Twelve South has ported its BookBook case to the iPhone 4. The BookBook for iPhone is an all-in-one vintage case and wallet. It looks good, at first glance.
In my left front pocket I carry an iPhone 4 and a credit card holder. I haven’t had the urge to simplify further since the two items serve their purposes quite well.
I use my iPhone much more than I do my wallet. Thankfully. I check my email, RSS feeds, text, make the occasional phone call, and take lots of photographs and videos.
I put some cash, a few business cards, a debit card and other identification cards in the card holder.
The BookBook for iPhone would let me combine the two, and it would work neatly with what I have. One less thing to grab when heading out the door. The idea sounds good, but there are some problems. For me at least.
I can imagine whenever I want to use my iPhone, and that would be often, having just a little bit of anxiety. I like to keep my card holder in my front pocket, for obvious reasons. Second, I only take my holder out when I need to pay for something. I don’t like exposing it longer than I need to. And that’s exactly what I’d be doing whenever I want to use my iPhone.
The other problem: my iPhone is my camera, my only camera. I take a lot of photos with it. And from what I saw in the video (at around the 0:39-sec mark) I don’t think I’d want to take out my BookBook case, flip the flap open, push the iPhone up exposing the lens, and then take a picture, every time.
The BookBook for iPhone is a fantastic idea and it’s quite beautiful. But for the two reasons mentioned above, it’s not for me.
While the iPad 2 display easily outperformed all of the previous Android Tablets, with the new Galaxy Tab 10.1, Samsung has delivered the first Android Tablet with an impressive, potentially outstanding display that beats the iPad 2 – except it produces gaudy oversaturated colors.
Weak demand in the LCD TV market has been putting great pressure on panel makers. According to industry sources, While the third quarter has been the traditional high season for LCD displays, sales of LCD TVs has not increased as expected causing the inventory of TV panels to grow. Panel makers hope that by reducing production during the high season, coupled with growth in consumption during Christmas holidays in the fourth quarter can bring back effective demand.
The TV channel is being cautious. The guys facing customers, the Best Buys, the Amazons are probably experiencing weak demand. They have enough inventory and won’t be aggressively stocking up for sales in November and December, still four months away. TV brands are in the same boat.
Unfortunately for LCD TV panel manufacturers their LCD fabs run 24/7. Unless the panels are shipped out inventory will continue to pile up. Expect some type of demand creation, like a big sale, from one or two of the major TV brands in the near future.
Fantastic hour-long exposé on Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures, which comes out looking like the root of all evil in the U.S. software patent protection racket. Lodsys, of course, is one of their shell company fronts.
There about 1300 IV shell companies, companies that don’t invent, have no employees, and are all about suing. In a word, patent trolls. Here’s how the name came about according to Peter Detkin, the guy who coined the term:
Oh, the story of a troll kind of fits ‘cause the whole Billy Goats Gruff thing, it’s someone lying under a bridge they didn’t build, demanding payment from anyone who passed.
Detkin is now a founder and vice chairman of IV in Silicon Valley. How ironic. The exposé is by This American Life.
DPReview: The DSC-TX55 from Sony sports a 3.3-inch XtraFine OLED touch display. I imagine taking photos on the TX55 will be somewhat similar to an iPhone. The back is pure minimalism.
I think Sony packed too many pixels (16.2 MP) into its backside illuminated Exmor R CMOS image sensor. I’d be excited if the pixels were 30% larger with a 9-MP sensor. Sony claims detail with low noise in photos and videos even in low light conditions. I’m skeptical. And the TX55 captures 1080/60i videos, which is unfortunate. Who wants to deal with interlaced files?
Going back to the OLED display: most of us don’t keep point-and-shoot cameras for many years. And maybe that’s why it may not become a problem, but OLED displays don’t last very long.
My friend who often visits South Korea tells me he sees blue screens on smartphones all over Seoul. Because blue OLEDs die faster than red and green, there is an algorithm that compensates for blue, turning the smartphone OLED display increasingly bluish over time.
I think we use smartphones more than we use digital cameras, so maybe we’ll never see blue OLED displays on a TX55. But I am concerned with OLED lifetimes on gadgets I intend to keep for many years.
Yesterday I posted some of the amazing new images we created with photographer Eric Cheng and the revolutionary LYTRO camera technology. If you haven’t seen and played with the images already, I invite you to scroll down and give them a try.
Lytro is a company pioneering light field camera technology allowing you to shoot first and focus later.
Dell: The UltraSharp U2412M is a 24-inch LED-backlit IPS monitor with a pixel format of 1920×1200 priced at just $399.
Specs: 8-ms GTG response time, 1000:1 CR, 300 nits, 178/178 viewing angles, 82% CIE 1976 color gamut. Connections: DVI-D w/HDCP, DisplayPort, VGA, and 4-port USB 2.0.
Update: TFT Central reviewed the U2412M:
The Dell U2412M utilises an LG.Display LM240WU8-SLA2 e-IPS panel which is capable of producing 16.7 million colours. The panel itself actually uses a 6-bit colour depth with Advanced frame rate control (A-FRC) to produce the 16.7m colours. [...]
An 8-bit e-IPS LCD panel would have been better, but also would have cost more.
Viewing angles of the Dell U2412M are very good, as you would expect from a screen based on an e-IPS panel. [...] The panel is free from any off-centre contrast shift which you see from VA matrices, and this is why IPS technology is so highly regarded in the colour enthusiast and professional space. It is also free of the very noticeable contrast and colour tone shifts you see from TN Film panels vertically.
Serious about color? The only real option is a monitor with an IPS LCD, preferably one with 8 bits.
John Gruber calculates total Android tablet activations last quarter at 1.21 million Android tablets.
We’ll never stop sharing our memories. Or getting lost in a good book. We’ll always cook dinner and cheer for our favorite team. We’ll still go to meetings, make home movies, and learn new things. But how we do all this will never be the same.
What you see is my Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) desktop, in 960×600 HiDPI.
After reading about HiDPI modes in OS X Lion and how it handles HiDPI, I wanted to check it out for myself. My 17-inch MacBook Pro has a pixel format of 1920×1200. So what I could do is halve the pixels horizontally and vertically to see what HiDPI would look like.
I used Quartz Debug, set the User Interface Resolution to 2.0, and effectively doubled the resolution on my MacBook Pro. And when I say resolution, I am referring to pixel density, as in ppi. In OS X Lion the setting would be 960×600 HiDPI.
HiDPI used to be a tricky concept, but thanks to the iPhone 4 it is easier to understand and to explain. The iPhone 4 can be thought of as running in HiDPI. On iPhones prior to the iPhone 4, the 3.5-inch LCD had a pixel format of 480×320 (landscape). The LCD was upgraded to 960×640 in the iPhone 4. Everything stayed the same size, except they were all much much sharper. That’s what HiDPI offers on the Mac.
Without HiDPI, setting my MacBook Pro to 960×600 would result in icons and text that are very fuzzy. In 960×600 HiDPI everything, except for web text (I’ll get to this later), is crisp.
It seems parts of Snow Leopard is already tuned for HiDPI. Look at how sharp the menu items are compared to web text from DisplayBlog. Icons are razor sharp: the red, yellow, green buttons, the Safari icon, the Trash icon, etc. But if you look at the top right corner the Spotlight search icon, AirPort icon, and the clock text are not HiDPI ready: they “shrank” by one-half both horizontally and vertically. Same goes for the mouse pointer, the bottom-right window resize icon, and contents within the Finder window.
There is one other problem, and this is big: text on the web look horrible. Web text look identical to non-HiDPI 960×600 on my MacBook Pro. I’ve googled to find out how to make text on the web take advantage of HiDPI monitor settings without success. Even text on John Gruber’s excellent Daring Fireball isn’t HiDPI aware. Does anyone know of a way to take advantage of HiDPI for text on the web?
I’m sure Apple does. I’m certain because Apple makes web text look great on the iPhone 4. Sooner than later, Apple will need to apply that knowhow to web text on OS X. I’ve seen a glimpse of HiDPI on my MacBook Pro and the visual clarity is amazing. I look forward to iPhone 4-level clarity on my Mac in the not-so-distant future.
DisplayBlog is written and produced by Jin Kim. Subscribe via RSS.