So, like a shark, Apple (AAPL) must keep moving. This week, it is introducing two new products designed to consolidate and increase its position as the leader in this new generation of hand-held computers. I’ve been testing both and I like them a lot, with some minor caveats.

One of the new products is a refreshed model of the iPhone itself, called the iPhone 3G S. It looks the same, but offers more speed, more memory, more battery life, and a few new features, including video recording and a better camera for still photos.

The second is OS 3.0, the third version of the iPhone’s operating system, which comes on the 3G S and also can be installed on all prior iPhones and Touches. It includes a much longer list of added features, some innovative and some long overdue catch-ups to other phones. These include such widely requested capabilities as cut, copy and paste; systemwide searching; a wider virtual keyboard; and a feature called MMS that allows users to send photos and videos directly to other phones without using email.

Apple last week also made a bold business move to complement these new products. It decided to keep making the current model, the iPhone 3G, and to slash its price by 50%, to $99. That’s an unheard-of price tag for a pocket computer of this power and versatility, and gives millions of additional consumers a reason to choose the iPhone instead of a competitor.

In my tests, both the new phone and the new operating system performed well, with a few small exceptions. I believe the two strengthen the iPhone platform, make it likely the iPhone will continue to attract scads of apps, and are good for consumers.

But I also regard these changes as more evolutionary than revolutionary, and I don’t think this latest iPhone is as compelling an upgrade for the average user as the 3G model was last year for owners of the original 2007 iPhone.

Current iPhone owners can get an improved product by merely sticking with their existing phones and upgrading to the feature-laden new operating system, which is free (it costs $10 for iPod Touch owners), rather than shelling out at least $199 for the new iPhone 3G S. And many new iPhone buyers can opt for the $99 3G model, which is not only cheaper, but also greatly improved by the new OS 3.0.

On the other hand, power users will crave the new model’s much-better performance, battery life, storage and other features. And some will want the new model because, unlike the current model, it’s capable of handling a new cellular network feature that, in the next few years, will offer double the current data speeds.

The new, free operating system is available for download starting June 17. The iPhone 3G S will go on sale June 19 for $199 for a version with 16 gigabytes of memory, and $299 for 32 gigabytes of memory. Those memory capacities are double the amounts offered on the previous model last year at the same prices, and far exceed the built-in memory on most competing smart phones.

These prices are for new U.S. customers on the AT&T network, plus current owners who are eligible for what AT&T (T) calls a “standard” upgrade. If you already own an older iPhone, you could pay $200 more to upgrade, depending on how far along you are in your two-year service contract and how much you spend monthly. But AT&T, stung by criticism in recent days, has just decided to offer the lower, new-customer prices at launch to iPhone 3G owners eligible for upgrades at any time up to Sept. 30 of this year, even if they were originally told they’d have to pay the $200 premium.

Before I detail the new features and how they worked in my tests, let me state up-front what the new iPhone and its new operating system don’t deliver. The iPhone still lacks a physical keyboard. It still can’t run more than one third-party app at a time, as the Pre does. Its otherwise excellent Web browser still can’t play videos created in Adobe’s Flash software, which is widely used on the Web. And it still isn’t available on any U.S. carrier besides AT&T.

Also, AT&T won’t enable MMS until late this summer, even though dozens of other iPhone carriers in other countries are doing so immediately. And AT&T hasn’t set a date by which it will offer tethering, a new iPhone feature that allows the device to be used as a modem for a laptop. Other carriers in other countries are allowing this right away.

Here’s a rundown of the most important new features of both the new hardware and software, and how they performed in my tests.

The iPhone 3G S

Speed: To me, this is the most important feature of the new iPhone 3G S. In fact, the “S” in the name stands for speed. During my week of testing, the new model proved dramatically snappier in every way than my iPhone 3G. Its processor is 50% faster than in the prior model, and it sports a new graphics chip.

Applications opened much more quickly. Web pages loaded far faster. The camera was ready to use almost instantly. And I never once saw the occasional, annoying iPhone behavior where you strike a key while typing and it sits there, seemingly stuck, before you can continue.

Cellular-data speeds were about the same, but in repeated testing on different Wi-Fi networks, the 3G S racked up speeds 30% to 50% faster than on the 3G running at the same time on the same networks.

Battery Life: On my 3G iPhone, I usually could make it through the day, but it was often a close call, with the battery indicator winding up in the red. By contrast, the new model did much better, never hitting the red zone and rarely requiring interim charging at the office or in the car, even though, because I was testing it, I was pounding it much harder than usual, making more voice calls, playing lots of videos and music, trying numerous apps, constantly downloading email from two accounts, and syncing two calendars over the air.

Apple claims about the same talk time for the new model as on the old, and about the same Web-surfing time over the cellular network. But it says the 3G S gets about 50% more battery life when playing videos or surfing the Internet over Wi-Fi and 25% more time — an astounding 30 hours — for continuous music playback.

Memory: With the new 32-gigabyte model, I was able to store over 3,000 songs, more than 1,600 photos, 74 videos, 67 applications, 400 emails, nearly 1,000 contacts, months of calendar data, and dozens of documents, and still have 5 gigabytes left over—more than most phones offer out of the box.

Camera: The new model’s camera has a 3 megapixel resolution, up from 2 megapixels, and has autofocus and a feature that lets you tap the screen to change the focus to an object or person in the background of a shot. It still lacks zoom or a flash, though it does better in low light. It also has a macro feature for close-up shots. In my tests, all of this worked, but I didn’t think the pictures it took were dramatically better than those on the old model, and it can’t compete with phones like Nokia’s (NOK) new $700 N97, which has a 5-megapixel camera with zoom.

Video: The new video recorder worked well, even in low light, and lets you post videos directly to YouTube, among other places. You can also trim your videos right on the phone. This all worked well, but the videos aren’t high definition, and pale in comparison to those on the latest HD model of the popular $229 Flip pocket camcorder.

Voice Control: By simply holding down the new iPhone’s home button, you can dial contacts and control music playback by uttering voice commands. The phone will even tell you which song is playing. Like most voice-recognition systems, this one isn’t perfect. But it worked most of the time.

Compass: I don’t consider this important for most users, but it did work when I was walking or driving. It can orient maps in the direction you’re heading.

Small Touches: You can optionally turn on a new battery indicator that shows a precise percentage of battery life left. The screen has a new coating that resists oil and grease from fingerprints.

Downsides: The new phone crashed on me twice during my tests. Once, the voice-control feature killed the sound on the built-in iPod, requiring a reboot. But I couldn’t replicate this problem. Another time, the phone froze while downloading a TV show. Apple blamed this on a prerelease server issue, and it didn’t happen again.

iPhone Operating System 3.0

Copy, Cut and Paste: Apple is late with this common feature, but it’s the best implementation I’ve seen on a phone. In a text page, you just double tap on a word, and it is selected with little handles around it that let you expand or contract the selected area. Then, you just click on a copy icon that pops up over the selection. To paste, you tap elsewhere in the page, or even in another app, and a paste icon pops up. Click that icon, and the selected text is pasted in. It worked well in all my tests.

The feature works a bit differently for some Web pages, where you hold down your finger over an area and it selects a whole block of text, like a paragraph, but still has the handles that allow adjusting the selection. It also allows copying and pasting photos. You can also just select a word or a section or a whole page of text and delete it. And if you want to undo a paste, just shake the phone.

Some Web pages and third-party apps don’t yet support this feature, but most do.

Search: Before, you could search only in the Contacts app. Now, there are search features in Mail, Calendar, the built-in iPod and Notes. And there is a way to search the whole phone at once. You just hit the home button, slowly, twice, and a special search screen appears. Type in any phrase, and it brings up every instance in multiple apps.

This is another catch-up feature, but it works well. For instance, when I searched for the word “Phil,” it brought up songs by Phil Collins, a note about Philadelphia, calendar items mentioning people named Phil or Phillips, emails to or from people with those names, and contacts for people named Phil or Phillips.

In email, the search function will even find messages that aren’t on your phone but that are stored on the servers of certain email services. For instance, I was able to almost instantly find emails from two years ago stored on Google’s (GOOG) Gmail.

One downside — in email, search looks for words only in email headers, not in the body of the messages.

Landscape Keyboard: In older iPods, the only built-in program that supported a wider, landscape keyboard, which is better for thumb typing, was the Web browser. Now, you can turn the phone horizontally and use a landscape keyboard in the Mail, Messages and Notes programs as well.

Find My iPhone: If you belong to Apple’s $99 a year MobileMe service, you can now locate a lost iPhone on a map on any computer, send the iPhone a message saying how to return it to you, and cause it to emit a beep, even if the sound is turned off. I tested this and it worked well. You can even remotely wipe all your data off the phone.

Voice Memos: The OS includes a Voice Memo app that lets you dictate reminders or other messages, and then edit and email them. I found it worked well.

Navigation: Another catch-up feature, turn-by-turn navigation with voice prompts, is also now supported. I tested this with a third-party app called Gokivo, and it did OK, though the developer admits to a prerelease bug I encountered.

Auto-Authentication: In the new OS, the iPhone can remember your log-in credentials for commercial Wi-Fi hotspot services, so you don’t have to enter them again and again. Unfortunately, in my tests with the AT&T Wi-Fi service, this failed repeatedly in several Starbucks (SBUX) shops. Apple blames a glitch in my prerelease phone’s SIM card.

Push Notification: To make up for its lack of multitasking, the new iPhone OS has a feature where third-party apps can notify you of new events, like a sports score, or a new invitation to an online game. I tried this with a game called TapTap Revenge, and it worked fine.

Stocks: The built-in stock application now has much more detailed data, including market cap, news headlines and price/earnings ratio for each stock.

MMS and Tethering: I couldn’t test these useful features because my tests were all done on AT&T, which hasn’t rolled them out.

Minor Touches: You can now move an icon among screens with one continuous motion, instead of stopping at each screen. And there are two more screens to house icons. You can finally synchronize Notes with your PC or Mac. You also can now maintain both calendars and contacts synced wirelessly with online services and those synced via cable with your computer. And you can play games and transfer files wirelessly over Bluetooth with other iPods or Touches that are nearby.

Bottom Line: Both the new iPhone and iPhone OS are packed with features that make a great product even better. But, for many users, the software may be enough of a boost to keep them from buying the new model.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081022/apple-polishes-popular-macbook-for-a-higher-price/ http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081022/apple-polishes-popular-macbook-for-a-higher-price/#comments Thu, 23 Oct 2008 01:02:04 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081022/apple-polishes-popular-macbook-for-a-higher-price/ Apple’s MacBook laptop, the company’s low-end portable computer aimed at average consumers, isn’t just any old product. It’s the best-selling Macintosh in history, at a time when Mac sales are growing much faster than sales of PCs in the U.S. overall. And, according to the sales-research organization NPD Group, the midrange model of the MacBook has been the single best-selling laptop of any brand in U.S. retail stores for the past five months.

So, when Apple completely revamped the design of the MacBook last week, it was a big deal, not only for Mac die-hards, but for anyone shopping for an everyday laptop.

I’ve been testing the base model of the new MacBook for the past five days, and I like it a lot, despite a few downsides. I found this new MacBook to be speedy, solid, innovative, and comfortable to use, with very good battery life.

The new model sports a sturdy aluminum case, instead of the old plastic one, and looks gorgeous. And it even seemed to run cooler than earlier Apple (AAPL) aluminum laptops. It’s 10% lighter, at 4.5 pounds, and 12% thinner, at 0.95 inch, than its predecessor, and continues to include a built-in DVD drive. Its processor is slower, yet it has good performance because of much faster graphics, and it also offers a far brighter screen in the same 13.3-inch size. But it still gets strong battery life — slightly better in fact than the older model, in my tests.

Plus, the new MacBook includes a huge, innovative glass track pad that functions as a combination of a traditional track pad and the multitouch screen of an iPhone. This track pad allows all sorts of fingertip gestures you can use to navigate Web pages, manipulate photos, and switch among programs.

In another radical step, Apple eliminated the button below the track pad. When you want to perform a mouse click, you just depress the entire track pad. The whole thing is a big button, which can act as either the left or right button on a traditional mouse, and which allows easy, smooth scrolling.

Like all current Macs, the new MacBooks come with Apple’s Leopard operating system, which I consider superior to Windows. But the new MacBooks can run Windows as well. In my tests, the new model ran Windows XP beautifully. I was able to run such Windows-only programs as Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer and Outlook right along with my Mac software, at snappy speeds. It can also run Windows Vista.

The cheaper of the two new versions comes with an adequate 160-gigabyte hard disk, though larger disks are available, and two gigabytes of memory, which is plenty for a consumer Mac.

On my tough battery test, where I turn off all power-saving features and play an endless loop of music, the new MacBook lasted three hours and 53 minutes — six minutes longer than the old one. That suggests that, in normal use, with power-saving on, you could achieve Apple’s claim of five hours of battery life, or come close.

There are some drawbacks, of course. The cheapest of the new models costs $1,299, $200 more than the cheapest of the old models. Though that’s the same price as the most popular of the older models, and you get more for your money, the swooning economy may make that price tag tougher for some families to swallow. As a hedge against this, Apple will continue to sell the base model of the old MacBook, at $999.

Another downside to the new MacBook is that the radical new glass track pad will take some time to get used to. At first, I found its surface so slippery that I had trouble accurately placing the cursor on the item I wanted to select. But three other people I asked to test this had no such trouble, and my own woes with this disappeared after a few days, either because I got more used to it, or because the surface picked up enough dirt to become less slick.

It also takes a while to adapt to the lack of a button. For left-clicking, you press the whole track pad with one finger. For right-clicking, you press down with two fingers, or you can set an option to perform right-clicking with one finger by pressing on one of the lower corners of the track pad. You can also optionally use light tapping instead of clicking, a common option on other laptops.

In addition, the model’s bright LED screen comes in only a glossy finish, which some folks hate because it displays more glare and fingerprints than the old matte screens.

Apple still stubbornly refuses to incorporate a slot for the flash memory cards commonly used in cameras and cellphones. And the new model omits the FireWire port, which some consumers used to connect older camcorders and certain external hard disks. The new model uses a common Ethernet networking cable instead of FireWire to transfer all your files and programs from an older Mac, a process I found worked perfectly.

All in all, though, Apple’s new MacBook is a terrific choice for consumers and students, if you can handle the $1,299 price.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20081022/apple-polishes-popular-macbook-for-a-higher-price/feed/ 9 http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20070208/produce-star-in-video/ http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20070208/produce-star-in-video/#comments Thu, 08 Feb 2007 00:01:00 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20070208/anyone-can-produce-and-star-in-a-video/ Everyone can now be a video producer. YouTube and other Web sites are filled with short amateur videos created on typical home computers. Even print journalists like me have joined the trend. For the past couple of months, I’ve been recording brief video commentaries to post along with my columns on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site, WSJ.com.

But how, exactly, does one make such a video? I’ve had multiple readers ask me about how I do mine, so I thought I’d explain the process. Because the Journal employs professional producers who help me, the method I use isn’t a purely amateur experience. But most of it is the same as what anyone could do at home. One look at my (ahem) production values confirms that. You can see for yourself at wsj.com/mossbergvideo.

Walt Mossberg gives a lesson on producing your own video for the Web, and lets you off the hook for amateur production values.

My method is pretty simple. Shortly after writing the columns each week, I sit down in front of a computer with a built-in video camera and record the commentary using the free software that comes with the computer. Then, using the same software, I convert the movie into a format our Web producers can use and upload it to them. They add titles and insert footage of any products I’m discussing.

I have recorded most of these videos in my home office in Maryland, using a desktop computer. But when I am on the road, I have used a laptop in hotel rooms from Las Vegas to New York City to Munich. At home, I use a professional microphone supplied by our producers, but on the road, I just use the laptop’s built-in mic. And I don’t use any special lighting.

In both settings, but especially in hotel rooms, I make sure the parts of the room that get in the shot aren’t too messy or distracting. Nobody wants to see a used room-service tray in one of these videos.

So far, I have done all my videos on a Macintosh, either an iMac desktop or a MacBook Pro laptop, and I’ve used Apple’s built-in iMovie software — mostly because it is simple and reliable, and produces good videos despite unpredictable conditions. It also easily exports the videos into QuickTime files, an Apple format that our producers — who also use Macs — can easily use. YouTube can use this format, too, along with other formats.

Such videos could also be created on a Windows computer that has a camera and accompanying video software. I have tested this on a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv6000 laptop with a built-in camera, using the free Windows Movie Maker program in Windows XP. The videos recorded fine, and I was able to save them in Microsoft’s Windows Media Video format, which the Journal producers — or sites like YouTube — can use.

Unfortunately, on this particular H-P computer, I’ve had problems with the video and audio being out of sync, an obstacle I’ve never encountered on the Macs. But I assume that doesn’t happen on all, or even most, Windows machines.

My videos are very basic: It’s just me talking into the camera and occasionally holding up a product. I’m not moving around much, or including other people. I don’t usually record multiple takes, and I don’t have time to do editing. Because I don’t care much about production values, there are shadows and the sound is hardly perfect. But you could use the same hardware and software to make more elaborate videos with better lighting and sound. Both iMovie and Windows Movie Maker allow extensive editing, the use of video effects and the addition of titles and transitions.

You could also buy better video software. For instance, our producers in New York edit my videos using off-the-shelf Macs running a high-end Apple video program called Final Cut Studio, which costs $1,299. A simpler version, Final Cut Express, costs $299. On Windows, there are video programs like Adobe Premiere Pro, for $849, or the simpler Premiere Elements, for $99.

What if you want to use a digital camcorder or the video function of a digital still camera, to shoot your videos? Well, you can easily do that and just import your videos from the camera into your Mac or Windows computer using a cable and most video software.

After you’ve imported the video and saved it to your hard disk, you can either directly upload it to YouTube or another Web site or edit it first before uploading.

While my computers have built-in cameras, if yours don’t you can buy an add-on, such as the external iSight camera made by Apple. For Windows computers, Logitech and others make a variety of external cameras. If you use a Mac, I also recommend a small program called iGlasses, a terrific $8 utility that can tweak Apple cameras to compensate for poor lighting or to enhance images. It is available at www.ecamm.com.

Two other tips: Remember to look into the camera, not at the screen, so you don’t appear to be looking away from the viewer. And if you wear glasses, as I do, turn off the screen, so it doesn’t reflect in your glasses.

If I can make videos, so can you.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. See video versions of my reviews at wsj.com/mossbergvideo.

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