Umbral Echoes Blog

Yesterday, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, volunteering himself to be chairman of the board instead. I predicted that their stock would plummet, but my company’s president (also named Steve!) said he didn’t think the stock would drop much because Apple “graduated everyone into the idea that he’s out.” Turns out, Steve was right — guess there’s a reason he’s in the driver’s seat.

In any case, I think this could be great for Apple. Actually, when Jobs leaves completely, I think Apple could make some great strides forward. How, you ask?

Because they won’t have Jobs’s ego holding them back. As one big example, HTML 5 is not replacing Flash, sorry buddy. Flash does not drain batteries like the filthy whore that Jobs makes it out to be (as proven by Flash running fine on hacked iPhones).  If iOS devices were to support Flash, that would knock out the main advantage that Android devices have*.  And hey, maybe they’ll be more willing to admit to mistakes too.  Remember that whole iPhone 4 antenna issue and Steve Jobs’s response to it?  Yeah.

Edit: It has been pointed out that I only used the example of Flash, which does not a valid argument make.  So as another example, Apple has a somewhat-recent policy of disallowing apps from linking to their own websites where people can buy stuff.  This, I feel, comes from the Jobs-like mentality of, “We’re the best, if you want in on our platform you play by our rules and give us a cut of everything that happens on our device.”  However, this will ultimately weaken them as companies turn instead to web apps, as Amazon recently did with their Cloud Reader. This gets consumers more comfortable with using web apps, and companies soon realize, “Hey, you mean I only have to pay to develop this once, and it will work on any mobile device with a browser — including both Apple products and Android products?  Sweet!”  More companies do that, meaning iOS has fewer exclusive apps, and consumers have a more viable choice in alternatives.

In general, I feel that Jobs has an attitude of, “We are the market leaders, therefore the market goes where we say, not the other way around.  We tell people what they want; they do not tell us what they want.”  Which, to some extent, is true.  But that level of ego also blinds one to their own weaknesses, which is to Apple’s detriment.

* I’m sure Android devices have many other awesome advantages, but from an average non-tech-savvy average Joe perspective, Flash is really the one functional thing missing from iPhones and iPads that Android has.

Apple pretty much assumes that everyone who is using their iOS beta has a Mac — which is a reasonable assumption, because the beta is really more for developers to make their application work with iOS 5 than for nerds like me who just want to use the features before they’re publicly available.  But I digress.

Since Apple doesn’t really provide any instructions or support for installing iOS 5 using a PC, I will tell you how.

1. Download and install iTunes 10.5 Beta 2 from here (you will need to have a valid Apple developer account, which costs $99/year).  This step is very important! Even if you downloaded 10.5 Beta 1 to install iOS 5 Beta 1, you still need to download Beta 2, or the upgrade won’t work.
2. Download iOS 5 Beta 2 from here (again, you’ll need a valid Apple developer account).
   • Make sure to download the correct version for your device. If you’re on AT&T, download the GSM version; if you’re on Verizon, download the CDMA version.
3. Using 7-Zip, unzip the .dmg file, then unzip the file “2.hfs” that is inside of that.
   • Inside of that, there should be a file named something like “iPhone3,1_5.0_9A5248d_Restore.ipsw”.  Note its location.
4. Plug your iPhone into your computer and start up iTunes if it does not start automatically.
5. Sync your iPhone to make sure that you have all the data on it backed up.
6. Shift+click on Restore, then navigate to that .ipsw file from step 3 and select it.
7. Restore your phone.
8. After restoring using that file, you will need to restore again using the backup from step 5.  This will take some time, but it will add all of your contacts, text messages, songs, apps, etc. back onto your phone.

And then you’re done! The only real glitch I’ve noticed is that during the last step, some applications seem to get lost in the ether, so you may have to reinstall them. You may also have to re-enter email passwords and the like.

Important Note: This is for iOS 5 Beta 1. I will provide an article for iOS 5 Beta 2 soon, though currently I am not sure if the workaround for non-developers listed below works for Beta 2.

There aren’t many good tutorials on this out there, so I’m making one. I actually made the instructions for my girlfriend to start out with, but I figured some other people out there might be interested too.

Caveat 1: I am not responsible for any damage/bricking/etc. that may occur from this — iOS betas are generally pretty stable, but sometimes bad things happen, so don’t blame me if they do.

Caveat 2: The beat is really only supposed to be for Apple developers. It will be buggy, and I have already found several bugs, in fact.

Caveat 3: It is possible that with the next release of the beta, Apple will patch any holes that allow non-developers to have access to this, which could brick your phone (restoring to a previous iOS is very hairy). If that happens, please do contact me and I’ll do my best to help you fix it.

Okay, with that out of the way, here we go! Note that this tutorial will also work for the iPad and the iPhone 3GS, but you will need to download a different IPSW file to do that, as mentioned above under step 3. Also this tutorial is assuming you’re using Windows, but there’s really not much difference (except that Apple doesn’t directly offer iTunes 10.5 even to developers as far as I can tell).

1. Back up your iPhone using iTunes.  Just do a normal sync operation, this should handle it.
   • Just to be extra sure, you might want to copy that backup to a different location. You can find this backup using these instructions.
2. Install iTunes 10.5 beta, from here (if that doesn’t work for some reason, there are other links listed here under “iTunes 10.5 (Windows x64(64-bit, 74.07MB)”).
   • If you have a developer account and want to get it in a more authorized way, you can — the Windows version is well-hidden under the iCloud downloads. iTunes 10.5 Windows Beta.
3. Download the iOS 5 beta torrent here (or again, if you have an Apple developer account, just get it from there but see the third note below if you do that).
   • For AT&T choose the GSM version; for Verizon choose CDMA.
   • If you don’t already have a BitTorrent client, I recommend uTorrent.
   • If you do a Google search and get it from elsewhere (or from Apple’s developer site) as a .dmg file, you might need a special program to unzip that; go ahead and install 7Zip to do that. After you unzip it, go into that folder and unzip the file “2.hfs”.  That should have a directory named “iOS 5 beta – iPhone 4 – 9A5220p” which will contain the file iPhone3,1_5.0_9A5220p_Restore.ipsw — that’s what we’re interested in.
4. Follow instructions here (basically fire up iTunes, hold down Shift while you click the Check for Update button, and select the IPSW file you unzipped above).

Tada!  Your phone will go through a few reboots, you will be prompted to activate it, and at that point you’ll be really scared because none of your apps, contacts, music, etc. will be on there.  Never fear — just run a restore from that backup you made in step 1, and you’re golden.

Happy upgrading!  And please, if any of this doesn’t work for you, or any links are broken, let me know.

Yeah, I jumped on the bandwagon. I upgraded from my iPad to an iPad 2. Who can resist the geek-chic siren’s call of new Apple products?

Seriously though, the iPad took the market by storm, and the iPad 2 is superior (in my opinion) to the alternatives — both those currently on the market, and those hitting soon. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have some glaring flaws as well. So, let’s get to it.

The Good

• Camera — The biggest change in the iPad 2 was the addition of a front-facing and read-facing camera. It works as advertised, though the rear-facing camera doesn’t seem to be as good as the iPhone’s. Honestly, I think they could have done away with that one entirely and made the front-facing camera better quality for better quality videoconferencing.  Though after a bit of playing around with it, I do have to say it’s a bit of a pain to transfer video from the iPhone to the iPad — to do it without annoying sync operations through iTunes you have to buy a 3rd party app, in fact.
  • Skype video over a 3G connection is not so great.  When I tested it, I was around 3-4 bars of signal (out of 5), so perhaps this would be better with 5 bars. I saw the other end okay, but they said I was doing the jitter, freeze-and-catch-up thing.
  • FaceTime is pretty awesome.  There was a bit of blurriness when FaceTiming with my girlfriend on the same WiFi network, but the network had been acting a little funny that night anyway.
• Smart Cover — I thought this would be a neat thing but nothing too special; however, it’s actually surprised me. The magnets are stronger than I had thought they would be, making the cover much more stable in the stand-up configuration than I expected. The triangle-fold allowing stand-up or slight-incline is useful, and much easier to use than the cases Apple pimped for the original.
• Battery life — When a device gets smaller, that usually means the battery gets smaller, as does the battery life. In this case, Apple managed to make it smaller and faster while retaining the amazing battery life. Some tests have even shown it to have superior battery life when compared to the original, but my bet is that they were using a brand-new iPad 2 and a year-old iPad, so there would be some battery degradation on the latter.
• Sexy software — iMovie is pretty awesome, though it does take a bit of getting used to (I wish they had a tutorial or something available within the app). Using iMovie is a much better experience on the iPad 2 than on the iPhone 4. I haven’t tried Garage Band yet (haven’t even bought it), but it seems fairly awesome.  And the operating system in general is intuitive, smooth, and sexy. You don’t have to read any manual to use this thing — you just turn it on and go.

The “Meh”

• Fingerprints — The oleophobic coating does help… a little. Mostly they help in removing the fingerprints more easily, not so much with preventing them. So the thing still gets fingerprint smudged to hell. The magical covers have a glass cleaner on the underside, which… kind of works, but not really. And because of the shape, even the bit that it does work makes causes issues because where the fold creases are in the cover, there is no cleaning, so you end up with vertical smudge stripes where the cleaning bits didn’t touch.
• Speed — This was actually improved a lot, but I list it as “meh” because the original acted very snappy, so the speed increase doesn’t really affect the experience much. Rebooting is notably faster, but you hardly ever need to do that. But if you’re interested in the boot time difference, check out this video I made.
• Thinner — It is notably thinner, and feels better in the hand. However, I put this in the “meh” section because it causes some issues too — mainly, the angled edge. It makes it really awkward to plug in the sync/recharge cord, and ejecting the SIM card was unintuitive (click that link to see). Also, it’s much thinner and only a little lighter, which means it’s actually more dense, which in turn makes it feel heavier.
• No back protection — Yeah, you can get a third-party case for it, but it is sort of a shame that the flagship covers don’t protect the back of the device from scratches. I’ve been babying it, and so far so good, but I’m betting that it’s going to develop tiny little scratches soon.
• Big iPod Touch — Let’s face it, there really isn’t any difference in iOS between a handheld device and the iPad. There is tons of whitespace between icons, for example, and overall you can really feel that the OS wasn’t made for a tablet device.  The same was true of Android until recently with version 3.0 (Honeycomb).

The Bad

• Expandable storage — It still doesn’t have it. There were rumors that it would, and I was hoping that because the tablet market is heating up bigtime that Apple would see that they need to compete in this way to lure photographers. But no, they just made an SD dongle that allows you to transfer photos and videos to/from an SD card, but not actually use it as extra space.
• Adobe Flash — There is no Flash support now, or ever (unless something changes drastically).  There are some alternatives to watch Flash video, like an app that costs $5 and converts from Flash to a playable format, but that doesn’t work with Hulu, and it doesn’t at all work with Flash apps or games.  Steve Jobs would like you to think that Flash is going away in favor of HTML 5.  He’d mostly like you to think that because he wants it to go away, and if he can convince everyone that it is going away then it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’ve got news: Flash isn’t going away.  Get over your shit, and support it.

Conclusion

I really like the iPad 2 a lot. For me, the video conferencing is definitely worth the upgrade. And if I didn’t get on the bandwagon with the first iPad, I definitely would have with this one. If you’re thinking about upgrading, I’d recommend trying to sell the old one on eBay first to see how much you can get for it (look to see what others are selling for and expect to get about that).  Or give it to a friend or your significant other and get the upgrade for yourself. People made fun of Jobs for calling the iPad “magical,” but once you play with one for a few days you’ll realize that it really is.

A final note, on Android tablets: Some of the Android options out there are neat, but none really compare to the iPad 2. They try to sell themselves on hardware specs, and honestly that shit just doesn’t matter. The iPad is relatively cheap, thinner, and more polished than the competition, with more killer apps. I hope that Android tablets will catch up, but right now there’s really no competition.

There were a few neat improvements in iOS 4.1. It had some smaller bug fixes of course, like fixing the proximity sensor so that you're less likely to hit the mute or end call buttons with your cheek while you're talking. Neither has happened to me, but my girlfriend did once suffer from the accidental mute issue. It also has a game interaction feature, where you can invite friends to join in on games, earn achievements (I couldn't personally care less, but there seems to be a craze over achievements in the gaming world), and that sort of thing.

But there were two big updates that really interested me personally: high-def uploads, and HDR photos.

High-Def Uploads

Now the built-in movie uploader (which can upload to YouTube) is able to upload in full 720p high-def. if you're on a WiFi network. It used to force the resolution down, so my first iPhone 4 test video actually got uploaded as low-def.

HDR Photos

HDR stands for "high dynamic range." You only really need to use this option if the photo you're taking has very bright and/or very dark areas that you want to come out better. The phone snaps 2 shots in quick succession and uses some magic to combine them into one good shot with (more) consistent lighting.

Here's an example, normal on left, HDR on right:

You can click the images for higher-resolution versions.  However, this doesn't really do much for photos that aren't high-contrast. Here's an example of a normal and HDR version of a picture with consistent lighting:

The second one actually looks worse, in my opinion — a little more washed-out (since it's darkening the really light areas and lightening the dark areas). So make sure to only use this option when you need it.

Work got me an iPad 3G, since a lot of our customers are likely to use one, and it would behoove us to have some on-hand to look at issues ourselves. It arrived Tuesday, and I’ve been putting it through its paces since then. Short version is, the more I use it, the more I like it. I’m sort of on the fence right now as to whether I’d actually buy it if work didn’t get it for me, but currently leaning toward “no.”

The Good

• Interface – Nothing notably new here if you’re used to the iPhone/iPod Touch interface. Apple is really, really good at designing user interfaces. However, being on a bigger screen, all the apps feel like grown-up versions. The music player is more like the full iTunes, email is a lot more usable.
• Speed – It’s fast. Notably faster than my iPhone 3G. Very responsive; it loads up apps quickly, and there’s very little delay in rotating the screen when you change orientations.
• Music Player – Very close to the full iTunes experience, thanks to the extra room.
• Battery Life – This seems to be pretty darn good, though maybe I’m biased because the iPhone has such crappy battery live. More testing will be required, but after a couple of days of moderate use (I’d say maybe 5-6 hours total) it was down to about 60%.
• No Contract 3G Service – $30/mo for unlimited wireless Internet, $15/mo for 250 MB, and you can change that up or cancel it any time you want. Not exactly cheap, but not an arm and a leg either, and no contract.
• Speedy Push Notifications – Though sometimes it’s about even, my iPad usually gets push and email notifications notably faster than my iPhone. E.g. when I get a new email via Gmail, my iPad usually knows even before my desktop web browser does, and maybe 10-15 seconds before
• Full GPS – The 3G model has a full GPS chip. I’ve heard reviews that have said it seems to take a little longer to lock on than the iPhone 3GS, but that once it does it seems to hold the signal better. I’ve only used this a little, but it seems to work very well. I could definitely see using this as a replacement for a car stereo and GPS.

The Bad

Too much blank space between icons

Most of these things are really more “annoying” than bad. But I wanted to use the good, the bad, and the ugly as my headlines, so shut the frack up.

• Weight – Its heavier than I thought it would be. Wihch isn’t to say it’s a brick, but it’s definitely solid. I can see this causing a bit of arm fatigue if you’re trying to hold it up for more than a minute or two.
• Whitespace – One area where the interface doesn’t shine. The homescreen seems to have lots of empty space. The app icons should either be closer together, or larger, or some combination of the two. See picture.
• Fingerprints – Like the iPhone, this thing is bad at collecting fingerprints.
• Recharge Time – Probably due to having a bigger/better battery, the recharge time is a lot longre on this than I’d expected.

The Ugly

• Audiobook Transfer – This is really odd and unintuitive to someone who’s used an iPhone. Instead of transferring audiobooks with your normal audio files, you transfer them as you do eBooks. When I first tried transferring, I noticed that the audiobook playlist I had didn’t even show up as an option for syncing. I added a non-audiobook file to it and it showed up, but when I synced the playlist it only transferred that one music file, not the audiobooks. Only after some searching the web did I find that you have to use the Books tab from iTunes on your computer, scroll down, and select audiobooks there.
• Can’t Recharge From Computer – When I connect the iPad to my computer via USB, it lists “Not Charging.” Apparently you can only charge your iPad from either a wall outlet, or from a Mac. PC users are out of luck. This is a pretty bad issue.

From Slashdot:

Yesterday marked the announcement of the Apple iPad device, and with it came a new version of the SDK. In this new version, Apple has lifted the VoIP over 3G restrictions that limited VoIP traffic to wifi only. This morning, Fring announced that it’s iPhone app is 3G-capable starting immediately. No update is needed as apparently the app had 3G capability all along, but a server-side block prevented its use. Furthermore, apparently a 3G-capable version of Skype has been ready for some time now, and has been waiting for this restriction to be lifted.

This is an interesting shift, and if what this says is true — that the restriction was server-side and not in the SDK itself — then that actually means AT&T has decided to allow VoIP over 3G, not Apple.  Maybe now that Apple’s contract is nearly ended with AT&T, they’re starting to play nicer because (joy of joys) people will actually have a choice.