Like before, Apple has left the EXIF data intact on its samples, including the geotagging data for a surprising number. I think it’s interesting to just take a look.

Image 1 – IMG_1610.jpg

ExifTool Version Number : 8.68
File Name : IMG_1610.JPG
Directory : /Volumes/Macintosh HDD/nerdtalker/Downloads
File Size : 1518 kB
File Modification Date/Time : 2012:03:08 12:44:45-07:00
File Permissions : rw-r--r--
File Type : JPEG
MIME Type : image/jpeg
Exif Byte Order : Big-endian (Motorola, MM)
Make : Apple
Camera Model Name : iPad
Orientation : Rotate 180
X Resolution : 72
Y Resolution : 72
Resolution Unit : inches
Software : 5.1
Modify Date : 2012:02:16 11:19:30
Y Cb Cr Positioning : Centered
Exposure Time : 1/2160
F Number : 2.4
Exposure Program : Program AE
ISO : 80
Exif Version : 0221
Date/Time Original : 2012:02:16 11:19:30
Create Date : 2012:02:16 11:19:30
Components Configuration : Y, Cb, Cr, -
Shutter Speed Value : 1/2160
Aperture Value : 2.4
Brightness Value : 10.13573086
Metering Mode : Multi-segment
Flash : No flash function
Focal Length : 4.3 mm
Subject Area : 1295 967 699 696
Flashpix Version : 0100
Color Space : sRGB
Exif Image Width : 2592
Exif Image Height : 1936
Sensing Method : One-chip color area
Exposure Mode : Auto
White Balance : Auto
Focal Length In 35mm Format : 35 mm
Scene Capture Type : Standard
Sharpness : Normal
GPS Latitude Ref : North
GPS Longitude Ref : West
GPS Altitude Ref : Below Sea Level
GPS Time Stamp : 19:19:30.6
GPS Img Direction Ref : True North
GPS Img Direction : 267.2341772
Compression : JPEG (old-style)
Thumbnail Offset : 904
Thumbnail Length : 10049
Image Width : 2592
Image Height : 1936
Encoding Process : Baseline DCT, Huffman coding
Bits Per Sample : 8
Color Components : 3
Y Cb Cr Sub Sampling : YCbCr4:2:0 (2 2)
Aperture : 2.4
GPS Altitude : 0 m Above Sea Level
GPS Latitude : 38 deg 21' 21.60" N
GPS Longitude : 123 deg 4' 1.20" W
GPS Position : 38 deg 21' 21.60" N, 123 deg 4' 1.20" W
Image Size : 2592x1936
Scale Factor To 35 mm Equivalent: 8.2
Shutter Speed : 1/2160
Thumbnail Image : (Binary data 10049 bytes, use -b option to extract)
Circle Of Confusion : 0.004 mm
Field Of View : 54.4 deg
Focal Length : 4.3 mm (35 mm equivalent: 35.0 mm)
Hyperfocal Distance : 2.08 m
Light Value : 13.9

Like last time I’ve reproduced the entire EXIF output using the ever-awesome exiftool, or you can do the same thing (which uses it as a backend) on exifdata.com. It’s the same data just presented in a nicer fashion online (and with a link to google maps).

So a couple things immediately stand out which I’ve bolded. First, the model of the device reflects Apple’s new naming scheme, and reports simply “iPad.” There’s no 3 or “Late 2012″ or any other moniker, which should further confirm (if it’s even possible to more strongly confirm) that the name of the thing is literally just “iPad.” The software this iPad was running is iOS 5.1, which makes sense. Image size is 2592×1936 which works out to exactly 5.01 MP as well – the original iPhone 4 also produced images 2592×1936 in size, in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same OmniVision CMOS being shared between the 4 and iPad (3rd Gen).

Moving on we also see that the focal length and field of view reported in EXIF data are exactly the same as those from the iPhone 4S. This does seem to back the claim that the iPad 3rd Gen is indeed using the same optical system/module as the iPhone 4S, at least superficially. Further, this means that the two must be using the same size sensor to achieve the same field of view with the same 4.3mm focal length.

Update: This ended up being the case, as the iPad (3) uses the same CMOS as the iPhone 4 (as predicted), which is OmniVision’s OV5650. That sensor has 1/3.2″ size and 1.75µm pixels. Recall that the iPhone 4S uses Sony’s IMX145 sensor which is 1/3.2″ as well, but with 1.4µm pixels. Using the same optical format is what makes it possible for Apple to reuse the same 5P optical design between the iPhone 4S and iPad (3).

The image is recorded at ISO 80 (which is the lowest I’ve seen the 4S go as well) and at 100% crop looks pretty good, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s mindblowing. There’s some definite noise visible in the sky and some noise-reduction which seems to battle it. Thankfully Apple still isn’t using a sharpening kernel, so there aren’t any halos around the flower’s petals. The lower part of the flower petal also has some oversaturation (100% white). The good part is that it seems to inherit the good optical qualities from the 4S system (same module, different CMOS I guess) and there’s minimal distortion or vignetting, two things that drive me absolutely crazy with most smartphone/tablet camera modules.

ExifTool Version Number : 8.68
File Name : IMG_0470.png
Directory : /Volumes/Macintosh HDD/nerdtalker/Downloads
File Size : 5.1 MB
File Modification Date/Time : 2012:03:08 12:44:50-07:00
File Permissions : rw-r--r--
File Type : PNG
MIME Type : image/png
Image Width : 2592
Image Height : 1936
Bit Depth : 8
Color Type : RGB
Compression : Deflate/Inflate
Filter : Adaptive
Interlace : Noninterlaced
Pixels Per Unit X : 2835
Pixels Per Unit Y : 2835
Pixel Units : Meters
Profile CMM Type : Lino
Profile Version : 2.1.0
Profile Class : Display Device Profile
Color Space Data : RGB
Profile Connection Space : XYZ
Profile Date Time : 1998:02:09 06:49:00
Profile File Signature : acsp
Primary Platform : Microsoft Corporation
CMM Flags : Not Embedded, Independent
Device Manufacturer : IEC
Device Model : sRGB
Device Attributes : Reflective, Glossy, Positive, Color
Rendering Intent : Perceptual
Connection Space Illuminant : 0.9642 1 0.82491
Profile Creator : HP
Profile ID : 0
Profile Copyright : Copyright (c) 1998 Hewlett-Packard Company
Profile Description : sRGB IEC61966-2.1
Media White Point : 0.95045 1 1.08905
Media Black Point : 0 0 0
Red Matrix Column : 0.43607 0.22249 0.01392
Green Matrix Column : 0.38515 0.71687 0.09708
Blue Matrix Column : 0.14307 0.06061 0.7141
Device Mfg Desc : IEC http://www.iec.ch
Device Model Desc : IEC 61966-2.1 Default RGB colour space - sRGB
Viewing Cond Desc : Reference Viewing Condition in IEC61966-2.1
Viewing Cond Illuminant : 19.6445 20.3718 16.8089
Viewing Cond Surround : 3.92889 4.07439 3.36179
Viewing Cond Illuminant Type : D50
Luminance : 76.03647 80 87.12462
Measurement Observer : CIE 1931
Measurement Backing : 0 0 0
Measurement Geometry : Unknown (0)
Measurement Flare : 0.999%
Measurement Illuminant : D65
Technology : Cathode Ray Tube Display
Red Tone Reproduction Curve : (Binary data 2060 bytes, use -b option to extract)
Green Tone Reproduction Curve : (Binary data 2060 bytes, use -b option to extract)
Blue Tone Reproduction Curve : (Binary data 2060 bytes, use -b option to extract)
White Point X : 0.31269
White Point Y : 0.32899
Red X : 0.63999
Red Y : 0.33001
Green X : 0.3
Green Y : 0.6
Blue X : 0.15
Blue Y : 0.05999
Image Size : 2592x1936

Software : 5.1
Modify Date : 2012:02:14 16:14:55
Y Cb Cr Positioning : Centered
Exposure Time : 1/1439
F Number : 2.4
Exposure Program : Program AE
ISO : 80
Exif Version : 0221
Date/Time Original : 2012:02:14 16:14:55
Create Date : 2012:02:14 16:14:55
Components Configuration : Y, Cb, Cr, -
Shutter Speed Value : 1/1439
Aperture Value : 2.4
Brightness Value : 9.728654971
Metering Mode : Multi-segment
Flash : No flash function
Focal Length : 4.3 mm
Subject Area : 1295 967 699 696
Flashpix Version : 0100
Color Space : sRGB
Exif Image Width : 2592
Exif Image Height : 1936
Sensing Method : One-chip color area
...
GPS Altitude : 0 m Above Sea Level
GPS Latitude : 38 deg 5' 51.60" N
GPS Longitude : 122 deg 51' 3.00" W
GPS Position : 38 deg 5' 51.60" N, 122 deg 51' 3.00" W
Image Size : 2592x1936
Scale Factor To 35 mm Equivalent: 8.2
Shutter Speed : 1/1439
Thumbnail Image : (Binary data 9285 bytes, use -b option to extract)
Circle Of Confusion : 0.004 mm
Field Of View : 54.4 deg
Focal Length : 4.3 mm (35 mm equivalent: 35.0 mm)
Hyperfocal Distance : 2.08 m
Light Value : 13.3

Software : 5.1
Modify Date : 2012:02:09 12:03:06
Y Cb Cr Positioning : Centered
Exposure Time : 1/1890
F Number : 2.4
Exposure Program : Program AE
ISO : 80
Exif Version : 0221
Date/Time Original : 2012:02:09 12:03:06
Create Date : 2012:02:09 12:03:06
Components Configuration : Y, Cb, Cr, -
Shutter Speed Value : 1/1890
Aperture Value : 2.4
Brightness Value : 10.12332838
GPS Altitude : 0 m Above Sea Level
GPS Latitude : 34 deg 1' 14.40" N
GPS Longitude : 118 deg 47' 10.80" W
GPS Position : 34 deg 1' 14.40" N, 118 deg 47' 10.80" W
Image Size : 2592x1936
Scale Factor To 35 mm Equivalent: 8.2
Shutter Speed : 1/1890
Thumbnail Image : (Binary data 8699 bytes, use -b option to extract)
Circle Of Confusion : 0.004 mm
Field Of View : 54.4 deg
Focal Length : 4.3 mm (35 mm equivalent: 35.0 mm)
Hyperfocal Distance : 2.08 m
Light Value : 13.7

In the course of doing smartphone reviews for AnandTech, I’ve taken a lot of photos for the expressed purpose of comparing camera quality. I don’t have an exact number, but it’s an absurd number of images, and of those, maybe 20% or so actually get published. We reviewed the iPhone 4S and discussed its camera at length in our review, but one of the things that piqued my attention was Apple’s claim that they had were sharing untouched, direct-from-the-iPhone samples online (at the bottom). In case you want all of the images, I’ve uploaded a zip here locally.

What’s interesting is that by default, iOS captures geolocation data on each image capture unless you decline the location services request on initial launch. I was curious to find out just how untouched these images were and whether all the EXIF data was left intact, including the GPS location data. Clearly these photos were taken at places that are either some engineer’s favorite hideouts, or possibly much more. Also, there’s that ever looming question of when they were taken, and whether there’s any chance anyone could’ve seen Apple employees taking photos with an unreleased iDevice at some scenic location.

You can analyze EXIF data in any number of image manipulation packages, and increasingly desktop OSes are exposing this data directly (Finder, Explorer, e.t.c.) but for quick analysis I turned to exifdata.com which does a nice job visualizing everything. Alternatively one can just dump the EXIF data using libraries like the very popular exiftool.

Image 1 – IMG1031

Here’s the dump from one of Apple’s demo images, “IMG_1031.JPG” which is the squirrel photo shown during the announcement event. There’s all the standard data included in the full headers, and you can see specifications such as focal length, exposure time, ISO, model, and the software (iOS 5) used. There are some other fields as well.

SubjectArea I believe corresponds to either where the face detection routine selected an AE/AF target with highest confidence value (most likely to be a face), or where the image was focused using tap to focus. The iPhone 4S also includes some new fields at the very bottom such as 35mm equivalent focal length, field of view, hyperfocal distance (at half this distance, all objects and further meet image plane blur criterion and appear in focus – this half trips people up), and even circle of confusion diameter (blur size/circle of confusion). These values at the very end appear to be specific to the iPhone 4S (and possibly its H4 ISP) and aren’t part of the JEITA EXIF 2.2 specification.

ExifTool Version Number         : 8.68
File Name                       : IMG_1031.JPG
Directory                       : .
File Size                       : 3.1 MB
File Modification Date/Time     : 2011:10:05 01:43:44-07:00
File Permissions                : rw-r--r--
File Type                       : JPEG
MIME Type                       : image/jpeg
Exif Byte Order                 : Big-endian (Motorola, MM)
Make                            : Apple
Camera Model Name               : iPhone 4S
Orientation                     : Rotate 180
X Resolution                    : 72
Y Resolution                    : 72
Resolution Unit                 : inches
Software                        : 5.0
Modify Date                     : 2011:08:24 13:13:33
Y Cb Cr Positioning             : Centered
Exposure Time                   : 1/286
F Number                        : 2.4
Exposure Program                : Program AE
ISO                             : 64
Exif Version                    : 0221
Date/Time Original              : 2011:08:24 13:13:33
Create Date                     : 2011:08:24 13:13:33
Components Configuration        : Y, Cb, Cr, -
Shutter Speed Value             : 1/286
Aperture Value                  : 2.4
Brightness Value                : 6.992671928
Metering Mode                   : Multi-segment
Flash                           : Auto, Did not fire
Focal Length                    : 4.3 mm
Subject Area                    : 1631 1223 881 881
Flashpix Version                : 0100
Color Space                     : sRGB
Exif Image Width                : 3264
Exif Image Height               : 2448
Sensing Method                  : One-chip color area
Exposure Mode                   : Auto
White Balance                   : Auto
Focal Length In 35mm Format     : 35 mm
Scene Capture Type              : Standard
Sharpness                       : Normal
GPS Latitude Ref                : North
GPS Longitude Ref               : West
GPS Altitude Ref                : Above Sea Level
GPS Time Stamp                  : 21:08:30
GPS Img Direction Ref           : True North
GPS Img Direction               : 346.4727273
Compression                     : JPEG (old-style)
Thumbnail Offset                : 908
Thumbnail Length                : 12311
Image Width                     : 3264
Image Height                    : 2448
Encoding Process                : Baseline DCT, Huffman coding
Bits Per Sample                 : 8
Color Components                : 3
Y Cb Cr Sub Sampling            : YCbCr4:2:0 (2 2)
Aperture                        : 2.4
GPS Altitude                    : 1222 m Above Sea Level
GPS Latitude                    : 37 deg 44' 10.80" N
GPS Longitude                   : 119 deg 35' 58.80" W
GPS Position                    : 37 deg 44' 10.80" N, 119 deg 35' 58.80" W
Image Size                      : 3264x2448
Scale Factor To 35 mm Equivalent: 8.2
Shutter Speed                   : 1/286
Thumbnail Image                 : (Binary data 12311 bytes, use -b option to extract)
Circle Of Confusion             : 0.004 mm
Field Of View                   : 54.4 deg
Focal Length                    : 4.3 mm (35 mm equivalent: 35.0 mm)
Hyperfocal Distance             : 2.08 m
Light Value                     : 11.3

If you look at this data a few things pop out. There really is GPS location data inside, and just like before the iDevice also encodes what direction the phone was pointing (compass data) when the image was captured.

This first photo was captured in Yosemite National Park on August 24th 2011, a full one month and 10 days before its announcement on October 4. Interesting.

Image 2 – IMG1664

This second image is of some waves breaking on a rocky beach and shows very nice detail. Just like the first image, it too includes GPS data and the creation date.

Make                            : Apple
Camera Model Name               : iPhone 4S
Orientation                     : Rotate 180
Date/Time Original              : 2011:08:29 18:50:23
Create Date                     : 2011:08:29 18:50:23
GPS Latitude Ref                : North
GPS Longitude Ref               : West
GPS Altitude Ref                : Below Sea Level
GPS Time Stamp                  : 02:27:00
GPS Img Direction Ref           : True North
GPS Img Direction               : 357.1590909
GPS Altitude                    : 0 m Above Sea Level
GPS Latitude                    : 38 deg 26' 28.20" N
GPS Longitude                   : 123 deg 7' 36.00" W
GPS Position                    : 38 deg 26' 28.20" N, 123 deg 7' 36.00" W

I’ve truncated the exported data for this image since the same format as the previous one. Note zero feet above sea level, indeed this checks out.

This photo was taken at goat rock beach on August 29th, five days after the first image, and one month 5 days before the announcement. What’s intense about this image is that if you study the google satellite view enough, then take into account the pointing direction, you can actually see the rock in the photograph.

Image 3 – IMG0032

This image is a landscape photo with a waterfall in the distance.

Make                            : Apple
Camera Model Name               : iPhone 4S
Orientation                     : Horizontal (normal)
Date/Time Original              : 2011:08:25 09:27:36
Create Date                     : 2011:08:25 09:27:36
GPS Latitude Ref                : North
GPS Longitude Ref               : West
GPS Altitude Ref                : Above Sea Level
GPS Time Stamp                  : 17:26:10
GPS Img Direction Ref           : True North
GPS Img Direction               : 254.5312024
GPS Altitude                    : 1192 m Above Sea Level
GPS Latitude                    : 37 deg 44' 38.40" N
GPS Longitude                   : 119 deg 35' 30.60" W
GPS Position                    : 37 deg 44' 38.40" N, 119 deg 35' 30.60" W

This one also includes the GPS location and pointing data.

Upon inspection, we can see this photo was taken also at Yosemite National Park and on August 25th 2011. It seems very likely this was taken by the same person who took the squirrel photo, given the fact that it’s a day later and in the same region in the park – perhaps a camping trip or something?

Image 4 – IMG1295

This image is of a person holding a flower up to the camera showing shallow depth of field and some serious bokeh. The subject is the same as shown in the 1080p video sample Apple provides, and appears to lack GPS data of any kind, but was taken on August 29th.

Make                            : Apple
Camera Model Name               : iPhone 4S
Orientation                     : Horizontal (normal)
Date/Time Original              : 2011:08:29 15:54:02
Create Date                     : 2011:08:29 15:54:02

Image 5 – IMG0945

This image looks almost like a test scene, and includes some potted herbs, drawers, fruits, lemons, and a bunch of different knick knacks. The EXIF data for this one includes GPS data.

Make                            : Apple
Camera Model Name               : iPhone 4S
Orientation                     : Horizontal (normal)
Date/Time Original              : 2011:08:30 14:01:03
Create Date                     : 2011:08:30 14:01:03
GPS Latitude Ref                : North
GPS Longitude Ref               : East
GPS Altitude Ref                : Above Sea Level
GPS Time Stamp                  : 13:25:21
GPS Img Direction Ref           : True North
GPS Img Direction               : 21.31747484
GPS Altitude                    : 342.1 m Above Sea Level
GPS Latitude                    : 50 deg 55' 6.60" N
GPS Longitude                   : 14 deg 3' 24.00" E
GPS Position                    : 50 deg 55' 6.60" N, 14 deg 3' 24.00" E

So far the images we’ve seen have been from just inside the US – this image is from the Königstein Fortress in Germany of all places, and was taken on August 30th.

This one is particularly interesting since it’s a great demonstration photo but also is the only sample image not taken in the US.

Image 6 – IMG1401

This image also has no GPS data, which means it possibly was taken by the same iPhone 4S as number 4 (and this user disabled location services for the camera app), or just someone else who was likewise cautious to not include position. This image is a macro of some flowers.

Make                            : Apple
Camera Model Name               : iPhone 4S
Orientation                     : Horizontal (normal)
Date/Time Original              : 2011:08:29 17:30:26
Create Date                     : 2011:08:29 17:30:26

This image was taken on August 29th, however.

Image 7 – IMG1720

Likewise, this one also lacks GPS data, but shows a beach at dusk (thus, west coast) and appears to have been taken likewise on August 29th in the evening.

Make                            : Apple
Camera Model Name               : iPhone 4S
Orientation                     : Horizontal (normal)
Date/Time Original              : 2011:08:29 19:28:56
Create Date                     : 2011:08:29 19:28:56

Image 8 – IMG0940

The last image shows the same hot air balloon as shown in the 1080p video sample, and includes GPS data. We can see where this video (and likely image 4) was taken.

Make                            : Apple
Camera Model Name               : iPhone 4S
Orientation                     : Rotate 180
Date/Time Original              : 2011:08:30 10:33:45
Create Date                     : 2011:08:30 10:33:45
GPS Latitude Ref                : North
GPS Longitude Ref               : West
GPS Altitude Ref                : Above Sea Level
GPS Time Stamp                  : 18:48:01
GPS Img Direction Ref           : True North
GPS Img Direction               : 270.9027778
GPS Altitude                    : 31 m Above Sea Level
GPS Latitude                    : 38 deg 30' 13.20" N
GPS Longitude                   : 122 deg 46' 21.00" W
GPS Position                    : 38 deg 30' 13.20" N, 122 deg 46' 21.00" W

Oddly enough image 4 and image 8 were taken on different days, so this possibly is a different location. That said, the location appears to be the Kendall-Jackson winery right off the 101.

Like the beach photo, this is just up the coast from San Francisco. The photo was taken August 30th as well.

Conclusions

Apple took sample images for its iPhone 4S presentation between the dates of August 24th and August 30th, a little over one month before the public unveiling. It’s interesting to note that had you been fortuitous enough to be in Yosemite National Park on the 24th or 25th, you might have by chance seen an iPhone 4S snapping photos of scenery and squirrels. Other locations near San Francisco seem logical given Apple’s location in Cupertino, CA, leaving the photo from Germany an odd outlier.

It seems that for all the scrutiny placed on bars surrounding 1 infinite loop, being in picturesque locales one month before an iPhone unveiling is quite possibly another logical strategy for spotting an unreleased iPhone.

I have to come full circle and say that I’m impressed Apple really didn’t scrub data from its sample images. This is something even I do to provide some location anonymity in the course of uploading sample images, though as of late I’ve become sloppy with scrubbing all the GPS data from EXIF for each sample image.

The 4G LTE network will extend through Tucson between Interstate 10 and Harrison Road, north to Sunrise Drive and south to Valencia Road, including the Tucson International Airport.

That’s a bit curious actually, since the four thoroughfares specified don’t completely bound a region. Sunrise doesn’t extend all the way to Harrison, and Valencia is a bit discontinuous as well. Further, Interstate 10 bounds the bottom and left side of the box. I spent some time figuring out what that actually looks like, and created a google maps/earth .kmz overlay image, and image.

There’s a bit of interpolation going on here, namely assuming that Ina will bound the north part after Sunrise disappears, and that the jump from Sunrise to Harrison takes place like shown. It gives a decent impression of what the initial profile will be like, however.

A few things immediately stand out. First, there’s a bit of the east side that is genuinely clipped off. Second, south tucson between I-19 and I-10 doesn’t seem to make sense. It’s definitely a part of “Tucson,” yet the bounded region that Verizon stipulates would seem to preclude coverage making it down there. But perhaps the most head-scratchingly surreal part of the box is the fact that coverage will only extend to Sunrise.

Beyond and around the Sunrise/Skyline line is the foothills. This is the region where it makes the most sense to deploy 4G LTE due to the kind of neighborhood it is. Extending only to Skyline (and not even a little beyond) seems like a completely missed opportunity. It’ll be interesting to see the actual coverage profile and when things start rolling out. As of right now, I can confirm that there isn’t 4G LTE anywhere in town – I’ve tested at the airport, downtown, U of A, and throughout town with the HTC Thunderbolt, Pantech UML290, Samsung hotspot, and another unreleased datacard thus far to no avail. Hopefully it comes soon. Verizon has 22 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum (upper c block) in most of Arizona including Phoenix and Tucson. Only the far west part of Arizona has 34 MHz.

Update: 

Today Verizon Wireless announced that the Tucson, AZ market will be included in the August 18 nationwide LTE rollout. Last week I heard from a good friend of mine with a Droid Charge that LTE was working in various parts of Tucson already, no doubt as Verizon tests individual eNodeBs for functionality.

Update 2: 

At around 10:30 PM on August 17, Verizon 4G LTE went live in Tucson. Some people on Twitter sent me notifications about them seeing the service light up in areas that were even outside the circle painted by earlier press releases, so if you’re reasonably close to the boundary outlined in the press release, there’s a good chance LTE is active in your area.

One person tweeted a link to some speedtests, which show that things are indeed working:

Currently I don’t have any 4G LTE devices, but when I get another one for testing we’ll have a better picture of coverage and speeds in this market.

Update 3: 

It’s live, and it’s fast! I’ve tested it thoroughly and published some results already in the context of the Droid Bionic review, which is only a UE Category 2 device. Soon as I get a UE Category 3 LTE device I will run some more tests and get a better picture.

I thought it was interesting last time I came that most casino floors in Las Vegas had shockingly poor or non-existant UMTS (3G) coverage on AT&T. I guess I didn’t find it too shocking, since coverage inside buildings in a dense urban environment is probably the most challenging for mobile networks, but it seemed to be a consistent problem. After getting frustrated about 6 hours into my stay, I decided to switch entirely to EDGE for the duration just because of how annoying being constantly handed between GSM/EDGE and UMTS is when you’re trying to do things. For whatever reason, back then I didn’t think to pull up field test on the iPhone 3GS I was currently carrying to see what bands were assigned to which network technology.

Now that I’m back, I decided to check. Thankfully, Apple has restored most if not all of the Field Test data products in iOS 4.2.1, a huge step forward from 4.1 just allowing signal strength in dBm at top left, and a far cry from 4.0 which shipped with no field test whatsoever. To save potential readers some googling, to get here, enter *3001#12345#* from the dialer and hit call – if it hasn’t been removed yet, you’ll get dumped into Field Test on iOS.

In EDGE and tapping on GSM RR Info, it’s immediately obvious why I saw that behavior last time I was here:

ARFCN dictates what channel inside what band we’re on, and 142 just happens to lie inside the GSM 850 band. It’s a number basically used to refer to the FDD pair of frequencies the phone is currently using. You can calculate exactly what frequency downlink and uplink are on with a little math and some reference guide (there’s a good table here), but basically with an ARFCN of 142 we know immediately that GSM/EDGE is on AT&T’s 850 MHz spectrum. Between 128 and 251 is that GSM850 spectrum.

Now, what about UMTS/3G? Enabling 3G (look at how weak that signal is…) and going into UMTS RR info, I saw the following:

Looking at the fields “Downlink Frequency” and “Uplink Frequency” we can see the device’s UARFCN channel numbers. It’s the same thing, but U for UMTS. Again, with a reference aide (read: wikipedia) we can see that UMTS/3G is working in the PCS 1900 MHz band.

Remember that higher frequencies are less effective at propagating through buildings. It’s pretty obvious now why getting good 3G coverage on AT&T is a challenge deep inside a casino in Las Vegas. There’s nothing inherently wrong with putting GSM/EDGE on 850 and UMTS on 1900, it’s just interesting in practice how immediately obvious the difference is walking around. Propagation is a challenge in dense urban environments with lots of people moving around to begin with, I’m sure this doesn’t help in Las Vegas. AT&T promised to put all of its 3G (UMTS) network on the 850 MHz band (wherever it’s licensed to use it) by the end of 2010, but sadly that hasn’t happened quite yet, at least in this market. I’ll keep checking, but thus far it’s been solidly in 1900 PCS. Oh well.

To begin with, I acquired an OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB SSD and installed it in my 2010 MacBook Pro. I had been waiting for a while to do this move, particularly because I find the optical drive of marginal use and decided to try an OptiBay adapter which would let me use the optical drive’s space as an other 2.5″ bay for whatever I wanted. More on that later, but I moved the MBP’s rather generic 5400 RPM 500 GB traditional platter drive into this optibay space, and stuck the 120 GB Vertex 2 where the HDD was.

Just get to how you did it already!

Cloning the drive onto the SSD was easy, everything works fine, but I was left with that generic and somewhat ugly mechanical hard disk drive icon that OS X has stuck with since forever.

First, I set out to create an appropriate SSD icon. Getting a Vertex 2 image was pretty simple, and I cleaned it up, cropped it, and added the appropriate clipping mask/alpha channel (depending what name suits you) for transparency. It’s a nice big PNG here:

Vertex 2 SSD by OCZ

The next step was changing the icon. It used to be trivially simple in OS 9 to do this, but things got a bit more complicated in OS X. To do so, I found a program named (aptly enough) “Set Icon” you can get here.

Set Icon for OS X

Pretty straightforward. Select the drive, drag an icon in, and click set icon.

Now you’ll have something like this:

Mac SSD

Looks pretty good alongside the old icon, if I may say so myself: Pretty simple, right? Enjoy!

Doing indoor photography with my girlfriend – especially weddings – it becomes apparent just how many AAs you can go through quickly. So many that it’s relatively expensive and prohibitive to keep up and carry all those batteries around. They’re expensive, and just don’t last long enough. One or two hundred shots or so, if I recall correctly.

SB600 Flash

Anyhow, right after getting them and charging them, I decided to shoot a wedding with my SB600 flash and the NiZn batteries. I was immediately floored at how fast the flash recharged and how performance never seemed to fade like alkalines do. Usually, flash performance seems to fall off exponentially with the generic alkaline batteries – eventually the time it takes to recharge gets so long you can’t take photos of anything. So what’s useful about the NiZn was the hugely fast, super quick recharge time.

That’s also… the problem. While shooting that wedding, I managed to somehow completely blow out the flash. This thing was under 2 months old, used at a few other weddings, without what I’d consider very many activations at all. The SB600 apparently has no thermal cutoff at all, allowing the whole thing to overheat. Whatever the case, while shotgunning some photos of the dance floor in low light, it stopped working. The flash didn’t feel notably hot, but the flash showed an error on the screen and wouldn’t work from then on. Anyhow, I shipped the flash back into Nikon and had a replacement about a month later, but the point is that I’m now far too scared to repeat the “experiment” again.

It seems that two things are possible:

• The SB600 lacks adequate/any thermal protection preventing the flash from overheating or being fired too quickly
• The SB600 possibly relies on alkaline AA battery performance to prevent the flash from being overheated
  • I realize that the NiZn PowerGenix batteries are 1.6 volts (as opposed to the 1.5 standard for alkaline, and 1.2 for NiMH). At the same time, there should definitely be regulation of some kind preventing failure.

The batteries themselves are remarkable in their performance, but it’s that which scares me out of using them in the flash where they’re needed most.

NiZn PowerGenix AA Batteries

What brings this all up is that engadget compared the PowerGenix batteries to some of the other new (and exotic) choices from Energizer and Sanyo Eneloop, and I left a comment.

I purchased the NiZn batteries after your initial review and was super stoked when they came. I’m an avid digital photographer, and replacing flash batteries at a wedding actually gets expensive enough to make buying a bunch of rechargables worthwhile.

That said, I had a brand new SB600 (just like yours) burn out with no warning while shooting with the NiZn batteries. I had to ship the whole thing in and get it replaced. I browsed the Fred Miranda forums some time later and found a bunch of people with the same issue – the SB600 relies on Alkaline batteries simply not being able to drive enough power quick enough when shotgunning that flash to avoid burning out. There isn’t any thermal safeguard.

So be warned, even though you’re testing on an SB600, if you actually do go out and abuse the batteries like you would at a big event firing the flash a lot, you WILL nuke your stuff. I’m too scared to use my NiZn batteries now.

That Fred Miranda forum thread I mentioned is here.

Anyhow, something about what I was reading there finally compelled me to write a bit, and what started small quickly ballooned to a huge comment I left on the post. I’m reproducing it below:

Epic Long Post:

It’s time we settle this illegal immigration dispute once and for all, honestly. I’m a native Arizonan, and I can honestly attest to how completely out of hand this situation is getting, and how completely misunderstood and misconstrued the current state of affairs are down here.

First of all, the majority of Arizonans support this legislation. Now, before you write us all off as being racially insensitive bigots and crazies, ask yourself what the rational reasons could be for passing such a sweeping piece of legislation. I’m shocked at the fact that this discussion is almost entirely centered around racial profiling (do you not show your ID for everything else already? Being pulled over? Getting on a plane? Buying something?) and the economy (albeit very superficially). The problem has gotten so immense that it literally has effects on almost every major issue.

To be honest, I don’t know how I feel about the bill, I just think it’s time this issue gets the serious attention it’s been sorely lacking for the greater part of two decades now. If nothing else, Brewer should be applauded for finally getting the border states in the limelight and *some* debate going, even if it’s entirely misplaced.

So just bear with me, put aside your misconceptions about the issue (because odds are, you don’t live here, you don’t follow the issue, and you’re probably not aware of the scope of the problem), and think.

1. The environmental aspect is being completely downplayed. This is something that has even the most liberal of the liberals supporting drastic immigration reform down here in the Sonoran Desert; the long and short of it is that Mexicans and drug traffickers are literally shitting all over the desert. The sheer volume of people crossing through these corridors in the desert, and the trash they bring with them, is absolutely stunning.

Example photo of waste in the desert

Don’t believe me? Look: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/trashing-arizona/Content?oid=1168857 Some of the locations in here are barely a 10 minute drive from where I sit now. Talk to me about the environment, and then look at the kind of mess being left out there. I don’t care what the solution is, this kind of dumping/shedding of stuff/massive ecological disaster cannot continue. It can’t. It’s literally devastating.

2. Drug trafficking. Has anyone even talked about this? It isn’t just about arresting working Mexican families, it’s about combating the completely out of control drug trafficking problem going on in our backyards. In fact, I’d say that probably the main catalyst has to deal with security rather than economical drain – in fact, there’s no arguing the fact that the Mexicans living here are probably helping us out with their labor and efforts, rather than draining the local economy.

In case you haven’t been following, the drug cartels are now nearly out of control in Mexico, in fact, it’s a problem that’s of more immediate concern to us down here (in terms of security) than terrorism. In fact, screw terrorism, I’m more worried about my family being shot or killed in the crossfire of this ongoing drug battle than some terrorist setting a bomb off. Read about how insane this is: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123518102536038463.html

“The U.S. Justice Department considers the Mexican drug cartels as the greatest organized crime threat to the United States.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War You better believe it. People are being killed in Juarez, Nogales, everywhere. This is literally next door, folks! Not a continent away! Full scale political unrest! Talk about a threat to national security.

3. The murder of Rob Krentz has galvanized support for serious, strong, kid-gloves-off reform in the state. If you aren’t familiar, this super high profile incident involved the murder of a well liked, peaceful Arizona rancher on his own property some weeks ago. http://azstarnet.com/news/local/crime/article_db544bc6-3b5b-11df-843b-001cc4c03286.html It’s now been found that marijuana was found on the site, and there’s definite drug trafficking ties as the ranch lies one of the numerous well-known migration and trafficking corridors that dominate southern Arizona.

Robert Krentz

I think when the history books are written, this guy’s shooting will be a real inflection point you can point to as leading to this kind of legislation. The sentiment for structured amnesty or some other kind of reform almost completely disappeared after a few similar incidents. Violent, often fatal crime near the border is literally making it a physical hazard to be down here.

Want more proof? Look no further than the concealed carry legislation that also just passed. It isn’t that we’re all a bunch of friggin psychos, it’s that we’re honest-to-god scared of being shot in our homes or out in the desert. I know I sure as hell wouldn’t go walking around out there when even the border patrol is worried about some parts of the desert even just an hour away.

4. Sure the economy has something to do with it, absolutely. Hell, our economy is worse off than California’s by percentage and by capita: http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2008/02/25/daily29.html

The major public universities in the state are struggling for dollars to keep classes going, mandatory furloughs everywhere, and we’re paying for the rest in fees and still not going to break even. Hell yes, the economy has something to do with the perception that illegals are partly responsible. (however true or untrue that actually may be, since personally I’d wager Mexican migrant labor probably has a net positive effect on the local economy; let’s be honest, profiling them as lazy people really *is* racism)

So there are a few good arguments I don’t really feel have been emphasized enough online, anywhere. Sit around and discuss the finer points of constitutional law and whether this is “racial profiling,” honestly, that debate has already been beaten and played out enough already.

Meanwhile, the problems down here are getting worse, and worse, and worse, and the very real drug war raging in the desert just continues to get scarier. I think this will be a very interesting and potentially huge states rights issue. In the meantime, some of the points I touched on (I hope) are good food for thought if you think that Arizona suddenly just decided to “go insane” or “lose our collective shit.”

I promise you, it isn’t the case.

See the update at the bottom for the real deal, I was partly wrong about some of the antennas in iPhone 4, though I was indeed right about the connector locations for the bottom, and partly for the top.

****

I’ve been following the iPhone 4G/HD leak saga like a hawk, and until now I haven’t been able to really add anything to all that’s been said. However, today, Gizmodo published pictures of the inside of the iPhone 4G hardware they obtained. They didn’t talk about much other than the absurd number of screws (upwards of 30), battery size, packaging, and potential ease of replacement. In fact, their primary aim seems to have been locating “APPLE” markings on the few ribbon cables inside, rather than picking apart Apple’s hardware choices. No doubt disassembly was challenging, potentially explaining why there aren’t any photos of the iPhone with the “connect to iTunes” lock screen (broken after disassembly?).

They neglected to remove the EMI shields atop the interesting bits on the PCB, what I would’ve considered the biggest news about the device. So we still don’t know virtually anything about SoC, how much NAND flash there is onboard, RAM, the hugely important baseband (and whether this thing is potentially dual CDMA/GSM and UMTS for it to work on Verizon/Sprint alongside T-Mobile and AT&T), WiFi or Bluetooth choices (likely the same as the iPad, however), or anything else you’d expect to glean without those shields in place. In short, all the squares in this diagram from the iPhone 3GS are big question marks for the iPhone 4G. Still, we can make very good guesses about what the likely choices are.

PCB components for the iPhone 3GS labeled by Phone Wreck

However, being the RF-obsessed dude I am, I scrutinized the photos for some time looking for other interesting bits. I think I’ve found some interesting things.

First and foremost, I think that there are two discrete antenna assemblies in the phone. One at the top, one at the bottom (as you’d hold it in your hand).

Red box is antenna 1, Blue is antenna 2. Source gallery

Note that the phone in this picture has been rotated; the red circled area on the hardware is actually the bottom. Now, look at the two places I’ve marked with the white arrows. You can very clearly see a pigtail and standard radio connector on the top one, and a connector pad at the tip of the arrow at right. This is 100% certainly an antenna, and it’s also in the same region of the hardware (at the bottom) as the 3GS.

Bottom Antenna - two connectors

Above is what I’m talking about at 100% resolution.

Bottom Antenna Connectors Plugged In

Above shows the antenna before being removed, with the pigtail clearly connected to the mainboard PCB. We can make an educated guess that whatever is under the EMI shield next door is the baseband.

Now, compare and contrast to the iPhone 3GS’s ribbon/kapton antenna assembly:

iPhone 3GS flex PCB

And see it inside the black plastic holder (only the trailing ribbon connector is visible at bottom left):

Flex PCB fits inside the black plastic case at bottom

If I’m not mistaken, the two connectors there are for discrete antennas inside, for cellular radio and WiFi/Bluetooth. I’m not infinitely familiar, but there only seems to be one antenna assembly in the 3GS at the bottom.

Now, on the iPhone 4G photos, there appears to possibly be a second possible antenna at the top.

Top antenna in place

Top antenna removed

I’ve labeled the connector that I can make out. Given the similar black packaging (possibly housing the flex PCB like in the 3GS), it seems likely this is another antenna.

I’ll leave you to speculate about why Apple might potentially want two discrete cellular antennas in their next generation phone…

Update:

After looking through the FCC OET internal photos of a huge number of other dual CDMA/UMTS design phones, all of which only require one antenna, I’m pretty sure the other top component is something less insidious. It’s entirely possible this is nothing more than a connector, some support structure, or perhaps maybe it is indeed an antenna, but for WiFi (N?). Whatever the case, I’m completely uncertain what this thing is, or if it’s part of the baseband. Obviously, the part at the bottom is an antenna, but the top part I’m more and more uncertain about.

We’ll see as time goes on and better pictures are made available what it is, but I’m not confident it’s an antenna anymore.

Update 2:

Of course, we now know the real deal with the iPhone 4. I was wrong about what the antennas were, but right about the connectors. Up at the top, if you scrutinize iFixit’s teardown, you can see a small gold pad right above a test junction for the WiFi/GPS/BT 2.4 GHz antenna. There’s a trace on the EMI shield which leads to a contact screw (gold, so it’s visible) leading directly to the antenna. So the connector for the 2.4 GHz antenna is up at the top near that seam.

iPhone 4 Top Connectors

For the UMTS/GSM antenna, the connector snakes across from the PCB to the left side of the phone facing up (facing down, it snakes to the right, like in this photo):

Inside the red square is the contact point

You can see the test point and connector at the left, the pigtail leading to the right across the EMI shield, and the gold screw which connects the whole deal to the aluminum antenna.

Of course, the interesting part is that this becomes the most active region of the antenna. It’s a monopole, rather than a dipole – in this configuration. The result is that for 1/4 wavelength, that part of the aluminum is very active at radiating RF. This is also the location your palm rests, interestingly.

I’m going to talk about the real deal on AnandTech shortly, so stay tuned…

It’s live here now: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/1

That said, what I’m going to do here by acknowledging and refuting something (that I consider trolling) directly breaks that rule. But bear with me.

Fishing for publicity

There’s been a lot of that going on this week, but what really started the week out for me was movie critic Roger Ebert’s second assertion that “games are not art,” and later that games can never be “high art.” It’s another attempt to fish for publicity and generally incite a wave of semantic debate stemming from a completely incorrect pretense of his. He did it five years ago, albeit in a very small blurb on his website:

I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

That was in 2005. Flash forward to 2010, and what does he decide to address just a month or so after his return to work from battling cancer? That very topic. Except, this time, his assertion is even more definite: video games can never be art. But never is a long time, so he hedges later by noting that games will never be art within our lifetime. Perhaps he refers to his own, admittedly shorter lifetime (seeing as the majority of gamers are at a median of 30 years old), but the clarification is nevertheless a “you know, just in case,” type of cop-out.

First of all, the timing of his post is telling; it’s obviously a publicity stunt to draw more attention to his recent return to movie reviewing. But I think it’s a relevant discussion to have at this point, whatever Ebert’s possibly misguided, possibly earnest motives for bringing up such an academic issue again.

His argument

Ebert is confused about what kind of argument he wants to do battle with gamers. In fact, if you break it down, there seem to be three.

1. His claim in 2005 was that nothing truly interactive can be artistic like “serious film and literature.” He makes this claim again in his 2010 piece, in so many words, by claiming that games can never be art in principle because gamers actively participate in the outcome. He argues that art is, because it guides one’s experience through a singular, common vision or experience crafted by the artist. It doesn’t rely on decision making or input from the user to convey its message; a novel or painting appears – at a superficial level – the same way to everyone. It’s static and timeless, not interactive.
2. The purely academic side of him wants to see formal, academic citations and comparison, like a critical essay or critique. He challenges, “no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets.” Perhaps Ebert is waiting for someone to write a really good critical essay with numerous citations and academic form. I’ll show in a few moments how absurd this point is.
3. He takes issue with videogames as a money-making industry, noting that art cannot be commercial. He quips, “I allow Sangtiago the last word. Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case.” Apparently, art isn’t art if it requires the infrastructure a business does.

Theses are Ebert’s primary theses.

I’m going to tear them down.

Argument 1: The folly of a straw man

Ebert builds a classic straw man argument in his first argument. He claims art need to be static for it to be art. For example, that The Return of the Native ends the same way regardless of what the reader does; you can’t change the outcome, you can’t win, you can’t lose, you can’t stop Eustacia from drowning, and you can’t influence characters outcomes. You could tear pages out of the book, write a critical essay about how different Thomas Hardy’s message might have been if several small events happened differently, or even burn the novel and mail him the ashes – but the novel’s story, plot, and message are immutable and common. It isn’t interactive. Much the same way, painting, photography, and sculpture – other perceptual art forms – don’t rely on user interaction superficially. They just exist however the artist finished them, and remain that way. They aren’t interactive either.

But are they?

In fact, I would argue that interaction and perception is one of the bases of art. In fact, the unique interpretation of some art form – the ability for something to be singularly and dynamically interpreted by a viewer in a personal way – is what makes art powerful. Sure, superficial and first-order art is important, but what makes good, high-level artwork powerful is that it can be dynamically interpreted. The experience of viewing some real piece of art, I would argue, is that it can be dynamically interpreted in different, meaningful ways for different viewers. The message can indeed be timeless, but art doesn’t exist in a vacuum – there always will be context, and that context continually ensures that the mere thought of viewing it makes real art an interactive experience.

I’m confused why Ebert, or any critic, would want to define an experience that isn’t engaging as being desirable.

What decade are you living in, Ebert?

Can a painting of chess be an art?

But all of this is beyond the point! Ebert is so out of tune that what he considers videogames are primitive constructs that existed, perhaps at latest, in the late 1980s. The vision of videogames he is stuck on is one where games existed solely to be won or lost, where perhaps the only secondary reward or outcome was some arbitrary high score. If you don’t believe me, consider this: Ebert constantly uses the example of someone playing a game of chess as an example. Yes, chess. Or mahjong. Or other basic board games. He’s so out of touch that at one point he brings up sports at one point. Yes, as in athletes and commercial competitive activities. This absolutely couldn’t be further from what gaming is or is about today. This isn’t “gaming,” it’s gaming, and this is where Ebert built his straw man. He’s arguing about an entirely different kind of video game than what people are thinking about; he’s talking about videogames that are little more than evolutionary progressions of board games. He’s thinking of things like frogger, tetris, or pac man. They exist to be played, not experienced. But videogames have changed completely since Ebert stopped paying attention and formed his misguided conclusions.

The irony, of course, is that telling a common, linear story for each player is actually a negative characteristic of a modern videogame. Titles like Crysis, for example, were lauded early on for allowing players to experience a game world in a unique and distinct way. Players can decide to charge enemies head-first and be destroyed in the uphill battle, or flank through the jungle, surprising an entrenched enemy force from the side, or perhaps snipe, miss the shot, and find themselves being flanked from both land and sea (since the entrenched force since radioed their buddies for help).

But at the end of the day, the game’s story remains the same. The outcome of the level is guided, and although the player’s decisions might have been unique at a small level, they still arrive at the same inevitable outcome. If you’re so inclined, it’s like a path-independent line integral – it doesn’t matter how you go through the scalar field, between two points, the difference is still the same. In the game, at a level-level, the beginning, middle, and end remain the same. These levels then (hopefully) tie together and lead to a story that ties levels together, giving the game a story that gives it some purpose.

To put it simply, modern games have a plot, a story – a beginning, middle, and end. In fact, you can extend the novel analogy further: Game levels are essentially chapters. The game itself is like a novel. There are even trilogies or series – look no further than Halo, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Bioshock or hundreds, perhaps thousands of other spectacularly well put together, coherent game franchises.

Argument 2: It isn’t recognized by academia

It’s obvious to me that Ebert is living in the past, in a world at least 20 years ago. If he was willing to do some research, read an academic paper, or just use google scholar, he would’ve heard of Ludology by now. If you’re going to write about something, guy, do your research, or you just get caught with your pants down looking patiently ignorant. Here, Ebert looks just that: confused, outdated, and misguided. Nobody has engaged you, Ebert, with serious arguments about why videogames constitute a true artistic form, probably because they’re too busy out making their art. Even more likely, because, until now, you wouldn’t entertain the dialogue. You’ve picked your battles against a straw man, and against titles that nobody has ever heard of or cares about. That modern videogamers have never heard of. That they don’t identify as art, or are so crude and basic that they’re a mockery. They aren’t mainstream. They aren’t good.

I could go out, shoot a 20 minute movie of the sky, write a couple hundred words about how it lacked story, purpose, plot, or thought – and then claim that all movies aren’t art. That they’re for children. But you know what, I wouldn’t, because that’s not a valid argument. Just like movies, games span the gamut when it comes to quality. It doesn’t do justice to make claims about any medium solely on the basis of a few bad examples.

So you know what, fine, I’ll give you a list of some games worthy of comparison “with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets.” (poets must be awesome in Ebert’s 1980s world, because he mentioned ‘em twice. Freudian slip?)

• Bioshock is gaming’s Citizen Kane. It’s as simple as that. It’s literally a game that retells Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy in a reimaged form.
• Zork is often cited as one of the first text-based interactive video games. It’s an immersive, engaging story without flashy graphics or artwork. The interaction and story are the game.
• Half Life is a narrative epic famous for being told almost entirely through the first-person perspective of the player. It’s a classic that’s nearly unrivaled in its genre. Doom, Quake, Return to Castle Wolfenstein – these are equally as epic.
• System Shock. This is a classic. System Shock is “the benchmark for intelligent first-person gaming”, “[it] kick-start[ed] the revolution which … has influenced the design of countless other games.”
• Fallout is an RPG staple that I would cite largely for being an example of great storytelling that isn’t linear. In fact, that’s the point of RPG – the story is almost your own.
• Knights of the Old Republic, the Jedi Knight series, X-Wing, TIE Fighter, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance are some of the best examples of games crafted from a movie world. Ebert seems to only consider video games that are awful adaptations of movies. Perhaps he’s under the impression every video game adapted from a movie is as godawful as the Back to the Future game, which has nothing to do with the movie. Or perhaps his mind closed with the E.T. Video Game, which many seriously cite as the tipping point that led to the video game crisis of 1983.
• Mass Effect is literally what Bioware (who developed Knights of the Old Republic) wanted to make when set loose. It’s a fully developed future universe, complete with characters, environments, races, and plots that are fully immersive. It’s amazing that movies like Avatar can be lauded over and over again for being so comprehensive in their vision, when games like Mass Effect have been doing the same for nearly a decade. Anything less would be half-baked.
• Heavy Rain is literally a game-novella for adults. It’s an absolutely amazing experience that plays like a movie, much the same way Metal Gear Solid IV plays just like a movie.

You want the modern equivalent of poets? The authors of prose presented in modern form? Look no further than:

• John Carmack
• Shigeru Miyamoto
• Cliff Bleszinski
• Casey Hudson
• Stieg Hedlund
• Sid Meier
• Yuji Naka
• Gabe Newell
• Will Wright

This list is only a 10th of the numerous acclaimed videogame designers, writers, programmers, and visionaries. Perhaps Ebert never ventured to this wikipedia page of famous videogame visionaries, or looked at any of those titles. Almost every single one is art. He’s paid to do write these pieces, why does it take me to find peer-reviewed sources of acclaimed examples that rival his acknowledged novelists, directors, and poets. Is it honestly beyond him to do research before writing? Or is his expertise so limitless that it needs no foundation?

Argument 3: Videogaming is an industry

Wait, and film-making isn’t? This point is so pleasantly confusing, conflicted, and wrong that anyone with a room-temperature IQ can see right through it.

• There are indie film-makers.
  • There are indie video game designers. (look no further than the App Store, Xbox marketplace, Android marketplace, or homebrew communities)
• There are independent movies.
  • There are independent game developers.
• There are huge companies making movies.
  • There are huge companies making videogames. (Electronic Arts, Rockstar, Blizzard, e.t.c.)
• The bar of entry for making movies is as low as having a computer and a video camera.
  • The bar of entry for making videogames is as low as having a computer and possibly a console, iPod Touch/iPhone/Android Phone.
• There are cult classic movies.
  • There are cult classic videogames.

See what I did there? What the heck kind of argument is it that videogames are an industry? Last I checked, movies and film-making is also a huge industry. In fact, both are subsets of the “entertainment” industry. So is music, yet nobody is blue in the face or 1,400+ comments into an argument about those mediums.

If running a successful industry (and thus “Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management”) makes an entire medium not art, then movies, music, and videogames are all not art. This is the classic argument fine-art photographers use to exclude photojournalism from being true art. Are we really going to have this argument again?

Concluding Thoughts

I guess what I find alarming really isn’t that Ebert doesn’t get it, it’s that he’s seriously vehemently engaged in killing the perception of videogames as an art form.

For the longest time, movies, cinema, film, whatever you want to call it (it’s the same thing – images presented in rapid visual succession to give the impression of continual video, perhaps accompanied with audio) fought an uphill battle to be considered art. In fact, cinema seemed no more of an art form than perception itself – it merely existed. No doubt some of the very first directors and cinema visionaries fought and argued with established critics of the time for the respect and accredited art form that Ebert takes for granted now.

Take a step backwards, and think about how long and how hard painters and photographers argued about which form was truer art. Which form was better. Is something captured, rather than crafted, artistic? Or can anything be crafted? Aren’t photographs taken with some form? Which one is art?

Go backwards again and consider the evolution from one media to another time and time again. Was realist art a truer art form than impressionism? Is modernism, pop art, or contemporary art less of an art form than photography? Than sculpture? Than cinema?

What makes art, art? Wikipedia defines art eloquently, as:

Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, sculpture, and paintings. – Wikipedia

So how is a videogame – which arguably is what you’d get if you convolved all of these together – not art? Modern videogames include all of those, well, arts. Musicians for directing soundtracks, scores, and guiding the player’s emotions and the game’s feel. Literature for the game’s story and plot, tying it into a cohesive experience. Film for cutscenes, directing, posing, and when the player isn’t in direct control. Sculpture for the artists crafting player models, environment models, scenes, levels, and objects. Painting for those creating textures of virtually everything mapped on the models. All of these aren’t just part of the process, they are the process. So isn’t the sum of a videogame greater than its parts?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course. My theory? Ebert is jealous. Video games are already dwarfing all of the other entertainment forms. Music, literature, and cinema. Look no further than Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Halo. Fallout. Unreal. Half-Life. All huge blockbuster titles dwarfing mere cinema.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, it’s semantic. What is “art?” I’d argue, art is that feeling left stirring in you after you’ve left the experience behind. After you’ve put down the controller, left the museum, closed the novel, or exited the theater. It’s that nagging presence you can’t ignore after you’ve been presented with something compelling. It’s obvious, really. Maybe video games aren’t art to Ebert – fair enough, but don’t presuppose that they can’t be art for everyone else, that art is something only you are equipped to appreciate, unless you really are arrogant.

Pundits can argue for all eternity; artists will still be out there practicing their trade – and real connoisseurs will appreciate their work, whatever the medium.

1 – Google Voice Integration: No Go

This still remains a no-show. Apple and Google relations have only continued to sour, despite the Steve-Eric coffee shop PR stunt meeting that was hugely popularized a few weeks ago. In fact, because Apple has repeatedly demonstrated no motivation to popularize any Google services anymore, it’ll likely never happen. This is yet another unfortunate artifact of the ongoing Google and Apple divorce process, and it just ends up stifling innovation. Apple and Google both give end-user focused experience an awful lot of lip service, up to the point where they have to integrate with other competitors offerings.

Google Voice is just one such example, but there are others. Mail on the iPhone still lacks support for Google’s unique organizational methods, and for the same token, Google refuses to this day to make their own iPhone OS gmail client. It works both ways, and both are equally guilty.

Back to that lip service I was talking about, you can really see just how far that philosophy goes from both companies actions – they still speak louder than words. As an end user, I don’t care about corporate bickering or what the political reasons are for Google not making a Gmail app for the iPhone, or Apple not integrating Google Voice – I just want the best experience.

2 – Google Latitude: Maybe

I’m not sure how to mark this one down. On one hand, there is indeed multitasking present in the operating system, as well as the ability to have certain applications periodically get location through location services. Thus, it’s finally possible for some enterprising third party developer to make their own google latitude updater, or for Google themselves to do it. We’ll probably see the former much earlier than the latter for the reasons I mentioned in part 1.

Of course, the software to do continual scheduled Google latitude position updating already exists through the Cydia store. It’s called Longitude, and it work fabulously. I’m relatively puzzled by Apple’s claims that getting a full GPS fix requires too much battery, since I already run Longitude on a 15 minute update interval and have experienced negligible battery degradation. In fact, even with updating set on a 10 minute schedule, there was no perceptable difference in battery life.

Longitude - You know, opposite of Latitude

I really have to wonder whether location services through Skyhook without using AGPS (eg only WiFi triliteration augmented with cellular positioning data) will be accurate enough for services like Foursquare. Time will tell, and arguably GPS won’t solve everything since users that are already inside those locations can’t get a GPS fix anyways.

3 – Better Gmail Integration: Sort of

So the Mail application is getting a definite overhaul in this new revision of iPhone OS – more than one exchange account, faster switching between each inbox, unified inbox, and support for threaded conversations. These are long overdue features that the competition has had almost forever. WebOS has had it, BlackBerry is famous for it, Android has it alongside even a Gmail-specific version, and even Windows Mobile had multiple exchange account and fast switching integration.

So it’s nice to see everything finally getting revamped. Apple’s interface still is minimalist though; there’s no font settings or style options to be found.

4 – Notification Overhaul: Nope

This is probably the most sorely lacking area, and simultaneously the most inexplicably neglected. Every single other mobile platform has better notifications than iPhone OS. Every one of them, even old and exiled Windows Mobile. In fact, during the Stevenote today Apple showed off some local application notifications (from applications running in the background) that still resulted in annoying centered blue bubbles – and touted them as being a good thing!

I don’t know what more there is to say here other than that with a more robust multitasking framework needs to come a better notification framework. The two go hand in hand completely: if you lack the screen real estate to show more than one thing at a time, but can still run it on the hardware, get information to the user effectively. That shouldn’t still equate to pausing and interrupting the current interaction with a gigantic blue popup that needs to be dismissed before interaction can continue.

5- Background apps done right: Yes

Apple needed to nail this one, and they did. There’s no arguing that the multitasking framework they’ve demoed is the way things should be. I’ve argued a few times with developers that the best way to deliver multitasking without sacrificing performance is to open APIs for the most common use scenarios. Apple enumerated all of them: music in the background, task completion, location-specific scenarios (turn by turn GPS, Google Latitude, e.t.c.), and a few others. This is effectively what I’ve heard described as a secondary “lite” binary running the core services in the background, using fewer resources and a few background specific APIs the OS can manage. That way, the background experience is consistent across use scenarios.

I think that this will work really well in the long run. In fact, Apple really did have little choice but to adapt a scheme employing lite binaries; they’re limited to 256 MB of RAM on the 3GS and iPad. Steve Jobs gets it – giving the user a task manager might appeal in the short term for how much control it offers, but it’s just too much. If the user is honestly expected to micromanage application launches and closes, they’ll eventually forget and nuke the battery. It just happens.

6- Better App organization: Yes

Thank goodness this is finally being addressed. I’ve almost reached the 180 application limit for the iPhone 3.x’s page specific interaction schema, and getting to applications on pages at the very end is as frustrating as it is time consuming. Finally getting some high level organization in the picture, even if it isn’t forward thinking, revolutionary, or something new, still is valuable.

Folders - Kind of ad-hoc, but better than nothing

7- Better power management: Nope

Definite no, in fact, we’ll probably never see this, at least on the iPhone OS. This particular platform is all about lowest common denominator usability – it’s simultaneously what makes the platform so alluring and magical, and the subject of so much griping. You can’t build something a baby can use, and then expect them to understand how to manage their power.

At the same time however, the option should be there for those of us that are knowledgeable about it. I realize I’m asking too much, but it’d be amazingly cool to see hardware reports on projected battery longevity, current draw from individual hardware components, and a trend of power use.

Conclusions: 4/7 ~ 57% Nailed

So Apple implemented 4 out of the 7 things I outlined, if we’re pretty generous about our criteria. You know, on the whole, 57% isn’t bad, but it simultaneously isn’t a slam dunk on my part.

In fact, that’s what makes this industry so interesting. Unlike the desktop, we haven’t yet settled on a paradigm user interaction model – each major platform is actively innovating and evolving, and it’s happening rapidly. Even in the last two years, we’ve seen Android go from being an iPhone OS wannabe to a seriously polished, worthy competitor. We’ve seen that cross carrier availability is hugely important for success (people just don’t want to switch, and they’ll convince themselves that their network is best). We’ve seen that none of the platforms have it all worked out. Apple’s iPhone OS platform is too closed, while Android’s might be just too open (a-la Windows Mobile). It’s a rapidly evolving market out there folks; I’m enjoying scrutinizing every bit of it.