4K2K. Quad HD. Whatever these terms refer to, YouTube is supporting them via an “Original” option in the video settings (source: The Official YouTube Blog). Let’s try to figure out what these terms mean. I will be using the term “pixel format” to refer to things like 1920×1080; resolution is not the right word as it refers to pixel density and shown as pixels per inch (PPI).
4K2K refers to a pixel format of around 4000×2000. Pixel formats and aspect ratios differ for digital film standards (source: Wikipedia):
According to the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), a joint venture among Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures Element, Universal, and Warner Bros. Studios, 4K2K refers to motion picture with a pixel format of 4096×2160 (source: DCI Digital Cinema System Specification Version 1.2, in PDF).
It can also refer to a simple doubling of 1920×1080 pixels in the horizontal and vertical directions to 3840×2160, resulting in the quadrupling of the total number of pixels from 2,073,600 to 8,294,400. And hence the term Quad HD. A more technically correct term would be Quad Full HD since you can fit four 1920×1080 screens. Full HD is yet another industry jargon for 1920×1080 and usually associated with progressive scanning at 60 fps.
YouTube has conveniently listed all 4K2K titles for anyone with the bandwidth and just as importantly a 4K2K-capable display for the complete experience. On the list these are the titles that allow you to view the video in the Original pixel format, as of this writing: Life in the Garden, Surf NYC, 2nd Movement for Violin, and Lupe. Secret World seems to be limited to just 1080p.
I watched these 4K2K titles on a 1920×1080 LCD and was fairly impressed except that there were too many artifacts related to compression/decompression. On the other hand, I captured the screen (above, cropped to 512 pixels wide) and the quality of the image was outstanding. For quite some time most of us will be relegated to enjoying 4K2K videos on less-than 4K2K displays. Display and capture devices capable of 4K2K are incredibly rare and expensive. For example, JVC’s DLA-RS4000U reference series 4K2K home cinema projector has a MSRP of US$175,000.
What’s next?
Ultra High Definition (UHD) is the next step after High Definition (HD) and 4K2K/Quad HD. But before we get into UHD we have to understand where we are with HD. The ATSC standard was developed by the Advanced Television System Committee for digital TV transmissions with a maximum pixel format of 1920×1080. ATSC replaced the analog NTSC TV system on June 12, 2009 in the US. The maximum pixel format of 1920×1080 runs at a maximum frame rate of 60i where the letter ‘i’ is interlaced and the 60 refers to frames per second. This can also be shown as 1080/60i. According to the ATSC standard progressive scanning for the highest pixel format include 1080/30p and 1080/24p. Progressive scanning at 60 frames per second is not terrestrially broadcasted but can be created with the deinterlacing process in the TV or an external box. Non-broadcast material such as Blu-ray has 1080/60p. So that’s HD; what is UHD?
The NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, official English name: Japan Broadcasting Corporation) Science & Technical Research Laboratories developed UHD, which is also referred to as Super Hi-vision. The pixel format jumps to an amazing 7680×4320 and the frame rate to 60p. The short form would be 4320/60p. (All HDTV and UHDTV feature a 16:9 aspect ratio.) Super Hi-vision was demonstrated at World Exposition 2005 in Aichi, Japan on a 600-inch display. On November 2, 2005 NHK successfully transmitted Super Hi-vision signals between Kamogawa (Chiba prefecture) and its Science & Technical Research Laboratories). The distance between the two locations is 260km and is connected via optical cables. Super Hi-vision video and audio were uncompressed and transmitted using Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM). You can find more information at NHK.
Lenovo’s chairman Liu Chaunzhi on Steve Jobs:
We are lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn’t care about China. My theory is that a manager needs to be the string on which he puts one pearl after another. But Jobs himself is a big pearl.
That’s what he shared with the Financial Times. Well, sorry to burst your bubble Mr. Chaunzhi, but Apple plans to open an Apple Store in Shanghai this Saturday. The Shanghai Apple Store will be located between the IFC Mall and the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. And by the end of 2011 the big-pearl bad-tempered Steve Jobs & Co. expects to open 25 stores in China. I guess Lenovo’s luck ran out.
PS: I don’t get Chaunzhi’s pearl analogy but this is an interesting coincidence: big-pearl Steve and an Apple Store next to the Pearl Tower.
That’s a lot of interesting names. Founded in 2009, Aava Mobile’s goal is to build open-source mobile device platforms for the OEM/ODM markets. The company just brought out a prototype based on Intel’s Moorestown CPU that runs the MeeGo OS. Carrypad has a photo of the prototype running an early MeeGO UI and it looks okay though I don’t quite understand what some of the icons mean on the browser. MeeGo seems icon-centric as opposed to Windows 7 Mobile’s text-centric UI.
Intel’s original plan was to power smartphones in 2010. Moorestown, the codename for the company’s CPU targeted at mobile phones, is claimed to be very power efficient yet have enough ooomph for video conferencing and HD video playback. The smartphone market is growing fast and is expected to hit more than 220 million units in 2010, based on IDC’s estimate of 54.7 million smartphone shipments in Q1’10. Intel is just getting into the game, but the company is now planning for Moorestown-based smartphones to hit the market in 2011 instead of this year. I expect Intel will have a solid showing at CES 2011. The smartphone market is definitely heating up.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber commenting on Consumer Reports’ iPhone 4 signal testing results:
So we seem to be nearing consensus. With strong reception, bridging that antenna gap doesn’t matter much. With weak reception, bridging that gap is enough to lose the signal.
OK… my question is: How do you know whether you’re in a place with strong reception or a weak one? Mike Gikas from Consumer Reports had three or four bars, which I think all of us would consider at least not weak, before going down to zero bars in about five seconds. All thanks to putting his pinky on “the spot” (read The iPhone 4 Spot). I guess help is on the way: Apple is working on a patch that will help you get a better feel for reception strength in your area (read iPhone 4 Reception Issue: Signal Formula Error?). So my recommendation, for now, is to find out whether you’re living, working, commuting in areas that have weak or strong receptions. If they are weak then I would hold off on the iPhone 4, no matter how painful that could be. Unfortunately, I live in an area with very weak AT&T signals. Pooey.
PERFECT DIMENSIONS
Is there a perfect size for a hand-held tablet? Many of us consider Apple’s iPad to be the perfect size, or at least Apple does. The iPad was announced on January 27, 2010 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In about six more months we can expect iPad 2.0 to be announced. I’m jumping the gun a bit, but here are my thoughts on what I think Apple should do to improve the iPad. First the dimensions need to change. The iPad’s physical specs are:
The display is a 9.7-inch IPS TFT LCD with these physical specs:
That means the black border around the display is about 22.85 mm or 0.9 inch on the top and bottom and 20.95 mm or 0.825 inch on the left and right. I’m actually a bit surprised to find that these borders aren’t symmetric. These borders might make the iPad look less modern but there is a good purpose for them being there: we need space to hold the iPad without touching the multitouch display. I still can’t get over the asymmetry, but there is an opportunity here to carve 0.075 inch from the top and bottom to make room for a slightly larger and wider display, if needed.
Are the physical dimensions optimal for average hands? I don’t think so. The virtual keyboard is almost unusable, unless you have small hands. Unfortunately, I have average hands. In portrait mode I found it very difficult to thumb-type; it was a little too wide. In landscape mode it was too narrow to touch-type. The iPad should be little thinner in portrait and a little wider in landscape.
The iPad can also be lighter. It is 680 grams. The picture above is the bare rear case and sourced from iFixit. Just the aluminum back weighs 138 grams, that’s a little more than 20% of the total weight. I think you can make the design flat, like the iPhone 4. With a flattened back the thickness can probably be reduced from 13.4 mm to about 11 mm. A lot of the extra layered aluminum can be rid of saving a lot of weight. The iPad has a lot of room inside so space isn’t an issue. In my opinion I think the iPad can be squeezed down to about 600 grams or less. I’m sure a lot of folks will like that.
THE PERFECT DISPLAY
Is the display the right size? To answer this question I went snooping for standard paper and printed picture sizes. I wanted to find what sizes and dimensions we are used to when reading and looking at photos. I googled around for international standard paper sizes. The international standard is ISO 216, sourced from Wikipedia “Paper size“. The aspect ratio is 1:1.4142 (1:√2) in portrait. For all countries, except the US and Canada, the standard paper size is A4, which has a dimension of 210×297 mm. The whole world, except for the two mavericks, is used to looking at A4-sized printouts and letters. So that’s documents. What about standard picture sizes? There certainly are standards for printed picture sizes and interestingly they all seem to hover around the A4 document aspect ratio. Let’s have a look (standard name, size in cm, size in inch, aspect ratio):
This was sourced from Wikipedia “Photo print sizes“. There are more, but I think you get the point: the photo print aspect ratio is very close to the aspect ratio of the standard paper size of A4. The closest to 1.4142 is the 3R size with 1.43 or 5R with 1.4.
Should a display have a similar aspect ratio as the standard paper size and some photo print standards? Well, yes! Only if the display is meant primarily to be used for viewing documents or photos, and not if you’re building a device primarily for viewing video content, which has transitioned from 4:3 (1.33, it did fit neatly with the others) to 16:9 (1.78). What should the primary focus be? The primary focus of the iPad is none; the iPad does a terrific job of getting out of the way and disappearing. The iPad was designed to have no focus at all.
The display with its dimensions was picked precisely because it needed to do everything, not perfectly, but well enough. I think the iPad’s 1.33 aspect ratio could be a little wider: watching HD content on it turns out to be a bit less than good-enough. SD fits perfectly, but who watches SD these days?
Putting all of this together, a more perfect iPad 2.0 would sport roughly a 10-inch display with a 1.4 aspect ratio. It is just a bit wider in landscape and a little skinnier in portrait than the current iPad and should be better at displaying all three media: documents, photographs, moving pictures while making it easier to touch-type with all ten fingers in landscape mode.
ABOUT TEN INCHES
Any company needs to leverage existing and future manufacturing infrastructure to secure enough supply and affordably. I recently wrote Chimei Innolux (CMI), Hitachi Displays Form Strategic Alliance To Manufacture 9.7-inch IPS LCD Panels For iPad Program and suggested that Apple may be developing a broad base of suppliers who can manufacture quality LCD panels for its popular but always in short supply iPad.
LCD manufacturers will be able to adjust the size a little from the 9.7-inch 4:3 LCD geared for the iPad. In the very near future LG Display (LGD), Samsung, Hitachi Displays and Chimei Innolux (CMI) will all be manufacturing displays for the iPad. It is also worth noting that Amazon chose 9.7 inches as the size for its larger Kindle DX (read Amazon Kindle DX & E Ink Pearl). The dimensions would be slightly different since the aspect ratio is 1.4 (versus 1.33 for the current iPad), but there will be many LCD manufacturers with enough capacity to build a slightly wider roughly 10-inch LCD.
IPS + PIXEL QI
I’ve been quite upfront about my preference for IPS LCDs, but for tablet applications like the iPad, I’m not so certain IPS alone is enough. In iPad IPS LCD versus Pixel Qi in Daylight, I refer to a video that shows an absolute clear Pixel Qi display in direct sunlight. On the other hand it is extremely difficult to make out anything on the iPad. Pixel Qi just started selling a 10.1-inch display using its amazing technology (read Pixel Qi 10.1-inch Netbook LCD Panel Available Now); the entire supply sold out within 24 hours. The best display for a portable tablet like the iPad would be to marry IPS with Pixel Qi’s amazing technology.
Most iPad users don’t read a whole lot. There’s just so many more fun stuff to do on the iPad than read a book filled with text. I do think people read books on the iPad but few adults do. A lot of kids read picture books on the iPad though. Magazine apps are great and so are newspapers with color. For those who really do like reading they are all but forced to go for one of the two Amazon Kindles. What if you could provide a display that could cater to both? There is a big opportunity to bridge the best of both worlds by incorporating Pixel Qi’s display technology. The 3qi has a power-sipping sunlight-readable mode for reading and a full-color mode for all the other more colorful stuff out of the sun. By bringing together IPS and Pixel Qi’s innovation you really do get the best of both worlds and end up having a display that’s much better than the one in the current iPad.
RESOLUTION
The current iPad sports a pathetic 1024×768 pixel format resulting in a resolution of 131.96 PPI. In light of Apple’s big pitch for the Retina Display in the iPhone 4 with a 326 PPI, the iPad isn’t even in the same level. I don’t think it is economically feasible to get to 326 PPI on a 9.7-inch LCD at the moment, but I do think it more than possible to do better than the current iPad. A Retina Display-equivalent 9.7-inch LCD would require a pixel format of about 2560×1920 keeping the aspect ratio close to 1.4. Is that technically possible? Probably. Does it make economic sense? Probably not. With the aforementioned aspect ratio of 1.4 and the size of about 10 inches a pixel format of 1680×1200 is doable. That translates into a resolution of 206.46 PPI. Not close to the limit of our vision of around 300 PPI at 12 inches (read Retina Display), but much better than the iPad’s anemic 131.96 PPI.
CONCLUSION
The iPad is not perfect. It is too heavy. It isn’t optimally sized for typing. The display isn’t the right aspect ratio for documents, photos and moving pictures. The display performance in direct sunlight is terrible. The resolution is anemic. All of these imperfections can be improved by flattening the overall design, like what Apple did with the iPhone 4, and with the incorporation of a 10-inch 1.4 aspect ratio IPS+Pixel Qi multitouch display with a pixel format of 1680×1200. While keeping everything else the same. Lastly, I would recommend adding a SD slot along with a USB port.
Apple on the iPhone 4 reception issue relayed by Engadget:
Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.
To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone’s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.
We will issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. Since this mistake has been present since the original iPhone, this software update will also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G.
Aw shucks! That’s it? Apple was just using the wrong formula to display how many bars of signal strength! And here I was rambling on about how it is a manufacturing defect, how Apple didn’t do enough real world testing, etc. (read Not Getting An iPhone 4, Yet).
I call BS. There is no way for sure to figure out whether or not there is a flaw in the antenna design, but I say there is. How does this explanation account for calls that connect and then disconnecting when the spot (read The iPhone 4 Spot) is touched? Is it also a coincidence that Apple has openings for eight antenna engineers? On June 23rd, Apple posted five jobs: three Antenna Engineer – iPad/iPhone and two iPhone OTA Wireless Systems Engineer positions. That’s about when reception issues on the iPhone 4 started snowballing. I’m skeptical that Apple would succumb to pressure like that, but I’m sure Apple new about the reception issue but couldn’t do anything about it since millions were already made and being shipped all over the US to Apple Stores and AT&T. That accounts for the three RF Systems Validation Engineer iPhone jobs posted on June 16th, before the iPhone 4 got into the hands of regular folks who then started to hold the iPhone 4 the wrong way (read Apple: You’re Holding The iPhone 4 The Wrong Way). These engineers would be focused on optimizing radiation performance for wireless portable devices, like the iPhone 4, which certainly needs it.
Let’s say folks with the iPhone 4 get this software update within a few weeks. The signal bars will be more accurate then, I guess. In other words the four bars you used to get will now be one or two. Great. With one or two bars these guys will get a voice or data connection and then the two bars will disappear after you hold the iPhone 4 the wrong way for a little while. The problem is still here. I understand that attenuation of antenna performance exist for almost all wireless phones but what we are seeing on many iPhone 4′s is too much attenuation. Should have adopted a dual-antenna design like the folks over at Motorola (read Droid X Pokes iPhone 4).
Boy Genius Report (BGR) reported earlier today of an email exchange between Tom (ficticious name) and Steve Jobs. BGR looked through the email headers and believed it to be 100% legitimate. Not 95%, 100%.
Here’s some of the things Jobs reportedly said in response to Tom, a professed Mac fan, who was more than upset about iPhone 4′s antenna issue and sent an email to an Apple engineer:
No, you are getting all worked up over a few days of rumors. Calm down.
You are most likely in an area with very low signal strength.
You may be working from bad data. Not your fault. Stay tuned. We are working on it.
So what’s the big fuss about? The email exchange is fake according to Apple PR and as reported by Fortune’s Apple 2.0 blog. AppleInsider reports the email exchange was shopped around by a Virginia man two days before appearing on BGR. Wild.
Google sent TechCrunch‘s Michael Arrington its Google Voice Desktop app powered by Gizmo5, a company the search giant acquired in November 2009.
What I like about Google Voice Desktop is the UI; it is simple and easy on the eyes. Skype on the other hand is a bit less simple and less easy on the eyes, especially on the Mac version. My main criticism of Skype is that it is addicted to opening up new windows. For instance, if I am video chatting and want to start text-based chatting Skype thinks I need a whole new window for that, and vice versa. Small niggles since I’m saving so much using Skype.
The simplicity of Google Voice Desktop makes me think it could be built not only for the desktop but also for iDevices such as the iPhone, iPod, iPad and Android devices as a complete VoIP connecting people end to end.
Then I would almost never have to worry about spending my precious anytime minutes. Actually, I wouldn’t need any anytime minutes. If current Google Voice phone call charges are any indication, it should be cheaper than Skype. TechCrunch tells us that Google isn’t sure it wants to launch Google Voice Desktop; I hope it does.
Sony is warning users of VAIO notebooks that they can overheat according The New York Times. When can this happen? Exactly when you don’t want it to: when you plug in the power adapter to charge the battery when the battery is almost empty. Sony is attempting to fix this problem via a software patch, a BIOS firmware update to be exact. Sony has communicated this with registered users, but how many of you out there using a Sony VAIO notebook are registered? Make sure to contact customer support (866-496-7669 in the US) and get that software patch. Sooner the better since keyboards or the casing can deform due to partial melting. Overheating can also be a burn hazard.
Affected VAIO notebooks include model numbers beginning with VPCF11 or VPCWW2. Full model number list can be found on Sony’s eSupport site as well as the BIOS firmware update.
In a brief chat with Core77, Jonathan Ive shares his thoughts about materials:
A big part of the experience of a physical object has to do with the materials. [At Apple] we experiment with and explore materials, processing them, learning about the inherent properties of the material–and the process of transforming it from raw material to finished product; for example, understanding exactly how the processes of machining it or grinding it affect it. That understanding, that preoccupation with the materials and processes, is [very] essential to the way we work.
It is good to know that Apple’s Ive will continue to be obsessively preoccupied with materials and processes. I can hope the imperfections found in the iPhone 4 will be ironed out, and soon. Read Not Getting An iPhone 4, Yet.
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