• Retina display
• Better battery life
• Better camera

Retina

The display is stunning – it is crystal clear and the colors are beautiful. Most apps simply become more crisp (assuming they don’t use a lot of low-res images). I don’t think you’ll see a ton of difference in the way you use apps due to the display, but you’ll enjoy the experience much more and it’ll feel less like a computer screen. This is one of those things where the old technology got the job done just fine, but man, after using this display for a few days now, I can’t wait to see it come to iPad and to traditional computer monitors. Once you get used to retina, all other displays start looking really blurry.

Battery Life

It’s excellent. It still isn’t going to last nearly as long as the iPad, but it seems to last significantly longer than my 3GS did while performing the same tasks.

Camera

For still photography, the camera seems to be improved, but it’s significantly better at low light photography. This is partly due to the new sensor technology, but it’s also due to the inclusion of a small LED flash. Don’t get me wrong, the low light photos are terrible compared to a DSLR or even a mid-range Point & Shoot…but it’s a huge step up from the camera in the 3GS that was barely usable in lower light conditions. Daylight photos (particularly macro type shots) range from good to excellent. If you want proof, check out this shot by a friend of mine. I’d say that under optimal conditions, the iPhone 4′s still camera is very competitive with mid-range Point & Shoot cameras. As for video, it’s 720p in size, but don’t expect anything close to Bluray quality. I put a couple of videos on my Vimeo account…these are “worst case” shots – indoors with low light shooting a dark subject with some fast movement. Quality wise, the video function alone is right there with my Creative Vado…there is absolutely no reason to use a Vado, Flip, etc. if you have an iPhone 4. In fact, when you add on the software (iMovie or otherwise), the iPhone 4 blows those devices out of the water.

Overall Feel

Compared to my 3GS, the iPhone 4 feels better & worse. I love the new design – it’s more sleek and feels even more solid. The downside is I feel more paranoid that I’m going to drop it. With the 3GS, you could drop it and have a pretty good chance of only minor scratches or maybe a small crack in the plastic back. With the iPhone 4, you’re either going to damage the glass on the front or back (and the camera is integrated into that back glass as well) or you’re going to bang up the antennas (since they form the metal band around the outside). In theory, the glass is super strong and not easy to break, but something about it just feels a little more fragile. Speed wise, everything feels fast. If you’ve used an iPad, it’s pretty much the same. I really don’t notice a ton of speed increase over my 3GS for day to day activities – I do know it’s much more powerful though, so I’m sure future apps will widen this gap.

FaceTime

FaceTime is the video calling feature built-in to each iPhone 4. I tried it out with a friend from Twitter and it’s certainly a nifty feature. It works as easily as Apple advertises…call someone, touch a button, and boom – video call. The big gotcha (for now) is that both parties must have iPhone 4s AND be on a WiFi network. I’m not sure I’ll be using this feature all that much, but I also prefer e-mail/twitter/IM to phone calls anyway. I can see it being pretty popular for some people and I do see a few use cases for myself.

iBooks

iBooks is an app I use a ton on my iPad. I was hoping the retina display would make it more readable to me on the iPhone 4. Text & images looks absolutely fantastic – but at the end of the day, I just can’t read on such a tiny screen. It’s not that the font is too small – I can see it fine – I just can’t fit enough content on the screen for my tastes. I read mostly technical (or at least non-fiction books) though, so books with less structured content may be a bit better. Imagine reading the tiny bibles you used to find in hotels – that’s what it’s like reading on the iPhone 4…super crisp text, but a little bitty reading surface. I do like having the ability to look up something in iBooks in an emergency though – so I’ll keep it installed just in case.

Multitasking

A lot of people have been anxiously awaiting multitasking on iPhone. I’m not one of them. I would like a few apps to be able to update in the background (Twitter for example) and I’d like to have a live IM client, but that’s about it. I don’t use Skype or Pandora on the phone, but if I did, I’d be happy. For me, this is a nice feature, but the only real benefit I get is that it’s slightly faster to switch between applications. Maybe I’ll be wow’d with what people are able to do with this in the future, but for now, I just don’t see much benefit for the tasks I do today…but I was never the target of this feature in the first place.

Reception

You’ve probably heard about the reception issues with iPhone 4. Steve Jobs said they don’t exist, but if they did, it’s because you’re holding it the wrong way. Apple corporate said they exist on all phones and you should buy a case. Well, they definitely do exist and I’m holding my phone the same way I’ve held every Apple iPhone. I’m going to end up buying a case I’m sure, but I’m really disappointed in Apple over this one. If you hold the phone in your left hand, you’ll connect two of the antennas with your finger or palm. By doing this, your 5 bars of full signal will drop to “No Service” within 30 seconds or so unless you happen to be *very* close to a cell tower. At home, I can do this easily every time I try. In West Knoxville, I had a harder time getting the signal to drop…so it seems to be partially dependent on your proximity to cell towers. I have yet to have a call drop due to this, but I have had SMS messages and data downloads stop/fail due to it…so it isn’t just a display issue – it really is losing the signal. Apple says some type of fix is on the way and if that’s the case, then maybe this won’t be a problem much longer. I expected I would get better reception than my 3GS due to the larger exposed antenna, but so far, my 3GS had a more stable signal. Call quality is as good or better on the iPhone 4 though. I haven’t tried making a call from a noisy area yet, but all of the calls I’ve made have sounded very clear on my end and no complaints from those that I’ve called.

http://adambyram.tumblr.com

I have maybe 3 personal finance posts written, but still need to proofread them before I make them public. My original plan was to not post anything on the personal finance site until I have about 14 posts ready to go so I can queue them up and start writing the next week or two worth of posts. That’s still my plan as of right now, but this is going to be harder than I imagined as far as keeping fresh content coming out. My target is to have one new article a day during the week. I just have to figure out a rhythm and then hopefully it’ll get easier, but I guess we’ll see.

I may go ahead and start the tech site as well with a series of posts about building a new blog engine. I’m not sure that I want to do that or not, but it may be useful and having feedback on the design as I go along would be helpful. Just have to find the time to do that too.

I’ve also been trying to get back into the habit of taking more photos and getting a little photoblog up and running, but I think that one is on the back burner for now. Just not enough time to do everything.

I just finished updating this blog to use the new WordPress 2.5 engine. It’s really quite nice – everything on the admin side is much more refined that before. The upgrade process is amazingly simple – you just upload the new files, run upgrade.php, and in a minute or two (or longer if you have lots of posts) you’re ready to go. While I was doing the upgrade, I decide I would go ahead and update the theme as well. I liked the last theme, but I saw a new theme that looked a little better to me – so I just popped it in since I was already messing around with the site anyway. It is a bit more streamlined than the last one and more my style.

New Blogs

Over the last week or so, I’ve been planning out some topics that I want to blog about. I realize I haven’t been actively blogging for a while now, but part of that is because I can’t decide what I want to include on this blog. I’m always torn between putting all of my thoughts on this one blog or trying to keep them on different blogs so that each blog has a particular topic. The problem is that I would end up not posting at all. So, I have finally decided I’m going to dedicate time each week (and perhaps more often) to blogging in general and I have also decided I am creating more focused blogs going forward. At this point in time, I’m going to start maintaining three different blogs:

AdamByram.com

This blog will continue to be blog that is purely personal – more to communicate with friends and such than anything else. If I have a topic that I want to talk about that doesn’t fit into either of the two new blogs, it’ll end up here.

New Personal Finance Site

I’ll announce the name later once I finish getting things setup and get the initial content loaded, but I’m creating a new site focused on providing personal finance advice / observations for Generation Y. My generation has the opportunity to do great things, but I keep hearing (and seeing) how so many in this generation can’t (or don’t want) to manage money. To me, this is one of the most important things someone can learn. Money isn’t the key to happiness, but it’s one of those things what you need to understand and learn to use to help you achieve your dreams. So I’m hoping my new site will prove useful to people that want to start learning about personal finance, but don’t want to get bogged down in the technical details of it.

New Software Development Site

I’ll announce the URL for this once it’s up and running as well, but this will be the place that all of my software development related ideas will go. At the end of 2007, I started a new job at a software startup and I’ve had many experiences there that I’d like to blog about (as far as what works, what doesn’t, and things I’m learning about). I’ve wanted to do a blog like this for a long time, so we’ll see how it goes, but I think it’ll be fun.

I Tweet

I have also started using Twitter. I seems like a nice way to stay on top of the latest happenings, particularly in the software world. I don’t tweet non-stop or anything, but I try to tweet every now and then. I have my latest tweets in the sidebar of this blog and you’re welcome to follow me on Twitter if you’ve like – http://www.twitter.com/adambyram/.

That’s all for now – more updates to come.

In the technical world, so many people still believe the “platform” is the key to everything. There are always discussions about which platform is the best – laptop vs desktop vs PDA, Windows vs OS X vs Linux, Nikon vs Canon, Ford vs Chevy – you get the point. That’s all fine and dandy and I don’t disagree that sometimes there are certain benefits to using a specific platform. But the kicker is that this is a stupid argument to begin with.

People don’t care about the platform. Even if you think you care, you probably don’t when you get right down to it. For example, when I’m using the Windows platform, I keep my current TODO list in Microsoft Outlook. Now that I also work on a Mac, I decided to move my TODO list to an online platform. Sure – I moved to a different “platform” because it made it easier to get to my TODO list from either OS, but it’s not the platform I really care about, it’s the data.

Whether my TODO list is on the web, on my desktop, on my iPhone, or on my physical notepad, the platform is of little importance to me as long as my list is there and it’s accessible when I need it. The platform only comes into the picture when it can better enable me to manipulate my data in ways that make me more efficient and effective. In reality, forget the platform and focus on the data (or on the actions driven by the data) and you’ll see that the platform being the key is a fallacy in this day and age.

The whole process of draining the oil is simple (just make sure you find the correct drain plug…there may be more than just the oil one and if you pick the wrong one…well…it probably wouldn’t be very pretty).  All you really do is remove the plug, let the oil drain, replace the plug, remove the filter, let remaining oil drain (if any), install the new filter, then just fill it back up with fresh oil.  It is a bit messy, but I would rather spend 30 minutes doing it myself than to spend 1-2 hours (mostly waiting) for someone else to do it – and you can save quite a bit of money depending on how cheap you want to be.  (I think my total costs are about the same as the dealer, but they could be way less if I tried and didn’t mind cheaper materials…)

Overall, the whole process is quite fun.  I think I’m going to start learning more about cars now – they don’t seem that hard to understand…there are lots of parts, but each part is pretty simple by itself.  We’ll see how it goes, but hopefully I’ll learn enough that I can start to work on my car more to fix the little issues that are popping up these days.