Category Archives: Hardware

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Just avoid holding it that way

Hall of Shame, Hardware

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

David Pogue, technology maven at the New York Times, is in what can only be called Desperate Back-Track Mode over the iPhone hold-it-wrong-and-it-dies design debacle. The poor schnuck failed to realize that his perfectly performing “free-for-as-long-as-you-want-it-David” iPhone4 tester was likely a carefully pre-screened model not some of the shelf POS you and I buy. Fair enough. Would you risk any old specimen assembled by one of a long line of suicidal Foxconn workers when your reviewer has an audience of millions?

Pogue backtracks, while still stepping in it.

So how should we hold it, Mr. Jobs?

Ummm …. you mean not this way as in the video at Apple.com? Better check it out quick before they change it.

Or this:

Or even this:

Hand on the antenna seam, every time.

Yeah. Sure. I know. It’s an isolated occurrence.


An isolated occurrence.

Maybe a spot of the Old Bard is called for:

I know BS when I smell it and this one reeks to high heaven.

Disclosure: No AAPL position. You think I’m stoopid?

Why I cancelled my iPhone 4 order

Hall of Shame, Hardware

A deeply flawed device.

I was hoping about now to be regaling readers with my experiences with the much improved 5 megapixel camera in the new iPhone, available today for those lucky enough to get a reservation:

Well, that is not going to happen.

Just about the time young Winston and I were getting ready to ride our bikes to the Apple Store, what comes across the wires but this story?

A moment later and I watch this shocking video.

So we do three things:

  • Cancel the trip
  • Cancel the order
  • Sell all my AAPL stock

Subsequent stories are confirming the issue is not isolated yet not universal. Mossberg of the WSJ made a vague reference to the signal strength bars fading occasionally, but made light of it – he’s not especially objective about AAPL so cannot be trusted.

It seems to me that there are three possible causes:

  • Sporadic manufacturing errors dictating a limited recall – an embarassment for Apple
  • Egregious design error requiring a total recall – a big ‘no confidence’ vote in the stock
  • Software glitch fixed with a new online upgrade – an irritation

None of these is good for a stock approaching nosebleed territory, no matter how attractive the fundamentals.

I have no idea which applies, but as my 3G iPhone is the only phone I use, and as I have no landline, it’s nonsensical to contemplate an upgrade at this juncture.

I’ll let others complete the discovery process and continue to enjoy my obsolete 3G iPhone in the meanwhile.

Talk of dodging a bullet! My advice to any prospective iPhone4 buyer is simple. Wait. Let someone else do the bleeding for you.

Note on older iPhones: You get the same effect, but less so, with older iPhones. My 3G shows 5 bars of signal lying on my desk, dropping to 2 or 3 once in the hand, after some 30 seconds. I can reliably replicate this behavior and it’s the same with iPhone OS 3.1.3 or iOS 4.0 – I tried both. After trying iOS 4.0 on my 3G iPhone I reverted to 3.1.3 – 4.0 adds little to a 3G iPhone (folders and a useless digital zoom for the camera) and unless you are really comfortable with use of Terminal and entering cryptic, high risk commands, think twice before upgrading to 4.0. My downgrade went well, but I know what I am doing – it’s anything but plug-and-play.

The loss in indicated signal strength seems absolutely related to hand contact with the rear and sides of the iPhone. When I place my 3G iPhone in its auxiliary clip-on battery pack, which doubles its battery life, thickness and weight, I lose no bars, so it very much sounds like an electrostatic design fault to me.

Be sure to check Comments for my analysis of the reason this poorly designed iPhone 4 is to be avoided until the hardware issue is fixed. Apple’s advisory today as to how to hold the iPhone is akin to the government telling you how to bend over before increasing your taxes. Unconscionable. Another Hall of Shame entry for the fruit company,

I figure the costs at $4.20/share – 3mm handsets recalled @ $300 + $600mm in legal fees + triple damages at $2.7bn = $4.2bn for 1bn shares. However, the reputational damage and lost sales make this sum insignificant by comparison. The Android crowd must be partying.

Disclosure: Sold all my AAPL position just before writing this.

PDF camera manuals on the iPad

Hardware, iPad

A great use for the device.

It’s debatable which is more obscure – the US tax laws and regulations (appropriately known as the Internal Revenue Code) or the printed manual for the Panasonic G1 camera, a piece of hardware I like to think I know and definitely know I love. Try to find anything in that manual’s execrable printed booklet which comes in the box, 168 pages of poorly organized materials with a genuinely worthless index, and you will redefine the meaning of frustration.

Well, GoodReader and the iPad to the rescue.

Simply download a PDF of the manual from Panasonic then upload it to the iPad – I have done this for my Canon 5D and both Panasonics I own – the LX1 and the G1. Handy for those occasions when you forget how some rarely used setting works in the myriad of screens, dials and buttons which typifes modern gear. The 5D and LX1 come in at 5-6mB each but, for reasons only know to the twit who assembled the like-length one for the G1, that one comes in at a whopping 50.7mB! To compress this file before uploading it to the precious free space on your iPad, if you are using Snow Leopard on your Mac, download and install Apple’s Compress PDF Workflow utility to restore the PDF Compress option in the Print dialog which pops up when you load a PDF using Preview (not Adobe Reader) and hit Print – for some reason this option went missing from Snow Leopard.

Here’s the files sizes after and before – duh!:

I’ll leave it to you to figure out which one to upload to your iPad. The smaller one shows no quality deterioration and a keyword search is many times faster.

The beauty of the GoodReader app is that it has a search function, far more powerful than the miserable table of contents provided by camera makers.

Here’s the title page of the 5D’s manual:

The Canon 5D’s 180 page manual on the iPad, viewed in GoodReader.

Goodness knows why Canon decided to label this ‘Copy’ – it’s not like it’s a Leonardo, after all, but whatever. The vertical scroll bar at left permits you to zip through the manual in GoodReader whereas the magnifying glass at the base permits word search.

Here’s a page search result in the G1’s manual where I searched for the word ‘Multiple’, highlighted in blue:

A keyword search in the G1’s manual.

Here are all three manuals uploaded to GoodReader on my iPad. I keep them in a separate sub-folder to clean up the clutter:

Not, you understand, that I would ever forget how my camera works ….

A moment’s thought suggests the infinite number of uses this could be put to – machine repair manuals for field technicians, heart transplant manuals for doctors, legal tracts for scumbag lawyers, and so on. Heck, I may even keep my tax returns on mine when I want some really depressing reading.

The L5 Remote

Computing, iPad

The best remote yet.

Those of you who, like me, are visually oriented, will likely be using your big screen TV for viewing pictures, as do I. Mine fronts as a display device for a Mac Mini, an AT&T Uverse cable box with a DVR, and for a BluRay DVD player. The latter adds BluRay which is not supported by Mac OS X.

With all those inputs the result is the usual mess of remote controls, each seemingly designed by someone who never actually tried using it. It is one of the worst areas of ergonomic nightmares in the home.

So it’s no surprise when I relate that I have long been searching for the perfect universal remote. Well, I’m getting closer. I started seven years ago with a mid-range infra-red Harmony which was OK, but still too many buttons. Then I migrated to the very costly infra-red Harmony 1000 with its small color touchscreen (‘push screen’ is more like it) which I upgraded to radio to avoid the line-of-sight frustration experienced with IR sensors. This was OK for a while but I got royally irritated with Harmony’s truly inept Mac software which constantly locked-up and with their device code database which is riddled with errors and requires much manual tinkering to get things working. So I sold the Harmony and went back to an inexpensive RCA IR remote, the RCA RCRP05B for under $20. You can see my review on the linked Amazon site. The appeal of this inexpensive device was its extreme programmability and before long I had it singing and dancing. My primary test is that our eight year old can use it with no help and I am at a point where Winston no longer asks for help. Getting there was far harder than that sounds!

To obviate the line-of-sight problem I added an IR blaster to amplify the remote’s signal regardless of how it is pointed and it’s such a significant enhancement that I recommend a like device unreservedly.

But, the RCA, capable as it is, still has lots of little buttons, none are illuminated making use in the dark very difficult, and most of the buttons are redundant at any one time. What I really wanted was a touchscreen remote like the AMX of old. That had three drawbacks. It could only be programmed by the vendor, it burned through its battery daily and it was clunky as all get up, but it did have a half decent touchscreen. Last I looked, 8 years ago, these ran upward of $5,000 …. and woe betide you if you change hardware.

Well, there’s a new kid on the block and it is very impressive indeed, fixing all of these drawbacks.

The L5 Remote attachment (circled) for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad

In the photograph you can see the L5 dongle attached to my iPhone (any model works as well as iPod Touches and iPads), displaying one of the screens I have programmed. When the dongle is first attached it downloads the related software from the iTunes store. You can program any number of screens to make the device activity based – one for Watch TV, one for Watch DVD, one for Listen to Music and so on. The icons are dragged and dropped into place and programmed by using your existing remote to ‘teach’ the L5, so if you have lost the original you are out of luck for now. L5 has promised to add a downloadable code database but that may take a while. I would also like the ability to directly input 5 digit JP1 codes to any key of choice, as is possible with the RCA.

Macros (command sequences) are easily created – just program individual (temporary) icons with the commands required then drop them onto a macro key. Once the Macro key sequence is assigned using your individual keys, the latter can be erased – the information is not lost. Very cleverly done and it really permits you to eradicate all clutter. In the following example which is for Watch TV, the On, Off and Favorites keys are all macros with embedded command sequences. The Channels icon utilizes another clever feature of the L5. Touching it opens a drawer below the main screen where I have inserted favorite Channels for direct touchscreen access. The icon with the small rectangles drops down a numerical keyboard for those (very) rare occasions when you want to key in a channel number.

The TV screen. Note the red Record button for saving to the AT&T Uverse DVR.

The Channels drawer has been opened here, showing three favorite channels.

Most importantly, the Macro key assignment function provides for variable delays, of the user’s choice, between the execution of key strokes. This is vital in practice as most televisions are very slow to start up and to respond to commands. My three years old 42″ Vizio needs some five seconds before it will respond to input switching commands and does not like to be rushed between input selection changes. Adding these delays, a matter of trial and error, is trivial with the L5 software.

A couple more screens:

The BluRay DVD player screen – I still need to add a Volume toggle.

The DVR/TiVo playback screen

When the dongle is attached to the iPhone all other functions remain usable at a touch of the Home button. The software rotates the screen image 180 degrees so that the dongle is pointing away from you in use, but if you use an IR blaster as I mention above, this is not necessary, but not something that can currently be switched off.

The quickest way to switch between activity screens is to simply flick them with a finger. It would be nice if L5 could add the ability to sort the order in which the screens appear.

If you are new to Macros, there’s lots of hard ways of setting them up and one foolproof easy way. Using your original remotes, go through the sequence of events required for an activity, making a written note of each keystroke. For example, if I want to watch TV the sequence is something like this:

  • Switch on TV
  • Switch on Receiver
  • Switch on AT&T Uverse cable box
  • Switch TV input to HDMI2
  • Switch Receiver input to Video2
  • Switch Uverse to Favorite channels

Now, following your notations, program each keystroke you had to make to a discrete button, add these to your Macro key in the right order, add inter-step delays as necessary if your macro misbehaves, test then delete the temporary keys you just created, keeping only the macro key which you can name anything you want. You can also choose from a range of logo/icons for any key you create.

L5 say that they are working on iPad-specific software though the existing app will run fine on the iPad. They have also promised to add the ability to transfer your settings from one iDevice to another. Yes, please! I actually like the small size of the iPhone’s screen for this application and expect to dedicate my 3G iPhone to the dongle full time when I shortly upgrade to the 4G iPhone to be announced on June 7, 2010.

Bugs? I have only encountered one. When designing a new screen after dragging and dropping the required buttons onto the display area, you hit ‘Assign’ to program these using your original remotes. On a few occasions the software showed a blank screen instead of one with the buttons on display and available for selection. Simply repeating the process generally fixed the issue which is only seen at the design stage. In operation the software and hardware have been flawless. Even hard to program remotes like the one which came with my Insignia DVD player proved easy to set up; where the L5 did not recognize the IR code on a first pass, it would ask for three or four passes and would invariably get there with ease.

The L5 Remote is highly recommended, costs $50 and comes from L5 Remote. To really get the best out of it I also recommend spending an additional $70 on an IR blaster.