iPad
iPhone
Who would have imagined a day where you can get better photos on a tablet than a phone (admittedly a 2 year old phone, but still.. most reviews of the iPad Air 2 have compared the camera to that of the iPhone 5).
Category: Other
Print vs Digital Magazines
I’ve been a subscriber to various magazines over the years. Since 2006 and to this day I’ve had a subscription to New Scientist (that’s just over 400 magazines delivered to my door alone), previously .Net Magazine and PC Pro.
New Scientist is a weekly periodical and appears in newsagents on a Thursday. Back in 2006 (and for many years) this meant it would arrive on a Thursday in the post. Unfortunately as time went on, it became Friday…and then Saturday. Recently I’d been receiving some issues on the Monday, 4 days after I’d seen it on the newsstand and 3 days before the next issue. This seemed a bit bizarre to me, so decided to switch to the cheaper subscription ‘digital only’ subscription.
I read a lot on my iPad, but i’ve always enjoyed the feeling of ‘switching off’ that comes with picking up a real, printed magazine. That said, I’ve found the NewScientist iPad app a vast improvement on earlier attempts at magazines on tablets. Unlike a lot of earlier magazine apps I tried when I first got an iPad in 2011, the NewScientist app is not a scanned-in image of the printed page. That means text is infinitely sharp, and you can select words to look them up (or even copy and paste them). A push notification alerts me when a new issue is available to download, although so far is hasn’t downloaded in the background as iOS NewsStand are apparently able to do. Being mostly text this does mean the downloads are relatively small, so that’s not a big deal.
One thing that does strike me as odd, being ‘digital only’, is the concept of an ‘issue’ itself. Does The Verge have ‘issues’, does the BBC News website? Of course not, they’re digital publications. I wonder whether magazines of the future will either. There is, however, something to be said for having a completed body of work that can be enjoyed as a whole, and having it delivered on a regular schedule and to be able to refer to back to an article based on its issue number and page rather than URL.
So glad I made the switch. Not sure I’ll be taking my iPad with me to the beach though. Sand and screens have never been a great mix. For that I’ll resort to good old paper.
iPhone OS 3
While self confessed geeks and technology enthusiasts like myself may get 2 or 3 years out of a device (if that, I know many people who switch phone multiple times a year), normal people expect to get a bit more out of these expensive gadgets. I found a first gen iPod Touch in my dad’s glove box today and thought I’d reminisce about how much iOS (then called iPhone OS) had changed, yet in some ways hasn’t much at all.
Home screen
This was how it looked from iPhone OS 1 through to 3 – the metallic dock. The iPod Touch always had separate ‘Music’ and ‘Video’ apps, whereas iPhones has a single app called ‘iPod’. No wallpaper, but apart from that it stayed pretty much the same until iOS 7 moved Spotlight search to the top instead of being on the left.
Lock Screen
The lock screen stayed exactly the same until iOS 7 – the only minor change was the additional of a camera button in iOS 5.1.
Home button
The days before ‘multitasking’ (aka recent task switching) meant the home button ‘double tap’ action could be customised. I always remember having it be set to launch the music player. If you had ‘Show iPod Controls’ selected then you would get an alert box with music controls, no matter which app you were in. Multitasking.
iTunes Store
The iTunes Store was a major selling point of the iPod Touch. Being able to wirelessly buy and play an album within minutes was pretty darn mind blowing at the time.
Wallpaper
The bundled lock screen images seem very ‘of their time’ – silhouettes with white ear buds.
No Speaker
This setting is a carry over from the classic iPod. The original iPod Touch had no loudspeaker. The noises it could make were on par with a Casio watch.
About
Released in 2007, the iPod Touch got its last software update on February 2nd 2010.
