• 28Aug 08

  What you should know before buying an iPhone

  I was one of the first to jump on the mobile Apple wagon when iPhone was launched, blinded by my friends funky demonstrations of multitouch surfing, innovative user interface and all kinds of small gadgets like the screen rotation and light sensors. I just had to get one.

  But after playing with all the little bells and whistles for a while, like an easily amused drunken monkey, the hangover evitable found its way. In fact, these days, the more I look at it, the more I think to myself, it's just a piece of pretty looking mediocrity.

  You already read all the praise from every other easily-amused-by-stuff-that-glitters reviewer, so let me just go through what it lacks after my period of sobering up, using it heavily every day for 9 months so far.

  SMS

  The phone got a lot of praise for its all new MSN Messenger like chatting SMS system. And different it is, indeed, with those cute little speech bubbles and finger-scrolling interface. We all forgot about the old and dusty features we been used to see to our boredom in other phones. But, now I realize I just bought a car with doors that open automatically, and so amused by this fact I totally overlooked the fact it lacks a bloody steering wheel!

  After using the iPhone for a while, I now think WTF?? Why can't I...

  1. Delete individual messages. Yep, keep the whole chat, or nothing at all. Really annoying when you want to keep those sweet or useful messages, but delete all the other chatter of "yes", "no" "how r u?" etc.

  2. Forward messages. Apple do not think you need to forward messages, so if you need to forward an address or anything at all, you need to type it up all over. Very annoying, I need this feature more frequently than I imagined at first.

  3. Send a phone number and contact details over SMS. A lot of times I need to forward a useful number to one of my friends. On normal phones this is very easy, but on iPhone not possible. You need to manually type the number in, then send.

  4. Send/receive MMS. Yeah, the iPhone is branded as the ultimate multimedia phone. But when my friends ask me if they can send me a picture from their stone age phone, I feel ashamed to admit my iPhone just does not have a clue about this.

  5. Save a message. Once in a while I receive a very useful SMS, with an address, codes or something I really need to keep. On a normal phone it's easy to save this for later, on iPhone it will disappear next time you clear your chat. And if you don't clear your chat ever, the message will be 1000 messages up in the queue after some time of chatter, as you can't delete individual SMSes.

  6. Send SMS to multiple recipients. Well, actually this is something Apple finally fixed, and the new versions of iPhone can do this. However, it is super slow to manually add one and one contact to the list as you need to get into the address book every time (which is sooo slow), not just check off the recipients from your phone book like on other regular phones. It works, but just barely...

  7. Type fast. The touch screen sucks big time for inputting text fast, especially if you are moving. Even the smallest bumps from a car ride is enough to make you miss the characters all the time. I type at least three times faster on a regular phone, with much less errors.

  8. Get instant feedback. With new updates, the iPhone is getting slower and slower, or perhaps its related to me having more and more contacts. It's now on the point where I can hardly get any visual feedback if I press a button at all. Nothing happens and you find yourself pressing one more time, three times, four times, before suddenly all the four presses are handled at once sending you to some damn submenu. With all the damn special effects that litters the user interface all over the place, you should think they got enough processing power to detect a keypress in realtime. The whole SMS part of the phone just feels slow and unresponsive.

  9. Use phone numbers sent in an SMS. On other phones, the phone will normally parse the incoming SMS message, and if it contains a phone number you can do a lot of things with it. Like store it, call it etc. On iPhone, you get none of that, and if you want to use it you need to type it again. A small detail maybe, but that's what we should be expecting for such an over praised piece of hardware like the iPhone.

  Lacking all these SMS features and making it up by adding a pretty little user-interface is just unforgiveable. At least if you plan to actually use the phone as a tool in your everyday life.

  Oh, and I did not even mention about the bugs. The SMS interface is bugged, and at times it will show you a message was sent to someone it was not sent to. Great to induce a sense of panic when you send a kinky message to your girlfriend, showing up as sent to your boss. It will sometimes refuse to let you type messages, and in fact it seems less stable for every new update Apple provides.

  APPLICATIONS

  When it comes to installing and creating applications for the iPhone, Apple really are a bunch of **** corporate jerks. They do all in their power to stop you from installing anything on your own, all should be installed through their AppStore. I have two big problems with this:

  1. They control who are allowed to make software for your phone. Claiming of course this will protect you from evil hackers. But f*ck off Apple! That makes no more sense than it would to force everyone who want to install software on Windows to only buy it through Microsoft store, and only if Microsoft think the software does not pose a threat to their monopoly in any way. Developers have to pay Apple for being developers (if they are even allowed, the screening is tough, just forget it if you live in certain countries), they have to beg for space on AppStore and can only make software that is to Apples liking. So God forbid any tool that replaces their totally broken SMS system for example.

  2. I forgot what my second point is, but again, F*ck you Apple! Give us Flash support and Java support, and stop behaving like you own our phones after we buy them! Let developers provide us software directly, you greedy pricks!

  You can, and should, jailbreak your iPhone of course, meaning you can install software that's not approved by Apple on it. But due to Apple's fanatic dictatorship you can expect those apps to fail after the next upgrade of your iPhone, as they work hard to make free software development possible.

  PHONE

  Yeah, the iPhone is also a regular phone. It does what it's supposed to do here, but again it fails short of regular phones. The signal reception is really bad. I always lose signal where other people happily can talk away. Also, the sound is quite low when using it outside, even on maximum volume.

  CAMERA

  The picture quality is basically very poor. Low resolution, and very poor photometric sensitivity making all dark areas just turn completely black in the picture. You get grainy, blurred low resolution images with dull colors. For emergencies only, if you forgot to bring a real camera (or a real phone with an up-to-date camera). The camera user interface is also clumsy, way too much fiddling around to take a picture compared to a one button solution like on many phones.

  BATTERY

  The battery is wielded into the phone, so when its performance drops in the future you need to go to through all the hassle to have it replaced by Apple technicians, who want to suck some money from you in the process. And forget about bringing a spare battery for those long trips, that's technology way beyond what Apple can master.

  I-TUNES

  I hate iTunes. iTunes is basically a shopping system you are forced to go through every time you want to do anything with your iPhone from your computer. It will even refuse to work unless you are online. I once tried to copy some movies from my laptop to my iPhone on an airport, as the iPhone has longer battery life and I wanted to watch movies for my 15+ hours trip. But no, it was not allowed as iTunes could not go online there. And if I cannot buy anything from them, then why would they bother to let me use iTunes to transfer my movies?

  The whole synchronization system also is a lot of headache. You have to keep two copies of everything! For example, I might want to copy an entire season of a TV series over to my iPhone. After converting the movies to iPhone compatible mp4, I will then have the original movies in high resolution, and the low resolution ones for my iPhone. The normal usage would be to move the lores ones over to the iPhone, and keep the hires ones on the computer. But no, iTunes commands that you need to keep also the lores mp4 movies on your computer, otherwise they would be deleted from your iPhone during the next sync. Why the @#$* would I want to keep 6GB of useless movies on my laptop when it's supposed to be stored safely on my iPhone? With 16GB iPhones, we are talking about a substantial amount of storage space!

  SO WHY BOTHER?

  If you are a design whore, like me, you would probably still use it. Just like a pretty woman would walk around with bleeding feet in uncomfortable high-heel shoes, as they makes her look good. It looks good compared to other phones, and the Apple logo has become some kind of status symbol as everyone knows Apple makes expensive stuff.

  I'm still using my iPhone despite all its problems, although sometimes I carry another phone when I need to do something useful. The iPhone is actually a great multimedia device, it's just a piss-poor phone/PDA.

  It shines at surfing the Internet at WIFI hotspots, and reading emails on the go. It's also a decent video player. If you look at it as a multimedia device, that also has some limited phone functions, you are closer to the reality. They should call it something else then, like iSuckAsPhone.

  My biggest issue is, it could easily be so much, MUCH, better, if the software did not SUCK. I'm still hoping for a decent software upgrade from Apple though, although so far they have done practically nothing, but I do not expect their greedy corporate policies to change with regards to allowing me to use it the way I want. So, the moment I find another phone that excels as a multimedia device and a primitive netbook, I'm all off to a better place.

  • Posted Aug 28, 2008 11:35 pm PT
  • Category: Technology
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• 17Jan 08

  DX10 - what Microsoft does not want you to consider

  I keep hearing gamers talking about DX10 being one of the biggest benefits of a Vista upgrade. Despite the lack of decent DX10 titles right now, the speculations is DX10 is the future of PC games.

  But, what is DX10? It is marketed as a Vista only superior rendering technology. But, looking more closely at it, there is more to it.

  The true value of DX10 is it defines a standard that graphics card manufacturers need to follow. DX10 cards needs to implement a certain amount of high-end 3D features, and by saying a game needs to be DX10 compatible, the developers can target a proper uniform platform rather than the thousands of various cards out there with all kinds of widely varying specifications.

  How does this benefit the gamer? Well, apart from the obvious fact that DX10 cards support the latest 3D magic, it will make the developers able to optimize the games far better than before. A lot of your systems power is lost due to the fact the developers cannot predict what it is, and need to make totally general 3D engines which will render on anything you throw at them.

  This effect is pretty obvious when you look at titles released on both xbox 360, which is basically a PC system, and a regular PC. Bioshock is a good example. It renders beautifully with all high end settings like dynamic shadows enabled on the xbox 360. On my PC, which configuration wise is far superior to the xbox 360, Bioshock runs at unplayable speeds when the same graphical effects are turned on. So, all the power is wasted, basically because the developers could not predict what my system looks like, and optimizing for every possible 3D card out there is just too hard.

  Once developers and 3D card manufacturers get their heads around DX10, it means DX10 titles should be tightly optimized to match your DX10 hardware, much like console games can. Naturally DX10 cards will have varying configurations as well, but the DX10 standard identifies a lot of common ground.

  But what does this mean for the Vista/DX10 binding? Basically it means that Vista is not needed to benefit from DX10. Since the main benefit from having a DX10 card comes from the fact it represents a common standard.

  Basically DX10 means two things:

  1. A label guaranteeing a minimum amount of features is supported by a 3D card.

  2. The name of the actual API Vista uses for rendering 3D graphics.

  Microsoft wants you to think of the two as one, as it will motivate you to get Vista. But in fact, technically there is nothing that stops DX10 as a standard being valuable on other platforms. OpenGl under Linux could just as well benefit from "DX10" features of a card, possibly making games look even better than DX10 can on Vista - given enough talent. Doom 3 is a good example of how OpenGl once pushed the gaming technology further before, despite the fact Microsoft was putting their mighty marketing muscles behind DirectX at the time.

  With DX10 Mixrosoft is in effect trying to take the credit for graphics card manufacturers technological achievements, and coupling new cards with a brand associated with Vista clearly will confuse gamers into believing they will need Vista to play tomorrows games.

  DX10 as a technology and driver is more than anything a lock, locking a game to a certain platform, to force you into upgrading your operating system, creating an artificial advantage to buying Vista.

  But I hope there will be another John Carmack out there who will prove this to be false, by making a great "DX10"-only game for new OpenGl or other drivers, running on other platforms than Vista. In the meantime we can benefit from projects like the Alky Project, promising to make XP drivers for DX10 games so they will run under XP, like they should be able to.

  • Posted Jan 17, 2008 6:16 pm PT
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• 26Jul 07

  nVidia new driver policy from hell

  I bought a Samsung Sens X65 a while ago, which is an awesome laptop featuring one of the first DX10 3D cards from nVidia (Geforce 8600 GS), but recently I tried to play a new game (Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2), and experienced some serious stuttering problems with the graphics.
  
  Checking some forums and found it is a know problem, and the solution is to update to the newest nVidia drivers. And then the fun starts...
  
  The official drivers on nVidia's homepage reports it could not find any compatible hardware. And an email to nVidia gave me the following response:
  
  "Display drivers for notebook GPU's are custom made for the notebook make and model they are used in to support some of the hot plug n play features your notebook supports. For this reason, the desktop Forceware display drivers which are available on our website will not work on your notebook. I am sorry, however you will need to visit the website of your laptop manufacturer for customer display drivers for your notebook. "
  
  Okay, so using the Samsung update software, and it found no updates. And I basically cannot locate any Samsung laptop specific drivers anywhere. In desperation Iturned to hacked drivers, which in fact did install, but not correctly. So, I am left with old fdrivers for eternity it seems, as Samsung obviously do not care about updating their drivers, and nVidia leaves notebook owners with Vista on their own as well.

  So, a warning to everyone aiming for an nVidia based 3D card for their laptop. Basically nVidia does no longer take any responsibility for updating drivers for laptops. At least in Vista, but nowadays all laptops are sold with Vista, so we are stuck with it.

  Very disappointed with nVidia now, the reason I stuck to them for so long is exactly because their Forceware drivers are so easy to use no matter what nVidia card you have. But, no longer so...

  • Posted Jul 26, 2007 4:31 pm PT
  • Category: Computers
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