I dislike 3D and Walter Murch nails the reason why. In a letter from Murch to Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:
The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the “convergence/focus” issue. A couple of the other issues — darkness and “smallness” — are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen — say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.
But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point.
3D forces our eyes to focus and converge at different points and that’s why so many end up getting headaches.
This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true “holographic” images.
To me it’s simple: if something gives me headaches, that something isn’t a good thing. I’ve only watched one theatrical feature film in 3D: Avatar. The 3D didn’t ruin the experience precisely because the 3D effects were very subtle. I prefer the 2D version, which I also watched. I’ll be keeping my eyes open for developments in holographic display technologies. In the meantime I’ll be watching 2D.
Philips #00 screws out; in come the pentalobes. Kyle Wiens:
Apple is switching to a new type of tamper-resistant screw. This is not a standard Torx, and there are no readily available screwdrivers that can remove it. This isn’t the first time they’ve used this type of screw—it first appeared in the mid-2009 MacBook Pro to prevent you from replacing the battery—and Apple is using a similar screw on the outer case of the current MacBook Air. This screw is the primary reason the 11″ MacBook Air earned a lousy repairability score of 4 out of 10 in our teardown last October.
Apple chose this fastener specifically because it was new, guaranteeing repair tools would be both rare and expensive. Shame on them.
Why would Apple make it harder to open up the iPhone? Simple: Apple doesn’t want you to fix your own iPhone. Right?
I don’t buy that. If the iPhone broke and was easy to open the casual user would just open it up, take a look, and try his hand at fixing it. If the iPhone was somewhat difficult to open the same user would think twice. If the iPhone was very difficult to open it would most likely end up at a local Genius Bar. Only the most serious would acquire the tools, open up the iPhone, and attempt to fix it. BTW, that’s why I’m not opening up my old Mac mini to upgrade; I’m not confident enough that I won’t break anything.
This effect has two positives. First, the casual fixer-upper won’t try to fix his own iPhone. This is probably a good thing because most likely he won’t be able to fix it and second Apple won’t be put in the position of having to inform the casual fixer that the warranty has been voided, or worse that it has now been rendered unrepairable.
The second positive is that only those who have the skills and determination would attempt at fixing a broken iPhone. Most likely the potential for success would be high.
These are the effects that Apple wants and what the company will most likely get with the pentalobes on the iPhone. My guess? Apple will continue to make it more difficult to open up most if not all of its products for this same reason.
Of course one could argue: just make it easy to fix and stop screwing around. That wouldn’t work: Apple’s products are highly customized. The new MacBook Air that Wiens mentions is a perfect example. In a typical notebook PC the LCD is modularized, meaning there is an enclosure that surrounds and keeps together the LCD cell and the backlight unit (BLU). The LCD module makes it easy to drop into a standard chassis. In the new MacBook Air that’s not the case. In order to slim down the overall thickness of the display, Apple did a custom job forgoing the module and putting the LCD cell and the BLU together using the chassis itself. The result is a really thin display but almost impossible to fix. Let me warn you: don’t open up the display. If you do, you’ll never be able to get the dust out and that will drive you nuts. If you have access to a clean room, go ahead.
PS: If you’re serious about fixing your own iPhone 4, iFixit sells the “iPhone 4 Liberation Kit” for $9.95.
Japan seems to be loving the Samsung Galaxy S: it was the top phone sold in Japan from January 10th through the 16th according to Gfk Japan and reported by Mobile Crunch. At #2 was the 16GB iPhone 4 and at #3 was the 32GB iPhone 4. Would rankings be different if the two iPhone 4 models were categorized simply as iPhone 4?
Next Generation Portable or NGP by Sony sports a 5-inch touch OLED display with a 960×544 pixel format. I am not certain whether the OLED is based on Nouvoyance’s PenTile Matrix or a regular RGB. All 800×480 OLED displays were based on a PenTile Matrix sub-pixel structure prior to Samsung developing its Super AMOLED Plus, which is considered to be RGB and having 50% more sub-pixels than PenTile Matrix.
If the NGP’s 5-inch OLED display is based on RGB this is a significant development: not only is the size of an OLED display increasing, the number of sub-pixels are now close to the best LCDs. A quad-core Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX543MP4+ GPU performs graphics duties. And this might hint at a possible quadrupling of GPU capabilities of a future Retina Display-based iPad.
The LG Optimus 2X is the fastest Android smartphone that you can buy, for now. Not only does the Optimus 2X pack a dual-core CPU it captures video in 1080/24p, which is quite a bit more than the iPhone 4′s 720/30p. MobileCrunch compares the video quality of the two:
My conclusion? The iPhone 4 wins hands down. The Optimus 2X’s footage is quite acceptable — but contrasted against identical footage shot on an iPhone, it falls short in both color and clarity.
It has taken a long time for the digital camera industry to figure out that the race to pack more and more pixels into the same image sensor was stupid. I wonder how long it will take for the smartphone industry.
Capturing video at 1080p will be the goal in the next year or two, but you don’t want to add that feature until it’s good and ready. Case in point: 1080p video capture on the Optimus 2X doesn’t seem to be ready. The lens need to be bigger and/or faster, the image sensor if not already needs to sport backlight illumination technology, the image processing engine needs to be better tuned, etc. Don’t rush to add the latest and greatest technology; first perfect it then add it.