Tomorrow morning, lots of lucky folks will get their hands on the latest must-have hardware from Apple - iPhone 4. Many of those will want to check out the new camera hardware first since the latest incarnation of the iPhone includes a five megapixel (for stills) camera module that can shoot HD video as well. What they will immediately notice, however, is not the increase in megapixels from three to five, but the much improved responsiveness when snapping a picture.
I noticed this myself today but not because I got the new phone before anyone else. I actually noticed this improved camera app performance after I downloaded and installed iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS. The new iPhone OS has been available since Monday, but I finally got around to it today. Usually I grab free stuff a bit faster,
I was just killing time waiting for my five and nine year old daughters to finish rehearsing, so I could shoot a video of their trampoline dance routine. The camera app on the new iOS 4 was so much faster than the previous version that I had to take quite a few pictures of my dog lazing on the deck before the girls were ready for video.
It was a big install package that wrested complete control of my iTunes while those nearly 400 MB were dumped onto the phone. Coincidentally, I had episode 200 of MacBreak Weekly playing where one of that podcast's regulars, Andy Ihnatko, pointed out that 80% of "the awesomeness of the iPhone 4 is available just in iOS 4." That was certainly evident with the camera app.
Having the MacBreak podcast take over my computer made it awfully difficult to read patents, but it did give me time to ponder the importance of software on Apple's various platforms. That's something I spent quite a bit of time thinking about while writing about the A4 apps processor for EE Times. The latest iPhone is built from some great hardware, not least of all the A4, but a great deal of the absolute performance of Apple computers, not just the general user experience or the slick eye candy of the screen layouts and icons, can be attributed to the software from the folks down in Cupertino.
iPhone 4 won’t be a lazy dog.
