Hoping for something a little larger.
Scooping all the other news sites, I can now reveal what next year’s iPad will look like.
Here is our son playing with the current model, shortly to be obsoleted by the jumbo in 2011.
Winston with the 2011 iPad.
Looks promising.
If it really is responsive, quiet and has a decent viewfinder, you will find me at the front of the line for the Fuji FX100. This is much more than the ‘Leica M9 for the rest of us’. It’s not just the price, it’s the automation. The Fuji has autofocus and shutter or aperture priority auto-exposure. The M9 has only the latter.
Sure, the lens cannot be changed, but as a single purpose street snapper, you don’t need that anyway. What you want is fast – no fiddling with exposure or focus or this or that. Just press the button. C’mon, gimme the snap.
So Fuji’s new site (mostly English, though some page turns get you to pure Japanese) is welcome.
Just look at the complexity of the design of that aspherical lens element!
35mm equivalent f/2 lens in the Fuji FX100
Emphatically not your father’s 35mm Summicron!
Yesterday’s news. The superb 35mm Asph Summicron which I used for years on my M2.
So it doesn’t look like Fuji is skimping on the optics, but the key variables remain to be assessed – speed, viewfinding and noise.
Still, I find lots to be excited about here.
To enter the FX100 site, click the picture below.
Click to enter the Fuji FX100 web site. Needs Flash, so no iPad! Thanks, Mr. Jobs, for being such a jerk.
Bring your own wifi.
Want to bring your own wifi hotspot with you rather than suffer the agonies of lousy hotel systems or ill equipped restaurants? Want to upload your snaps to friends or write and upload your blog from the road? Want to do whatever it is you do seamlessly on your travels?
Well, now it’s easy and cheap. It’s called the MiFi 2200 from Virgin Mobile, it’s the size of a credit card, although a bit thicker, runs four hours on a charge and it costs $150.
The Virgin Mobile MiFi 2200 – 140% of life size
It also works fine off the mains. $40 monthly for unlimited use on the Sprint cellular network and it fools your computer into thinking it’s a wifi source, not cellular 3G, so things you cannot download using 3G (like large files) work fine.
Before I bought one and signed up I checked coverage for 3G Sprint at Sprint’s coverage map for my favorite places in California – I refuse to fly, so that means driving distance. These include Monterey Bay and Carmel, both a two hour ramble from home in the old roadster.
Well, it turns out that Sprint is excellent (=orange) in both locations; here’s Carmel for example:
After signing up (more passwords and codes than a retriever’s litter – a disgrace) I tried it with my iPhone, iPad and MacBook Air. All work perfectly. While my iPhone has 3G built in (my iPad version does not) this reduces battery drain on the iPhone significantly. On Airport Extreme/AT&T 10mB/s broadband, my iPad usually gets about 4mB/s download; I got 1.1 mB/s using the diminutive MiFi. I also tested it using this slower speed with an HD Netflix movie and it works fine. Wow!
I like to drive to Carmel and Monterey Bay now and then for some R&R and have been staying at the Pine Inn on Ocean Avenue in Carmel since before wifi was invented. The Pine Inn has the worst – the absolutely WORST – wifi on the planet and I have been complaining about it mightily for years and years. They smile and do nothing. Another favorite, the Spindrift Inn in Monterey, just down from the Monterey Aquarium, always tries to charge me for their wifi (a truly dumb business practice) and I always have to fight to get the charge reversed as the service is awful.
No more!
The additional advantages of the gadget are that you can have up to five computers/devices accessing it at the same time and it uses WPA encryption for high security. I’m going to see about getting a second battery for travel, just in case. Battery life is claimed to be 4 hrs, 40 hours standby. Plus, when iPad2 comes along, I’ll buy the cheaper non-3G version as the MiFi is device independent – meaning it’s not built in.
But here’s the real killer feature for someone like me who simply cannot be without the Internet. The MiFi works perfectly with my desktop HackPro which of course has no cellular receiver! It may not be a speed demon, but it works fine, so if AT&T’s wifi goes down at home, the desktop HackPro thinks the MiFi is just another Wifi source and can lock on to it. So the MiFi is also a wifi backup system in the home.
Here it is running on the MacBookAir (2WIRE665 is the native AT&T feed; Tigger’s Network is the Airport Extreme wifi in the home; the seemingly unsecured Tigger’s Airport Extreme is actually a secure Airport Express range extender which the Mac seems incapable of naming or displaying properly):
For some reason Virgin Mobile has decided that when the MiFi 2200 is connected to your MacBook using the provided USB cable as an alternate charging source, its wifi/3G is disconnected. Duh! Well, needless to say there’s a hack out there to fix that – a simple change in the config file, so I’ll be doing that tomorrow. That means one less charger to carry on the road.
Just for fun this was written using the MiFi to proof, upload and finalize the whole piece on the MacBook Air from the road. While obviously slower than native wifi, after a while I was so into the process that I no longer noticed. The MiFi sat in my shirt pocket, got noticeably warm to the touch – not old Apple TV fry-your-eggs-and-bacon hot nor new Apple TV too-cool-for-school cool – and worked like a charm.
What are you waiting for?
Warning! Update January 13, 2011:
Just received this from the crooks at Virgin Mobile – they are limiting monthly downloads to 5gB for new MiFi plans bought January 15, 2011 or later:
Hey, Virgin? Up yours!
Your own iPad cloud.
I have some 800 uncompressed movies stored on a 4+4 terabyte ganged series of hard drives, attached to a MacMini which is connected to our TV. Uncompressed because one day I believe 100″ LCD screens will be affordable and compression drops quality. That 100″ screen will need a high quality original DVD file. These movie files, in VOB format, average 4-6gB each and while you can copy these to your iPad there are two snags.
First, you will run out of space on the iPad very quickly, and you are wasting resources as an uncompressed file is unnecessary for the iPad’s small screen. Second, you are wasting your time as the iPad cannot play VOB files; it’s limited to m4v/H264 video files which average 1.2-1.3gB. So I have a few favorite movies on the iPad which I have converted to m4v using Handbrake and RipIt (where needed) but the process is very inefficient. Conversion averages 30 minutes, and I have to rotate the files on and off the iPad owing to its very limited storage.
Well, there is a miracle app for the Mac and your iPad which does everything you could possibly wish. It’s called ZumoCast and it makes your Mac or PC into your own cloud storage. It will access your movie, picture or music files over the air and can access these whether they are on the Mac or on HDDs attached to the Mac. And here’s the magic part. ZumoCast converts those monster VOB files to m4v on the fly and displays them perfectly on the iPad after a few seconds of buffering using our home wifi. To set Zumo up you download the Mac app, tell it which folders you would like your iPad to see, install the iPad app and click away. The movie quality on the iPad’s screen is superb.
So now my iPad has access to the 4tB of storage attached to the Mini, access to the Mini itself and access to any other Intel Mac on the network where I have installed the Zumo Mac app. Unless I have the Mini doing some processor intensive task like a backup there is no stuttering, multitasking works fine and for music files I can route the sound to any network device in the home. The Macs in the home have suddenly become my own cloud storage, accessible from the iPad.
Two other items of lunacy – Zumo says the iPad app works over 3G as well as wifi (I have not tried that as my iPad does not have 3G), and ZumoCast is free. Quite how their business model works I have no idea as there are no ads, but free is good.
Showing the folders on the MacMini made available to ZumoCast on ther iPad – including four remote ‘Movies’ HDDs.
AirPlay works fine for sound but not for video.
The iTunes library on the remote Mac works beautifully with AirPlay.
A movie directory from one of the remote HDDs seen in ZumoCast on the iPad.
Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ – the original VOB file plays on the iPad over the air.
If you want to store the converted file on your iPad, ZumoCast allows you to do that though it’s hard to see why you would need to do this – maybe for viewing/listening where you have no wifi or 3G access? The stored file will be in the appropriate iPad format.
Limitations: ZumoCast cannot play copy protected DRM files – like older iTunes music purchases or any iTunes movie purchases. However, if your content has all been ripped from DVDs and CDs, like mine, this is not a problem.
ZumoCast compared to Apple’s Remote iPad app: ZumoCast doesn’t care what format your remote file – music or video – is stored in, as long as there’s no DRM. Further, you do not have to have iTunes running on the remote Mac for the iPad app to work as ZumoCast addresses the remote files directly, not through iTunes. Remote will play DRM files on the remote Mac but that Mac must have iTunes running. So it seems the only time you would prefer Remote is when the remote file has DRM.
So with ZumoCast you can use the iPad as a remote controller for your file servers where your music and video files, regardless of format, reside, and watch them on the iPad; further, for sound tracks you can route the sound to your AirPlay device of choice. There is no need to perform format conversion to suit the limited range supported by iTunes or the iPad and storage is not an issue as your files never make it to the iPad, the latter being used solely as a routing and display device. Inspired.
Can you say ‘Blah’?
When it comes to changes in cameras my primary area of interest is the advanced amateur/semi-pro gear. It’s what I use and fits nicely as regards features and cost between the mind-numbing array of point-and-shoots and the heavy duty and very costly pro gear.
For the advanced amateur user 2010 was a disappointing year for hardware, with by far the greatest let down being the Panasonic GF2. Where the world was expecting Panny’s design genius to deliver a camera with a proper offset optical or electronic viewfinder, what we got instead was a warmed over GF1.
Still sporting the useless LCD finder, with a clip on low definition/high noise EVF option (you might as well get the G1/2 as the size is much the same with one of these clunkers and the G1/2 EVF is a whole lot better), the camera addds little to the GF1 for the serious user.
No less disappointing was Panny’s G2. Adding a touch screen to the immensely capable G1, which I use and love, is not my idea of progress. Excuse me, you are going to ponce about touching the hard-to-see screen to do stuff while taking pictures? I don’t think so.
At the upper end of the spectrum for the truly insecure nouveau riche came the Hasselblad Ferrari. Or is that Ferrari Hasselblad? I like both marques as well as anyone but, please, you need to tell the whole world that your ship just came in?
Hair piece and gold chains not included.
No, by far the most exciting camera of 2010 is one which will not be available until 2011 – the Leica for the rest of us, the Fuji FX100.
Promising a dual optical/electronic finder, a fast six element wide angle fixed lens, an APS-sized sensor and looks that are just right, this is an exciting machine. Aperture priority, shutter priority or full exposure automation come standard. Let’s just hope it lives up to its promise. Why, even the textured body covering reminds me of my film rangefinder Leicas.
As for 2010, it was strictly a year of blah.