iPhone 5 will have a dual core (A5) processor, 1GB of RAM, a slightly larger screen edge-to-edge but approximately the same form factor. Camera will be upgraded to 8MP.

It will come with an aluminum back.

Available in 16, 32 and for the first time, 64GB sizes. White and Black.

And then things started getting interesting. I heard about the Fujifilm X100 around CES (or was it Photokina?) earlier this year and it sounded pretty special, even without any actual units capable of producing images, people were going nuts over it. Sporting a proper Fujinon 35mm-equivalent F2 fixed lens, this was a totally different point and shoot. A range finder camera with an innovative prism allowing it to work as either a straight optical or an electronic viewfinder. And man, it looked great.

Unfortunately, once the hardware started shipping, the reviews weren’t off the charts. With a $1200 price tag, I’d kind of expect this little gem to be the best thing short of a Leica M9 you can fit in your jacket. While the image quality is great, the performance seems a little average. Noticeable shutter lag and some confusing controls make for a fiddly experience and more than likely, some lost shots. Then again, I’ve been eating up CoffeeGeek‘s reviews of his X100 and he’s making it sound pretty sweet. They’re also, apparently not available due to manufacturing shortages in Japan. If you’ve got one, consider yourself very lucky.

Enter the GF2. I did a bunch of reading, comparing some of the different available cameras like the Olympus E-PL2, the Canon G12 and the S95 as well as the new Nikon P7000 and Lumix LX5 and the Sony NEX3. The Micro Four Thirds (m4:3) cameras were looking more and more interesting. Despite an aging sensor, the Panasonic GF2 had some very innovative features. Not all reviewers were keen on the touch screen, but I was willing to give it a shot (or several thousand).

One big advantage over the fixed zooms was the interchangeable lens format. I wanted to keep the camera as compact as possible while providing a solid, fast lens. My primary focal range when I’m walking around with my D300 is a 24mm (38mm equivalent on full frame) which mapped very closely to the Panasonic 20mm F1.7. As a pancake lens, it’s quite compact, though not quite as svelte as the 14mm F2.5 pancake that came with it.

In addition to some processing improvements over the GF1, the GF2 eschews many of its predecessors’ hardware controls in favor of a very well-implemented touch screen system. This was a concern of mine and something some reviewers haven’t been too kind about, proclaiming the GF2 a  “dumbed-down” camera. In practice though, I find the touch-screen both very intuitive and surprisingly fast to access frequently-used controls. The touch screen controls are very customizable via the Q-menu functions allowing you to set your preferred controls on a dock-like, scrollable menu. Augmenting the touch screen is a command dial which does dual-duty as an extra selection button. In manual mode, the command dial toggles between F-stops and shutter speed. In aperture priority, between aperture and exposure adjustment.

It is also Very Fast. Not just for a point-and-shoot, either. The GF2 is under a second from power-on to recording a shot. Shutter response is instantaneous with no noticeable lag. Focus is quick and intelligent. The 23-point AF system has a bunch of features I haven’t really played with yet. I did play a little with the focus-tracking system where you select a subject on the touch screen and the camera magically keeps it in focus as it moves around.

My one beef is the Q-menu button does double duty as a programmable Function button. There’s one other button on the top of the camera that serves as a “noob” button for novices, the GF2′s “Intelligent Auto” button would be a lot more useful if it were programmable to something else. I don’t see myself ever using iA mode. Maybe a firmware update will provide a programming option. Please. In any case, the one programmable button means having to use the screen to access the Q-menu feature if you want to program the button to do something else.

Image quality from the supplied 14mm lens is excellent. The optional 20mm pancake lens is even better, providing great low-light performance and impressive bokeh. Lens distortion on both lenses is surprisingly minimal. Noise-levels at ISO 800 are stellar. Even up to 1600, you can take a decent shot – the Foveon X3 sensor giving a nice film-like grain. Color noise is acceptable and easily removed in a decent image editor.

Yes. I like this camera a lot. Having spent a week with it in a bunch of different lighting situations, I’m more than happy with the pictures that come out of it. I’m really happy to have a portable, well-built camera to carry around.

See some more pics here.

Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.

Jon Bon Jovi, via MSNBC reprinting the Sunday Times (paywalled)

A popular recent quote from a man who’s seen a thousand cities and rocked them all. I’m not a fan of Bon Jovi’s music, but I can’t really argue with what he’s saying in the above-linked article. There is a whole generation of people who think music is supposed to sound like it’s on YouTube.^[1]

The comparative high-quality of compressed music available in the iTunes Music Store and elsewhere is considered reference-quality for most people. As portable music goes, the quality of 320kbps, VBR-encoded AAC files or MP3s is pretty damned good. On a good pair of headphones or a high-end system though, the limitations start to become apparent.

When I first started listening to compressed music at the turn of the millenium, many people compressed around 96kbps. I tended to compress at higher levels and encoded my music in 160kbps rips from MusicMatch transferred to my Creative Audio Nomad Jukebox. A clunky, hard-drive-based music player with a horrible interface that I loved the hell out of at the time. People thought I was crazy for using such “high quality” mp3s.

As the years went on, I realized that the harsh encodings of 2000 sounded really bad on my improving audio gear. So I upped the bitrate and transcoded everything at 192kbps. This happened again later and I jumped to 256 and then 320. Now it’s happening again. I’m actually listening to physical media as my preferred media format. And re-ripping a large chunk of my library in “lossless” format. If it were available, I’d buy everything in SACD or some emergent blu-ray audio format, were such a thing to exist.

To FLAC or ALE?

Now that I’m considering doing the Lossless step, I’m faced with a somewhat difficult choice. FLAC or Apple Lossless Encoder? I think the “correct” choice would be FLAC, an open-source audio compression codec. Unfortunately, it doesn’t integrate very nicely into iTunes. There are plugins for it, but they’re hacky and Apple is bound to break them with every iTunes upgrade.

So, the great dilemma of the modern age: does convenience trump portability? In this case, for me, I think it does. There are tools to move from Apple Lossless (ALE) to FLAC (DoubleTwist for one) that should serve well enough if I ever do have to ditch the Apple platform at the cost of a few hours of scripting and re-encoding. The other “advantage” of ALE is that it’ll happily play on my iDevices if I ever want to take some with me. And iTunes makes it relatively easy to make lossy copies of ALE files for transport. If there’s another piece of music software out there that can do this with FLACs, I’d love to hear about it.

The Setup

I’ll be listening to music in the following places:

• My computer
• Home system (direct via SPDIF)
• My laptop with headphones (streamed via wifi)
• My living room (streamed via Airport Express)
• Anywhere else on my iPhone or iPad (via homesharing)

When I’m roaming, I’ll have my iPhone or iPad and headphones. In all of the above locations around my house, I want lossless audio served up from my main computer. On my iPhone and iPad, I want that converted down to some decent, high-quality compressed format like AAC 320VBR.

iTunes provides an option to convert music on portable players to AAC 128Kbps on sync. Unfortunately, this is woefully inadequate for me. This means storing two copies of music in my iTunes library: one uncompressed and one compressed. The best instructions on how to do this that I’ve found are on iLounge from 2004 (found an updated version from 2011 with no real new info). They recommend converting before sync and then deleting the copies again after you’re done. The old option on the iPod “classic” to “manually manage music” is no longer present on the iOS devices.

Another option is to keep multiple iTunes libraries. One for lossless streaming, the other for syncing to devices. This is not super groovy as it means shutting down iTunes and restarting it depending on what I’m doing. I also lose a lot of metadata by having separate libraries. Play counts and ratings in one library don’t automatically get linked up without some very clever (probably impossible) AppleScripting.

Speaking of AppleScript, I should probably mention Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. He’s got a ton of useful automation for all kinds of iTunes tasks including a script for re-encoding lossless tracks onto an iPod capable of letting your manage your music collection. (probably means iPod classic)

Where to from here?

I’m in limbo. I’m currently ripping tracks to lossless in iTunes and removing said tracks from my iPod synced playlists. Every disc I rip gets removed from my iPhone and iPad. I’m likely not going to replace everything in my library. Some things I just don’t have. Others probably wouldn’t benefit hugely from a lossless conversion due to weak recording. I’m toying with the idea of using my laptop for device syncing, copying compressed versions to that machine and keeping my desktop server as the lossless library.

Help me! I’d love to hear your suggestions, no matter how outlandish. I am more than willing to throw iTunes to the kerb for a decent home streaming solution.

[1] – Sony killed the music industry in the 80s with The Walkman and tape decks so maybe it’s just the most-recent “death of the music industry”.

Performance and Battery

The Streak kind of surprised me after I got Froyo running on it. The 1GHz Snapdragon processor (source: streaksmart) feels pretty responsive. With 512MB of RAM, there’s a lot of room for applications. The UI (with LauncherPro) is snappy.

Running the benchmarking app Quadrant, with DJ_Steve’s StreakDroid 1.8.1, I was able to get a score of 1267 which I hear is pretty good. I certainly have no complaints about the speed of applications running on the Streak.

The battery feels a little weak under use. Having a 30 minute Skype conversation while connected to 3G almost killed my charge (after running a day on standby). I tend to nurse the battery by keeping the Streak in airplane mode most of the time and only turning on wifi or 3G when I need to connect to something. If I were using this as a phone, that’d be a royal pain. The battery’s replaceable in this, so you could have a backup, but with the annoyance of pulling the back plate off, that’d feel like a pretty big failure.

The charging cable’s a proprietary 30pin edge connector similar to an iPhone dock plug. I assume they did this for connection to the AV Dock accessory, but it’s a real pain in the ass as the Streak only comes with one (short) cable in the box. With a battery like this, I’d want to stow chargers in my vehicles and carry one in my laptop bag. If you’re planning on taking this on a long trip and expect to be able to read a book, listen to music, watch a video and do some communications with it, you’d better bring some extra batteries, a cable and a power-source.

The Form

For starters, it’s the first touch-screen device I’ve used that’s comfortable to thumb type on in portrait mode. The iPad is too wide for this, and I usually turn it to landscape for finger typing. The iPhone is too small to comfortably type on in portrait mode, though I keep trying to do it and botching it. I find the iPhone uncomfortable in landscape. The 5″ screen of the Dell Streak actually works really well, especially after disabling Swype.

The soft buttons on the Streak are stuck in landscape mode, suggesting the device is meant to be used in that orientation most of the time. This is weird. For reading web pages and viewing text, portrait is so much more comfortable. The lockscreen even defaults to landscape and won’t reorient into portrait if you’re holding it that way so you end up reading the clock sideways all the time. That’s annoying and feels kind of silly. Also, the Streak is possibly the only Android device without a search button. I have to say, I think the search button is unnecessary so I don’t mind its omission.

The case is predominantly hard black plastic with a removable metal plate on the back housing the SIM, microSD slot and battery. Removal is awkward but reseating the little metal tabs back into their slots is even trickier. There is no indication that the plate is fully-seated. It just sort of slides into place with no click to let you know it’s all the way in. I think I’ve already bent at least one of the tabs that hold it in during the many times I had to pull the battery during my firmware upgrade trials.

Still, fully assembled, the Streak actually looks pretty good. I got no shortage of oohs and ahhs when I pulled it out at my local bar and passed it around. People asked if it was a phone. If it was for reading books. If it was a little computer. I even ended up in a conversation about Android with a non-techie friend who showed me her phone when she recognized I was running the same OS and Launcher as her. Even some of the tech-jaded people in California on a recent visit would take a look and ask about it and give it a whirl.

It’s weird, but I actually think the Streak was a bigger hit than my iPhone 4 which, from a hardware angle, is decidedly sexier, in my opinion. The build quality is certainly an order of magnitude higher and I can buy a decent case for the iPhone.

The Radios

The Streak has a capable GSM/HSDPA Qualcomm radio in it. It’ll operate in quad-band GSM or in one of two 3G HSDPA modes (source: gsmarena) depending on your carrier and firmware. Speedtest.net’s application gave between 1000 and 2500kbps download and 50-250kbps up on Rogers. Having used some terminal clients remotely, I can say that the connection is perfectly acceptable. With Froyo, the Streak works as a wifi hotspot as well so you can use it to power a portable personal network.

The Wifi radios are not exactly state-of-the-art though. The best the Streak can manage is 802.11g and it seems to have a hard time staying connected for more than about an hour on a WPA connection. I had to open an 802.11g network in my house to support it since everything I use now has 802.11n. Range appears to be adequate though.

A funny thing happened the first time I turned on Bluetooth on the streak to pair a headset. It was sitting on my desk and I powered on the radio. I have a bunch of bluetooth and wifi devices on my work desk, keyboards, mice, trackpads and my main computer, a Mac Pro uses bluetooth for its keyboard and trackpad. When I turned on bluetooth on the streak, the bluetooth radio in my Mac stopped working and flashed an error in the little bluetooth indicator in the menu bar. I had to reboot the computer to get bluetooth working again. That’s some radio! Presumably it works fine if you keep it away from your computers.

The Screen

It has been maligned across the web as being too hard to view from an angle. Honestly, I don’t find the 5″ TFT gorilla glass LCD that bad. How often do you look at these things off-axis? My one beef is that the screen’s resolution should be higher. Not sure if it’s a limitation of the original operating system it shipped with or if it was to keep the price down but it should really have more pixels. Touch controls feel precise and colors are reasonably vibrant even if the temperature is a tad cool.

The Sound

The sound hardware in the Streak was pretty disappointing the first time I plugged in the provided in-ear headphones that came with it. Powering up Winamp or Songbird, when you first hit play on a song with any quiet passage, you can hear the audio hardware come online with a noticeable hiss. Signal-to-noise must be extremely low as the white-noise of the audio circuitry is easy to hear in the background of all but the loudest music. It’s less annoying when using it for Skype or watching Youtube video, but that’s hardly demanding. I will say that the built-in speaker can crank out some volume which is nice if you’re showing off a youtube video in a room. Not much else I can say about that, other than if you like quality sound, this is probably not going to make you happy.

The Cameras

The Dell Streak has both a front-facing and a rear camera. The rear camera is a 5 megapixel shooter with two LED flashes mounted next to it. It’s a pretty decent sensor and lens combination and I do like the pictures that come out of it… when I can get the camera to fire on time. The dual-position shutter button is very slow, sometimes taking a second or two to fire the shutter after focusing. The button itself requires a pretty firm press to push in shutter release mode which often means anything you’re shooting in low-light will come out looking blurry. I’m not a fan of LED flashes, but the ones on the Streak are powerful enough to light a subject up to a good 20ft away, based on some test shots. I’d put the camera roughly on par with the iPhone’s in terms of quality of image, but due to the lack of responsiveness, it’s going to lose points.

The front-facing camera is your typical 640×480 VGA chat cam. Not HD. Noisy.

Conclusions

After the painful process of ordering and receiving the Streak, I was all set to dislike this thing. The reviews I read during the long wait didn’t make me terribly excited to actually get my hands on it. Despite some of the limitations though, I do really like this thing. I’d feel a little silly using it as a phone (sidetalkin’!) without a headset, but as a datapad, it works really well. This is my first Android device and though lots of it feels a bit fiddly at times and upgrading different devices is a total crap-shoot, they’ve done some nice things with the operating system. It’s customizable to a fault. Picking up someone else’s Android device, there’s a big chance it’ll take you awhile to figure out what’s going on. Desktop widgets are a great feature that I wish iOS had. The back button is a very sticky interface element that I find myself trying to hit on my iPhone. I notice that I have to look for the back button on an iPhone now because they’re not really in a consistent place. Some of the apps available on Android are very nice and will give their iOS counterparts a strong run.

I think when we get some real video players on these things we’ll finally have a worthy alternative to iOS. This is a very good thing.

[update, official Rogers update available via this thread: http://communityforums.rogers.com/t5/forums/forumtopicpage/board-id/Android/message-id/927]

Now that Rogers has finally released a Froyo update for the Streak, I think my own upgrade exploits are a little less necessary for the average human. Or maybe not. I haven’t read any reviews of the Rogers version yet, but I have a hard time believing it works as well as DJ_Steve’s StreakDroid firmwares. I’m using 1.8.0 now (aka Chernobyl Meltdown) and it seems to work very very well. He’s done a great job of packaging up a ROM with useful features and software and I recommend it heartily.

My own upgrade path took me all over the internet. With some helpful pointers from @gav_taylor on twitter, I found the XDA forums and from there, links to a trove of firmware options tailored (pun!) to my very needs. I started with an O2 version of the ROM which made my radios think they were operating somewhere in England and unable to work in high-speed mode on Rogers. But at least I could see the device’s potential. From there, I upgraded to a stock Dell 2.2 ROM (v318) and finally migrated to StreakDroid 1.6 (still Froyo, despite the confusing numbering). It was tricky, required a lot of removing the battery, and felt like I was going to brick my device at any second. Since then, DJ_Steve’s had two more releases, 1.7.0 and 1.8.0. I just installed the latter yesterday and it doesn’t seem very different from 1.7.0. I think it’s mostly a bug-fix release. Battery life seems improved, I think. [and so does jdmcivic, it appears]

So now that I’ve got this Froyo thing what do I think?

It makes a helluva difference for starters. It takes this smallish slab of metal and glass and plastic and turns it from being a cumbersome, graphically antiquated toy to something you can actually use and even enjoy. Froyo looks good and works well on this device. DJ_Steve’s tweaks make the Streak feel like a pretty capable device and adds some extra glitz to the environment. App switching is instantanous. LauncherPro (thanks for the rec, madhava!) with all the eye candy turned up to full is silky smooth. It runs very well, but is a little battery intensive (more on that in my review of the hardware). The Gingerbread keyboard is a huge improvement, especially with swype disabled.

There’s already a huge array of software available for Android. I was amazed to see the number of entries in the store is comparable to the iTunes app store, if not ahead of it now. Of course, there are some caveats. Not all of the software I’ve tested is as high quality as most of the featured items on the iTunes app store. The bar to entry feels a bit lower. That said, there are whole classes of application available for Android you just can’t get on iTunes. File managers, wifi hotspots (unnecessary with Froyo which has that capability built-in), rooting tools for the hacker-minded.

Appz

Like the iTunes App Store, one of the weakest aspects of the Android Marketplace is the application itself. There is a cool alternative for Android users though. I recommend AppBrain for managing your applications. It has some extra features like notifying you when your apps have updates and the ability to sync your installed apps. Highly recommended.

For music players, WinAmp seems like a pretty capable player. I haven’t played with the desktop version yet on Windows which will allow syncing and file management, but it looks like a pretty solid player. It comes with some widgets for controlling the app from your desktop launcher too. There’s also Songbird which I was surprised to find in here. There are various built-in music player apps as well.

Some apps have jumped  the AppStore boundary and are available in both Android and iTunes. Kindle for one I’ll be watching closely over the coming months as Apple’s tyrannical bid for Moar Monayz unfolds. I will say that the Android version feels like it’s a bit behind the iPhone version. Some features are missing (syncing books not purchased from the Kindle store) and some of the polish on the iTunes version. The music identifier Shazam is also here as well as the omnipresent Angry Birds. I haven’t tested either of these, but it’s nice to see that some of my favorites are on both platforms. It’ll make the eventual total migration less painful.

One completely absent category is the media player. Whither video players galore? I was totally shocked to see that the base media player that ships with Froyo is a really basic, incapable device mostly included to play recorded videos from the camera app. Apparently Android is turning on accelerated video in some future release of Android. I have no idea what codecs that will include (hopefully WebM?) or what that’ll mean for video apps like VLC who I hear is working on a port. This is kind of a deal-breaker for me as one of the best parts of my iPad is its ability to play glorious, high-quality video (admittedly after some transcoding in Handbrake). I have no doubt it will come, but it’s absence feels strange and unexpected. It is a let down.

Also exciting to see several web browsers on offer. The two I’ve been playing with most are the Firefox beta and Miren. I hear good things about Dolphin too. All of these are easily better than the default browser that Android ships with and it begs the question: Do Android devs talk to Chrome devs? Then again, I’m happy to have Firefox there so I don’t really care.

Still have a post on upgrading to alternate firmware forthcoming, though it’s less urgent all of a sudden.

But as a software company, I find many of the arbitrary restrictions Apple places on software developers and vendors entirely loathesome. The iTunes “Music” Store has become a gateway for a Mac App Store by way of selling iOS apps. This is terrifying. If you don’t believe me, take a look through their terms (after paying a $99 fee to become an Apple Developer, of course). Some excellent examples:

• Apps may not crash
• Apps may not exhibit bugs
• Apps my not use external update mechanisms
• Apps may not use deprecated technologies (e.g., Java)

It goes on. Sure, I approve of them setting the bar high. I don’t want visible bugs in my apps either, but you don’t often have full control over your environment. By their own rules, much of the OS X desktop environment probably wouldn’t pass. I’ve seen the Dock, Finder, Dashboard and other built-in components crash on numerous occasions.

I won’t even mention the Human Interface Guidelines rule.

And now Apple is insisting that third party vendors must sell in-app content through their App Store on iOS devices by March 31, 2011. You can see where this is going, don’t you? If this is applied to the desktop app store as well, Apple will be taking a cut of every in-app purchase available there as well. As the app store will be a major piece of OS X 10.7, it’s not that far-fetched to imagine Apple locking down the desktop to outside installers the same way that iOS devices are limited.

In a time when “open” has become a popular buzz-word and Apple touts itself as a company with a large chunk of open source scaffolding, it’s really frustrating to see them locking the cages and limiting choice and freedom in their products.

First, some unboxing pictures.

Out of the Box

Powering up the Steak[sic] for the first time was exciting. After waiting a few minutes, I looked through the installed apps and menus. Something didn’t seem quite right though. This was not the OS I was expecting, having played with a few different Androids before. This one felt, well, old and slow. It outright failed to install Firefox on it, and judging by some of the reports on SUMO (Mozilla’s support forums), I was not alone in this. Something was clearly amiss.

Looking in the About screen, I quickly discovered what was wrong. It shipped with Android 1.6 (Donut). An operating system that first became available back in September of 2009 (according to the wikipedia entry on Android Version History). I could have sworn the site was claiming it came with 2.2 aka Froyo, the OS that’s been available in the UK for a couple of months at least. No luck.

(Note, that I just read on Streaksmart that the Streak is now available through Amazon in the US. Definitely recommend using them instead of Dell whose product page I won’t even link to after my own experience with them.).

I proceeded down the glorious and noble path of voiding my warranty to get the latest version of Android available for the Streak up and running.

Next up, the excitement of updating firmware, or, how to turn your steak into a brick!