Hasta La Gadget!

The iPhone 3GS is Apple’s current mobile flagship, but most of us using iPhone 3Gs won’t be paying for the upgrade. So instead, we get the new 3.0 firmware—not such a bad deal.

The free 3.0 upgrade ($10 for iPod touch users) is available today. Indeed, some of you have probably already downloaded it (and some of you have been downloading beta versions for months). Update: You may want to hold off a few days, as readers are already reporting problems due to the fact that everyone is trying to upgrade at the same time. iPhone OS 3.0 finishes many unpolished edges of the iPhone: Copy/Paste, obviously, but Spotlight Search, A2DP stereo Bluetooth, push notifications, and a long-requested landscape keyboard for text messages and email—a series of improvements that are less revolutionary than necessary to be part of the modern smartphone market.

It’s sort of like the iPhone was always a pretty good looking guy, but then all these other good looking guys came around so the iPhone had to beef up a bit to keep his thousands of rich girlfriends paying too much at AT&T every month.

We’re just going to walk through the new OS’s features point by point rather than boring you with technological soliloquies. Here are the benefits—and liabilities—of iPhone 3.0:

Spotlight Search
From the mainscreen, a simple swipe to the left brings you to the new Spotlight Search. You see a searchbar on top and the keyboard automatically pops up so there’s no waiting. Its speed? Fast. A few letters gets you a slew of results instantly that pair down as you type. It digs through emails, apps, contacts and music/movies, then click any option and you’re linked right to it. (For instance, click a song and you start playing that song). Limitations? It won’t look through the contents of third party apps, like your individual Tweets, nor will it search Maps, Weather or SMS. (Note: You can disable anything that you don’t want to search in settings.) But even with a few limitations, Spotlight has far more breadth than the searches available on the Pre or Android. It’s impressive.

Camera
There’s no updating the low megapixel count of old iPhone camera hardware, but the new firmware has undoubtedly improved the experience of taking photos. While you still won’t be taking shots in the dark, general lowlight performance feels greatly improved. Also notable: attaching multiple shots from your photo library to a single email is a wonderful, fluid experience.

Video
Good news for photos, but what about video? Sadly, Apple has chosen to save video functionality for the iPhone 3GS…even though jailbreaking the iPhone can provide existing users with video.

Stereo Bluetooth
The new A2DP stereo Bluetooth profile syncs easily and works without issues. We paired it with this iHome dock, and cranked it up. It sounded fine. And even if someone calls during streaming, no problem. It’s just as smooth as when someone interrupts any iPod function.

Mail
Finally, users can not just download but search their email over IMAP. In practical terms, that means you can search for a keyword in your Gmail without opening Gmail in Safari—the old workaround if you couldn’t find an email. On paper, that sounds perfect. In practice, it can lag a bit (mostly when over 3G), but it’s functionally adequate. Also, if you search a keyword on the server, search something else and then search that first word again, your results will still be cached. But speaking of Gmail, where is our push Gmail? It debuted on Android and has since made its way to the Pre.

Calendar
Calendar’s big upgrade is CalDAV support, a protocol that allows you to view/edit schedules in the cloud, like Google and Yahoo calendars. In my testing, it took about 20 seconds for Google calendar to update from my phone. It’s about as fast as it can be without push.

Landscape Keyboard
SMS and Mail both get access to the long-desired landscape keyboard. And I must say, after trying them out, I never used them (intentionally) again. The real issue is that you just lose too much screen space. But hey, if it’s your thing, I’m really happy for you.

Safari Autofill
The new Safari gets a small but convenient upgrade with Autofill, the ability to enter address/contact info into fields automatically. (Note: Autofill doesn’t appear to turn on automatically, at least not if you don’t have yourself saved in your address book.) When facing one of those dreaded pages full of contact info, you click the first field, click the “autofill” button on the keyboard and presto, the fields fill in like magic. However, if you’re using it to pay for something online, you’ll be on your own for credit card information.

Find My iPhone
If you’re willing to pay $100 a year for MobileMe, one of the big perks is being able to stick it to the guy who steals your iPhone. Find My iPhone takes about 2 minutes to locate your phone on Google Maps (through MobileMe’s web interface). At that point you can send an alert beep or an “Important Message,” and can even and can deactivate it, or remotely wipe its contents. Of course, as Matt Buchanan explained in his earlier testing, there’s a major flaw that will keep you from busting the criminal underground with the iPhone. Still, it seems pretty handy if you just dropped your phone in your friend’s couch, or left it in a locale full of very honest patrons.

Voice Memos/Notes
Apple must have noticed the seemingly endless list and recording apps in their store, so they’ve appeased those of us who want to jot down a quick note with their Voice Memo and Notes apps. Voice Memo is a simple voice recorder that is really no better than any third party solution we’ve used (it’s adequate for an interview in a pinch, but worse than most standalone mics). And Notes, while present in older versions of iPhone software, can now be synced to your computer (via USB).

Shake to Shuffle/Undo
It’s either me or just that Apple hates me. But I find it very hard to change an iTunes song with a shake-induced shuffle. It’s like I’m trying to break the neck of a kitten. But every time I drop the iPhone to my side after texting? The iPhone attempts to “undo” the message, which it can’t since the message is already sent. Luckily, the iPod controls can be disabled. The “undo” command cannot.

Stocks
It’s so great watching my devastated portfolio in the new landscape mode!

Copy/Paste
Many have already discussed Copy/Paste, but it would be impossible to review 3.0 without making a mention of Apple’s response to the greatest gripe of their platform. Copy/Paste works. It’s not as elegant as I’d hoped, given how long we’ve waited, but like I said, it works. Click a word/sentence, the magnifier comes up, unclick and you’ll have the option to “copy.” A bar on each side of the word can be stretched to include more text; copy, and you are set.

Stretching the boundaries of text can be a bit more difficult than the iPhone usually makes its touch inputs, but my bigger issue is that “copy” pops up almost all the time I’m working with text. Because of its implementation, every time you want to place a cursor anywhere other than the end of a sentence, you get the option to cut/copy/paste. Isn’t that a bit overkill?

Speed/Stability
iPhone 3.0 software is adequately responsive. Apps open and close without too much of a fuss. Some people feel that it’s a bit springier than the last 2.0 revision, but in our side-by-side testing, we found that it probably wasn’t, and in many cases—like boot-up time—it’s slower. Certain UI tweaks are added to make you feel like less time is being wasted, such as the implementation of a red exclamation mark next to outgoing, but as yet unsent, text messages. But some new features actually slow things down too: The animation tends to glitch when you pan from the Home screen over to Spotlight, and most of the time you click on a text field you’ll be met with a similar brief delay.

Though these setbacks are minor, if you want that slick 1.0 feeling back, your target phone should be the iPhone 3GS because only accelerated hardware can really fix the performance deficit caused by the in-flow of all these third-party apps.

Stability? That’s tough to judge, with most applications having just released their first updates for 3.0. But in terms of Apple’s own apps, we’ve encountered occasional performance hiccups when emailing a photo or pulling up QWERTY in a text field. Nothing actually crashes, and it’s certainly not noticeably less stable than earlier firmware versions, but you might sit there looking at a stuck screen once in a while.

Push Notifications
Maybe the biggest new feature in iPhone 3.0 is that apps can utilize push notifications. In other words, an app like AIM could pop up an instant message even if you weren’t in that application. As you can imagine, there isn’t a lot of third-party push content to test at the moment—possibly because Apple isn’t approving background-notification-equipped apps until after 3.0 rolls out. So while we couldn’t stack push apps to the sky to see how the iPhone could handle them, we did try Tap Tap Revenge 2.

But Tapulous, makers of the game, clearly has some profile syncing issues—as we found in testing and documented within forums online. That leaves us with developer clips that have leaked of the AIM beta, which can give you a look at how Push notifications should work. We’ll update this post with more push notification impressions as they are available, and will be discussing it further in our iPhone 3.0 apps roundup.

What Didn’t We Test?
Turn-by-turn directions, MMS, and tethering—these are all big features that we simply can’t access at this time due to lack of app or carrier (cough, AT&T) support, but we’ll be looking forward to trying out each of the features later. AT&T has confirmed MMS for late summer, but has not named a date for tethering availability at this time. (When it does come, it will undoubtedly come at additional monthly cost, and most of our readers are still pretty wishy-washy on whether or not they’d use it.)

With the new firmware, the iPhone’s biceps have never been bigger. Spotlight Search is a powerful, industry-leading tool. And functions like Find My iPhone—for paying MobileMe subscribers only—will surely become standard practice in the mobile-connected world of the future. It’s just a shame that most other improvements feel like defensive maneuvers rather than a true watershed software revolution—most of this stuff should have been here already. Now that the phone’s critics should be mostly silenced, we’re interested to see where Apple goes from here. Let me guess: Multitasking?

iPhone Firmware 3.0


Spotlight works wonderfully


It’s free, so maybe we can’t complain


Lots of little improvements


Really, lots of little improvements!


The OS is rarely snappy


Let’s give those shake to do stuff gimmicks a rest

Additional reporting from Matt Buchanan and Jason Chen. Check out our guide, Everything You Need To Know About iPhone 3.0, for even more info and screenshots.

In lieu of a Photoshop Contest this week, we held an MS Paint contest asking you to design your dream iPhone apps. Now we know why you should never, ever design apps in Paint; these are absolutely terrible.

No top three this time because, well, none of them really stood above the rest to me. Maybe you guys disagree. What were your top three favorites?

We’ve seen a lot of innovation in the consumer point-and-shoot market over the past year or so, from capturing homemade action sequences at 1000fps to shooting 720p video underwater. Many of these innovations are borderline overkill, like 12 megapixel sensors wedged in behind cheap lenses, so we’re happy to report that, despite its impressive specs, the latest superzoom shooter from Panasonic is respectable all the way through. The DMC-ZS3 doesn’t offer any crazy features that are completely unheard of elsewhere, nor does it suffer from any rock and roll-style excesses for the sake of arbitrary “world’s greatest” claims. It’s just a solid camera, but at $400 is it the sort of thing you want in your pocket, capturing your family’s precious moments this summer?

Continue reading Panasonic DMC-ZS3 hands-on and review

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Panasonic DMC-ZS3 hands-on and review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Jun 2009 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As the dust settles from the last two weeks of mobile madness, one question remains unanswered: Which of the new generation of smartphones should you actually buy? We’ve collected everything you need to know.

We’ve selected the five phones that most feel like modern handsets to us—the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3G S, the Palm Pre, the HTC Magic (or, as we soon expect, the T-Mobile G2) and the BlackBerry Storm—and broken them down by hardware, software and cost. This is a guide in the strictest sense, meaning we aren’t declaring winners or losers, just giving you the information you need to make your own choice. So! On with the matrices. Phones’ hardware specs tend to dominate carriers’ marketing, but in many cases they just don’t mean much, with a few exceptions: screens, storage, graphics performance and input.

The iPhones and Pre hold a sizable advantage in the screen department, trumping the G2, which doesn’t have multitouch, and the Storm, which has an ill-conceived pseudo-multitouch clickscreen that left most reviewers at best underwhelmed, and at worst downright frustrated.

In terms of storage, our phones take two fundamentally different approaches. The iPhone and Pre include healthy amounts of nonremovable storage—in the case of the iPhone 3G S, up to 32GB—which makes sense: if we’re going to use our phones as they’re marketed (as multimedia devices), we need space. The G2, like the G1 before it, depends on a removable microSD card for file storage, since its inbuilt memory is measured in megabytes. So does the Storm. This is fine if the carrier bundles the handset with a capacious card; Verizon is good about this. T-Mobile, on the other hand, shipped the G1 with a pitifully small 1GB card, so we’ll just have to hope they’re more generous with the G2.

Technical 3D ability is actually fairly uniform across this hardware, with the exception of the iPhone 3G S, which is, in this area, a next-gen product. Only Apple and HTC, though, give developers any meaningful kind of access to their handsets’ graphics accelerators, meaning the G2 and iPhones (particularly the bulked-up 3G S) will be the sole options for would-be gamers. And of the two platforms, iPhone OS has amassed plenty of serious gaming titles, while Android, let’s be honest, hasn’t.

The Pre is an obvious standout in that it has a hardware keyboard in addition to its touchscreen. The hardware QWERTY/onscreen keyboard debate is all about personal preference, so whether this is a boon or a burden is up to you. Typing on a screen is an acquired skill—but much more so on the Storm than the iPhone or G2.

Battery life would seem to be a valuable metric; it’s not. The differences in capacity and claimed endurance don’t really matter much, since realistically, they all need to be charged nightly.

Note: the Storm is due a minor hardware refresh, possibly quite soon. The main change, it’s been rumored, is a different touchscreen.
The greatest hardware in the world couldn’t save a phone with shitty software, and your handset’s OS is the single largest determining factor in how you’ll enjoy your phone. We’ve explored the differences between the major smartphone platforms at length here, and there’s no point getting too far into the specific differences right now.

To summarize: iPhone OS claims advantages in ease of use, its burgeoning App Store, and a respectable core feature set, but falters on multitasking and its lack of ability to install unsanctioned apps. The Pre’s WebOS is extremely slick and friendly to multitasking, but its App Catalog is light on content, and its development SDK is somewhat restrictive. Android and BlackBerry OS are both more laissez-faire, letting users install apps from whatever source they choose. Neither of their app stores is spectacular, but Android’s is markedly less anemic. More on app stores here.

Carrier preferences will often override prices, but here they are anyway. The Pre and G2 are the most economic options, and the Storm roughly ties the 3G S as the most expensive. (It’s easy to underestimate how much a small monthly cost difference can add up over two years.) But again, carrier loyalty (or more likely, disloyalty) and coverage quality is as important as cost. If Sprint’s killing your Pre buzz, it could be worth waiting until next year, when Verizon is rumored to pick it up. Likewise, if T-Mobile coverage in your area is patchy, don’t worry: by the time T-Mobile actually offers the G2, we’ll probably have at least another functionally identical handset lined up for release elsewhere.

So there you have it: everything you need to know about the latest crop of consumer smartphones. Go forth, and be gouged.

It’s easier than ever to pit Windows 7 and OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard head-to-head: They’re launching soon, both within a month of each other—and both are basically glorified service packs of the current OS.

In way, they’re opposites: Windows 7 uses the same core foundation as Vista while fixing issues and prettying up the outside, while Snow Leopard keeps most of the same spots while re-arranging how things work internally. But the mission is the same—to evolve their current OS—not change the whole game. And launching this fall, we can’t avoid a comparison study. The stars of Redmond and Cupertino have never been so closely aligned before.

Price/Availability
Snow Leopard socks Windows 7 on both counts here: It’s shipping in September for just $29. Windows 7 doesn’t hit until Oct. 22, and we’ve heard it could be pricier than Vista, though it will, on the other hand, be cheaper for people who already have Vista. Nowhere near $29, we bet, but we can dream, can’t we?

Storage Footprint
Both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are engineered to gobble less of your hard drive than their predecessors. Snow Leopard promises to give you back 6GB of storage—cutting out all the code for PowerPC-based Macs helped a lot there. Microsoft isn’t touting how much extra space you’ll have with Windows 7 vs. Vista, but an earlier version of Windows 7 used about 6GB of space, and they’ve been thinking about ways to make drivers take up less space.

If it says anything though, Snow Leopard requires 5GB of free disk space, while Windows 7 has a minimum recommended requirement of 16GB for the 32-bit OS and 20GB for the 64-bit OS—Microsoft doesn’t put out absolute bare minimums, though the footprint seems to be about 6-8GB for Windows 7.

Startup/Shutdown/Sleep
Windows 7 smoked Vista with sub-30-second startup times, and RC1 is even faster. Shutdowns are quicker too. We had problems with sleep in the beta release, but it still seemed better than Vista, if not faster. Apple doesn’t pimp a specific improvement in startup time, but promises doubletime wakeups and 1.75x faster shutdowns than Leopard.

64-bit
Windows 7 will come in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors—it’s up to you to pick the right one (hint: 64-bit). The majority of Windows 7 install will likely be 64-bit—since you don’t have to worry about compatibility issues as much as with Vista 64, and people are starting to want 4GB or more of RAM—so we’re at a tipping point there. Snow Leopard will also more or less finish up OS X’s transition to 64-bit, so it’s something Apple’s pushing hard as well.

Multicore Parallel Processing Powah
Some of the tweaks that Microsoft is making to the core of Windows 7 are to improve parallel processing—in short, using multiple cores to handle more simultaneous tasks than past versions of Windows. But these multicore-optimizing tweaks don’t seem as extensive as Apple’s parallel processing plans in Snow Leopard, headlined by what it calls Grand Central Dispatch.

What’s key about GCD is that if it works like Apple says, it’ll make easy for app developers to use multiple cores by handling threading for the programmers. The trick these says isn’t the hardware, it’s the software—the software tools that enable programmers to actually use multicore technology. (Just look back at our interview with Intel chair Craig Barrett, who explained why Intel hires more software engineers than hardware guys at this point.)

GPGPU—Processing Powah Continued
Again, since Snow Leopard is all about the plumbing, Apple’s being the loudest about how they plan to tap your graphics card for even more processing power. Using the OpenCL language, programmers can more easily tap the hundreds of cores lurking inside of your graphics card for applications that might have nothing to do with graphics. OpenCL is a big part of Snow Leopard, if you haven’t noticed. Snow Leopard will also use your graphics card for H.264 video acceleration (for smoother playback without overheating the CPU), if you’ve got a newer Mac with an Nvidia GeForce 9400M chipset.

Windows 7 also uses graphics cards more smartly than Vista—it has native GPU-accelerated transcoding and some other refinements in the graphics programming. But its big GPGPU push we’ll see a bit later when DirectX 11 launches in July.

Browser: Do You Want to Explore or Go on Safari?
Sorry guys, there’s not much of a contest here: Internet Explorer 8 is by far the best browser Microsoft has ever shipped, but when you consider it needs a compatibility list for all the sites coded for IE’s past shittiness, the real modern web standards support in Safari 4 gives this one to Safari without even considering the other features. It’s also wildly better than IE8 at handling JavaScript, which is pretty key in the age of web apps.

Networking
Networking is waaaaaaaay better in Windows 7 than it was in Vista—you can actually get to wireless networking with fewer than seventeen clicks, and the networking UI makes more sense. It also seems to be a little smarter at finding stuff on your network, at least in our experience. We’re still not totally sold on HomeGroups, but hey, Microsoft’s trying. And (sorta) easy remote streaming built into the OS? Pretty good.

Apple’s not really promoting any changes to networking in Snow Leopard beyond the metric that it’s 1.55 times faster at joining networks than Leopard it’s got more efficient filesharing. You could argue networking in Leopard didn’t need to be reworked—it was definitely better than Vista’s—but really, networking is one of those things that’s still not easy to understand for regular people in either OS.

How Long’s Your Battery Gonna Last?
Windows 7 supposedly improves notebook battery life by a minimum of 11 percent. On the Snow Leopard front, well, um, all of the new Macs have much bigger batteries? Since Apple didn’t drop a slide at WWDC telling the whole world, we can presume there isn’t any benefit.

So Much Media Playing
Windows Media Player will handle pretty much any kind of mainstream video or audio format you throw at it, be it H.264, Divx, Xvid or AAC. The UI is better too, but it still kinda sucks ’cause it’s trying to do too much (kind of like iTunes nowadays). But it has a few pretty great tricks, like “Play To,” that’ll command any compatible device on your network and stream stuff to it by way of the newest DLNA standard. Not to mention it’ll natively stream your whole library over the internets to anywhere. Oh yeah, and Windows Media Center still rocks.

Apple doesn’t get too specific on whether or not QuickTime X can now handle a broader range of formats with its fancy new logo, just that it’ll play “the latest modern media formats” like H.264 and AAC even more betterer. It’s also got a pretty classy new UI and supports graphics-accelerated playback (mentioned above). But maybe the best new feature is built-in video recording and trimming.

If all this talk of video codecs and file formats is confusing, read our (hopefully) helpful guide on the subject.

Backgrounds
Have you seen Windows 7 acid-trip backgrounds? Incredible. What’s Snow Leopard got? Some stupid purple star thing. Apple background designers needs more drugs, plz.

Backup/Backup Time
Time Machine is simply awesome because it’s so incredibly easy to use and implement. It’s 50 percent faster in Snow Leopard. Our only gripe is that it’s still all or nothing—a few built-in scheduling and content preferences wouldn’t hurt. Windows Backup and Restore is definitely improved in Windows 7, with finer control over backups and descriptions actually written in English.

Dock vs. Taskbar Round 3
Oh, this is a contentious one. We think Windows 7’s taskbar is pretty damn excellent and even said that it was useful than OS X’s dock thanks to Aero Peek, which lets you find any window in any app smoothly and instantly. Jump lists, which give you quick access to common functions right from the taskbar icon, were also a nice touch. In short, with these features and stuff like Aero Snap, more usable previews, and Aero Peek mixing it up with Alt+Tab, Windows 7 has the best UI of any Windows yet.

Snow Leopard’s UI is mostly the same, but it manages to improve on one of its best features—Exposé—and the Dock at the same time. You can actually do a whole lot more stuff from the Dock now, so you can easily drop files in whatever app window you want to. Exposé, my “I would die without it” feature in Leopard, now arranges windows in a neat grid, rather than scattering them across whatever space is available. Stacks is actually useful now too, since they’re scrollable and you can look in folders within stacks in Snow Leopard.

Exchange Support
Snow Leopard’s got it built-in, your copy of Windows 7 doesn’t. Freaky but true.

Overall Snap Crack and Pop
Both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are designed to be faster, leaner, stronger and more stable than the OSes they’re building on. Windows 7 is markedly more responsive, and you simply feel like you’re more in control. We’ll have to see with Snow Leopard, but if it lives up to Apple’s promises, we’re definitely looking forward to the performance prowess.

There’ s a whole lot that goes into deciding whether you’re a Mac or PC, but whatever one you pick, you definitely won’t go wrong upgrading your OS this fall.