Meh!

I got tired of waiting for independent reviews of matte screen films for the iPad, whose glossy screen is an abomination if you are trying to use it near light sources.

I simply fail to understand what the heck Steve Jobs has against matte screens except maybe that they do not display as well for impulse buyers in the showroom. As of now the only Apple screens available with a matte finish (even Apple refers to it as ‘anti glare’!) are on special order versions of the 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pro and on the very costly (and seriously dated) 30″ Cinema Display. Everything else comes in ghastly, glossy glass. It’s the reason I use two Dell IPS monitors with my HackPro.

A friend suggested the Zagg screen protector and while their site has all sorts of torture tests for the plastic film, it’s not scratch avoidance that is the issue here. As a long time user of the iPhone I can testify that the screen is extremely tough. No, the issues are glare and fingerprints.

For a small sheet of plastic, the $30 Zagg is extremely expensive which, I suppose, figures when their site uses the words “military grade”, an expression given to us by the Army with its $750 hammers and $5,000 toilet seats. Hey, it’s patriotic capitalism. Why not gouge the taxpayer?

The Zagg is shipped in a very stout cardboard tube (no indication whether it is military grade but it feels like it), with a small rubber squeegee and a bottle of solution. The packaging probably cost more than the piece of plastic sheet. You clean the iPad’s screen – I used a final swipe of isopropyl alcohol having soaked my hands in it first, and then moisten the adhesive side with the spray on solution. The instructions tell you to moisten both sides but that is wrong.

Now comes the part which is sheer, bloody hell. Zagg has a video which makes it seem simple. Trust me. It is not. I wonder how many times they made that video before they lucked out with perfect placement on the front. Their video also shows the rear protective film (I did not waste money on that) being slid around – possible because of the textured, low surface tension, aluminum surface. You cannot slide the film on the glass, another place where the included instructions err. Gee, considering it took me all of 2 minutes to realize this, Zaggers, why the heck couldn’t you spend 5 minutes typing the instructions correctly? No job in Apple design for you! Read on.

The instructions state that you should slide the film into place on the iPad but that’s impossible. It wants to stick. So after several efforts at rough positioning I got one corner and side just so and somehow managed to work the rest of the film into place without stretching. You really must not stretch it as the size is perfect, right down to a cut out for the iPad’s Home button, and I was careful to keep the moisture down in that area as it looks like moisture might migrate under the Home button. The center of the cut out and the annulus surrounding it have to be removed once in position but, once again, the instructions fail to point that out. If not removed the surrounding film is very reluctant to stick.

Having got the film in place you now moisten the front to allow the provided squeegee (an excellent design) to slide easily over the surface as you smooth out bubbles. The generic instructions go on to say that you can use a hair dryer to help set the film around uneven surfaces. Zagg makes a back cover also for fetishists who care how the rear of their iPad looks. The rear is not plane and may need some local heat to set it. However, all I can say on that inspired piece of advice is “Good luck with the class action suit, boys”.

No matter how hard I tried I was still left with a microscopic bubble or two especially visible in the black frame which surrounds the iPad’s screen. Zagg states “Micro-bubbles and imperfections will work themselves out over 2-3 days” so check back here and I’ll let you know if that is true. The vendor also goes on to say that the iPad should be left for 12-24 hours to allow any remaining solution to dry. This strikes me as pure rot. What is there to ‘dry’ when the plastic sheet is not porous?

So how does it work?

If you are looking for the reflection cutting effect of a good matte TV or computer screen, forget it. It’s a waste of money. The glare is cut a little bit but the film is still far too glossy.

As regards fingerprints – a purely cosmetic issue as they do not affect readability of a ‘naked’ iPad screen – the Zagg film is good. It is more fingerprint resistant than a naked screen but the fingerprints are also harder to clean off. The screen has a very slight texture, which probably explains this.

Finally, as regards the Zagg’s effect on touchscreen sensitivity, I can detect none. It’s just like using a naked iPad.

Unintended consequence: With all that squeegeeing and accidental button pressing, i did relearn an old iPhone trick with the iPad. Press the home button thrice on a sleeping iPhone or iPad and you get the iPod controls (volume, play/pause, fast forward and reverse) without having to unlock the device. Nice.

Conclusion: At $30 it’s hard to recommend the Zagg. It’s a solution for a non-existent problem when it comes to scratch-proofing the glass and does a poor job in cutting glare. It comes with flawed and possibly dangerous instructions, corrected in the video if you bother to find it (the iPad link on their web site is faulty and you have to hunt around). Get my drift? A pretty schlocky job by the fellow who decided that a generic instruction set would do. Not right. In Zagg’s defense they do not tout glare reduction but their published User Comments very much do. Pure BS. Would I recommend it at $30? Give me a couple of days but I’m pretty sure that the answer is “absolutely not” and that ye Zagger is destined for the recycling heap, lifetime replacement warranty notwithstanding.

Basically, I feel I have been …. Zagged.

Hopefully something better comes along that really does what I want, which is to cut glare, and shows a higher standard of care when it comes to written instructions.

Some oddness.

I delved a little deeper into the wifi signal strength in the iPad, following up on my earlier notes which disclose wildly varying broadband speeds as measured from the iPad.

I haven’t quite got to the bottom of it, but there is something fishy going on.

First, a note on my home wifi setup.

• Broadband is provided by an AT&T Uverse modem connected with Ethernet cable to an Airport Extreme (AE) running 802.11n at 2.4gHz. Mine is the version previous to the current dual band one.
• My Mac Mini for the TV sits right below the AE. It is connected to broadband wirelessly.
• My office is 30 feet and two walls away and houses my HackPro with a wireless card emulating Airport functionality.
• I have an Airport Express (AEX) set up as a range extender four feet from the HackPro, boosting the AE’s 802.11n at 2.4gHz. Mine is the current 802.11n version.
• The iPad is, of course, all over the place.

Now take a look at this signal strength chart generated using Airport Utility at the HackPro’s location:

Wifi signal strengths as seen from the HackPro

As you can see the Mac Mini (green line) has the strongest signal, as well it should as it sits right below the AE.

The HackPro gets a weak and fluctuating signal (red line) from the AE (32% of max) but once the AEX is added as a range extender the signal is strong and steady (55% of max – black line). The AEX is a fine complement to a device in a weak wifi location, broadcasting a powerful wifi signal.

But it’s the iPad’s behavior which is puzzling. The iPad’s wifi antenna sits right behind the radio-transparent apple logo in the center of the iPad’s otherwise aluminum back. Right around where I have placed the iPad arrow pointer on the graph, above, I had moved the iPad so that its Apple logo (antenna) was literally touching the AEX’s casing. The wifi signal seen by the iPad dropped some 12 dB (yellow line). By contrast, look at the signal at the iPad on the right hand side of the graph, when I had removed the iPad to a location where it was separated by a wall from both the AE and the AEX. The signal is much stronger and steadier.

This suggests that the iPad’s wifi reception is overloading its wifi circuitry.

By way of follow up I tested the iPad using the Speedtest.net app in three locations:

The three readings reflect:

• iPad on top of the AEX (2.48 down/1.40 up)
• iPad on top of the AE (3.61/1.40)
• iPad 10 feet and one wall away from the AE and 10 feet and one wall away from the AEX (4.69/1.40)

So the closer the iPad is to a wifi signal, the slower it gets! And it’s slowest on top of the AEX which seems to send a more powerful signal than the AE.

As one final test I took readings with the iPad 30 feet and one floor distant from both the AE and AEX. And guess what? I got the highest speeds of all, 5.31 down and 1.41 up, respectively!

So what is called for, it seems, is for Apple to revise its software to reduce the iPad’s antenna signal transmitted to its circuitry when the iPad is very close to a wifi source. The result will be higher speeds. Whether for surfing or sending photographs, you cannot have enough speed. And you can’t be too rich or too thin either, both challenges to the average American at the time of writing.

RAW does not work well.

Yesterday I commented on how long it takes to email a photo using Photos on the iPad if the original you imported using the Camera Connection Kit was in RAW format. Bottom line is that it takes so long (>4 minutes) that it’s a waste of time. (At this point Apple fanboys, blinded by Jobs’s Reality Distortion Field, can pour themselves a tall glass of STFU and exit stage left).

Today, I took a RAW snap, uploaded it from the G1’s SDHC card to the iPad using the Camera Connection Kit’s SDHC card reader, then emailed it from the iPad to a poor unenlightened individual who has the misfortune of using Windows 7 and MSFT Exchange at work.

The reply came back: “I cannot open the file”. Now being an empirical type (meaning I don’t write “it works” until I have tried it, unlike some of the jerks posting comments here), I also copied myself on the email to Mail app in Snow Leopard. I could see the JPG preview attached to the RAW file fine, and also noted that the RW2 RAW file, some 12mB in size, was attached to the email. However, all the Windows 7-using addressee could see was an RW2 icon which he could not open, not having the necessary RAW converter on his PC. Further, the large file size of the JPG to which the RAW file was attached may well have been blocked by his employer’s email system. So he saw nothing save an RW2 icon which he could not open. Like so:

I fished around in Photos on the iPad and also in iPad’s Settings->Photos but could not find an option to send only the JPG file as an email attachment. So, if you want your iPad-emailed photos to be visible to all email addressees, it seems that the right thing to do now is to forget RAW and shoot in JPG. That way only a JPG will be sent, visible to one and all.

Further, unlike sending photos by email using iPhoto on a Mac – which gives you a choice of which size you wish to send – there is no such option at present in iPad’s Photos app, meaning that whatever resolution you shoot the JPG with will be the size emailed. As my native JPG in the G1 is set high, that makes for large JPGs – not very useful when all an email generally dictates is a photo with a long side no more than 640 pixels.

Not very useful.

I just received the iPad Camera Connection Kit from Apple:

It includes two adapters which plug into the base socket on the iPad – one for direct connection of a camera, the other to allow download to the iPad of images stored on an SDHC card.

I tried it with a direct connection to the Panasonic G1, noting the following:

• 20 RAW images took some 10 seconds to download to the Photos app on the iPad – not bad
• The JPG previews are 1336 x 2000 pixels (2.7mB), which is what you will see when you email yourself the photo, in addition to the underlying 10-12mB RAW file
• You cannot sync photos downloaded to the iPad to your desktop. Right now iTunes only allows sync from desktop to iPad, not the other way around
• The only way to get a photo to your desktop is to email it to yourself
• Try to email more than one RAW image at a time (approx.11mB per image) and the iPad chokes
• Sending a single image take 4 minutes which is as good as useless
• Preview on the iPad is fine but that’s as far as it goes as Photos has no processing capability yet
  
• Most disappointingly, you cannot use the iPad as a giant Live View preview screen for composing studio pictures, as the G1’s EVF is diabled the moment a camera cable is plugged in. Other Live View cameras may differ.

SDHC connector and camera connector – you supply the cable

Connecting the SDHC card reader and inserting an 8gB SDHC Transcend card saw the same 20 pictures loaded to the iPad in 7 seconds. Not bad at all.

If you are using a camera which uses CF cards, use a CF->SDHC card adapter in the camera as the Camera Connection Kit does not accept CF cards

So what’s needed here to make the iPad more than a cursory review device is the following:

• Software for the iPad with processing controls
• Two way cable sync between the iPad and a connected computer to allow speedy moving of files from the iPad to the desktop.
• Panny needs to update its software to allow piping of Live View images to an external device

However, long time readers of this column will know that Dr. P. is anything but a quitter. Check my earlier piece on iPhone Explorer, written when the only people with iPads were Steve Jobs’s kids and a few guys in Cupertino, CA sworn to secrecy on penalty of death, and you will see that you can look at your iPhone files by simply firing up iPhone Explorer on a Mac to which your iPhone is connected. Well, guess what? It works just fine with the iPad!

iPad files viewed on a desktop Mac using iPhone Explorer

In case you are wondering about the two XMP sidecar files shown above, those were generated by the iPad when I emailed the related RAW files to myself. I did not email the third, hence only two XMP files.

Now you can drag and drop the files onto your connected Mac and transfer is lightning fast. The three RW2 RAW files from the G1 came over in 3 seconds with the iPad connected using the standard USB cable. They open fine in Lightroom which sees them as RAW files:

RAW files from iPad downloaded to LR using iPhone Explorer

I had hoped that maybe you could just use LR’s “File->Import Photos from Device” menu option but unfortunately LR 2.6 does not see the iPad as a device. Given the awfully bad blood between Adobe and Apple at this time, I wouldn’t be holding my breath for LR to recognize the iPad any time soon. No matter, someone else will figure it out. Obviously, if iPhone Explorer can see the files, it’s not exactly nuclear physics to make a photo processing Mac application see them.

Well, it’s a start. At least you can move files quickly to the iPad by sidestepping email but there’s work to be done in Apple HQ.

Disclosure: No AAPL position.

Follow-up:

I have received several comments from readers who assure me I am doing something wrong and that I merely need to load iPhoto on my Mac to transfer photos from the iPad. Clearly, none of these readers have tried that. Talk is cheap. Expertise rare. It will be a cold day in hell before I publish drivel like “You are doing something wrong” with no suggestions as to what ‘right’ is. What possible value are you adding by wasting your time typing that?

However, I have found out what I was doing wrong, no thanks to these useless Comments. Where do you people come from?

Here’s the fix.

I was connecting the iPad to one of the USB outlets on my Dell monitor. These are low power outlets (0.25 watt if memory serves) and clearly do not generate sufficient power to force recognition of the iPad in iPhoto. I twigged this when it occurred to me that you can use these low power outlets for recharging the iPad , if slowly, only when the iPad is asleep. Otherwise, the iPad displays a ‘Not charging’ message. Aaah! More power is needed.

So I connected the iPad to a motherboard outlet on my Mac and, voila*, the iPad and its picture album popped up in iPhoto and download was speedy and easy.

Let me repeat. Comments which add value will be published. All others, like this jerk’s, go to spam status.

* Or ‘viola’ as those asinine commentators would put it.