The Verizon iPhone 4

Wednesday, 2 February 2011

It’s the same phone. The only difference is the network. And Verizon’s network is better.

That’s it in a nut.

Here’s the whole story. I’ve been using a Verizon iPhone 4 since Friday morning.¹ I was in San Francisco through Sunday morning, and I’ve been home in Philadelphia ever since.

First, it’s not really the same phone. For one thing, the Verizon iPhone currently runs an ever-so-slightly newer version of iOS. (More on this below.) For another, the Verizon iPhone 4 is, technically, different hardware. The existing iPhone 4 only supports GSM networks. The new Verizon iPhone only supports CDMA. Thus, the two phones have entirely different 3G networking components. The external antenna is also different. I find the CDMA iPhone 4’s antenna to be more aesthetically pleasing, because it’s symmetrical, but it’s a very subtle change. In every other regard, the two phones are identical. They feel the same, they look the same. They perform the same. They have the same battery life.

In six days of use, I find call quality noticeably superior on the Verizon iPhone 4. This was more obvious in San Francisco than it was here in Philadelphia, but it’s noticeable here, too. For example, both of my parents — neither of whom are technically savvy or use cell phones regularly — agreed that I sounded much better while using the Verizon iPhone 4 than I did on my AT&T iPhone 4. There’s an audio mushiness on AT&T.

That said, AT&T’s network actually held up pretty well during Macworld Expo last week. I had data service even on the Expo show floor, and I didn’t miss or drop a single call. But calls on the Verizon phone consistently sounded better.

For data, AT&T’s network is faster, exactly as advertised. I used two apps to test data networking speeds over several days: Speedtest.net and FCC Mobile Broadband. These are the average results:

	AT&T	Verizon
Download	1.87 Mbps	1.28 Mbps
Upload	1.18 Mbps	0.48 Mbps
Ping Latency	284 ms	281 ms

These tests were conducted in my home office in Philadelphia. I lacked the foresight to conduct them before leaving San Francisco. For downloading, AT&T is a little faster. For uploading, it’s a bit more than twice as fast. And latency is about equal.

In practice, though, walking around San Francisco and Center City Philadelphia, I feel like I get better service on the Verizon iPhone. For example, my wife and I share a Ta-Da List account for grocery shopping. It’s entirely web-based, and there are certain sections of our grocery store where it doesn’t work with my AT&T iPhone. The Verizon iPhone got perfect service throughout the store. I noticed the same thing in several places in San Francisco. I found only one spot (it was in San Francisco) where my AT&T iPhone 4 had a strong connection but this Verizon iPhone did not.

The numbers don’t lie. AT&T’s data network is faster — when you have a strong connection on both phones. The catch is with that “when you have a strong connection” clause. Verizon’s network has wider, more consistent coverage, and noticeably superior voice quality.²

For what it’s worth, my end of last Friday’s episode of The Talk Show, reporting from Macworld Expo, was recorded entirely over a single continuous voice call placed using the Verizon iPhone 4. It was a 39-minute call (not every minute was recorded) from San Francisco, one block from Moscone, in my hotel room on the 8th floor. No drops, no hiccups, decent quality throughout.

The Wi-Fi Hotspot

The Verizon iPhone, at this moment, also has one unique feature: Wi-Fi hotspot tethering. My unit is running iOS version 4.2.6, and I believe that is the version Apple intends to ship to customers on February 10. All other iPhones around the world are currently on iOS 4.2.1.

When next Apple rolls out an iOS update, all iPhones will get this feature. It will be up to individual carriers whether they support it, just as with the iPhone’s existing USB/Bluetooth tethering feature.

But when will that be? I asked, and Apple declined to answer. My hunch is that we got our answer today, at, of all places, the announcement event for The Daily. The Daily requires a subscription — either $1 per week, or $40 per year. They’re using a new in-app subscription payment system from Apple for this — but these in-app subscription APIs aren’t in iOS 4.2. So The Daily launched today, free for a limited time. They announced at the event that this initial free two-week period was brought to us by: Verizon.

So my guess is that a deal was worked out like this:

1. The Verizon iPhone debuts with worldwide exclusive access to the Wi-Fi hotspot tethering feature. This way, all the reviews for the Verizon iPhone will mention a very cool feature that the AT&T iPhone doesn’t have. But what it really is is a feature that the AT&T iPhone doesn’t have yet. But it won’t play that way in the review summaries.

2. Verizon sponsors a two-week free period for The Daily.

3. At some point in the next two weeks or so, Apple holds an announcement regarding in-app subscription APIs (and, I suspect, given this week’s news regarding in-app payments for third-party bookstores, other in-app purchasing changes). At this point, Apple releases a new version of iOS with support for in-app subscription purchasing and the Wi-Fi hotspot feature. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Apple releases that iOS update prior to February 10, the date the iPhone 4 is slated to arrive in Verizon customers’ hands.

That’s all truly just a guess on my part though. I could be wrong. For one thing, The Daily is an iPad-only app, and tethering is an iPhone-only feature. But I suspect that Apple now prefers to keep the iOS versions in sync between iPhone and iPad — and surely, there will be subscription payment apps that work on both devices.

As for how the hotspot feature works, it’s just great.

First, it’s a lot easier to turn on than it was before. Previously, you needed to open Settings, then go to General → Network → Internet Tethering. Now it’s right at the top of the first level in Settings, with a new name: “Personal Hotspot”.

Turn it on, and you get a Wi-Fi hotspot. The name of the network is the name of your iPhone, as specified when you sync it with iTunes on your computer. It’s password protected by default, and Apple even auto-suggests good passwords like “closed53soaps” — two words, all-lowercase, separated by two digits.

When a client connects, you get a pulsing blue status bar, just as with the existing tethering feature. But now, the status bar includes a count of the connected clients. In the same way that you can tap the green pulsing status bar to return to the Phone app during a call, you can tap the blue pulsing status bar to return to the Personal Hotspot settings.

I used the hotspot feature from my Mac and iPad for much of my work so far this week. It works perfectly, and speed is about as good as one could hope for. The iPhone’s battery meter dropped about 5 percent for every 20 minutes of web surfing while used as a hotspot.

Apple has made the iPhone pretty aggressive about ceasing to broadcast the hotspot when there are no clients connected. So if you turn the hotspot feature on and leave it on, but no clients actually connect, there doesn’t seem to be any effect on battery life that I could see. The same thing happens about a minute or so after the last remaining client disconnects.

However, after the iPhone stops broadcasting the hotspot network, when you then attempt to reconnect, you need to go back to the Hotspot Tethering screen in Settings to get it to “wake up” and start actively broadcasting the network again. You don’t need to change any settings on the screen, because you left the toggle set to “On” — you just need to open the Personal Hotspot settings screen to wake it up. Put another way, it seems to me that if you’re going to use this feature regularly, you can leave the toggle switch set to “On”, and your battery life won’t suffer when the hotspot isn’t actually being used. But when you do need to use it, you need to open the Personal Hotspot settings screen each time.

If you don’t like this sort of “extend the battery life at all costs” behavior, you probably don’t like the iPhone anyway.

The hotspot feature works so well that I can’t really see paying for a 3G iPad again. I’d rather have a Wi-Fi-only iPad and my iPhone’s hotspot, when needed, than pay $15 a month for a 3G data service that only works on the iPad itself. It’s not quite as convenient as having 3G built right in to the iPad, but I just don’t use 3G on the iPad all that much. The other big thing is that with iPhone tethering, my MacBook can get online too — one $20 monthly tethering fee, and all my portable computers have 3G access. (Worked great at SFO Sunday morning.)

That Simultaneous Voice/Data Limitation

When Apple and Verizon announced their deal for the iPhone 4 last month, there was much hemming and hawing about a technical CDMA limitation: it doesn’t support simultaneous voice and data. My thought was: if this CDMA simultaneous voice-data restriction is a deal-breaker, how come we’ve never heard complaints about it from the 94 million existing Verizon customers?

The original 2007 EDGE iPhone had a similar, but much worse limitation. With EDGE, not only could you not use data while on a call, but when you were using data, you couldn’t get calls. If a call came in while you were using data, it would go straight to voicemail. Worse, voicemail messages sometimes took a few minutes to appear. Easily the most annoying aspect of the EDGE iPhone. (Update: Apparently this is an AT&T EDGE limitation; not an inherent limitation of EDGE.)

CDMA’s limitation only works one way: when you are on a call, you can’t use data. But when you are using data, calls come through. If you decline the call, data continues, almost uninterrupted. When you’re using the hotspot feature, if you accept a call, Wi-Fi clients receive no data for the duration of the call, but the Wi-Fi connection is not dropped. As soon as the call is ended, data resumes.

I haven’t run into a problem with this once in the week I’ve had the phone.

Music to Verizon’s Ears

So let’s slightly tweak the nutshell summary of the Verizon iPhone: It’s the same phone. The only differences are (a) a brief period of Verizon exclusivity for the Wi-Fi hotspot feature, and (b) the network. And Verizon’s network is better.

I think both Verizon and Apple are delighted by this.

Apple is delighted because it’s a way of “proving” that the iPhone’s notorious problems with call-dropping and voice quality are AT&T’s fault, not theirs. Now, it’s theoretically possible that the AT&T iPhone’s problems are still Apple’s fault — it could be that the GSM iPhones have hardware or driver problems that the CDMA iPhone 4 does not. But, alas for AT&T, GSM iPhone users around the world do not share in the problems of GSM iPhone users in the United States. Regardless, what matters is mass market perception. Technical people understand that the Verizon iPhone 4 is not exactly the same hardware as the AT&T iPhone 4. But normal people see them as identical. That’s the whole point of Apple’s “two is better than one” commercial: the only difference is the network.

Verizon is delighted because the iPhone 4 is effectively a controlled experiment. There’s one difference, the network, and their network looks better. Verizon isn’t competing with Apple. They’re competing against AT&T. Assuming the iPhone 4 continues to perform on Verizon going forward as it has for me this past week, Verizon is going to bash AT&T over the head with the iPhone 4. Same phone, better on Verizon.

Verizon sells phones. They will continue to sell phones. They will continue to own and push (and control) the Droid brand. The iPhone, though, is a phone they don’t need to own, push, or control. Apple will sell it for them. Verizon just needs to sell their core competency: cellular networking.

I doubt there was much contention between Verizon and Apple. I don’t think we had to wait until now for a Verizon iPhone because they were negotiating with sharp daggers over putting a Verizon logo on the hardware, or custom Verizon apps on the homescreen, or ceding control over OS updates. Verizon may have been reluctant about those things back in 2006, but not now. Verizon might very well prefer a world where the iPhone never existed, but given that it does, and given its popularity, they want it.

No, I suspect the reason we had to wait until now for a Verizon iPhone is that AT&T’s U.S. exclusivity deal with Apple ran through the end of 2010. It’s that simple. That’s why Bloomberg could be so certain, all the way back in June, that Verizon would be getting the iPhone in early 2011. The deal was done, they just had to wait. And while they waited, Apple and Verizon tested and tweaked the shit out of these things on Verizon’s network.

A lot of people have been waiting for four years for this phone. The funny thing is, by next month, the Verizon iPhone is going to seem like the most normal thing in the world. ★

Push Pop Press

Tuesday, 1 February 2011

My general policy is not to link to teaser sites, on the grounds that there’s plenty of stuff that’s actually shipping to write about and draw attention to. But, there are exceptions.

Push Pop Press is an exception.

Their teaser site, which opened today, offers this description:

Our team is bringing together great content and beautiful software to create a new breed of digital books. Books that let you explore photos, videos, music, maps, and interactive graphics, all through a new physics-based multi-touch user interface.

Their team has a track record of creating excellent, boundary-pushing software: designer Mike Matas (whose work includes Delicious Library, and, at Apple, work on the original iOS), and engineers Kimon Tsinteris and Austin Sarner. While both were at Apple, Tsinteris and Matas collaborated on the iOS Maps app.

Last week in San Francisco, I got a hands-on demo (from Matas) of what they’re working on. It’s amazing.

What I saw (and used) was a multimedia-rich book running on an iPhone 4. There is no UI chrome. No status bar at the top or tab bar at the bottom. It’s just like you see in the still image on their teaser site. The entire screen is filled by content, not user interface elements. The screen is the book, the book is the screen.

You use it almost entirely by swiping and pinching. Typically in iOS, when you play an embedded video, the screen fades to black as you switch to full-screen mode for the video. Then, when you’re done watching the video, you tap a blue “Done” button at the top left corner to go back, at which point the screen fades from black back to the previous layout. In Push Pop’s books, that’s not how it works. To play a video, you just tap play and it plays in place. If you want to play it full-screen, you pinch it out. Pinch back in to go back to the book layout. There is no fade-to-black stuff. The video, playing live, simply grows or shrinks as you pinch, on top on the page.

And, as they say, there’s a physics engine in place, which gives all the elements on screen a certain heft as you swipe and pinch them. It doesn’t just feel like a game — it feels like an exquisitely crafted game.

Performance is achingly smooth. E.g., when you zoom out or in on a video, the zooming tracks the pinching of your fingers precisely and instantly. Do the pinch fast — more like a popping pinch-flick — and the zoom expansion will respond accordingly and pop the element into full-screen size. Think about how the standard iOS list controls have a momentum-based feel to them — like when you flick them to scroll quickly, or the bounce when you hit the top or bottom. That’s what Push Pop’s UI feels like, except it’s for everything — page-turning, image/video zooming, everything.

The closest comparison I can think of is to Flipboard’s iPad app, but Push Pop Press’s UI feels smoother than Flipboard’s. (That could be because I only saw Push Pop’s stuff on an iPhone 4, whereas Flipboard only runs on the iPad. The iPhone 4 feels faster to me, in general, than the iPad.) Also, Flipboard lets you open and close elements via pinch gestures, but also has UI chrome for the same things — a literal “Close” button, for example, that performs the same action as pinching to close. Push Pop’s UI lacks such chrome. It’s nothing but content on screen, and nothing but gestures for interaction.

The format of their “books” is not HTML or anything like ePub (the format Apple uses for iBooks books). Push Pop’s books are native Cocoa Touch iOS apps.¹ I’ve seen some cool stuff rendered through WebKit, but never anything like this in terms of smoothness, precision, and the lack of latency between touch gestures and on-screen responsiveness. “Pages” look more like they were laid-out by a designer than randomly rendered by a web browser.

The better visual layout, smoother and more show-offy interaction, and proprietary native-to-iOS format are more what I expected Apple’s e-book platform to be. This thing just begs for a gushing look-at-how-awesome-this-thing-is on-stage demo from Steve Jobs. I think Apple went with the wrong type of show-offy-ness with iBooks. Apple went in the direction of skeuomorphically aping the paper book — a spine, the outline of paper pages rendered on screen, animation that mimics paper page turning.

I find iBooks’s design to be distracting. It demos well, but grows tiresome quickly. In a paper book, there is one layer of “chrome” surrounding the content of the book — the physical boundaries and binding of the paper itself. In iBooks, there are two layers of chrome: the physical black bezel and metal frame of the device (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), and the virtual paper book rendered on screen. And the fake paper book in iBooks doesn’t even offer useful visual context — the stack of “remaining” pages visible under the current page never changes in thickness, offering no clue, as in a paper book, how far along in the book you are.

Amazon has taken a more content-focused approach with the Kindle. No fake paper boundaries rendered on screen, and the paging animation looks like screens moving, not sheets of paper turning. The content in a Kindle book, as rendered on any device — iPhone, iPad, or Kindle hardware — is surrounded almost only by the device hardware itself. But there’s no joy in the Kindle experience. No one looks at the Kindle app and says, “Wow”. But that’s exactly what you’re going to say when you first see a Push Pop Press book.

Kindle’s minimalism is perhaps appropriate for books like novels, which are entirely (or almost entirely) text. (They could certainly stand to vastly improve their typography, however.) I suspect that Push Pop Press’s platform would be overkill for a purely-text book like a novel. The demo book from Push Pop that I played with was, content-wise, more like a textbook or Taschen-style coffee table book — chock full of photographs, illustrations, and movies. I can’t imagine reading a book like that on a Kindle device or even in the Kindle app on an iPad, and I don’t think iBooks is capable of it either.

Kindle and iBooks seem to have the goal of reproducing what is possible in paper books. Yes, iBooks supports embedded video and audio content, but it does so in a way that feels as though Apple pondered what it would be like if you could play video on a piece of paper. Push Pop’s concept strikes me as far more ambitious: What can we do with the idea of a “book” if we eliminate the limitations of ink and paper, rather than mimic them? E-books that aren’t merely rendered by software, but rather e-books that are software. ★

Oceania: We Have Always Required Books From the Eurasian E-Bookstore to Be Sold Through Our In-App Purchasing System

Tuesday, 1 February 2011

When I went to bed last night, this NYT story had just hit. Sony went to The Times with the story that their iOS e-book reader app had been rejected by Apple, because book purchases weren’t made through Apple’s in-app purchasing system. (Which system, let’s be clear up front, gives Apple a 30 percent cut of the revenue.)

It remains unclear from The Times’s story just how Sony’s app, as submitted to Apple, works. Amazon’s Kindle app and Barnes & Nobles’s Nook app don’t use Apple’s in-app purchasing system, either — but they don’t allow purchasing within their apps, period. You purchase books through a web browser, then you can access those books through the apps.

In short, it wasn’t clear at all, from Sony’s story, whether anything had changed:

Some application developers, including Sony, say Apple has told them they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps unless the transactions go through Apple’s system.

Taken literally, that paragraph implies nothing has changed, because no third-party iOS e-book apps allow in-app purchases that circumvent Apple’s system.

Today, Apple has clarified, to some degree, what’s going on. Jim Dalrymple reports:

“We have not changed our developer terms or guidelines,” Apple spokesperson, Trudy Muller, told The Loop. “We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.”

Translation: We haven’t changed the rules, but what used to be allowed is no longer allowed.

Yeah, that makes total sense.

Jason Kincaid has a good rundown of how this is, indeed, a change in de facto policy, regardless of whether there’s been any change to Apple’s written policies. Kincaid points to section 11.2 in Apple’s iOS developer guidelines, which state:

Apps utilizing a system other than the In App Purchase API (IAP) to purchase content, functionality, or services in an app will be rejected.

Kincaid writes:

Now, Amazon’s Kindle app doesn’t conduct its purchases through the app itself — users are instead kicked off to a browser where they actually buy their books, and that content is then synced to the Kindle app. Apple’s rule is worded vaguely enough that it can claim this workaround is in violation of the guidelines. But it obviously hasn’t been enforced like this before now, so the notion that nothing has changed is clearly false.

I.e., Apple’s official stance seems to be that the rules haven’t changed, but they weren’t enforcing them until now. Sony’s iOS app may well act exactly like Amazon’s Kindle app, but apparently that behavior is no longer permitted.

Even if you take aside the double-speak “We have not changed our developer terms” preface, Apple’s stated explanation of the new rules leave several unanswered questions.

Does the new policy really only apply to “books”, specifically? Apple gave the identical statement to several publications, each time specifically saying “books”. I would assume, though, that this applies to any purchased content, not just books. Books are simply the first type of content for which these rules are being applied.

What about pricing? Can Amazon comply with these new rules by selling its Kindle books through Apple’s in-app purchasing system with a 43 percent markup, to account for Apple’s 30 percent cut through the in-app API? Consider a Kindle book that Amazon sells for $10. Can they sell it for $14.30 through in-app purchasing? That way Amazon’s cut would remain $10. Or will Apple insist on price matching, meaning Amazon can only comply by accepting 30 percent less revenue on books purchased in-app compared to those purchased from Amazon directly?¹

My guess is that Sony is getting hurt because they were late to the game. Amazon’s Kindle app precedes the existence of Apple’s in-app purchasing API. I thoroughly doubt Apple is going to pull the Kindle (or Nook) app from the App Store, but I’ll bet they’re already in discussions with Amazon (and Barnes & Noble) about how these apps need to change going forward. It’s easier to reject Sony’s app as a first step toward the application of new rules because Sony’s app is brand-new — Apple isn’t taking anything away from users that was previously available to them.

This sucks for Sony because, for now, they’re locked out of the App Store. It sucks for Amazon and Barnes & Noble too, if I’m right that, going forward, they’re going to have to offer in-app purchasing as an option. But you can’t say it’s surprising that the rules are evolving toward more money for Apple while improving the experience for users — that’s win-win from Apple’s perspective. Here’s the de facto rule, in a nut: If you have an app in the App Store, Apple gets a cut of the dough from the app.

It’s hard to imagine Amazon accepting a 70/30 split from Apple. But I can’t see Amazon pulling their iOS Kindle apps, either. Amazon could switch to mobile web app clients for Kindle-reading on iOS, but I don’t think they could do so without taking a hit in terms of user experience. And users simply expect that apps come from the App Store. My guess is that Amazon will bite the bullet and adopt Apple’s in-app purchasing APIs.

Don’t forget, either, that tomorrow is Apple’s joint appearance with News Corp. to announce The Daily, and new in-app subscription purchasing APIs for native iOS apps. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple has more to say about in-app purchasing rules for books and periodicals at or after tomorrow’s event. ★