Total Pageviews

An iPhone 5 Case Arrives Before the iPhone 5

September 12, 2012, 5:40 pm
By ROY FURCHGOTT

Before the announcement of the new iPhone 5 was made, the first protective case for the 5 arrived on my desk. I also got a news release promising me that another case was available as well.

How is it possible to build a case for a phone wrapped in secrecy?

The iPhone and many iPhone accessories are manufactured in Shenzhen, China. “There has always been a bit of a rumor mill around the companies in Shenzhen,” said Tim Hickman, whose company Hard Candy Holdings makes both cases I mentioned, one under the Hard Candy brand and one under the Gumdrop brand.

Mr. Hickman said Shenzhen manufacturers routinely pass around design information to the point where it is no longer an open secret but a strategy to attract customers like Mr. Hickman. “The factories have gone from, ‘Shhh, hey, buddy, look at what I have for you,' to making it part of their presentation,” he said.

Mr. Hickman said his company doesn't pay for design information or seek it out, but it will examine what it is offered. “We've literally had the information e-mailed to use blindly from several factories, so that's where the data comes from.”

Still, being first to market still holds risks. Mr. Hickman said his company prepared cases based on rumors of a new iPhone last October. “It was a swing and a miss,” he said. “We spent the money to make all of the tooling but didn't have the lead time to physically make cases.”

This time, though, he said his confidence level was higher. One reason is that a factory with a good track record said it could make cases for the iPhone 5, but rather than show the plans to Mr. Hickman, it had him send designs that the factory would modify.

He lowered the risk this time by ordering the tooling and 5,000 units of each case design, the $45 Gumdrop Drop Tech Series and the $40 Hard Candy Shock Drop. He chose not to ship them from China until he was certain that the phone was really available this time. “The product cost itself is not overly significant,” said Mr. Hickman. “The freight can be more than the iPhone case itself.”

Some of the cases â€" 3,000 of each were sold overseas, leaving 2,000 of each for the United States â€" will arrive here in about three days and should start shipping to customers on Sept. 21 or 22,  Mr. Hickman said.

How well the cases fit the phone, I can't say. I have the case, but no phone.



The iPhone 5: Pogue\'s First Impressions

September 12, 2012, 5:54 pm

Apple unveiled the new iPhone 5 today in San Francisco. As it turns out, most of the individual rumors about it were true - but even so, they didn't describe the whole package.

The new phone is the same width as the old one, but taller and thinner, as though someone ran over the old iPhone with a steamroller. When held horizontally, the four-inch screen has 16:9 proportions, a perfect fit for HDTV shows and a better fit for movies. The added screen length gives the Home screen room for a fifth row of icons.

The band around the edges is still silver on the white iPhone - but on the black model, it's black with a gleaming, reflective bezel. It looks awesome.

The back is aluminum now. The strips at the top and bottom of the back are made of glass, the better to allow the wireless signal through - but as a side benefit, you can now tell which way is front as you fish the thing out of your pocket.

The processor, with a new design, is twice as fast, according to Apple. And the iPhone has 4G LTE, meaning superfast Internet in select cities.

Not many rumor mills predicted the improvement in the camera. It's an eight-megapixel model with an f/2.4 aperture, meaning that it lets in a lot of light. The panorama mode is the best you've ever seen: as you swing the camera in an arc in front of you, a preview screen shows you the resulting panorama growing in real time. I took only two panorama shots in my limited time with the iPhone 5, but they came out crazy good.

The camera is also 40 percent faster to snap, it can recognize up to 10 faces (for focus and exposure purposes) and it can take still photos even while you're filming video.

The new phone also offers bette r battery life (eight hours of talk time or Web browsing), according to Apple (I haven't tested it yet). It also has noise cancellation both for outgoing and incoming sound. The phone is also ready for wideband audio - your callers won't have that tinny phone sound, but richer, more FM-radioish sound - but that requires the carrier to upgrade its network. The catch: no American carriers have announced plans to do that.

At first glance, there's really only one cause for pause: Apple has replaced the 30-pin charging/syncing connector that's been on every iPhone, iPad and iPod since 2003. According to Apple, it's simply too big for its new, super-thin, super-packed gadgets.

So with the iPhone and the new iPod models also announced today, Apple is replacing that inch-wide connector with a new, far smaller one it's calling Lightning.

 

I'll grudgingly admit that the Lightning connector is a great design: it clicks nicely into place, but it can be yanked o ut quickly. It goes in either way - there's no “right side up,” as there was with the old connector. And it's tiny, which is Apple's point.

Still, think of all those charging cables, docks, chargers, car adapters, hotel-room alarm clocks, speakers and accessories-hundreds of millions of gadgets that will no longer fit the iPhone.

Apple will sell two adapters, a simple plug adapter for $30 or one with a six-inch cable for $40, to accommodate accessories that can't handle the plug adapter.

That's way, way too expensive. These adapters should not be a profit center for Apple; they should be a gesture of kindness to those of us who've bought accessories based on the old connector. There's going to be a lot of grumpiness in iPhoneland, starting with me.

Overall, though, Apple seems to have put its focus on the important things you want in an app phone: size, shape, materials, sound quality, camera quality and speed (both operational and Internet data), and that's good. I'll have a full review once I've had some time to test the thing.

The new iPhone goes on sale on Sept. 21 for $200 with a two-year contract from Verizon, Sprint or AT&T. (That's the 16-gigabyte model. You can get 32 gigs for $300 or 64 gigs for $400.)

If you're content with last year's technology - or 2010's - you can also get the iPhone 4 free with a two-year contract, or the iPhone 4S (16 gigs) for $100 with contract.

The holiday shopping season has begun.



TimesCast Tech: The New iPhone

  • Previous Post Ask Us Your Questions About Apple's Announcements


    • Film Shown on Russian TV Ties Exiled Tycoon to Pussy Riot

    September 12, 2012, 3:57 pm
    By ANNA KORDUNSKY

    A film shown Tuesday on the state-owned Rossiya 1 channel claimed to have found the mastermind behind the Pussy Riot controversy: Boris A. Berezovsky, the exiled Russian tycoon living in London. The second installment of “Provocateurs,” a film by the journalist Arkady Mamontov, suggests that Mr. Berezovsky financed the punk band in order to destabilize Russian society.

    “Provocateurs 2,” the second installment of a film shown on state-owned TV in Russia.

    The film quotes a Moscow-based religious activist, Alexey Veshnyak, saying that Mr. Berezovsky had been plotting the punk band's performance in Christ the Savior Cathedral since at least 2011, providing money and strategic guidance. Mr. Veshnyak says that Mr. Berezovsky shared his plans with him in London that February, pointing to photos of the band member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and her husband, Pyotr Verzilov, and saying, “We will soon start acting in the church's direction.”

    Mr. Mamontov also cited a letter said to have been obtained from an aspiring singer whose name is not disclosed “for safety reasons.” The letter describes the young woman's brief encounter with a recruiter advertising a mysterious Western-financed project about five years ago:

    “The project was supposed to appeal to young people in order to use these people for other goals like a herd of fanatics. The clients, it turned out, were some Americans, and they were ready to pay good money. When I wondered if they were afraid of Putin at all, they replied that there's enough money for a revolution.”

    The film also claims that internationa l celebrities are being lavishly paid to publicly support the band, using funds from Mr. Berezovsky funneled through a Britain-based public relations firm.

    Pro-Kremlin commentators have long suggested that Russia's opposition is manipulated from behind the scenes by Mr. Berezovsky, a longtime political enemy of President Vladimir V. Putin. His fortune is estimated at $800 million even after his legal loss to Roman A. Abramovich last week.



    Latest Updates on Rage Over Anti-Islam Film

    September 12, 2012, 12:46 pm
    By ROBERT MACKEY

    The Lede is following the angry protests and violence in the Muslim world which began on Tuesday in response to a film trailer posted on YouTube that insults Islam's prophet.



    Obscure Film Mocking Muslim Prophet Sparks Anti-U.S. Protests in Egypt and Libya

    September 11, 2012, 7:25 pm
    By ROBERT MACKEY and LIAM STACK

    Video of Egyptian protesters on the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo ripping the American flag apart.

    Angered by reports in the Egyptian media that members of the Coptic Christian diaspora in the United States had produced a crude film mocking the Muslim prophet, protesters climbed the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday and tore down the American flag. Later, a Libyan security official told Reuters that armed militiamen had attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi to express their rage at a 14-minute trailer for the English-language film which was posted on YouTube in July.

    The trailer attracted little att ention until last week, when a version dubbed into Arabic was posted on the same YouTube channel and then copied and viewed tens of thousands of times.

    While it remains unclear who produced the film, an Egyptian-American Copt known for his broadsides against Muslims drew attention to it last week in an e-mail newsletter publicizing the latest publicity stunt of the Florida pastor Terry Jones, reviled in the Muslim world for burning copies of the Koran. Reached by telephone in Florida, a representative of Mr. Jones seemed unaware of the film, but hours later the pastor sent The Lede a statement by e-mail in which he complained of the attack on the embassy in Cairo and announced plans to screen the trailer for the film on Tuesday night, saying that it “reveals in a satirical fashion the life of Muhammad.”

    The Coptic activist, Morris Sadek, did not respond to a request for an interview, but he is an ally of Mr. Jones and his blog f eatures photographs of the two men at a tiny, anti-Islam protest outside the White House in June. Later, he told The Associated Press that he planned screenings of the film.

    Although Mr. Sadek did not claim in his e-mail promoting Mr. Jones to have produced the movie - which dramatizes the life of Muhammad, incorporating scenes based on slurs about him that are often repeated by Islamophobes - three days after he passed around a link to the film's trailer, a Cairo newspaper reported that the leader of an Egyptian political party had “denounced the production of the film with the participation of vengeful Copts, accompanied by the extremist priest Terry Jones.”

    The same day, a scene from the film - in which an actor playing a buffoonish caricature of the prophet Muhammad calls a donkey “the first Muslim animal” - was broadcast on the Egyptian television channel Al-Nas by the host Sheikh Khaled Abdalla.

    Video of a scene from a film mocking the Muslim prophet as shown on Egyptian television on Sunday.

    Last year, the Egyptian-British journalist and blogger Sarah Carr wrote, “Sheikh Khaled Abdalla is part of a school of particularly shrill religious demagogues who turn every possible event into an attack on Islam.” She added that Sheikh Khaled regularly attacked Egypt's Coptic Christian community.

    The Egyptian media reports appear to have drawn much more attention to the obscure film trailer, which was posted on YouTube by someone using the name Sam Bacile who failed to respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

    As Menna Alaa reported for The Egypt Independent, photographs and video posted online showed the protesters at the embassy in Cairo on Tuesday ripping the American flag apart and raising a black, jihadist flag with the words, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.”

    The Cairene blogger who writes as Zeinobia repo rted there were “also pro-Al Qaeda chants unfortunately,” which was particularly striking on the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

    Mostafa Hussein, a psychiatrist and blogger, pointed to a photograph that showed that the protesters had also scrawled the name Osama bin Laden on a sign outside the embassy.

    In response to the protests, diplomats from the besieged compound said in a statement: “The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims â€" as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.” Later, the embassy's official Twitter feed condemned both the provocative film and the attack on the compound.

    Zeinobia also reported that confusion about the origins of the film was so general that one group of fundamentalist Muslims was “calling for another huge protest at the embassy of Netherlands demanding its closure because the Dutch government is producing an insult film against Islam.” Dutch diplomats responded with a statement denying these claims, she noted.

    The Egyptian blogger who writes as The Big Pharaoh noted that one sign wielded by a protester outside the American embassy in Cairo called for “the expulsion of Coptic Diaspora from Egypt.”



    Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)