Ouch. After having to fight a legal battle to be able to work at Apple as a senior vice president in 2008, Mark Papermaster is once again looking for a job, possibly due to the iSpot on the iPhone 4.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/technology/08apple.html?_r=1

Oh, and maybe I should stop referring to it as the iSpot, now that Clear sells a product by that name. Missed out on getting one for $29.

To be fair, the person at Apple who thought of using the metal band as the aerial should be reduced to bussing tables in the apple staff canteen. Assuming they haven't already been fired.

I assume nobody has publicly owned up to coming up with the idea?

Well, I just got my iPhone 4 this last weekend, and I think it's the bee's knees.

I can make the bars change by touching the iSpot too. But interestingly, I seem to be able to make the bars go up when touching the iSpot just as often as I can make them go down. Radio frequencies are just weird that way.

Does that make an external touchable antenna a good design or a bad one? Meh, I don't care, the thing works for me. It's got some great features and it performs well.

I was just at an Apple store today to get a new power supply for my MacBook - the "old" one died last night and I've been unable to use my computer since yesterday. Luckily I managed to squeeze into a Genius bar appointment.

Anyway, I spent a few minutes with the new iPhone. The new model makes all the old ones feel positively crap in your hand. It looks and feels amazing, completely unlike every other phone I've ever held. The difference in build quality between the iPhone 4 and every other mass-market mobile on the is astounding. There's simply nothing that even comes close that I've ever seen (or heard of) - nothing out of Japan or Korea and nothing out of Finland. This is the little pig's brick shithouse whereas most other phones are the straw house or for a few select models, the wood/stick house.

It's still not worth $800 to me though. I'd buy one for $350 unlocked in a heartbeat.

There was a long lineup outside the store (in a mall) but I'm not sure exactly what they were waiting for. Or when they'd be serviced. The iPhone 4 is sold out at every Apple store locally as far as I know, and none of the carrier-branded stores or other cell stores have them either. I don't think the antenna is a factor that seems to be affecting sales in an appreciable manner.

I've never found that bars are anything but a pretty little picture on the phone. They certainly don't seem to have any relevance to any sort of signal quality.

Bruno, while I agree that the build quality on the iPhone 4 is unrivaled, I've been a little surprised that I'm in the minority when it comes to how it feels in my hand. To be honest, I find the phone rather blocky, with edges too sharp to be comfortable in my hand for long periods of time.

This is clearly a subjective opinion, but that's definitely how it feels to me from the times I've held it.

My phone is all plastic (and feels like it), and edges aren't even at a couple spots, but the rounded edges (like previous iPhones) make it more comfortable to me. Again, to each his own...

I believe Apple bas been putting people on waiting lists for both the iPhone 4 and iPad this year. When your day comes up, you get notified somehow to come in. Odds are the line was for iPhone 4 people, waiting on the store to slowly go through the carrier signup/contract extension process for people ahead of them.

Knowing that there was a going to be a queue for the iPhone 4 anyway, I bought mine online by - get this - installing a special "Apple Store" applet on my iPhone 3G and buying it that way. This actually ended up being the best possible buying experience: The phone came about a week earlier than they said it would. Because I'd bought the new phone by running an app on the old phone, it made the upgrade process 100 percent painless; the old phone's data was automatically part of the purchase, the new phone literally got activated on my existing phone number the moment that I plugged it into iTunes, and the old phone got deactivated.

I've since jailbroken/unlocked the old phone just to mess with it. (I like to keep my daily driver phones "legal" and under warranty, but getting the new phone allowed me freedom to do whatever I wanted with the old phone.) I verified that a T-Mobile SIM works in the thing. Anyone want a 3G?

I think the blockiness and solid feel of the iPhone 4 are what appeal to me most about its design. They edges don't feel sharp to me, but maybe that's because I've also used the MacBook Pro and older iPods that have razor edges. The metallic band isn't as wide as the phone is thick, so there's some rounded-ness because of that. The edge of the glass is also smooth rather than chiseled like a knife as found on the Unibody MacBooks and a number of other Apple products.

Those people in line were going to be there a long time. The queue didn't seem to get any shorter during my hour at the shopping center. The Apple store was what I'd call quite "full" as well, certainly more so than any other store in the entire shopping center - I walked around the whole thing while killing a bit of time until my appointment.

Unfortunately they didn't have any of the new 27" displays available to play with. All the stores in Ontario are pretty small, we certainly don't have anything close to the flagship stores. They're not even as big as the one in the Walden Galleria in the Buffalo area. As an example of space shortage, there was only a single Mac Pro on display and only perhaps two 24" cinema displays from what I saw, one of which was running on the only Mac mini in the store. I suppose that with MacBooks and iMacs making up the lion's share of Mac sales, there are very few displays sold, especially in-store. Even the online store doesn't have a graphic front and center for the Displays category anymore.

Impressive demo of Rage running at 60fps on an iPhone 4, with graphics quality beyond what the Playstation 2 and XBox 1 could do, nearing XBox 360/PS3 level graphics/effects. Amazing what power is contained in such a little pocket device, and what can be done with it in the hands of a very skilled programmer.

http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/30824

The interesting part of the Rage demo is that Carmack took the time to get it working even on the 2007 iPhone without looking that different then what was on the iPhone 4. And both were pulling in megatexture assets.

Comparing the two side by side, the Rage demo was far more impressive then the Unreal Engine 3 one.

Unreal Engine 3


Rage (unfortunately not a lot of good stills out there)


The rage tech should be shipping in an iPhone game by the end of the year, with a second iPhone game planned alongside the 2011 PC/Console game release.

Agreed. The penumbra effect is a remarkable improvement. I assume that that's what smoothing out object edges, too.

The UE3 stuff is like 7 months old. I'm sure it looks better than that now.

I guess the main difference would be that Epic's demo actually did something. (Edit: Not that it'd be that hard to make Carmack's demo do something as well)

Carmack's demo was neat but I came away from it with the same feeling I have for most of id's games. They're neat but mostly just showcases for Carmack's tech. The more impressive stuff is usually what licensees do with it.

While I agree that the phone is capable of some incredible performance, personally I simply cannot get past the lack of hard buttons. I can't play most games with just the screen, and it looks to me like playing an FPS would be torture for me (if I could even stand looking at it).

Don't get me wrong, this isn't an iPhone thing for me, it's a thing with all slate phones. I have an SNES emulator on my Nexus one that is more than capable of playing any game from my SNES days, but I can't stand controlling them. Granted, those games weren't designed for this input method, but the ones that are don't feel good to me either.

And don't get me started on accelerometer-based games. Not for me, thanks...

I don't have an iPhone, so I haven't been able to check this out.

http://bit.ly/cpbrZ3

Here are a couple of videos of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtcLSXKk5To
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPiOynw7cCo

Wow, just wow. So detailed and so, so smooth.

Let me be clear when I say this: that is amazing. Absolutely. I'm so excited that a mobile platform can do that now.

BUT (you knew that was coming): to me, that still looks like a PITA when it comes to controlling it. I suppose I might get used to it after playing with it for a long time, but should I? There are faster control methods out there, it's actually kind of sad that I have to cover up those beautiful graphics with my thumbs!

The only other thing I have to say is that I love the first video because it simultaneously shows what the iPhone does better than anyone - the gaming - and worse than everyone - the horrible, disruptive notifications. I'm amazed that Steve is happy with how those work... I know we talked about the notifications already, how it's difficult to change them quickly, but I'm amazed they aren't even talking about it.

Definite improvement over what they last showed, and pretty cool they shipped their tech demo for people to play around with. Now to see what they do with the tech, not only for their own game, but how they license it.

I'm not a gamer. I found navigating around ok, however it was much easier on the iPad, just so much more room.

Interesting, looks like Apple wanted to have Rage be in the keynote.

Honestly, as pretty as it is, I actually wasn't impressed. Because it's not doing anything "hard" by modern standards: It's all pre-rendered textures, all the lighting is baked into the textures already. There's no dynamic lighting that I could see. Having a decent set of tools to create baked environments like that is impressive and important, but I don't find the tech of "playing back" all that pre-baked stuff surprisingly impressive. At that point it's just textured polygons.

Don't get me wrong, though, I certainly couldn't code anything like that, that's all rocket science to me. And the artistry of the level design is top notch, I'm not capable of that either. All I'm saying is that the art is more impressive than the tech in that demo.



Interestingly, the two-thumbs control scheme is not the only way to control things. I like the adventure-game style click-to-walk-there mechanic and I don't think it gets in the way nearly as much as the two-thumbs method. I can envision entire games built around that mechanic. You can see it in the latter half of the second video, and if the dude didn't hover his finger over the screen the whole time, it would actually be a lot less obtrusive.



I don't know what those were about. My phone doesn't do that to me. Maybe it's because I have a lot of that crap turned off...

They were just notification from an app. Your phone would of course have done that too if you'd have received a text message or an app notification while playing the demo.

Ah. Yeah. I just turn off all the push notifications.

I guess what Dignan was saying was that the OS architecture should have a more graceful way of handling that sort of thing even when you enable the feature.

I think there's a mobile OS that does that already.

Indeed, WebOS notifications are pretty slick. Android, eh, they are ok. (Just realized I never did post my final thoughts on my Android experience, I'll look to do that tonight).

Just saw this on DealExtreme and laughed in surprise. Had to share.
Colorful Hard Rubber Sucker Stand for iPhone 3G/3GS/4/iPod (Color Assorted)

Imagine leaving that on your desk at work!

With all of the oddball multipurpose devices on DealExtreme, I'm surprised they didn't list a second use for that one, too.

I'm just wondering how exactly its supposed to work (with your iPhone)

You stick it to your desk and then lean your iPhone against it? It doesn't sound very secure to me...

No, I think you stick it to the phone, and lean the plug ball end against the desk.