 features that work only with the 3GS.

Please note that this is from the “Canadian perspective” and I apologize if any current AT&T customers feel jealous about MMS!

For the most part I will revisit the highlighted items from my post back in March on the iPhone OS 3.0 Update. (note this link goes back to my personal web site)

Installing

Installation was a breeze. I have to admit that I was caught up in the excitment for this one and got up bright and early and started scanning for updates in iTunes but none were to be had. At work through TweetDeck I setup a search feed to watch Twitter for #iPhone3.0 and saw a lot of people waiting. I checked again at lunch time and nothing (I’m in EST by the way). Around mid afternoon, say around 3-4 pm I saw notes all over the place of people downloading. There was also reports of time outs, iTunes activation problems, delays, peoples phones not coming back, etc. Needless to say I was a bit aprehensive. But I know I would try anyway.

I was home around 5 ish that night and wondered if the servers would still be bogged. I plugged in my iPhone, gave it one last glace at 2.x, then proceeded with the upgrade. The download of a couple hundred megabytes took about 17 minutes or so. The backup of the phone took place, then the firm ware was installed. This was probably about 10 minutes. During installation my phone went black and I saw the normal silver Apple logo with a progress bar underneath. I thought I would see that progress bar each time the phone started as a new feedback feature, but alas not the case.

Before it was done iTunes alerted me that there was a software update from my carrier (Rogers) and if I wanted to download this. I can only assume that it had something to do with the MMS and tethering capabilities. I agreed and it downloaded and installed in no time.

That was it. My iPhone came back all loaded. I normally reseve the home page for the factory apps, and in 2.x I had 1 spare space where I put Tweetie. After 3.0 the Voice Memos app was added which pushed Tweetie to the next page. However what it did was put it on a blank page just to the right of the home screen all by itself. I was startled at first but fine with it. I believe you can go up to 10 pages now and I find that I now want to still reserve factory apps for the home screen, then frequently used ones on a more or less empty page.

Later on I’ll talk about Spotlight which kind of antiquates this.

App Store & iTunes (from iPhone)

I find these 2 apps now slower for me. Maybe I’m crazy but I get the loading screen a bit longer than I normally do. Even slower when not on Wi-fi.

First time I started the App Store I had 2 apps that had updates now that I was on 3.0. However each of them failed repeatedly. They would sit on the waiting stage for a while and then I would try again and from the App Store and I would get 2 failures. Finally I was in either the App Store or iTunes and I got prompted to accept the license agreement.

Finally on the App Store, when you look at the details of an app, you no longer have to click through the images, they all load on the detail page and you just swipe left and right to look at them. This is great for me beause I like to see all the screens but I don’t want to have to click one, then go back, click one then go back.

I did that and lo and behold I could update those apps. Only hiccup I’ve had there.

While I haven’t done it, I think it’s neat you can get TV shows and movies from iTunes right on the phone. I beleive you will need Wi-fi to download them because my 1 GB cap just won’t handle it!

Touted Features

Apple says over 100 new features, and I found this site that lists them all. Here is my personal experience with each of them.

Cut, Copy & Paste

Another feature that I think it’s great that it is there and extremely useful, but I just don’t do that much copy pasting on the phone to begin with. When I do use it though, it works as expected. And the shake to undo and redo blows a lot of people away and was a very nice touch on Apple’s part. I’m used to double tapping to zoom things and often the bubble pops up with text selected but its easily dimissed.

It’s just the way it is, but without a mouse it is a bit slower to narrow down to select the text you want, and I do find that the feature is smart about finding a word, then paragraph and then page.

The fact that the feature works across all apps is expected and works great. Copying images (up to 5 I believe) from the Photos app to an email works well (although you can send via email right from the Photos app), but grabbing an image from a web page and mailing it off is great too.

I don’t use this a lot, but I sure am glad it’s there!

Landscape Keyboard

I sort of got used to typing in portrait mode so it is a conscious reminder to flip to this form. Primarily I would use it in Email and Messages. I don’t take notes very often but I’m sure I would use this there as well.

Text Messaging & MMS

As mentioned above, the landscape keyboard is now in text messages which marginally helps me type. I do find it can take up a lot of room and leave me little area to see what is there:

One of the first things I did was try to send pictures over MMS. This worked like a charm. The small camera next to the text line makes it easy to snap a new shot or choose an existing one. I was told by my friend that pictures with text came out weird on his phone, but I love how they appear in speach bubbles on my end.

Last week though I tried to send him some shots of our basement project and all of them failed. Failed messages have a little red exclamation point beside them that you can click and retry. I did this many times but they still failed and I just gave up.

As I found out tonight (June 24) my friend also sent me pics last Friday (June 19th) and Sunday (June 21) and I didn’t get them until tonight. I then replied back with a picture and it worked. Best guess is that Rogers was overwhelmed or had to work on something last minute to make MMS work better. No idea. Haven’t seen any word on this.

You can now selectively forward and delete individual messages which I like rather than clearing the whole conversation.

Sadly I can’t take video because I don’t have the 3GS so I don’t think I can MMS any either.

A great change to the Messages app is now that when you send you are not locked out of the app while it sends but your message bubble pops up and at the top the app you have the “sending” note with the progress bar. That made a lot of sense to me.

I don’t find the app opens any faster but in fact seems slower to me.

Spotlight

This is a great idea addition to the phone. However I keep forgetting that it is there and often find myself locating apps and contacts the old fashioned pre-3.0 days.

I know its there I just need to remember to use it. The number 1 reason I would use this is quick access to my contacts. I don’t have pages and pages of apps and I organize them a bit so it’s not such a big deal to flip through the pages. I think it’s great that it will look into my email and calendar events, not to mention the iPod library.

Other

I have noticed modest speed boosts in web site rendering but I don’t tax things that greatly. I do know that JavaScript heavy sites like the Google services work quickly. I use the mobile version of Google Reader and its fantastic.

Another feature I use often is the landscape support in Email. Not so much for flipping through the list of messages, but opening emails I find it very useful. I still get the delay while the app tries to adjust the font size so it is readible, but that is mitigated a bit by the landscape support. I find that I type faster in SMS using portrait mode but from time to time I will use the messages app in landscape mode too.

If you want, here is forum documenting user found features you may not even know about yet!

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=715629

Note: this article has been edited from the original and first appeared on my site: www.davidrstorms.com on July 5th, 2009

A follow up focusing on MMS and Tethering will be coming soon!