Pre-WWDC iPhone Yearnings

Tomorrow (6/7/10) is the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Fransisco and I'm all sorts of fired up for it. The iPad announcement found me hold up in my car on 3G since the company internet connection wasn't letting me reload Engadget's liveblog fast enough. I suspect a similar situation with the WWDC keynote. Jobs better blow his iPhone load in the first hour of the keynote, as I have a pesky meeting to attend at 2PM. Who schedules things during WWDC? Dumbphone users, that's who. 

Without a doubt, Apple will be announcing the next iPhone, just like they have in the past 3 WWDCs. It looks like most of the surprises have already been blown due to the lost iPhone in California, and a slew of other next gen iPhones and components popping up around the world. 

There are four really important things that we know for sure about the hardware:

1. The look and feel of the phone has been totally redesigned
2. The screen resolution is now 960x640
3. It's running an A4-ish Apple-designed processor
4. It has a front facing camera (woot!)

As for the software, we already know about OS 4.0, but there will additional announcements with regards to the software supporting the new hardware features. In particular, it will be interesting to see how they handle video chat, and if AT&T is going to want to screw you over for the service. The screen resolution chosen is very clever, as old apps don't need to be redesigned. Current apps will simply look like they do on the 3GS and below since the new resolution has busted each pixel up into 4 separate ones. When developers start reworking their apps, they'll be able to cram in 4x the pixels in the same area; it's going to be beautiful. Currently, the screen on the current generation iPhone looks like a joke when compared to the Droid or any of the higher end Android phones. This increased pixel density will be very well received.

My main gripe with the iPhone 3GS, besides the screen resolution, is the weak GPS. I run with my phone all the time to track my pace and course, and find that when it is in my arm band it gets poor GPS reception, resulting in a sad tracking and pace calculations in the 'Runner' app. Hopefully the new design allows for better GPS reception in this position. However, I don't expect this to be the case, as turn-by-turn navigation, a killer app for this device, should have the reception optimized for the opposite orientation. Best case scenario, they pop a much nicer GPS receiver in there and I never have to hear my phone confidently declare "10 minutes completed, 351 minutes per mile" anymore.

The latest iteration of Andriod, Froyo, has all sorts of really amazing features that I'm concerned the iPhone just won't get. Specifically, the ability to turn the phone into a WiFi hotspot, pushed application installs, and overall speed improvements have pushed Android much closer to being able to overtake iPhone OS 4.0. Combine that with a really compelling piece of hardware, like the EVO 4G, and you've got yourself a competitor. By the end of the keynote it should be clear if Apple has again raised the smartphone bar out of the reach of Android and WebOS again or if it's possible for Android to put tech junkies that just want the best smartphone experience, like me, in a position to toss our iPhones in the trash. 

I don't expect too many surprises tomorrow, but I'm hopeful that Steve has a few more things up his sleeve. Who knows, we could even have a release to another carrier like Verizon!

Oh, and I'm calling the name: iPhone HD. I'm about 80% confident. My other 20% goes to iPhone 4. They can't do iPhone 4G unless this thing is LTE or WiMax.

All in all, I really doubt they'll disappoint tomorrow. 

Another CableCard tuner on the way - now a choice!

I've had a media center box for years, and fully intend to write up my experiences with them. Currently, I'm dead set on replacing the garbage Motorola DVR loaded with Comcast's horrifically buggy, slow, and janky software with a home theater PC. To do this, it needs an HD tuner, and since I'm interested in watching the premium content I pay Comcast for, a regular over-the-air tuner won't do. This is where CableCard tuners come in.

If you aren't familliar with CableCard, it's the only other way to get the HD content you pay for (not the broadcast channels you get for free) from your cable provider besides getting their DVR or set-top box. Many HDTV's have a CableCard port that you can plug one of these baby's into and be able to watch all of your premium content. They're available from your cable provider, Comcast in my case, for a few bucks a month. This is a great solution, since I find it emotionally scaring to pay $15 per month for a DVR that doesn't even know how to record to the very end of a show.

Until just a few months ago, the only show in town was the single tuner ATI branded board by AMD. These are hard to come by, are intended for OEM's, and end up eBay for near $300. Since you need a bare minimum of 2 tuners to have a usable media center, this is a really expensive solution. But then came CES 2010 and the quad CableCard tuner from Ceton. This used multi-stream CableCards, letting you record up to four HD programs at once. Although this card is $400, that's only $100 per tuner. Check out Ben Drawbough's review of this one. I'm pretty much sold on it, but it's not yet available. Well, it almost was. 

Today, Engadget broke the news of a new three-tuner solution from HDHomeRun. This is exciting since 3 tuners is still quite reasonable and the cost per tuner is down to a little over $80. Expected ship date is sometime around 'the holidays', so I'm not holding my breath. At least the Ceton tuner is a slam dunk, this could be a slightly lower cost option.

Until one of these companies starts to ship boards, we're stuck with lame analog tuners or excessively overpriced solutions from AMD. Sadface.

AT&T MicroCell: A brief review.

I like to refer to the large granite faced hill behind my house as "The Mountain", and take great pride in it's authentic New Hampshire beauty. Unfortunately, this thing is directly in the way of the closest AT&T tower. That said, I take significantly less pride in the 0-1 bars of service, usually Edge, that my iPhone 3GS can scrounge up around the house. Until just a few weeks ago, my solution to this problem was to place calls from Cellphone Rock, Cellphone Window Frame, Cellphone Desk; all aptly named specific locations where a correctly oriented GSM device could get enough service to maintain a call.  This all changed when AT&T finally got around to releasing their femptocell, for whatever reason they have named MicroCell, in the Granite State. 

The concept of a femtocell is simple: It's a mini cell tower for your house, much like a wireless router, that your phone can connect to to place calls and send/receive messages. The device uses your internet connection as the pipe back to your wireless provider, and viola, you've got service where you had none before. Other carriers like Verizon have had femptocells available to their customers for a while now; AT&T is just a little on the slow side.

I picked one up as soon as they became available in my area and was able to place calls with it in just a few hours. The setup is really simple: Register it with AT&T on their website, plug it in to your network, and wait. It needs to be placed near a window, as the device won't work unless the on-board GPS decides you are in the area you said you were in (think E911!). If you can't get a great GPS signal where you want to place it, say in the middle of a building, there is an input for a GPS antenna on the back. Sounds like a hassle if you're stuck with this option. This is what the 8.5" beauty looks like:

AT&T 3G MicroCell (click to enlarge)

The initial setup time can take a few hours. It took somewhere from 1-2 hours to hook up with AT&T after configuration to be ready to place calls. Once it has a solid internet connection and a GPS lock, it blinks the 3G service light in anxious anticipation of AT&T's approval, until finally staying lit. You're even greeted with a text message from AT&T declaring that your MicroCell is good to go. Once it's set up, it comes up after a power cycle in less than 10 minutes. I located mine by a window, so the GPS lock takes only a few minutes, the bulk of the time is spent waiting for it to decide to say 3G service is ready. 

You'd think it would be party time when AT&T toting friends arrive, but alas the MicroCell will only whisper sweet 3G nothings into the ears of phones you have approved via their website. You can register at most 10 numbers with AT&T for your device, and in my experience it can take up to a half hour for the newly added phone to be ready to place calls. It's a pain. There's an article floating around that mentions an unmanaged mode, where any AT&T device can connect, but there is no mention of this anywhere in the manual or on the rest of the internets. At most, 4 devices can be using it simultaneously, and it's for 3G devices only. There are no GSM (EDGE) radios in it, so first generation iPhone owners and the like are out of luck.

When you've connected to it, it lets you know that you're on it with "AT&T M-CELL 3G" listed in the carrier section (WiFi is off in the picture below):

iPhone 3GS on MicroCell

I did some extremely scientific and thorough testing to see how robust the connection was with the MicroCell, placed in the front of my house at the corner of two exterior walls with no line-of-sight to a window. While blaring Pandora on nothing other than 'Miley Cyrus Radio,' I wandered around my neighborhood to see how far the connection could go without dropping. WiFi was disabled for the test and the iPhone 3GS I was using always displayed that it was connected to the MicroCell. 

The results were a little surprising. I made it down the street nearly 400ft before the connection dropped; careful to stop frequently and make sure that the connection hadn't already dropped (Pandora does buffer, you know). Starting back at the house, but going the opposite way of the first path, I was only able to go 100ft or so. This other path put an additional exterior wall in between the phone and the MicroCell, which explains part of the reduction in range. I was able to repeat the 400ft path starting from the house and taking a perpendicular path to the first one. Wandering around the yard I have great service, usually 5 bars, and in all the rooms of the house. 

There have been several times that my connection has flaked out, though. Unfortunately it is difficult to figure out if the issue is from the iPhone 3GS, not particularly well known for hanging on to its connection, or if it was the MicroCell. Just before doing this testing, I was receiving 5 bars of signal strength but had no real data connection. A power cycle of the MicroCell didn't work, but power cycling the iPhone's radios by switching in and out of airplane mode did the trick. This sounds like a fairly obvious case of iPhone sickness, but I had been running Pandora off of a 'real' 3G connection not 2 hours before. I have also had calls break up and drop while sitting still in a 5-bar area, a problem that I have not had happen on 'real' 3G networks. Any conclusions I make from this would be suspect, so let's give this thing the benefit of the doubt and blame it on Apple for now.

So, how much does it cost to be able to rock out to Pandora in your 3G coverage-less neighborhood? $150 if you decline to add any additional service to your plan, like unlimited minutes while on the MicroCell. It is most definitely worth the expense if you are stuck on AT&T and have poor coverage at home. Isn't it fun to pay for coverage you already pay $80+ per month for? No, no it's not, but at least if I break a hip I'll be able to place a 911 call from home.

Thoughts on 'Thoughts on Flash'

Running in the cool night air, dodging puddles accumulated from the recently passed thunderstorm, a man's mind turns to Flash. Well, maybe not, but Nilay and Josh did have a really good debate on this weeks Engadget podcast about Flash that got me thinking about it again. The topic even got into mainstream news recently, appearing on the front page of cnn.com , so this issue is even more out in the open than ever.

If you don't know what all the fuss is about, let me briefly break it down. Adobe, the software company that makes Photoshop and all sorts of other popular graphic arts tools, owns a multimedia platform known as Adobe Flash (or just Flash if you're one of the cool kids). Flash is everywhere on the internet, and I mean everywhere. According to a few studies, Adobe's Flash Player is installed on over 98% of internet-connected computers and devices. You are bombarded with Flash constantly, whether you realize it or not. Pop the baloon and win a free iPod? That ridiculous animated ad is probably on Flash. Watching a video on Hulu? All the video uses Flash. Checking out HBO.com? The entire site is Flash based. There is so much Flash content out there that you can even install Flash-blocking plug-ins for your web browser. Flash is all over, and there's no getting around it.

Well, then the iPhone showed up. Navigate to a site with flash on it, and you're greeted either with a blue lego (alerting you of a missing component, get it?), a gaping hole of nothing-ness in the middle of the page, or a seemingly helpful message directing you to go install Flash. Hulu is nice about it:

Hulu sadness on iPhone

At least here you know that there's something you're missing. Recently, the sad blue lego that used to appear in place of the content you were missing a plug-in for no longer appears. So, when you're reading Engadget's review of Microsoft's Kin devices on your iPad, you come across a section that looks like the screen capture below on the left. From a desktop, on Google's Chrome browser, you see what you're actually missing (below right).

  

                        Kin review on iPad                                                 Kin review on Chrome

iPhone OS does not support flash, meaning the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad can't rock Flash content, and Apple recently made it clear that it does not intend to implement it in the future. Adobe is obviously not happy about it, just read any of their press releases or interviews on the subject. Heck, they've even got a passive aggressive message waiting for you when you try to install Flash player for your device.

If you haven't read Job's open letter on why Apple has decided to forgo Flash, you should definitely check it out. This is what I will be to talking about in this post. 

When you sit down at a computer, you surf the web, and you just expect everything to work. If you go to a website and there's a gaping hole where Flash content should be, you have a right to get angry. Now, if you're on your smartphone, say an iPhone, and you navigate to a Flash-based page, you might be able to make peace with the fact that you can't get at all content since this is still just a phone. This is a much tougher sell with the iPad. Steve Job's is famously quoted as declaring the iPad has "the best web browsing experience you've ever had", even as he scrolled past sad looking Flash-holes in web sites. Why would Apple leave out such a popular and, in many cases, critical component of the web from their devices? All the answers are in Job's open letter on the subject. Here's my take on it.

I believe that the underlying reason for most of the points in the letter is the fabled Apple experience. Ask anyone about Apple computers and invariably they will come back with "they don't crash", "they just work", or they're "really easy to use". Same with the iPhone, and now with the iPad. Don't believe it? Ask this little lady. Apple sells an experience, and at a premium. You pay the 'Apple tax' for the experience, an experience that is only possible because of the extremely closed nature of their hardware and software. If people pick up an iPhone and the web browser is crashing all the time because of the Flash-filled websites, that takes away from this aura that Apple has tried to surround their devices with. Combine this with the additional drain on your battery as the processor feverishly decodes the video, and you have an even worse experience. 

Now, this is not to say that I think these downsides are all that big of a deal. The browser, Safari, crashes on me all the time anyway. And there is no way in hell that I could possibly get two full days of charge out of this thing to begin with. After a full night's charge, I've got about a 30-40% charge at the end of the following day. It's quite a bummer when you navigate to a page you're interested in and all the good stuff is in Flash, and thus completely blank. You get used to it after a while, come to expect it, and move on.

I could definitely tolerate some degradation of the iPhone/iPad experience to have Flash thrown in the mix, but I'm not sure that I can blame Apple for keeping it out of their 'walled garden'. They're the phone to beat in the mobile world, and have the first successful tablet on the market. Nobody got these devices anywhere near close to being right until they came along. Apple dominates the market with these devices, and has enough weight to shape the future. If they want Flash out, it might be hard to stop them with the current rate of adoption of their products. And since Flash is such a resource hog, that part isn't even up for debate, I think that the end result will be faster adoption of HTML5 than would be possible otherwise. 

Adobe had a lame response to Job's letter because ultimately, Jobs was correct on his technical points. However, since today's internet is so heavily entrenched in Flash, iDevice users are not getting the full experience. So now we wait. We wait until everyone switches over to HTML5 or the websites we care about start writing apps (Hulu please!!!). In the mean time, we can be pissed that there's no Flash, just like we were until copy and paste was implemented, and just like we while we waited for the worlds most awesome smartphone to learn how to send a picture message. Eventually this will be a non-issue, but for now, it's the most visible and restrictive issue with iPhone OS. 

There is another major point of contention in Job's letter, and it has to do with blocking the use of cross-platform tools that allow app developers to write an app in some other programming language and compile it for iPhone OS. He says the reason for this is that this additional layer of abstraction results in sub-par apps. I'm on board with that, but cross-platform coding is used very widely. Adobe even has support in CS5 for compiling iPhone OS applications, which because of Apple's new legal terms, has been rendered useless. 

This story is still developing, but I think I get why Apple is doing this. They want developers to develop specifically for their platform. They want apps that have been tailored to exactly what the iPhone has to offer, but primarily to have developers putting more effort into iDevices than, say, Android or WebOS. And this could even work! Look at the numbers; there are millions and millions of iPhones and iPads floating around out there. The iTunes store is incredibly successful; Apple's ecosystem rocks. Now that you can't just write one app that you can push on to all the major smartphones, you have to write the same app in two different languages.If you're a developer, you'd be crazy not to go after Apple's customer base. This strategy keeps developers spending more time with Apple and less time with everyone else, plain and simple.

I'm actually getting quite sick of this story, and luckily it looks like some of the major issues will be relieved. Hulu is reportedly working on something that could get their content to these devices, Adobe seems to be whining less about flash and instead announcing HTML5 tools. Moving away from Flash is good for everyone, well maybe not Adobe, but until we get something else it's the consumer who feels the burn. 

In the mean time, thank you ABC for your app that fills the void that a Hulu-less iPad has left in my heart, you've shown everyone that if you want to get your content on iPhone OS, you can just go off and do it. 

Wacky Folder Problem in Windows 7

One of the folders on my desktop that I keep a mirrored copy of on my network is an iTunes media folder. This guy contains about 80GB of music and video that I'd rather not see vanish when my RAID array breaks, a HDD explodes, or Somali pirates make off with my desktop. After running a command line utility called 'robocopy' regularly to perform this backup across the network, I noticed something strange in the drive where I keep this folder.

[Click to enlarge]

Yep, there are two folders named iTunes there. Try making two folders with the same name in Windows Explorer. Good luck with that.

Reviewing the properties of both of these folders showed that one was about 80GB and the other was just a handful of bytes. It's pretty clear which one was bogus, but attempts to delete it through the file browser were met with "The system cannot find the specified path". Awesome.

Interestingly, drilling down into the bogus folder looked like I was drilling down into the non-bogus folder. It was filled with the same files and folders as the 80GB one. I created a few new files, dragged, and dropped them in. These files simply vanished; they were not in this folder when opened.

I tried all sorts of things, ridiculous things, things that didn't make sense all in an attempt to trick Windows into figuring out where this folder actually was (or was not!). Nothing worked. Renaming the good iTunes folder allowed me to try removing it via the command line, but none of the commands could figure out where this magical unicorn of a folder was. However, once I renamed the good iTunes folder, the contents of the bogus folder changed.

[Click to enlarge]

Inside the folder were two files that I had dropped into this folder earlier, but had disappeared. A folder, MIR, lived in here as well and was also un-deletable. This newly discovered folder, however, links this issue to robocopy. I use the switch /MIR to perform the mirroring of this folder, making this mess likely a leftover turd from robocopy. Presumably it was caused by prematurely terminated one of the backup sessions, but I have yet to repeat it.

After scouring the internets for a solution to this problem over the course of a few days, I finally ran into this thread. All the way at the bottom, a forum member mentioned using the short DOS folder names to wipe out un-deletable folders by using the /x switch for the dir command.

[Click to enlarge]

The bogus folder had a short DOS folder name of ITUNES~1. Armed with this alternate path to the same folder, I ran 'rmdir /s ITUNES~1' and miraculously, it was gone forever. I had the same issue on the remote drive and was able to erase it the same way.

It was suggested that this could be a symbolic link; something I was familiar with in Linux but had no idea even existed in Windows. I looked into this quite a bit, and found that they were treated very similarly to regular files and folders when it comes to removing them. However, what I had going on here wasn't a symbolic link. I created one to see how it would show up.

[Click to enlarge]

The command prompt, even in its seemingly archaic fashion, still knows best. Symbolic links are shown as what they are; what I had before was most definitely not a symbolic link. It was something else entirely. 

So what was it? Maybe it was just a slightly corrupt folder, but I suspect this won't be the last time it happens. And when it does, it's short DOS folder names all the way.