Category Archives: iPhone

A smartphone with a decent camera

The iPhone 4S does San Francisco

iPhone, Photographs

How good a street snapper is it?

Test charts never did cut it for this street snapper. Real world use and responsiveness turn my crank. So, with that view in mind, I ventured to SF from the south bay, the iPhone 4S’s hotspot providing wifi for the iPad so that I could do my day job on the train there and back.

The iPhone is not going to win any prizes for ergonomics and, frustratingly, I found myself activating the movie slider on more than one occasion until I got the hang of how to hold the gadget right, neither going into movie mode or obscuring the lens. I learned to hold it in the left hand just so, with the camera on, and it was then easy to raise to face level, squint and shoot. I used the Volume ‘+’ button for the shutter release, in preference to the awful touch button on the screen which is an ergonomic nightmare.

What made the whole experience a (relative) joy is the responsiveness of the shutter release which has minimum delay and short time between snaps. Just for fun I tried to see how fast I could shoot and managed 24 snaps in 15 seconds, without trying too hard. Not half bad! Those were all garbage of course, as is typical for machine gun shooting. But one or two others worked out, helped by the strange unobtrusiveness of the iPhone, as your subjects think you are messing with a phone rather than taking their picture. In many respects, now that it has a half-decent camera, the iPhone 4S is the least obtrusive street snapper I have used. As a matter of interest, I consistently found portrait orientation easier than landscape.

Where you see blurred backgrounds they are courtesy of Photoshop CS5 and those thinking of writing me about bokeh or some such nonsense should spare themselves the effort. Bottom line, post processing blur works and it works superbly. It’s hard to relate with a straight face but there are dorks out there who get off on studying the unsharp bits ….

Confused. Obviously an Android user. On Maiden Lane.

Yerba Buena Moscone Center carousel.

Union Square. This lady bears a striking resemblance to Georgia O’Keefe.

Ad doubtless sponsored by knee and back surgeons.

Yuerba Buena colors.

Alone.

Machismo. A lovely warm, masculine face.

Carousel horse.

Chez Mondrian. Off Brannan Street.

The iPhone has got what it takes for street snaps and not too many excuses are called for.

Some of the above were processed lightly in LR3 with background blur added in PS CS5.

Lunch after all this exertion? Why at the South Park Cafe of course!

Pork, dates, a rich sauce and mash. iPad testifies that this was a deductible business trip! Mmmm!

Fellow diners.

Just walking the pup

iPhone, Photographs

Um, where’s my camera?

One of the toughest things about the iPhone 4S is that you have to keep reminding yourself that there’s a very capable camera with you at all times.

These were snapped on yesterday evening’s walk with Bert, the resident Border Terrier.

American. Truck. iPhone 4S.

Setting sun.

Dinner. Food. Art.

First two processed in Snapseed, the last unprocessed. All snapped on the iPhone 4S.

The iPhone 4S – Part III

iPhone, Photographs

Some snaps and observations.

When my second AppleTV refused to update over-the-air to AppleTV OS 4.4.1, and as I did not have a micro USB cable to do it over iTunes, I decided to take it to the Genius Bar at the local Apple Store and let the geniuses have at it. While they milled about, humming and hawing, I got to taking a few snaps in the melée that is the Burlingame store.

Once you learn to keep your finger away from the lens, the 4S is a more than decent snapper. Shutter lag is minimal, I have learned how to switch the flash to On-Off-Auto with the screen touch control and face detection shows a green rectangle to tell you what is being focused on. A touch changes the area of choice if that is wrong. Inter-snap delay is very short and there is no meaningful shutter lag. You can bang away at up to two pictures a second with ease.

Because the focal length of the lens (35mm FFE) is a very short 4.28mm, everything is mostly sharp all the time, though the f/2.4 fixed aperture does make touch focus useful for closer subjects.

On the way to the store we first encountered the parrot man in the street:

Parrot man. 4S, 1/120, f/2.4, flash, ISO 125.

A bit of lens flare is visible here around the red cap, though it may be from thumbprints on the lens as much as anything. Something to look out for – or to exploit for certain subjects. Nothing quite like a good greasy thumb to give you that ethereal look!

Nothing wrong with the definition in the above picture:

Parrot Man – detail.

Down the road my son Winston had to have a snap of the ghoul on the local restaurant’s wall – this is completely unretouched:

Ghoul. Picture by Winston Hofler, aged 9. 4S, 1/120, f/2.4, ISO 125.

Where Winnie saw a ghoul, I saw a ghoulish business which thinks nothing of stealing from Americans daily:

Bankster ghouls. 4S, 1/120,f/2.4, ISO 80.

Once in the Apple Store, pups were everywhere to be seen while water damaged keyboards and dropped iPhones were being attended to.

Pup at the Genius Bar. 4S, 1/20, f/2.4, ISO 125.

And another:

Another pup. 4S, 1/20, f/2.4, ISO 125.

Apple likes to get ’em young, and there was a plenitude of snap opportunities in the kids’ play area:

Trying the iMac. 4S, 1/20, f/2.4, ISO 100.

In the next snap, I zoomed in using the un-pinch gesture to see what the quality would be like. The answer is that whereas most of the above will print well at 13″ x 19″, this one starts to break up at 8″ x 10″.

Intent. 4S, 1/20, f/2.4, ISO 100.

Don’t be fooled by those blurred backgrounds. These were done in Photoshop CS5 using the Magic Outliner, Refine Edges and Filter->Lens Blur. But then you wouldn’t know that unless I told you! You can see just what a great job Adobe has done in coding this technology in the close-up of the Parrot Man’s whiskers and the young blonde girl’s hair, above. It takes seconds to do and you can bet this code will be in-camera before too long.

The Auto White Balance in the iPhone 4S beats the pants off that in the Panny G1 and G3.

The funky handling of the 4S takes some getting used to, the screen is awful in bright daylight and the camera is better than 99.9% of photographers out there, most of whom seem to contribute to the fora at DP Review. The remaining 0.1% of us actually take pictures.

That AppleTV? Turned out to be a dud so Apple replaced it, no questions asked, doing the software upgrade on the replacement for me in the store. Can’t grumble – time wasted being more than repaid by some great picture opportunities. And because everyone thinks you are futzing with your phone, no one takes any notice. That’s worth a lot. Now I can enjoy wireless Mirroring from the iPhone 4S, when it’s not being used to take snaps or make calls.

Wireless video routing

iPhone, Movies

Made possible by the A5 CPU.

AirVideo:

A few months ago I wrote about ZumoCast, software which, when installed on a computer and an iPad or iPhone would permit routing of movies on that computer to the iDevice wirelessly. The use was obvious. When you have a lot of movies on your computer or on a file server connected to that computer, it’s nice to be able to view them remotely. The iPad is ideal for this sort of thing when you are in bed!

Sadly, ZumoCast is not available for iOS any more. Motorola bought the company and that business now belongs to Google. Google and Apple are not friends. Goodbye ZumoCast.

But there’s a new alternative named AirVideo, available for your iDevice for all of $2.99 with a free app which has to be installed on the computer in question, as with ZumoCast. AirVideo works well and you can enjoy movies over wifi from your file server or computer on your iPad or, for those with great eyesight, on an iPhone. My iPad 1 or iPhone 4S receives and plays the video and sound fine as long as I am in range of the home wifi.

Rebroadcasting:

But why not take it a step further?

One of the major changes in the iPhone 4S and iOS5 is the ability to rebroadcast whatever the 4S shows on its screen to any display device to which an AppleTV is connected. This is non-trivial and Apple has done a poor job of publicizing this feature, also available on an iPad2. Earlier iDevices which do not have the fast A5 CPU in the iPad2/iPhone 4S cannot do this. They call this AirDisplay and it’s much improved in iOS5.

The Apple TV is an inexpensive, unobtrusive gem, much underappeciated and poorly marketed. I wrote about it extensively, starting here.

Invoking AirDisplay:

First hop into AirVideo on your computer, set up the directories where your movies reside – this only has to be done once – and you can start AirVideo on the iDevice.

To enable rebroadcasting of the iDevice’s display, double click the Home button on the iPhone 4S/iPad2, then swipe the displayed app icons at the base of the screen twice to the right. (Clicking the AirDisplay icon from within an app does not cut it). You will see a volume slider and the AirPlay redirection icon. Touch that icon and available output devices will be displayed. If you have an Apple TV on the same wifi network it will appear as a choice. Choose it. Below the Apple TV choice, if you have upgraded the ATV to OS 4.4 or later, you will see a Mirroring button. Turn it on. (If your ATV is on OS 4.3 or earlier that button will be missing. Update your ATV software).

Air Display Mirroring control in iOS5, on an iPhone 4S.

Choose the movie to watch on the iPhone/iPad and you will see:

You can now play the movies on the display attached to the AppleTV you chose earlier.

Topolgy:

  • My stored movies reside on the ‘file server’ – a bunch of wired hard disk drives.
  • The file server is connected to the MacMini and can play those directly.
  • I am instead re-routing them to the iPhone 4S and thence to the AppleTV, both wireless.
  • The software on the MacMini and iPhone 4S is AirVideo.
  • The Apple TV routes the wireless video signal to a wired screen of choice – to any screen the AppleTV is attached.

Here’s how things are connected:

AirServer topology.

Why bother? After all you could simply watch the movie on the MacMini without any of the other hardware or software.

And why not just put all the movies in iTunes on the MacMini?

Well, first iTunes is very restricted as to which file type it will accept. No .avi, no .VOB, etc. And my stored movies are in many different formats.

Second, the display device with its attached ATV can be anywhere there is a wifi signal!

And, finally, the hard wired approach dictates just that – physical wire connections which are not always possible.

So to get a wireless signal to a remote big screen, say, without having to move server boxes or having to run cables, all that’s needed is an iPhone 4S/iPad 2 (the iPad 1’s CPU cannot hack it and stutters), and an ATV connected to the remote display device of choice – big screen TV or overhead projector. The iPhone 4S acts not only as receiver/converter/transmitter but also as a wifi remote, no IR line-of-sight controller required.

When a call comes in, the movie is automatically paused and the phone call is answered. When you hang up, one touch on the iPhone’s screen gets the movie playing again.

Display quality is identical to that when the movie source is hard wired to the display.

Is that serious magic or what?

You can get some sense of how much faster the 4S is at processing tasks, compared with its forerunners, from this Apple Insider chart:

I think I have just solved remote routing of movies from the file server to a large, remote drop down screen!

Performance:

I ran a full length HD movie through this and the iPhone 4S used about 40% of its battery during the two hour test. It is working very hard, converting the received movie from the MacMini on the fly and rebroadcasting it to the Apple TV. Despite that the movie does not stutter. If the battery is low simply connect the iPhone to a USB connection on a local laptop or to the mains. iPad2 users should have no battery capacity issues.

Oh! Siri

iPhone

Language, language, language.

One of the more inspired pieces of marketing surrounding the iPhone 4S is the funny answers Siri, the voice recognition/AI technology, gives to philosphical questions. These are all over the web so I will not regale you with them here. The genius of these is that they humanize and personalize a piece of otherwise dispassionate technology.

However, one thing which I at first found to be frustrating was my low success rate in getting Siri to understand me. I was getting maybe a 50% error rate. So I thought ‘Beta release, whatever’ and took the dog for a walk. While conversing with the pup he pointed out to me that I do speak ‘sort of funny‘ and should really know my place in the former colonies. He’s from Yorkshire so that was rather like the pot calling the kettle black, but I let it go.

Then, as luck would have it, I learned that Settings->General->Siri on the iPhone 4S offers no fewer than five language choices. There is The Queen’s English, Former Penal Colony English (there goes my Australian readership!) and what passes for English in the site of George III’s greatest folly, as well as French and German. Ah! I switched to Buckingham Palace and the change was a revelation. Siri’s error rate went to almost zero and sentences were almost always transcribed correctly!

So I got my boy on the job. He hangs out too much with me and speaks sort of funny too. We had been trying to cheat on his homework using Siri and the Wolfram Alpha search engine built into every iPhone 4S and had given up in mighty frustration trying to get it to ‘Define Product’. After no fewer than forty tries, I put on my best American accent, which is truly ghastly at the best of times, and, Bingo!, right first time. Now, seconds later, with Siri switched to The Queen’s English, the computer voice changed from that of a nice American woman to a slightly inebriated-sounding Englishman. Well given the climate over there I could understand and forgive him having a pop or two and I could only approve of the transformation in accuracy. We both tried ‘Define Product’ several times. Yup, you guessed it. Right every time.

So now I decided to get ambitious and asked American Siri for local Mexican restaurants. Once I got the accent right she came up with the goods.

American Siri

Next, switching to Her Majesty’s lingo, I gave the friendly inebriate a shot and what did I get?


British Siri

Oh! dear. Apple has made the error of assuming that British English speakers only reside outside the US whereas in fact there are several million of us refugees here, basking in political and relative economic freedom.

I gave it another shot and switched to French Siri. No go. Location lookup doesn’t even work for French Siri, suggesting again that language is driving lookups, rather than physical location. And, presumably, the Académie française has yet to approve the dictionary, which may take several years.

In any case, now that I was a relative Siri convert, I called the mothership and got Lance at Apple Customer Care in Indiana. He listened hard and concluded I was onto something, passing my findings to Siri’s programmers. Thus, when version 0.1 comes out, all you British English speakers out there residing in America will know whom to thank. The call with Lance actually took 20 minutes. 5 to discuss my findings and 15 of me comparing the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4S in aiding him in his buying decision, which has to be one of the stranger conversations I can recall having. He now knows all about Geekbench tests and CPU/GPU specs in the product he supports ….

As for asking Siri about Henri Cartier-Bresson in English, or even in American, fughedaboutit. She/He is clueless. Can’t understand a bloody word.

In the interest of research, I asked an English resident British English speaker to try the test on her 4S using American Siri. Sure enough. Same error. Nice to know Apple is a hotbed of equal opportunity discrimination.