This leads me to think that these new units may require iOS 4.1 at minimum, and the new firmware could therefore be made available to iPhones (and older generations of iPod Touches — ok now that’s a weird plural) on the same day.

Of course, the new units may be shipped with a particular version that won’t be made available to other devices, as it was with the iPad: iPhone OS 3.2 was never made available for iPhones, and iPads won’t see iOS 4 until the fall. Apple may also release iOS 4 for iPad on Wednesday, or give a release date. Or perhaps introduce iPad 2 whilst lowering the price of the current iPad, probably giving a refund to angry customers (it has already happened with the original iPhone.) Besides, Apple would get to use the line they love so much: our competitors are still trying to copy version 1, and we have already released version 2.

Personally, I don’t care what new hardware is on the horizon. I just want iOS 4.1 for the iPhone and I want it to make my 3G decent again.

I still think that Apple shouldn’t have allowed 3G units to run iOS 4. The advantages are negligible: aside from folders, unified inbox and very little extra things, the list of what’s missing is huge. No multitasking, because the phone just can’t handle it; no wallpaper, because the phone just can’t handle drop shadows in real time (well, why not pre-render them once?); no screen lock (why, Apple, WHY?) and so on. Latest news is that it won’t even have Game Center, but then again, most games will probably soon drop support for the 3G entirely. The question remains: why did they let us upgrade? My educated guess is that they can push iAds to our devices, but I cringe at the thought of how pathetic the experience must be. We’re not even getting wallpapers, and they really expect us to navigate ads that are “as fun as apps”? Give me a break.

Going back to 3.2 is possible, but it’s a messy and unsupported procedure, not to mention that most apps have been updated to run on iOS 4 and that can be difficult to circumvent. Sticking with iOS 4 is a painful experience on its own.

This is not the geek in me who wants the latest toy, trust me. I do admit that the iPhone 4 is nice, especially coming from a sorry-I-don’-t-do-videos-at-all iPhone 3G. I am not making up excuses with myself to go and buy an iPhone 4. The truth is the 3G has gotten so slow that it’s impossible to use. I honestly hope I will never need to make an emergency call with it, because I may as well start crying for help instead of wasting time.

It has to be said that not all 3G units are created equal, it seems. Some people have very few problems, while others have pretty much given up. A friend of mine was so fed up that he ditched it and got an HTC Desire (which is a very sweet phone, by the way.)

The general opinion, however, is that iOS on the iPhone 3G, well, sucks. Remedies popped up all over the web, ranging from confirmable attempts, such as disabling Spotlight, to the voodoo ritual of  the “double hard reboot” to clear any leftover cache (which kind of works, but why do it twice? nobody really knows; then again, it’s a ritual.) It seems that a simple reboot does not really help. Rebooting normally apparently saves the state of the phone onto the flash memory as a disk image, similarly to the “deep sleep” feature of modern Macbooks. The hard reboot is much more brutal, and works better.

After a while, though, things start going wrong again. Be it an hour or two days, the slowness creeps back. It becomes unbearable. Sure, you can do the hard reboot again, you can close any Safari window before moving on to other things, but at the end of the day you may be in a rush to do something with your phone, and that’s when Murphy’s law strikes. The problem, in fact, is not just a general sense of sluggishness: it’s that it literally freezes up for a random period of time. Sometimes it’s a few seconds, other times it can stay in its coma for a solid two or three minutes. Again: I am not making this up, and this may be different from phone to phone, but that’s my experience. What’s worst is that it happens in a completely random fashion, and I cannot reproduce it on demand. Sometimes it happens when I’m writing a text message, other times when I’m using Safari, or even as I’m opening up the Settings app to put the phone into airplane mode for the night.

The only consistency I can mention is that gaving the keyboard on the screen makes the phone especially prone to sleepiness. I am able to blindly write a full text message; thankfully, at least with that, it usually catches up and doesn’t miss anything; however, I usually end up making several typos because, being unresponsive, it gives me no suggestions until it wakes up.

Yesterday night I wanted to show a website — ZooBorns — to my father. Bad idea. I was over wi-fi, but bandwidth was limited because my iMac was busy with the network. After noticing it was slow at loading data (it was exclusively a network problem up to that point), I went to the Settings app to disable wi-fi, and it fell asleep after I tapped “Wi-fi”: it had even made the item blue because it had recognized the tap, but it took about 45 seconds to load the next page. I disabled it, tapped the home button, and re-opened Safari. IT started to load over 3G and all was fine, until I scrolled down. I understand that it’s a huge page with lots of pictures, and I can live with the fact that I get the “checkered background” as it’s re-rendering parts of it. But if the whole phone falls completely asleep for over three minutes, and fails to respond to any tap or button press — effectively making it impossible to even force a shutdown — well, it’s a bit too much. I can tell that the phone is completely numb because it doesn’t even dim the screen, which should happen after one minute of inactivity (yes, I am that conservative when it comes to battery life.)

So, are 3G units destined to be useless? No, not necessarily. I think that, while the hardware isn’t up to par with its younger siblings, it can still be decent. I think that iOS 4 has some fundamental flaws on 3G, and maybe even on the 3GS and the iPhone 4; on those units, though, it may not be as easily visible. Of course, it may also be that the problems in question are limited to the 3G. I am talking about memory leaks. Something is extremely wrong in the way memory is handled in iOS 4, but this is my own speculation. I do not develop for the iOS platform, and I don’t know much about its internals. Yet, I have a very concrete way of seeing that memory isn’t released properly: MemoryInfo. It’s a cheap little app that shows the most memory-hungry processes running on an iPhone, and automatically frees memory by killing those processes that it deems killable. Well, with 3.2 my inactive memory count usually went from 7-10 to 35 MB; now it goes from 1-2 to 45-50 MB, even though it quickly decreases to 30 MB free again without even exiting the app.

Whether the culprit is Safari or iOS itself, a memory leak is occurring somewhere for sure, and it manifests itself at random times with freezes that can make everything difficult. Apple is investigating the problem, and that’s a good thing. I’m not sure what their approach will be, but given that the OS is going to grow bigger anyway, they could simply allow it to swap on the flash memory. Right now iOS has no support for virtual memory: the actual RAM is the only memory it can use. Why they decided to do that beats me: sure, smaller units with just 8 GB of flash space can’t really reserve that much for potential swap, but even 5% would be an acceptable trade-off. Back in the old days of Linux, the rule to calculate how much space to reserve for the swap partition was: no less than twice as much as the physical RAM. With 128 MB of physical memory, an extra 400 MB would do wonders, and it wouldn’t even be too slow. It would certainly be faster than using a spinning hard drive, anyway. Let’s see what they come up with. In the meantime, enjoy a sad but true video:

For the sake of completeness, here are the machines by Apple I have owned over the better part of the last decade: iMac G3 “Blue Dalmatian”, iBook G3, Airport “Snow” Base Station, PowerMac Dual G4, iBook G4, iMac Intel, MacBook, MacBook Pro, iPhone 3G. What can I say, I am very satisfied with their products, even though I have nothing against alternatives: my current wireless network is provided by a Netgear router and a D-Link access point, for instance.

I didn’t get the original iPhone because it was never officially available in Italy, and I didn’t want to play the cat and mouse game of jailbreaking to make it work. I got the unlocked 3G in September 2008, and have been quite happy with it. Sure, it did have a few strange limitations (tethering, just to name one; something that any Nokia phone has been able to do for years when it was simply called “using your phone as a modem”), but I was quite happy.

Things changed slightly with the introduction of the iPhone 3GS. It was essentially the same phone, other than better hardware specs, the ability to shoot video and a digital compass. Not a big deal for me, and I never felt the need to upgrade, as I knew it was just an incremental upgrade and that the next one would be big. I was however disappointed when I noticed that iPhone OS 3.0 made my iPhone 3G a bit slower. Ah well.

Fast forward about a year, and the iPhone 4 is introduced, together with iOS 4. (Incidentally, I personally find the name iOS hideous; why not call it Apple Mobile OS or something like that?) It was clear that people with an iPhone 3G were considered pretty much an afterthought. Our hardware is, apparently, not powerful enough for multitasking, for background pictures (?!) and for the screen orientation lock (?!?), so why update? Folders, unified inbox and some other minor things. Oh, and iAds. There is enough power for that, isn’t there?

I do realize that iPhones are subsidized in the US, and that people with a 3G have a contract that’s about to expire; that they can therefore jump to the iPhone 4 bandwagon for a very low entry price. However, testing iOS 4 on iPhone 3G units would have been very much appreciated by those of us who cannot, or do not want to, upgrade.

See, iOS 4 made my iPhone 3G so slow that I am considering going to a random store a get one of those extra-basic €19.90 black and white phones. Ok, maybe it’s not that radical, but it’s frustrating. While swiping across the menu is faster (caching, maybe?), everything else is slow. Sometimes it takes up to 15 seconds for the phone to wake up from sleep and start responding to my touch. I get an SMS, I tap ‘view’, and it takes at least 5-6 seconds to show it. Forget about snapping a quick picture, for the Camera app has gotten very, very lazy. Mind you, my 16 GB iPhone 3G has 5 GB free and I only have 48 apps on it, so I’m not sure what’s the culprit here. I tried restoring rather than upgrading, and then did a double hard reset; that seems to help, but after 12 hours, it feels like it’s reverting to being slow as hell.

It seems that nobody cared to see how older units perform. Which leads me to the iPhone 4 itself. It is a fact that Apple appears to favor appearance over functionality at times: take the Mighty Mouse, or the Magic Mouse. The iPhone 4 is gorgeous, elegant, sleek and sexy. But it’s amazing messy.

The front and the back are entirely made of glass. The same glass used for helicopters’ windows, it seems; however, the latter is as thick as a whole iPhone. The result? Units cracking and crashing from falling from a couple of feet, or even as low as one foot.

Then you get the amazing signal loss if you happen to short-circuit the two antennas on the lower-left corner. This would be quite a mess for me, because even though I’m right-handed, I’m left-eared. I just can’t use a phone on my right ear, it feels extremely unnatural to me. Then again, I also unscrew bottles’ caps with my left hand and I would fail miserably if I were to use my right hand. In any case, if you bridge the two antennas with your fingers, you’re doomed: signal goes to zero and calls drop. There are many videos demonstrating the problem. Considering that I also hold my iPhone 3G with my left hand and use my right index finger as a “stylus” of sorts, I’d be unable to use the thing.

Who’s forcing me to buy one, you ask? Nobody, and in any case it won’t be available in Europe until late Summer. Yet it’s amazing that such a big issue was not discovered. While it is true that all cell phones — or any radio device, actually — will have a harder time staying connected if something interferes with its antenna, it just should not be this bad in every day use. Steve Jobs’ alleged own response is that people are just holding it wrong. Might be, but it’s just the way people hold it in commercials, and how even he himself used it during the keynote last month. Perhaps it’s a plot to sell the infamous $30 rubber bumpers, which sound like a good idea anyway, considering the glass issue.

There is speculation of a software fix coming as soon as tomorrow, but many are skeptical about it. It feels like a hardware problem indeed, but it seems that the same behavior is appearing on iPhone 3G and 3GS units as well, so there might indeed be some software component. Perhaps the system fails to increase the transmission power when the signal is attenuated? Or maybe it just shuts down the radio subsystem whenever a shortcircuit is detected on the iPhone 4?

It would also be very interesting to understand why this happens when the gap itself is bridged. If the two antennas are made of metal, they are conductive all along. The bug should therefore be reproducible by touching them even on distant points.

In any case, we will see. I just hope that they make the performance on the iPhone 3G somewhat better, or I may just have to go back to 3.1.3.

I happen to live in the Province of the Empire, in a country I oftentimes call “the third world of technology.” No way to rent movies online – or through the mail, for that matter –, no Pandora.com or Last.fm to easily find new music (the latter is available on a paid-membership basis; the former is simply forbidden), no iBooks when the iPad comes out, and so on. I live in Italy.

I am also a happy Mac and iPhone user. Not an evangelist, not anymore at least: I will praise how durable and enjoyable Apple products are, but I won’t urge anybody to buy them. I will, however, talk about them to people who ask me. After close to ten years as a Mac user (I do remember MacOS 9.2 and MacOS X 10.0) and years of previous experience with Linux systems, Apple has become an invaluable provider of my daily computing. OS X allows me tinker with the underlying UNIX system with ease while being extremely user-friendly with the rest of the user interface. As a web developer, it’s the closest thing to perfection I can think of.

When the iPad was announced, I was following Steve Jobs’s keynote through Engadget. I gradually turned from skeptic to disappointed: what, a big iPhone? A few hours later, a friend of mine summarized such feelings as: “I was hoping for a laptop replacement, and he just announced a tray. An iTray.”

A few days later, however, an article on a blog shone light on the matter: most of us computer people probably wouldn’t have much for a device like that. I’d personally much rather use my 13-inch MacBook Pro rather than an iPad, as it’s a full-fledged computer onto which I can install any program I want, with which I can multitask and that has a physical keyboard. I do sometimes use my MBP on the sofa, and while I agree that it’s not the most perfect experience, I’m willing to trade comfort for power.

People who do not have complex computing needs, though, will love the iPad. Take my father: he inherited the last PC I used, a glorious machine based on an AMD Duron 850 MHz CPU and 512 MB of memory. It runs Windows XP, and it’s far exceeded its time. Components keep breaking, and they are becoming hard to find. Every replacement has to be second-hand, and considering the higher price compared to current parts, it’s probably best to just ditch the machine entirely and build a new one. That was the plan, until the iPad was announced.

See, my father isn’t very computer-savvy. In fact, all he does is using Firefox to browse the web and little more. He doesn’t even care about productivity suites, he just reads a few online newspaper, peeks at The Daily Kitten, browses YouTube and visits the occasional website that he might hear about. He doesn’t even use email, in fact his email address is forwarded to mine so any messages he might receive from his bank will be taken care of. Also, since his computer started acting very flaky, he barely turns it on at all; and he doesn’t like sitting at the desk for long, and has no intention of learning how a computer works, therefore he is often confused by the interface.

Here are the three alternatives:

1. he can spend about €350 for a new PC that will be possibly left to dust
2. he can spend about €550 for a Mac Mini that will also be possibly left to dust and which will require him to get used to OS X
3. he can spend no less than €450 for a cheap laptop whose battery will last a couple of hours and which will have a learnng curve to be climbed
4. he can spend some €450 for the smallest iPad available (I think that that’s the pricing it will get in Europe), which he can use on his sofa, outside and anywhere else there is a wirless network, and that will take little time to get used to

He has also been saying that he wants a digital frame – and that kind of scares me, considering that I have 40 GB worth of pictures and that I will be the one who has to go through them with him – and that’s something else that an iPad might double as.

The iPad is, effectively, a closed environment. Users cannot install anything they want on it, and Apple can censor and refuse any content it doesn’t see fit. In return, the experience is smooth and without hurdles. What works, works; what doesn’t work, just doesn’t work. Those of us who see that as a threat to freedom should talk with computer illiterates. They would be amazed at how many people are perfectly fine with the concept of “you just can’t, period.” For them, even the simple lack of multitasking can be extremely beneficial; and that applies to some of “us” too.

Even tinkerers like me can be perfectly fine with closed systems, once the “threat to freedom” argument is put aside. I have been using an iPhone 3G since September 2008, and aside from minor annoyances, it’s served me very well. Sure, it would be great to have a wifi stumbler with GPS tracking support, but I can live without it. Also, tethering has been finally enabled with my cellular operator, so that’s not an issue anymore for me. And while the lack of multitasking can be annoying at times, the increase in battery life allows me to get over it. Of course, everyone has different needs, and I certainly do not question that; but that’s why there are alternatives.

For instance, I have read complaints by people who bought iPods and were extremely disappointed to see that they needed to install iTunes on Windows, or were just out of luck when using Linux. I think that such complaints are petty, pointless and naïve: the fact that you haven’t made any research prior to purchasing a product does not mean that the product is mediocre. The real problem is that your workflow isn’t flexible enough to fit said product, whether by choice  (“I don’t want to install iTunes”) or by need (“there is no iTunes for Linux”.) But that’s a problem with your workflow, not a problem with the product. The good news, however, is that there are plenty of other MP3 players that can be mounted as if they were USB drives and will read any files that are copied onto them. And they’re also cheaper than iPods!

The same applies to music: songs can be purchased from many online stores other than the iTunes Store, and they will play just the same. If you are old-style like me, you can also still buy physical CDs, with a printed booklet and whatnot.

Some commenters are astonished that the same people who bash Microsoft have a different attitude towards Apple. That may be true – Microsoft has a history of forcing their products onto the computer industry at large, whilst Apple’s influence is recent and limited to specific media industries –, but the truth is that even the most bitter anti-Microsoft people eventually grow up and take up a healthier “live and let live” attitude: I do not need Windows, I don’t use it; OpenOffice perfectly replaces anything I might need to do with Office; and so on.

Now, if Apple manages to modernize the press industry, then it’s certainly good for them. Rest assured that DRM won’t last long: media is bound to be globalized, and I am confident that in a few years producers will realize that they will make much more money by allowing everyone on the planet to buy their movies/songs/books without resorting to artificial boundaries; pecunia non olet, said the Romans. By the time a movie is released in another part of the planet, those who were waiting for it might as well have gotten it illegally: why not cash that money?

And incidentally, Apple is often an innovator. It was the first company to believe in mass-distribution of music over the ‘net, and many others followed suit; it was the first to believe in having computers with only USB ports (the glorious iMac); it was the first to provide the masses with a usable graphical user interface (Windows 1, released two years later, was little more than MS-DOS with a colored border around the screen); and so on. Who knows what will happen with Light Peak…