The time to test the device is before the launch, not afterwards. This is a complete fail on Apple's part.
And I'm sure they did test, and they did find issues with performance, but Jobs simply wasn't willing to change the design. Apple is entirely about form over function -- the only reason anyone would pay 2x-3x for one of their PCs is just that... the come in pretty cases.
Actually, all current high-end smartphone do MPEG-4 encoding: iPhone 4, Droid, Nexus One, etc. There's enough horsepower for at least D1-class video; most of the phones with 1GHz CPU or so are doing 720p. And just as on playback of H.264, many of these devices have other resources (dedicated hardware, DSPs, etc) to streamline the process.
Similarly, most new consumer P&S cameras are using H.264 or "AVC-Lite" (base level and 720p only) for video, replacing the MJPEG that's been popular. Nearly all tapeless consumer HD camcorders and all video-capable DSLRs are also recording in H.264. It is, among current hardware, already by far the most popular recording format.
Their issue isn't with H.264 specifically, that's just the latest flavor. Rather, they're claiming some sensitivity to other DCT-based encoding mechanism: H.264/AVC, WMV9/VC-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/ASP, MPEG-1, even motion JPEG and DV are all DCT-block based compression algorithms.
Though far as I know, so it VP8. I would expect complaints more from maybe the Dirac people, since Dirac is another thing entirely (wavelet compression, not DCT).
For one, you're not going to stream camcorder video directly -- any web video site is going to re-code your video, no matter what format you chose for deliver. AVC from a consumer-grade camcorder is likely to be in the 17-24Mb/s range. Streaming video is more like 2-3Mb/s, depending on the specific resolution and service (of course, most sites trancode your submission to multiple resolutions for delivery, too).
Second... your camcorder manufacturer does pay the license fees that allow you to record video, and to play it back for your personal use. There is no license for public broadcast... the format of recording is not pertinent to the licensing for broadcast. It's likely to be re-coded, but regardless, it will be relicensed if they're showing it in H.264.
The main reason for H.264 in camcorders is cost. Yeah, your camcorder company pays a licensing fee... they would for MPEG-2, as well. But compared to the cost of memory to support recording, that's a small fee. Even going from H.264 to MPEG-2, the camcorders would need higher performance flash memory, and more of it, to deliver the same video quality. That's what they switched from MPEG-2 to AVC (most did, anyway) when going from tape to tapeless. It had nothing to do with uploads.
A few camcorders do offer "direct to YouTube" modes, but those are pretty out-of-date concepts anyway. They're shooting in higher compression, lower resolution MPEG or AVC, assuming that YouTube is the YouTube of some years ago. These days, they allow up to 2GB per upload... you can actually send raw camcorder footage if you must, since the time limit is still 10 minutes (unless you're grandfathered into a "Director's Account"). And of course, they do support streaming of up to 1080p, though naturally, much lower in bitrate than anything from your camcorder.
Actually, in the USA, satellite is largely H.264. Both Dish Network and DirecTV launched H.264 based systems about three years ago. While they still support MPEG-2 for some feeds, HD is exclusively broadcast in H.264.
And really, that's not the issue anyway... the issue is capture and conversion. At present, most current consumer camcorders, and increasingly large number of professional models (Panasonic's AVCCAM and Sony's NXCAM, for example) capture in H.264. And if it's not H.264, it's very likely MPEG-2, which is the standard for older formats like HDV and XDCAM.
So really, the WebM folks are going to have to live with material that originates in some form of MPEG, for quite some time. Since you're re-coding for online anyway, it's not as if you're going to shoot with an AVC camcorder and upload directly (even if you did, it's re-coded by YouTube or other publishing sites). The issue is as they stated... MPEG-based encorders are often tuned toward re-encoding MPEG. VP8 is going to have to deal with this as well, to offer comparable video quality.
But overall, this is good news. I've been reading this report annually, these guys really know their stuff. That VP8 is looking as good as it does is rockin' good news. It took years to get H.264 to its current level of quality; have any doubts about this, go shoot some important video with an H.264 camcorder from 3-4 years ago. Not pretty...
Right. But it's also important not to confuse media and I/O standards with PC implementation details.
What's in the PC box should when things need to be made better, and compatibility is a nice thing, but hardly necessary. The usual solution is to maintain "old" and "new" together for a little while: ISA and PCI, PCI and PCIe, ST-506 and PATA, PATA and SATA, etc.
External hardware standards ought to be much longer lived. And media standards, longer still. And consumer media standards longer still... which is why so many of these consumer standards find their way into PCs. We KNOW CD/DVD/BD isn't going away tomorrow. You can't say the same for any computer industry standard for replaceable optical media. The consumer standards change slowly, and over the last 30 years or so (basically, since we all went digital), it's been often possible to include backward compatibility.
Some of it's media, and some of it's storage. Particularly easy CDs didn't have dyes as stabilized as today's dyes, so they did fail with much less exposure to excess heat or light.
I still have one CD around here, originally burned on a $15,000 CD-R drive, on a $50 gold CD-R blank, for the Commodore CD32 project. Worked just dandy, last time I tried it (about a year ago)... of course, the data on it is no longer of any value, but that's not really the question.
Of course, back when you paid $50 per blank, you hoped for a fairly good disc. These days, you can pay for archival quality media (which is higher spec, but unlikely to actually last the rated time... not that I'm all that personally concerned about a 300 year life, which is what Delkin claims for some of their archival discs), or you can use the $0.10 bulk media, and get what you get.
One thing about the falling cost of media... they are made cheaper. Just because they know how to make longer lasting dyes for "-R" discs doesn't mean you get those in your 10-cent disc. As well, CDs fail if the top laquer layer degrades -- that's what protects the reflective layer. DVDs fail if the lamination fails... all DVDs are two 0.6mm polycarbonate discs glued together. So the mechanical construction is also an issue. I've had a small handful of early DVDs fail due to lamination breakdown, even though glass mastered DVDs ought to last pretty indefinitely (well, basically until the lamination fails... the pits are in the polycarbonate, they're go going anywhere).
Well, I'm absolutely certain that you're wrong here... the punch card reader is neither more durable nor more repairable than the average SD card reader... not to mention replaceable. People get these weird nostalgic ideas about such hardware. But let's actually consider reading comparable data.
Two weeks ago I filled the better part of three 32GB SDHC cards, shooting a wedding on two camcorders. I can report that my 3.5 year-old laptop did a dandy job of copying the data out from these cards, in a very reasonable amount of time, and I was able to get a next day edit of the ceremony online without a hitch (look here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD8qFgciwIU).
Now, punched cards vary, but there's definitely one format that can store 120 bytes per card (others only 64 bytes). So I would need 266,666,666 cards to store one SDHC card's worth of data... that's 133,333 standard boxes of cards. At the most recent price I could find, a box runs $35 each... so you're talking about just about $4.67 milllion in punched cards to store 1/3 of my video. This would weigh about 645,333kg... I don't think I get to check that though Southwest for free...
A very fast card reader could process 2000 cards per minute... so it would take your card reader 92 days to read in my video, operating 24 hours continuously. However, the weakest link on these readers is probably the card pickup hopper, which I've seen listed with an MTBF of 100,000 card feeds. So on the average, this will fail 2,666 times during the read of my video.
BD readers also read CD and DVD.. that's 28 years of backward compatibility so far. Not too shabby.
SD readers don't go quite as far back, but the reader attached to my PC, bought back in the early SDHC days, supports SDXC, SDHC, SD, and MMC... going back to flash media that's generally upward compatible since 1997. The one thing the SD folks did correctly was learn from the past, and avoid the architecture-specific problems inherent in Smart Media and even Compact Flash. SD has a reasonably high speed interface, but also supports SPI, which is an interface any college-level EE student can get up and running from any old microcontroller in an afternoon. That's about as future-proof as you can hope for in a hardware spec.
The simple fact is that digital consumer media isn't going through the same kind of form-factor changes that pre-digital media did. Sure, there's some jockying in the industry based on competing standards: SD vs. CF, BD vs. HD-DVD, etc. but the better standards are increasingly long lived, and when something needs to change, the form factor is retained to allow compatibility going forward, at least.
And as with CD/DVD/BD, there's no compelling reason yet to change the form factor. Maybe there will be some day, but the scope of this format is actually expanding. I have over a dozen devices that support SD cards, last year I switched over from videotape to SD storage in my camcorder, I use it for still photos (with CF to SD adaptors for my older DSLRs), etc.
There's plenty of room for a long-lived write-only version of this memory card standard, at the right price. It'll most likely require new firmware, probably adopting UDF or another WORM-compatible file system for the cards rather than FAT/FAT32/exFAT used today. And for general use, the price needs to be on par at least with other "one-use" media.... a 16GB card for $8.00 or so would be a great replacement for an 83 minute miniDV tape. The one thing I do miss from tape is the inherent backup (yeah, you can tape over a tape, but serious video folks don't). Now true, I use BD-R for backup, and that's much cheaper ($2.00 for 25GB), but then there's the need to make the backups. Current Flash cards are too expensive and too short lived for this (they expect data to last 10 years...I'd expect that to vary, just as it does with tape, CD, DVD, BD, and any other recording medium).
I'm surprised on one stated the obvious: only 1GB? What are you going to do with just on gigabyte? With 2GB SD cards selling readily for under $4.00, this is likely to be a special purpose item only, until they get the capacity up and price down.
iPods and iPhones use the same ARM CPUs as every Android phone. Sure, you can run Android on other devices and other CPUs, but ARM is the overwhelming choice for smart phones.
You can, apparently, re-flash an iPhone with Android. So even the iPhone isn't a complete dead-end. The port still needs a little work, but I suspect it gets pretty popular once old iPhonies see how crippled iOS4 is going to be on said hardware.
Flash is hardly just ads. For one... yeah, it is video. And curiously, that video is more than likely H.264 these days, and as such, no more power consuming than any other H.264 video.
And then there's the GUI stuff... also no more power hungry than any Javascript. Like it or not, it's a very real part of first class web browsing. There are online stores written in Flash, even hardcore tech stuff... some semiconductor sites have flash-heavy GUIs that fail without flash plug-ins (not that Mac people would know this.. you can't design hardware on a Mac anyway, so Mac and iPhone users never visit such sites anyway, I guess). The reason is simple: Adobe had made some of the best content creation tools. You can get you web guy to author the site in Flash, or pay a programmer to do it in Javascript, taking three times as long and six times the cost... and with less maintainability.
This is why Flash is popular. Anyone really interested in replacing Flash would release their own HTML5 tools that do the same job. Google would give them away, if they had that in mind (they don't... they're doing better than just about anyone else, supporting practical web standards, de-facto or otherwise, leading edge or trailing edge, open source or closed, etc).
And yes, I agree that putting the MPEG-LA in charge of essentially all video on the web would be bad. Unfortunately, that's pretty much what Microsoft and Apple have in mind. Google is the only one doing something reasonable about this that won't adversely affect the quality of the content.
People with multitasking phones multitask all the time. I do, every day.. no to mention the various daemons running on my phone. Even some Apple isn't going to offer on the iPhone4 (iOS 4 apps can "opt in" to limited multitasking, but only Apple can write daemons).
Anyone who thinks multitasking isn't important on smart phones is an Apple apologist, or just not thinking clearly. These phones are significantly more powerful than PCs were not all that long ago... and desktops have had full multitasking since the mid 80s, if not earlier (depending, of course, on your OS of choice).
The mobile market was pretty boring until recently. One Blackberry was pretty much like another, same with Palm and Microsoft WinCE/PocketPC/WinMo.
It was really Apple legitimizing the "Consumer Smart Phone" that's got everyone out there now scrambling for position in this space. Which, curiously, is exactly what happened in the 70s, 80s, and into the 90s in the world of personal computers. Back in the 70s, there were dozens of companies making proprietary hardware, operating systems, etc. You could have something come along, like the Apple Macintosh or the Commodore Amiga, that entirely changed the market in one shot.
Since then, PCs have more or less grown up. The level of complexity is such that it's very difficult to do anything interesting at the system level... it has to be part of a new chip design. That raises the risk threshold significantly, as well as time between new generations of CPU, GPU, or PC system chips and architectures. Even Intel is slow moving on these things. As a result, most of the stuff that gets called "innovative" in the PC marketplace is little more than "same, old, same old" in fancy casework (Apple), or increasingly small incremental improvements what was pretty damn fine last year (Intel, AMD, nVidia, etc).
The powers that be are pretty settled... Intel rules in CPUs, and is only likely to move that forward fast enough to keep AMD stumbling along.. they don't benefit from delivering new CPU technology any faster. This summer's $1000 CPU becomes next year's $200 bargain, but that only works if they can make a suitable replacement by next year. Without sufficient challenge, it's actually best for the company to keep this pace something they can optimize... one reason why the kind of shortages of parts we used see, say, around the 1GHz mark, rarely if every occurs these days.
Software too... we're so used to waiting years for Microsoft to properly support new hardware standards (USB, Firewire, AGP, 32-bit, 64-bit, etc), that not much attention is really given to new hardware ideas. Microsoft, largely, gets to claim they're "mainstream", and until they do so, they effectively aren't. This is a stupid way to manage an OS... the very existence of the OS as hardware abstraction layer is supposed to make adopting new hardware faster, not slower. But MS always need a carrot to dangle for upgrades. They use hardware wherever possible.
The hand-held market is booming for several reasons. One is simply that the opportunity is now undeniably real, but the powers that will be not entirely settled yet. This means everyone in the PC, Telco, and CE markets can jockey for a position in the new order. This happens every so often in tech... digital cameras is a good example. The pace of the film camera market was pretty settled: Nikon and Canon accounted for 80+% of all SLRs, Kodak and Fujifilm made most of the film, etc. But enter digital, and now film companies have to become sensor and camera companies, traditional camera companies have to get digital and electronic very fast, if they haven't already (or team with with CE companies, like Leica-Panasonic and Zeiss-Sony), PC companies look at this as Yet Another Electronic Device, and as well a PC peripheral, so you have them in the mix (Epson, HP, etc). The dust from that is settling, but for handhelds, it's just getting to the fun parts.
And as with cameras, companies are looking at their future in new ways. Motorola never cared all that much about smart phones when it was just business people buying them, but as soon as it's looking like everyone will be involved, they had to think intelligently about where they'd be in 5 years, selling largely only dumb and "feature" phones. Palm finally woke up, a bit late, but they did. Android seems to be in the position held by MS-DOS in the PC days, only implemented better (open source, a decent enough design, Linux roots). And Apple's been making a fortune on this stuff, though still concentrating on form over function. It's not exactly the wild and woolly days of the PC indu
No, they won't about-face. This is Jobs, and it's not tech, it's religion. Steve didn't fix his issues back in the early 80s, and while he got ousted, it caused long-term harm in the Mac market. He's making money now, so don't expect him to change it, even if his fortunes start to fail a little. Jobs only functions with it's 100% his way. Sometimes that works, but it's in all our best interest to see this fail. This isn't just the re-invention of 70's-style proprietary platforms (Apple, Commodore, Tandy, Atari, etc), it's that idea taken to the next level. I mean, for christsake, they're dictating the development tools you can use. This is the polar opposite of everything that's open. And if Apple keeps doing well at this, you can expect others to follow, and open development put at risk.
The battle against Flash was never about the performance of Flash on the Mac or iPhone. Rather, it's all about protected content distribution. Which is just another aspect of Jobs' desire for full, game-console-like control of everything on the iPhone.
If you support Flash, you take it all. This would allow free games on the iPhone that don't go through iTunes (and thus, might detract from iTunes sales). And video... if I can watch protected Flash video, particularly popular and free TV, I won't pay to get that same program from the iTunes store, for a buck or two. Apple wants to own DRMed content distribution on the iPhone, and Flash is the only major competitor.
Apple's been playing games to make people think Flash is a Bad Thing. It's not tech, it's a PR campaign. Apple's claiming to be the champion of "open", promoting HTML5, claiming Flash underperforms and crashes, and leading the entire story to being about video... just tossing the whole "Flash Games" thing under the rug. And that of being a first-class web client, rather than the compromise that the iPhone is today.
If Apple can hurt Flash significantly this way, that means fewer will use it, and as it becomes less important, the iPhone becomes more capable online. But Apple's been really, really stupid about this... just not quite as stupid as the Flash people. If you really wanted to get Flash replaced by HTML5, you'd "pull a Google" and make a content creation tool that's as good as Adobe's Flash authoring suite, but based on HTML5, and you'd make it free. The small reason people use Flash is "only standard for video". The large reason... the tools enable web content people to do in a week what you'd need programmers for a month to do in Javascript or other "standard" technologies.
Google is doing what a Web company should do with their client OS... ensuring the best possible web experience. Android users already benefit from Google's viewpoint. Apple, Palm, and Microsoft (to name a few) moved from the PDA/PMP prespective -- devices that orbit the personal computer. Google wants devices that orbit the web.. so Android devices don't care about PCs. Sure, you can add tools on your PC to do local sync, but most everything happens via the web. And since you have an always-connected device, it happens automatically and incrementally. Thus, dramatically better than was done in past environments.
Between these two factors, Apple's in a bad, bad place on technology. Not yet on market.. they have many fanboys. But really... they're selling the iPad as, essentially, a Netbook/Laptop replacement, but you can't use it without docking to a PC (Windows or Mac, not even Linux). How insanely stupid is that? Because its artificial... zero reason for a PC to be involved. But they're clinging to the old and restrictive, while Google's embracing the here, now, and in particular, the customer feedback. Apple is trying to hold on to something between the old Apple ][ / Commodore 64 computer sales model and the modern videogame console model for their iOS devices. This NEEDs to fail. All these things, like their war on Flash, are manifestations of their archaic notion of making a completely proprietary system. Even Microsoft has yet to try and lock things down to this degree. This NEEDs to fail, and given the popularity of the iPhone, things like Android are perhaps the only way to see this happen.
Nope. The iPhone 4 does not implement LTE. It finally does implement a full HSPA+ modem. The 3GS only does HSDPA (downloads) at full speed; it does not implement the HSUPA protocol (uploads)... all previous iPhones were limited to 384kb/s uploads. Or less.
Not that LTE is a target for this model anyway. AT&T announced plans to roll out LTE, in their 12MHz wide slot in the 700MHz band, next summer. If they're unusually fast at upgrading (given that it took them three models to full implement 3G), they'll have LTE support in next June's iPhone upgrade. With that said, HSPA+ is the fastest 3G protocol, when you can get it. The problem with the rollout, at AT&T or T-Mobile, has been the required bandwidth. 2G and CDMA2000's EvDO 3G technology only take up 2.5MHz of bandwidth. Plain HSPA wants 10MHz, and HSPA+ is two 10MHz cells coupled together.
Verizon is going hot with LTE this summer, in their 20MHz slot, also in the 700MHz band. If any of the iPhone on Verizon rumors are true (latest one says "maybe in January), it's more likely that's where you'll first see LTE support on the iPhone. But I wouldn't hold my breath... Apple clearly doesn't consider the network technology a priority.
And hey.. at least they got full 3G support on the 4th model... even uploads. If they also fixed the antenna problem, they are now officially on par with the Blackberries and Palms that ran on 3G/HPSA networks prior to the original iPhone's release. I wonder how long it'll take them to fully implement LTE?
Every high-end smartphone has had at least 800x480 for awhile now. Apple's playing catch-up here, so sure, they want to boost resolution. Also to allow integer scaling of existing applications, since, unlike Android, they didn't have support for multiple display resolutions all along.
Of course, they're still behind in display technology. The difference between a 980x640 and 800x480 display at these screen sizes is fairly unimportant. The difference between LCD (even good LCD, as in the Mot Droid and the new iPhone) and AM-OLED is profound. And most of the other high-end smartphone are AM-OLED these days. So Apple's still behind.
And sure, others may feel differently. But Apple's big problem is just that... they have a one-size-fits-all solution for a device that's subject to very personal requirements. I wouldn't buy a smartphone without physical keyboard, since I actually use mine for writing notes, and don't need a virtual keyboard covering much/most of the screen during this activity.
Like "free", "voluntary" comes in different flavors. Taxes are voluntary, in that no one's coming along taking the money from your pocket... at least not at first. But not in the sense of being optional. Eating is voluntary too... but you will ultimately volunteer to eat.
My kids have had Windows-based netbooks issued from the local High School. I wouldn't have minded having that level of expense (as low as $200), but the netbooks are actually provided by the school. You can get full insurance for $50/year, which isn't all that crazy, though over the course of four years, you'll pretty much pay for one netbook in insurance fees.
The only place they're not using these is the media lab... my daughter's editing video on desktop Mac there. And I have her on Vegas at home on her Windows PC. It's also a useful skill to use different computer platforms, so, while the school certainly fell into that "must have Mac for Multimedia" trap, it's not a big issue. Well, not that their video editor (iMovie, I think) now finally supports AVCHD editing.... something of a problem last year.
My kids have had a number of their textbooks available online, for several years now, at the local High School (Woodstown, NJ). They're even in PDF... so you can read 'em online, download them, see them on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, etc. Absolutely no need for platform lock-in to do this, but I'll bet Apple-only schools are going to find themselves with a wide variety of platform lock-ins.
Apple had a hard time getting a carrier to agree to their initial demands for the iPhone. They most certainly had to give a little in return, too.
In the USA anyway, one of the typical agreements between cell carriers and hardware providers is that the carriers pay a specific small percentage of the full MSRP for each phone they buy. This is designed to keep the price of unlocked phones very high.
Think about it... an iPhone costs about $40 more to make (probably less, in Apple's volumes) than a similar generation iPod Touch. So that's another $100 or so, maybe a bit more with Apple's typical high margins. You see this today with iPads. But what you find is that an iPhone lists for about twice the price of a similar iPod Touch. That's the effect of dealing with carriers.
Google ran into the same problem with the Nexus One. Remember, they were supposedly going to "revolutionize" the cell phone market by selling it unbundled. And they could have... at a much lower price. But the N1 came out at what, $20 less than the MSRP on the Motorola Droid... just under $600. And before you knew it, they were selling through T-Mobile. Of course, the contract-free idea doesn't work anyway, unless you have real universal 3G support in the phone: 850MHz, 1700MHz, 1900MHz, and 2100MHz... just for HPSA in the USA.
The problem is bandwidth. AT&T, being the merger of AT&T Mobility and Cingular, was around for quite some time, and had both 850MHz and 1900MHz slots in most of the country. T-Mobile is what happens when the German Telecom bought little Voicestream... the first company doing GSM in the USA, but with virtually no coverage. They've expanded, but there were only two carrier slots at 850MHz in any area... and Verizon nearly always had the other one.
Then take in the HSPA/UMTS technology. Regular 2G channels use 2.5MHz of bandwidth; 1.25MHz up and 1.25MHz down. HSPA wants 5MHz up and 5MHz down (10MHz, but not necessarily in the same band), and for HSPA+, you need two 10MHz channels. That's a pretty hard thing to come by. The bandwidth requirements are why AT&T doesn't have universal 3G coverage, much less HSPA+ everywhere. And of course, why T-Mobile needed new bandwidth opened up before they could offer any real 3G services.
Verizon and Sprint both use QualComm's EvDO (Evolution Data-Only) for 3G. It's slightly slower than HSPA (and of course, slightly less than half the speed of HSPA+), but EvDO fits in the same 2.5MHz channel used for 3G. This is why you have universal 3G coverage on Verizon (obviously, you get 2G downgrades due to signal quality, but not due to a lack of support on any cell site).
Sprint is supporting 4G now, via WiMax, in partnership with Clear. Other folks in the Clear group include Comcast, Google., and Intel. Clear is on 2500MHz, and they have lots of bandwidth there... up to 90MHz in some locales. But, as with anything that high frequency, they have problems with signal propagation, particularly through buildings and foliage.
Version won the 20MHz slot in the 700MHz band, and they're rolling out LTE-based 4G this summer, something like 40 cities going hot all at once. AT&T won the 12MHz slot in the 700MHz band, and expects to roll out LTE-based 4G sometime next summer. Thus, no need for the new iPhone to handle 4G... that'll be next year's iPhone. If Apple bothers to be current. They've generally been behind.. the iPhone 4 model out now is the first with full HSPA support (previous models limited to slow uploads).
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The time to test the device is before the launch, not afterwards. This is a complete fail on Apple's part.
And I'm sure they did test, and they did find issues with performance, but Jobs simply wasn't willing to change the design. Apple is entirely about form over function -- the only reason anyone would pay 2x-3x for one of their PCs is just that... the come in pretty cases.
Actually, all current high-end smartphone do MPEG-4 encoding: iPhone 4, Droid, Nexus One, etc. There's enough horsepower for at least D1-class video; most of the phones with 1GHz CPU or so are doing 720p. And just as on playback of H.264, many of these devices have other resources (dedicated hardware, DSPs, etc) to streamline the process.
Similarly, most new consumer P&S cameras are using H.264 or "AVC-Lite" (base level and 720p only) for video, replacing the MJPEG that's been popular. Nearly all tapeless consumer HD camcorders and all video-capable DSLRs are also recording in H.264. It is, among current hardware, already by far the most popular recording format.
Their issue isn't with H.264 specifically, that's just the latest flavor. Rather, they're claiming some sensitivity to other DCT-based encoding mechanism: H.264/AVC, WMV9/VC-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/ASP, MPEG-1, even motion JPEG and DV are all DCT-block based compression algorithms.
Though far as I know, so it VP8. I would expect complaints more from maybe the Dirac people, since Dirac is another thing entirely (wavelet compression, not DCT).
That's a false premise, though, on two accounts.
For one, you're not going to stream camcorder video directly -- any web video site is going to re-code your video, no matter what format you chose for deliver. AVC from a consumer-grade camcorder is likely to be in the 17-24Mb/s range. Streaming video is more like 2-3Mb/s, depending on the specific resolution and service (of course, most sites trancode your submission to multiple resolutions for delivery, too).
Second... your camcorder manufacturer does pay the license fees that allow you to record video, and to play it back for your personal use. There is no license for public broadcast... the format of recording is not pertinent to the licensing for broadcast. It's likely to be re-coded, but regardless, it will be relicensed if they're showing it in H.264.
The main reason for H.264 in camcorders is cost. Yeah, your camcorder company pays a licensing fee... they would for MPEG-2, as well. But compared to the cost of memory to support recording, that's a small fee. Even going from H.264 to MPEG-2, the camcorders would need higher performance flash memory, and more of it, to deliver the same video quality. That's what they switched from MPEG-2 to AVC (most did, anyway) when going from tape to tapeless. It had nothing to do with uploads.
A few camcorders do offer "direct to YouTube" modes, but those are pretty out-of-date concepts anyway. They're shooting in higher compression, lower resolution MPEG or AVC, assuming that YouTube is the YouTube of some years ago. These days, they allow up to 2GB per upload... you can actually send raw camcorder footage if you must, since the time limit is still 10 minutes (unless you're grandfathered into a "Director's Account"). And of course, they do support streaming of up to 1080p, though naturally, much lower in bitrate than anything from your camcorder.
Actually, in the USA, satellite is largely H.264. Both Dish Network and DirecTV launched H.264 based systems about three years ago. While they still support MPEG-2 for some feeds, HD is exclusively broadcast in H.264.
And really, that's not the issue anyway... the issue is capture and conversion. At present, most current consumer camcorders, and increasingly large number of professional models (Panasonic's AVCCAM and Sony's NXCAM, for example) capture in H.264. And if it's not H.264, it's very likely MPEG-2, which is the standard for older formats like HDV and XDCAM.
So really, the WebM folks are going to have to live with material that originates in some form of MPEG, for quite some time. Since you're re-coding for online anyway, it's not as if you're going to shoot with an AVC camcorder and upload directly (even if you did, it's re-coded by YouTube or other publishing sites). The issue is as they stated... MPEG-based encorders are often tuned toward re-encoding MPEG. VP8 is going to have to deal with this as well, to offer comparable video quality.
But overall, this is good news. I've been reading this report annually, these guys really know their stuff. That VP8 is looking as good as it does is rockin' good news. It took years to get H.264 to its current level of quality; have any doubts about this, go shoot some important video with an H.264 camcorder from 3-4 years ago. Not pretty...
Right. But it's also important not to confuse media and I/O standards with PC implementation details.
What's in the PC box should when things need to be made better, and compatibility is a nice thing, but hardly necessary. The usual solution is to maintain "old" and "new" together for a little while: ISA and PCI, PCI and PCIe, ST-506 and PATA, PATA and SATA, etc.
External hardware standards ought to be much longer lived. And media standards, longer still. And consumer media standards longer still... which is why so many of these consumer standards find their way into PCs. We KNOW CD/DVD/BD isn't going away tomorrow. You can't say the same for any computer industry standard for replaceable optical media. The consumer standards change slowly, and over the last 30 years or so (basically, since we all went digital), it's been often possible to include backward compatibility.
Some of it's media, and some of it's storage. Particularly easy CDs didn't have dyes as stabilized as today's dyes, so they did fail with much less exposure to excess heat or light.
I still have one CD around here, originally burned on a $15,000 CD-R drive, on a $50 gold CD-R blank, for the Commodore CD32 project. Worked just dandy, last time I tried it (about a year ago)... of course, the data on it is no longer of any value, but that's not really the question.
Of course, back when you paid $50 per blank, you hoped for a fairly good disc. These days, you can pay for archival quality media (which is higher spec, but unlikely to actually last the rated time... not that I'm all that personally concerned about a 300 year life, which is what Delkin claims for some of their archival discs), or you can use the $0.10 bulk media, and get what you get.
One thing about the falling cost of media... they are made cheaper. Just because they know how to make longer lasting dyes for "-R" discs doesn't mean you get those in your 10-cent disc. As well, CDs fail if the top laquer layer degrades -- that's what protects the reflective layer. DVDs fail if the lamination fails... all DVDs are two 0.6mm polycarbonate discs glued together. So the mechanical construction is also an issue. I've had a small handful of early DVDs fail due to lamination breakdown, even though glass mastered DVDs ought to last pretty indefinitely (well, basically until the lamination fails ... the pits are in the polycarbonate, they're go going anywhere).
Well, I'm absolutely certain that you're wrong here... the punch card reader is neither more durable nor more repairable than the average SD card reader... not to mention replaceable. People get these weird nostalgic ideas about such hardware. But let's actually consider reading comparable data.
Two weeks ago I filled the better part of three 32GB SDHC cards, shooting a wedding on two camcorders. I can report that my 3.5 year-old laptop did a dandy job of copying the data out from these cards, in a very reasonable amount of time, and I was able to get a next day edit of the ceremony online without a hitch (look here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD8qFgciwIU).
Now, punched cards vary, but there's definitely one format that can store 120 bytes per card (others only 64 bytes). So I would need 266,666,666 cards to store one SDHC card's worth of data... that's 133,333 standard boxes of cards. At the most recent price I could find, a box runs $35 each... so you're talking about just about $4.67 milllion in punched cards to store 1/3 of my video. This would weigh about 645,333kg... I don't think I get to check that though Southwest for free...
A very fast card reader could process 2000 cards per minute... so it would take your card reader 92 days to read in my video, operating 24 hours continuously. However, the weakest link on these readers is probably the card pickup hopper, which I've seen listed with an MTBF of 100,000 card feeds. So on the average, this will fail 2,666 times during the read of my video.
Sorry, no... I'll take the SDHC reader.
BD readers also read CD and DVD.. that's 28 years of backward compatibility so far. Not too shabby.
SD readers don't go quite as far back, but the reader attached to my PC, bought back in the early SDHC days, supports SDXC, SDHC, SD, and MMC... going back to flash media that's generally upward compatible since 1997. The one thing the SD folks did correctly was learn from the past, and avoid the architecture-specific problems inherent in Smart Media and even Compact Flash. SD has a reasonably high speed interface, but also supports SPI, which is an interface any college-level EE student can get up and running from any old microcontroller in an afternoon. That's about as future-proof as you can hope for in a hardware spec.
The simple fact is that digital consumer media isn't going through the same kind of form-factor changes that pre-digital media did. Sure, there's some jockying in the industry based on competing standards: SD vs. CF, BD vs. HD-DVD, etc. but the better standards are increasingly long lived, and when something needs to change, the form factor is retained to allow compatibility going forward, at least.
And as with CD/DVD/BD, there's no compelling reason yet to change the form factor. Maybe there will be some day, but the scope of this format is actually expanding. I have over a dozen devices that support SD cards, last year I switched over from videotape to SD storage in my camcorder, I use it for still photos (with CF to SD adaptors for my older DSLRs), etc.
There's plenty of room for a long-lived write-only version of this memory card standard, at the right price. It'll most likely require new firmware, probably adopting UDF or another WORM-compatible file system for the cards rather than FAT/FAT32/exFAT used today. And for general use, the price needs to be on par at least with other "one-use" media.... a 16GB card for $8.00 or so would be a great replacement for an 83 minute miniDV tape. The one thing I do miss from tape is the inherent backup (yeah, you can tape over a tape, but serious video folks don't). Now true, I use BD-R for backup, and that's much cheaper ($2.00 for 25GB), but then there's the need to make the backups. Current Flash cards are too expensive and too short lived for this (they expect data to last 10 years...I'd expect that to vary, just as it does with tape, CD, DVD, BD, and any other recording medium).
I'm surprised on one stated the obvious: only 1GB? What are you going to do with just on gigabyte? With 2GB SD cards selling readily for under $4.00, this is likely to be a special purpose item only, until they get the capacity up and price down.
iPods and iPhones use the same ARM CPUs as every Android phone. Sure, you can run Android on other devices and other CPUs, but ARM is the overwhelming choice for smart phones.
You can, apparently, re-flash an iPhone with Android. So even the iPhone isn't a complete dead-end. The port still needs a little work, but I suspect it gets pretty popular once old iPhonies see how crippled iOS4 is going to be on said hardware.
80% of iPod/iPhone devices won't support a full featured upgrade to iOS 4. Obviously, I prefer Android.
This month, it's over 50% of the market on Android 2.1.
Flash is hardly just ads. For one... yeah, it is video. And curiously, that video is more than likely H.264 these days, and as such, no more power consuming than any other H.264 video.
And then there's the GUI stuff... also no more power hungry than any Javascript. Like it or not, it's a very real part of first class web browsing. There are online stores written in Flash, even hardcore tech stuff... some semiconductor sites have flash-heavy GUIs that fail without flash plug-ins (not that Mac people would know this.. you can't design hardware on a Mac anyway, so Mac and iPhone users never visit such sites anyway, I guess). The reason is simple: Adobe had made some of the best content creation tools. You can get you web guy to author the site in Flash, or pay a programmer to do it in Javascript, taking three times as long and six times the cost... and with less maintainability.
This is why Flash is popular. Anyone really interested in replacing Flash would release their own HTML5 tools that do the same job. Google would give them away, if they had that in mind (they don't... they're doing better than just about anyone else, supporting practical web standards, de-facto or otherwise, leading edge or trailing edge, open source or closed, etc).
And yes, I agree that putting the MPEG-LA in charge of essentially all video on the web would be bad. Unfortunately, that's pretty much what Microsoft and Apple have in mind. Google is the only one doing something reasonable about this that won't adversely affect the quality of the content.
People with multitasking phones multitask all the time. I do, every day.. no to mention the various daemons running on my phone. Even some Apple isn't going to offer on the iPhone4 (iOS 4 apps can "opt in" to limited multitasking, but only Apple can write daemons).
Anyone who thinks multitasking isn't important on smart phones is an Apple apologist, or just not thinking clearly. These phones are significantly more powerful than PCs were not all that long ago... and desktops have had full multitasking since the mid 80s, if not earlier (depending, of course, on your OS of choice).
The mobile market was pretty boring until recently. One Blackberry was pretty much like another, same with Palm and Microsoft WinCE/PocketPC/WinMo.
It was really Apple legitimizing the "Consumer Smart Phone" that's got everyone out there now scrambling for position in this space. Which, curiously, is exactly what happened in the 70s, 80s, and into the 90s in the world of personal computers. Back in the 70s, there were dozens of companies making proprietary hardware, operating systems, etc. You could have something come along, like the Apple Macintosh or the Commodore Amiga, that entirely changed the market in one shot.
Since then, PCs have more or less grown up. The level of complexity is such that it's very difficult to do anything interesting at the system level... it has to be part of a new chip design. That raises the risk threshold significantly, as well as time between new generations of CPU, GPU, or PC system chips and architectures. Even Intel is slow moving on these things. As a result, most of the stuff that gets called "innovative" in the PC marketplace is little more than "same, old, same old" in fancy casework (Apple), or increasingly small incremental improvements what was pretty damn fine last year (Intel, AMD, nVidia, etc).
The powers that be are pretty settled... Intel rules in CPUs, and is only likely to move that forward fast enough to keep AMD stumbling along.. they don't benefit from delivering new CPU technology any faster. This summer's $1000 CPU becomes next year's $200 bargain, but that only works if they can make a suitable replacement by next year. Without sufficient challenge, it's actually best for the company to keep this pace something they can optimize... one reason why the kind of shortages of parts we used see, say, around the 1GHz mark, rarely if every occurs these days.
Software too... we're so used to waiting years for Microsoft to properly support new hardware standards (USB, Firewire, AGP, 32-bit, 64-bit, etc), that not much attention is really given to new hardware ideas. Microsoft, largely, gets to claim they're "mainstream", and until they do so, they effectively aren't. This is a stupid way to manage an OS... the very existence of the OS as hardware abstraction layer is supposed to make adopting new hardware faster, not slower. But MS always need a carrot to dangle for upgrades. They use hardware wherever possible.
The hand-held market is booming for several reasons. One is simply that the opportunity is now undeniably real, but the powers that will be not entirely settled yet. This means everyone in the PC, Telco, and CE markets can jockey for a position in the new order. This happens every so often in tech... digital cameras is a good example. The pace of the film camera market was pretty settled: Nikon and Canon accounted for 80+% of all SLRs, Kodak and Fujifilm made most of the film, etc. But enter digital, and now film companies have to become sensor and camera companies, traditional camera companies have to get digital and electronic very fast, if they haven't already (or team with with CE companies, like Leica-Panasonic and Zeiss-Sony), PC companies look at this as Yet Another Electronic Device, and as well a PC peripheral, so you have them in the mix (Epson, HP, etc). The dust from that is settling, but for handhelds, it's just getting to the fun parts.
And as with cameras, companies are looking at their future in new ways. Motorola never cared all that much about smart phones when it was just business people buying them, but as soon as it's looking like everyone will be involved, they had to think intelligently about where they'd be in 5 years, selling largely only dumb and "feature" phones. Palm finally woke up, a bit late, but they did. Android seems to be in the position held by MS-DOS in the PC days, only implemented better (open source, a decent enough design, Linux roots). And Apple's been making a fortune on this stuff, though still concentrating on form over function. It's not exactly the wild and woolly days of the PC indu
No, they won't about-face. This is Jobs, and it's not tech, it's religion. Steve didn't fix his issues back in the early 80s, and while he got ousted, it caused long-term harm in the Mac market. He's making money now, so don't expect him to change it, even if his fortunes start to fail a little. Jobs only functions with it's 100% his way. Sometimes that works, but it's in all our best interest to see this fail. This isn't just the re-invention of 70's-style proprietary platforms (Apple, Commodore, Tandy, Atari, etc), it's that idea taken to the next level. I mean, for christsake, they're dictating the development tools you can use. This is the polar opposite of everything that's open. And if Apple keeps doing well at this, you can expect others to follow, and open development put at risk.
The battle against Flash was never about the performance of Flash on the Mac or iPhone. Rather, it's all about protected content distribution. Which is just another aspect of Jobs' desire for full, game-console-like control of everything on the iPhone.
If you support Flash, you take it all. This would allow free games on the iPhone that don't go through iTunes (and thus, might detract from iTunes sales). And video... if I can watch protected Flash video, particularly popular and free TV, I won't pay to get that same program from the iTunes store, for a buck or two. Apple wants to own DRMed content distribution on the iPhone, and Flash is the only major competitor.
Apple's been playing games to make people think Flash is a Bad Thing. It's not tech, it's a PR campaign. Apple's claiming to be the champion of "open", promoting HTML5, claiming Flash underperforms and crashes, and leading the entire story to being about video... just tossing the whole "Flash Games" thing under the rug. And that of being a first-class web client, rather than the compromise that the iPhone is today.
If Apple can hurt Flash significantly this way, that means fewer will use it, and as it becomes less important, the iPhone becomes more capable online. But Apple's been really, really stupid about this... just not quite as stupid as the Flash people. If you really wanted to get Flash replaced by HTML5, you'd "pull a Google" and make a content creation tool that's as good as Adobe's Flash authoring suite, but based on HTML5, and you'd make it free. The small reason people use Flash is "only standard for video". The large reason... the tools enable web content people to do in a week what you'd need programmers for a month to do in Javascript or other "standard" technologies.
Google is doing what a Web company should do with their client OS... ensuring the best possible web experience. Android users already benefit from Google's viewpoint. Apple, Palm, and Microsoft (to name a few) moved from the PDA/PMP prespective -- devices that orbit the personal computer. Google wants devices that orbit the web.. so Android devices don't care about PCs. Sure, you can add tools on your PC to do local sync, but most everything happens via the web. And since you have an always-connected device, it happens automatically and incrementally. Thus, dramatically better than was done in past environments.
Between these two factors, Apple's in a bad, bad place on technology. Not yet on market.. they have many fanboys. But really... they're selling the iPad as, essentially, a Netbook/Laptop replacement, but you can't use it without docking to a PC (Windows or Mac, not even Linux). How insanely stupid is that? Because its artificial... zero reason for a PC to be involved. But they're clinging to the old and restrictive, while Google's embracing the here, now, and in particular, the customer feedback. Apple is trying to hold on to something between the old Apple ][ / Commodore 64 computer sales model and the modern videogame console model for their iOS devices. This NEEDs to fail. All these things, like their war on Flash, are manifestations of their archaic notion of making a completely proprietary system. Even Microsoft has yet to try and lock things down to this degree. This NEEDs to fail, and given the popularity of the iPhone, things like Android are perhaps the only way to see this happen.
Nope. The iPhone 4 does not implement LTE. It finally does implement a full HSPA+ modem. The 3GS only does HSDPA (downloads) at full speed; it does not implement the HSUPA protocol (uploads)... all previous iPhones were limited to 384kb/s uploads. Or less.
Not that LTE is a target for this model anyway. AT&T announced plans to roll out LTE, in their 12MHz wide slot in the 700MHz band, next summer. If they're unusually fast at upgrading (given that it took them three models to full implement 3G), they'll have LTE support in next June's iPhone upgrade. With that said, HSPA+ is the fastest 3G protocol, when you can get it. The problem with the rollout, at AT&T or T-Mobile, has been the required bandwidth. 2G and CDMA2000's EvDO 3G technology only take up 2.5MHz of bandwidth. Plain HSPA wants 10MHz, and HSPA+ is two 10MHz cells coupled together.
Verizon is going hot with LTE this summer, in their 20MHz slot, also in the 700MHz band. If any of the iPhone on Verizon rumors are true (latest one says "maybe in January), it's more likely that's where you'll first see LTE support on the iPhone. But I wouldn't hold my breath... Apple clearly doesn't consider the network technology a priority.
And hey.. at least they got full 3G support on the 4th model... even uploads. If they also fixed the antenna problem, they are now officially on par with the Blackberries and Palms that ran on 3G/HPSA networks prior to the original iPhone's release. I wonder how long it'll take them to fully implement LTE?
Every high-end smartphone has had at least 800x480 for awhile now. Apple's playing catch-up here, so sure, they want to boost resolution. Also to allow integer scaling of existing applications, since, unlike Android, they didn't have support for multiple display resolutions all along.
Of course, they're still behind in display technology. The difference between a 980x640 and 800x480 display at these screen sizes is fairly unimportant. The difference between LCD (even good LCD, as in the Mot Droid and the new iPhone) and AM-OLED is profound. And most of the other high-end smartphone are AM-OLED these days. So Apple's still behind.
And sure, others may feel differently. But Apple's big problem is just that... they have a one-size-fits-all solution for a device that's subject to very personal requirements. I wouldn't buy a smartphone without physical keyboard, since I actually use mine for writing notes, and don't need a virtual keyboard covering much/most of the screen during this activity.
Like "free", "voluntary" comes in different flavors. Taxes are voluntary, in that no one's coming along taking the money from your pocket... at least not at first. But not in the sense of being optional. Eating is voluntary too... but you will ultimately volunteer to eat.
My kids have had Windows-based netbooks issued from the local High School. I wouldn't have minded having that level of expense (as low as $200), but the netbooks are actually provided by the school. You can get full insurance for $50/year, which isn't all that crazy, though over the course of four years, you'll pretty much pay for one netbook in insurance fees.
The only place they're not using these is the media lab... my daughter's editing video on desktop Mac there. And I have her on Vegas at home on her Windows PC. It's also a useful skill to use different computer platforms, so, while the school certainly fell into that "must have Mac for Multimedia" trap, it's not a big issue. Well, not that their video editor (iMovie, I think) now finally supports AVCHD editing.... something of a problem last year.
My kids have had a number of their textbooks available online, for several years now, at the local High School (Woodstown, NJ). They're even in PDF... so you can read 'em online, download them, see them on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, etc. Absolutely no need for platform lock-in to do this, but I'll bet Apple-only schools are going to find themselves with a wide variety of platform lock-ins.
Apple had a hard time getting a carrier to agree to their initial demands for the iPhone. They most certainly had to give a little in return, too.
In the USA anyway, one of the typical agreements between cell carriers and hardware providers is that the carriers pay a specific small percentage of the full MSRP for each phone they buy. This is designed to keep the price of unlocked phones very high.
Think about it... an iPhone costs about $40 more to make (probably less, in Apple's volumes) than a similar generation iPod Touch. So that's another $100 or so, maybe a bit more with Apple's typical high margins. You see this today with iPads. But what you find is that an iPhone lists for about twice the price of a similar iPod Touch. That's the effect of dealing with carriers.
Google ran into the same problem with the Nexus One. Remember, they were supposedly going to "revolutionize" the cell phone market by selling it unbundled. And they could have... at a much lower price. But the N1 came out at what, $20 less than the MSRP on the Motorola Droid... just under $600. And before you knew it, they were selling through T-Mobile. Of course, the contract-free idea doesn't work anyway, unless you have real universal 3G support in the phone: 850MHz, 1700MHz, 1900MHz, and 2100MHz... just for HPSA in the USA.
The problem is bandwidth. AT&T, being the merger of AT&T Mobility and Cingular, was around for quite some time, and had both 850MHz and 1900MHz slots in most of the country. T-Mobile is what happens when the German Telecom bought little Voicestream... the first company doing GSM in the USA, but with virtually no coverage. They've expanded, but there were only two carrier slots at 850MHz in any area... and Verizon nearly always had the other one.
Then take in the HSPA/UMTS technology. Regular 2G channels use 2.5MHz of bandwidth; 1.25MHz up and 1.25MHz down. HSPA wants 5MHz up and 5MHz down (10MHz, but not necessarily in the same band), and for HSPA+, you need two 10MHz channels. That's a pretty hard thing to come by. The bandwidth requirements are why AT&T doesn't have universal 3G coverage, much less HSPA+ everywhere. And of course, why T-Mobile needed new bandwidth opened up before they could offer any real 3G services.
Verizon and Sprint both use QualComm's EvDO (Evolution Data-Only) for 3G. It's slightly slower than HSPA (and of course, slightly less than half the speed of HSPA+), but EvDO fits in the same 2.5MHz channel used for 3G. This is why you have universal 3G coverage on Verizon (obviously, you get 2G downgrades due to signal quality, but not due to a lack of support on any cell site).
Sprint is supporting 4G now, via WiMax, in partnership with Clear. Other folks in the Clear group include Comcast, Google., and Intel. Clear is on 2500MHz, and they have lots of bandwidth there... up to 90MHz in some locales. But, as with anything that high frequency, they have problems with signal propagation, particularly through buildings and foliage.
Version won the 20MHz slot in the 700MHz band, and they're rolling out LTE-based 4G this summer, something like 40 cities going hot all at once. AT&T won the 12MHz slot in the 700MHz band, and expects to roll out LTE-based 4G sometime next summer. Thus, no need for the new iPhone to handle 4G... that'll be next year's iPhone. If Apple bothers to be current. They've generally been behind.. the iPhone 4 model out now is the first with full HSPA support (previous models limited to slow uploads).