Oh, you know I had to do a hands-on and give the iMore Nation a quick look at the glowing Apple logo mod for iPhone and iPhone 4. Despite Ally’s warnings, the moment I saw this luminescent bit of K.O.Gadget awesome go up for sale I knew I had to have it. My own. My precious!

I’ll be doing the mod this weekend, and hopefully electrocuting neither myself nor my precious iPhone in the process, and will have the full video up for you soon. In the meantime, whether you want one of your very own, are still on the fence, or will have nothing to do with such brazen acts of folly, check out the unboxing for the pure, geeky thrill of it!

One of the new features of the iPhone 4S is an 8 megapixel camera equipped with a fast f/2.4 lens. Without question, this was the feature I was most excited about, and I almost immediately started snapping pics.

For sample photos and a summary of my thoughts, follow along after the break! (All photos are original; none have been edited in any way beyond being resized to fit the page.)

Landscapes

The iPhone 4S does a phenomenal job with landscapes. These have the potential of being tricky for cameras because of the broad range of lights and darks, but even with HDR turned off, the iPhone 4S produces great results. The two photos above were taken without use of HDR.

HDR

That leads us to HDR. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and refers to the range between the darkest part of the photo and the brightest part of the photo. Camera sensors can only record so much of this range, so if a photo’s dynamic range is too big, darks will be too dark and brights will be too bright. With HDR enabled, however, the iPhone 4S will take two photos, one exposed for the darks, and one exposed for the brights, and merge them together as one photo.

The photos above, although not the most interesting of subjects, does a great job of demonstrating the capabilities of the iPhone 4S HDR. The first photo was exposing for the shade, and thus blew out the sky. With HDR turned on, both the shade and sky look good.

Movement

Since the iPhone 4S is equipped with an f/2.4 lens, it has the ability to let in more light and speed up the shutter speed. Theoretically, this would mean that the iPhone 4S should do a better job of freezing motion. Without having full control of the settings, however, this can be hard to achieve.

In the end, I’m impressed with how the iPhone 4S handles motion. The above pic does have a little motion blur, especially on my face, but it’s not too bad. Below is a picture of my daughter that I took while she was bouncing up and down. On the iPhone 4, it would have never come out that clear.

Face Detection

The iPhone 4S now has the ability detect faces and use them as the focus and exposure point. It works great! I was impressed with how it recognized my daughter’s face even when she was moving around or when I was taking a profile shot with only one eye visible.

Macro

The Macro capabilities of the iPhone 4S camera are very impressive – when it can lock a focus, that is. Unfortunately, I was continually disappointed with the iPhone 4S’s inability to focus. I understand for objects that are very tiny and blend in with the background, but the camera even struggled with focusing on larger items that stood out from the background, like in the following image.

Digital Zoom

First of all, it’s important to emphasize that the iPhone 4S is equipped with a 5x digital zoom, not optical zoom. The difference is that the lens is not capable of zooming, but the software is. So using the digital zoom on the iPhone 4S is equivalent to taking the photo without the zoom and cropping it. This greatly reduces the quality of the photo and there are very few situations where you would want to use the digital zoom.

However, since the iPhone 4S has been upgraded to an 8 megapixel camera, there is an improvement to the digital zoom over the iPhone 4. The first photo above was taken with 0x zoom and the second one was taken with 5x zoom. You can see obvious damage done to the quality of the image, but it is, admittedly, better than I was expecting. I also believe that this is an example of a situation where you might want to use the digital zoom if you wanted to, say, show your kids a picture of the duck you saw earlier in the day.

Low Light

The iPhone 4 has a great camera, but it was always lacking in low light situations. I was very excited to test out the iPhone 4S in low light since it’s equipped with an f/2.4 lens and better sensor. I am definitely impressed with the improvement. My living room has the worst lighting on the planet and I could never get a decent photo of my daughter with the iPhone 4 while indoors at night. But with the iPhone 4S, I was able to capture the above shot! It doesn’t take much movement to make your shots blurry, however, but that should be expected.

Here’s an example of a macro shot in low, bad light.

Flash

The last thing I tested was the flash and it worked well! Just as with the iPhone 4, it is very slow and your photos are guaranteed to show any small amount of motion blur. I tend to hate camera flashes, but if you’re trying to capture a memory in a dark environment, it’s often times your only choice. For those times, the flash on the iPhone 4S will get the job done.

Conclusion

The iPhone 4S is equipped with a very nice camera that takes beautiful photos. The macro lens has the potential to be incredible, but struggles with focus more than I was expecting. At 8 megapixels, the iPhone 4S has the ability to produce nice 8″x10″ prints that can be displayed in your home.

The camera was the feature of the iPhone 4S I was looking forward to the most, and it has delivered – it turned out to be my favorite feature of the iPhone 4S. Yes, I like it even more than Siri.

Have you been taking some amazing shots with your iPhone 4S? Head on over to our forums to show them off!

Stuff.tv got their hands on an iPhone 4S at the Apple media event in the UK last week, and now applemastertouch got an early hands on as well, and both put Siri through its paces. Highlight:

Goran: I love you.

Siri: I hope you don’t say that to other mobile phones, Goran.

Nice. Check out the videos below.

Source: iPhoneTicker.de, x2

Pool Party is a photo sharing from the brains behind the recently-aquired Slide. Like Google+, it’s an invite-only beta right now, and like Google+, and Picasa, it allows you to quickly and easily share pictures with people you know who are also members. Why Google feels they need to be positively Microsoft-ian about the sheer number of overlapping image sharing services they offer right now, I don’t know, but here’s how they bill this one:

Instant photo fun

Pool Party is a simple, free photo sharing app. Create group albums and see your friends’ photos as they happen in real-time.

Pool Party is invite-only at the moment, so you’ll be asked to enter your email address after installing the app. If you haven’t already been invited to Pool Party by a friend, you can visit our website at poolpartyapp.com to request an invitation.

I’ve been testing Pool Party for iPhone with Phil Nickinson from Android Central, who’s putting the Android version through its paces and… it’s got a lot of promise. The UI is dark, with big, bold white text. (Though they insist on color-coding your friends’ names, which is ends up feeling very Christmas tree.) They also stick to tried and true UI metaphors (even, smartly, borrowing the now almost standard “pull to refresh” pioneered by Loren Brichter in Tweetie/Twitter for iPhone).

Organization is done in Pools, and one you add a a Pool you can add people to it. For those who thrive on such things, push notifications are included to keep you up to date on every little interaction imaginable (I turned them off, like I turned off Google+’s email notifications). There are also a couple prominent places to provide feedback, so it’s clear the developers and designers want to make this a good experience.

This being Google, there’s also a web interface for when you’re away from your iPhone (or Android device).

Whether or not this ultimately takes any users away from established image sharing services like Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, or Google own services, new and old, like Picasa and Google+ remains to be seen. It’s great to see Google trying things and fantastic to see them working on improving their user experience. Ultimately, however, it will be nice to see them coalesce into a single, coherent, consistent service.

Screenshots after the break. If want more on the background story, MG Siegler from TechCrunch broke it yesterday (link below).

[TechCrunch]

The iPad 2 is here! You’ve run down the specs – including the 2x as fast A5 processor, the lighter 1.33lb weight, and the crazy-thin .34 inch “thickness.” You’ve considered whether it’s worth it for iPad 2 owners to upgrade. You’ve taken a look at what’s new in iOS 4.3. Heck, you’ve even read up on how to transfer your data from your original iPad to the iPad 2. What’s left to do? Check out TiPb breathlessly unpacking and examining the real deal.

If you waited in line today and picked one up – congrats! If you are wondering what we think of Apple’s latest, here’s the short version: it’s a thinner, lighter, faster iPad with a couple of cameras. That may sound anti-climactic – but after using the iPad 2 for just a very short while we’re starting to suspect that it’s anti-climactic in the same way that “the iPad is just a big iPhone” was anti-climactic in 2010. In other words: it’s an experience that can’t quite be quantified but gets under your skin in the same way the original iPad did. There’s “nothing new” here to most people, but the execution of all the little details adds up to something pretty special.

As far as the hardware is concerned, we’re impressed. Looking at the spec differences between the iPad 1 and the iPad 2, you might be tempted to say that there’s not much improvement here. But .5″ vs .34″ only tells part of the story. The full story is that the tapered back of the iPad 2 makes it feel thinner than any device this size has a right to be. It’s kind of amazing. Unfortunately, we can’t quite say the same for the weight – while the iPad 2 is lighter, it’s still not something you’re going to happily hold at arm’s length unsupported for any appreciable length of time.

A full photo gallery is after the break and video is coming right quick – keep it locked to TiPb as we unpack our thoughts and impressions of the iPad 2 this weekend and, heck, for the months to come.

(Full disclosure: this white iPad 2 is for @CrackBerryKevin, who plans on putting the thing head-to-head with the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook when the time comes. He also opted for the “CrackBerry Orange” SmartCover. He’s a BlackBerry user at heart, but it’s hard to resist the iPad 2, innit?)

Our good friend CrackBerry Kevin got to go hands-on and do a full BlackBerry Playbook review today — including a one-on-one with Apple’s iPad — and I got dragged along as camera guy. Here’s what Kevin had to say:

Overall, after having used the BlackBerry PlayBook I’m wayyy more excited for it than I was prior. Though I detest the iPhone for use as my primary mobile device (I’ve tried it, I hate it… too inefficient for me for what I do with a phone when it’s in my hand 90% of the time), I also own an Apple iPad which I really enjoy using (especially for killing time on flights). Steve Jobs’ comments of 7″ isn’t big enough for a tablet had me worried that RIM went the wrong direction with the PlayBook and that they should have started out with a 10″ model. I now think going 7″ was a smart starting point for RIM though – the PlayBook is portable.

It fits in my coat pocket and is light enough that I’ll actually carry it around with me on a daily basis. When I walk out of the house, I’ll toss my Bold 9780 in my front pocket, and my PlayBook in my coat pocket. The iPad just sits around my home (where it doesn’t get used that much as I have computers and laptops around) until I’m going somewhere like a trip where I then pack it into a backpack.

I thought the PlayBook looked very good. Much more responsive and fluid than the Galaxy Tabs I’ve tried (that will likely change come Honeycomb on the Droid Pad) and while it wasn’t finished hardware or software yet, it certainly looks like it’s living up to RIM’s ambitions. Developer support/platform momentum, future form factors (RIM has one of every phone type, could there be bigger tablets, keyboard sliders, who knows?), how it will play beyond the BlackBerry base, and what the tablet market will look like when iPad 2 hits are all questions that remain to be answered. But for today, kudos to RIM for a slick, smooth UI and really nice looking hardware.

Kevin’s iPad vs. Playbook video after the break. Check out CrackBerry.com for the full Blackberry PlayBook review including RIM’s walkthrough video, Kevin’s impressions, and a ton more photos. Then race back here and tell us what you think, is the BlackBerry PlayBook going to make a dent in Apple’s iPad 2 plans?

The iPhone 4 was officially launched today and after picking mine up, I was eager to test out the new cameras. The rear camera is 5 megapixels and features 5x digital zoom and 16:9, 720p HD video recording. It also has a built-in LED flash that can be used for photos or video. The front-facing camera is VGA quality and can be used for both 1.4 megapixel stills and 360p video as well.

So how do the iPhone 4 cameras perform? Find out after the break!

Photos

Photos taken with the rear camera are beautiful. They are very crisp and the iPhone 4 does an excellent job with exposure and focus. As with the 3GS, I am extremely impressed with the macro ability of the lens. Here’s a few pictures I took with the 5 megapixel camera.

The quality of the VGA front-facing camera also impressed me. The photos are, as expected, not as good as those taken with the 5 megapixel camera, but they are still very nice. This self-portrait was taken with the front-facing VGA-quality camera:

The LED flash is much better than expected. I have not been able to test it while recording video because it’s still daylight, but photos taken with the flash look great. Here’s a sample of a photo taken with and without flash.

I will admit to being a skeptic about the 5x digital zoom. Optical zoom is so superior to digital zoom that I expected it to look horrible. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that software behind the digital zoom does a great job with the photos. Clearly, they are not as good as they would be without the the zoom, but not too bad. Here’s a series of photos I took in increments of 1/4 of the full 5x digital zoom.

Video

HD video recording on the iPhone 4 is a dream come true. The ability to record 720p video with my iPhone feels like such a luxury. The video comes out crisp and beautiful and is so easy to edit with iMovie directly on the device. My only complaint is that the tap to focus feature can be a bit touchy (pun intended!). When standing still while recording, tap to focus works wonderfully. However, if you’ve walked around for a bit and then decided to tap to focus, the iPhone sometimes struggles to grab a good focus. I demonstrate this in the the video below.

The VGA-quality front-facing camera also captures video, and although it’s not HD, the quality is still pretty good.

Here’s a video I put together with iMovie for iPhone with video and photo samples. What do you think? If you’ve put your iPhone 4′s video recording to the test, we want to know your experience and thoughts as well. Sound off in the comments below!

TiPb hasn’t had a chance to get any hands-on time with the no-longer mythical Apple iPad, announced today, but that doesn’t mean we can’t live vicariously through the awesome power of the interwebs. What does TiPb think? If you call the iPad a big iPod touch, you’re right. If you think that’s a bad thing, you’re nuts fully justified, but we see it as a huge positive, if only a first step. Removing the constraints imposed by a small screen? Yeah, the iPhone OS is just getting started. Apple is legitimately excited about this, and that means iPhone OS, and iPhones are going to benefit. Love. Up.

Now here’s a quick rundown of some of the coolest bloggers in the sphere (in alphabetical order), and what they think of the iPad.

• 9to5mac hands-on and video
• Daring Fireball hands on
• Ars Technica hands-on and gallery
• Engadget Hands-on with video
• Gizmodo hands-on and video
• iLounge video walkthrough
• SlashGear hands-on and video

Give them a read and let us know if they change any of your opinions!

Week 4 of the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin brings me face-to-big-glass-face with our most ancient nemesis — Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Phone, this year spawning the killer keyboard of the HTC Touch Pro 2, and the monstrous hardware of the HTC HD2. Yes, that’s 2 times HTC version 2 devices and to help me out, I’ve got the dark lord of WMExperts himself, the one and only WMExperts Phil Nickinson to show me the ropes — and quite honestly to help me lift that ginormous HD2 onto the table!

Remember, every day you post on my WMExperts Forums thread, you’re entered for a chance to win the Windows Phone of your choice. (And there’s a total of 6 smartphones up for grabs — one per SPE site — so check them all out!)

This week also brings the yin to my yang, the productivity to my play, my best frenemy forever, CrackBerry Kevin back to TiPb and the iPhone he claims never to use. Head on over to the TiPb forums and help him out, would you? (i.e. show him some neat new games). And get a chance to win an iPhone 3GS for your troubles.

Video hands-on with the Touch Pro 2 and HD2 after the break!

[YouTube Video link]

Gizmodo got somes hands on a Google Phone Nexus One and shared some impressions.

A tad thinner, lighter, and “silky”-er feeling in the hand compared to the iPhone, Nexus One also sports a less cheap, more rubbery back. (The rubber lobby is no doubt thrilled with that bump in cachet). Its screen POPS and blows everything away, and it’s (likely 1GHz processor powered) web rendering is a bit faster than the iPhone 3GS, both of which are faster than the Droid. (Though the iPhone 3GS still outscored all comers on JavaScript benchmarks. Nitro FTW!) It’s also got a crazy animated background system that can launch bit blocks or ripple when you touch it, but becomes a visualizer when music is playing. Like Sense UI’s animated weather, that kind of eye candy is just sweet.

With iPhone 4.0 and a 4th generation iPhone due June/July 2010, how selfish are we to beg all comers to “bring the awesome!” so that Apple is incentivized to bring their own innovation to market faster? Exactly this selfish: well done, Nexus One, you’re not failing to impress.

Speaking of which, check out Android Guys video UI walkthrough after the break, and tell us what you think!

UPDATED: Engadget scores an invitation-only pre-sale rumor starting Jan. 5 with a T-Mobile rollout, perhaps, to follow. Also, specs galore, with what looks like 802.11n(!) support, 8??x480 WVGA AMOLED screen, 1 GHz proc, and all the trimmings.

[via Android Central]

[YouTube link]

In Brazilian Portuguese, but if you’re dying to see Apple’s latest universe denter in action before Friday, hit the play button and enjoy.

(Thanks to antonioj for the tip!)

UPDATED AGAIN: Pastebud founder, Jed Schmidt, via the comments, directs us back to Technologizer (see link below) for his update on what was happening:

I’ve updated this issue over at Get Satisfaction[1], but let me just summarize what exactly was going wrong: you were inadvertently forwarding your emails not to your secret pastebud address, but to the address set as the from address for these emails, which was noreply@pastebud.com.

This happened to other folks too; instead of sending email to secret-random-string@pastebud.com, they were sending to noreply@pastebud.com. And everyone who was doing this ended up sharing the same clipboard.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that we’ve fixed it, and the changed will be live by the morning.

PREVIOUS UPDATE/PRIVACY WARNING: Technologizer is showing that they’re getting other people’s clipboard data in their paste results, including complete emails:

Pastebud’s site addresses security, and says it’s “safe enough” for general use. Based on my experience so far, I think not! But I don’t know if I’m running into some bizarre quirk or doing something wrong, or if this is happening to everyone who’s trying Pastebud as I speak. I just know that I’ve come to the conclusion that using a Web service as a substitute for a feature that should be in a device’s OS may not be such a great idea after all.

This might be a temporary glitch on the server side, but it’s a very disturbing glitch and one that might just be a deal-breaker for the security and privacy concerned.

Original post after the break…

We mentioned Pastebud yesterday, the bookmarklet based cut/copy paste “solution” that’s trying to plug one of the longest and most glaring omission in the iPhone feature set. Well, Gizmodo and fellow Gawker-site Lifehacker has given it the hands on look see, and what did they find? Giz says:

Pasting text back into another web form via the PASTE bookmarklet is easy—after tapping it, a green box labeled PASTE HERE is overlaid onto any open form field. Tapping that drops in your clipboard’s contents, preserving any HTML that was there if the form supports it. But, of course, there are some drawbacks. While pasting to and from different Safari windows and emails covers a lot of one’s copying and pasting needs, it’s not anywhere close to the convenience a system-wide solution would bring.

Lifehacker weighs in with:

One small issue, though, at least for those who don’t pay $5 to Pastebud—it inserts a little “Pasted from my iPhone!” and promotion link in every paste. You can delete it, of course, but it’s there every time… And once your text arrives, you get a little pop-up box, asking you to upgrade for $5 to “make it even more convenient”

Need more incentive to cough up the $5? LH says SSL, destroy-on-paste, and other security concerns will be soon addressed in the paid version.

Enough for now? Still not good enough? Waiting on a built-in solution from Apple? Or forget Apple, gimme whatcha got?

Both Engadget and Gizmodo, those lucky [redacteds], got some hands on time with the new iPhone 3G. Ushered into a secret, dimly lit back room and likely surrounded by storm troopers, they came back with the following:

The Good

• 3G is faassst! 2X EDGE on quicky test, and can be Settings disabled (for those who won’t spring for the extra $10?).
• Better phone quality.
• Flush headphone jack for realz!
• Camera software improved, same megapixels, better images.
• Build quality, even on the all new, all plastic back, felt okay. Lighter, better fit, and design-wizardly thin. Bonus points for Jony Ive!

• Oh, cut and paste, where art thou? C’mon Apple! You nailed this with Mac 1.0!
• Chrome buttons are for realz as well!
• No WiFi 802.11n! This, the iPod Touch, and the MacMini are still the only Apple devices to bring down your network speed.
• No sign of video iChat, or video recording.
• No sign of A2DP stereo Bluetooth, and no comment on whether its in or coming.
• Dock now sold separately. Guess that $199 price point gotta hit us somewhere?!)

• The predicted after-market for your old iPhone 1.0 (though if you manage to catch some people stuck on non-Apple signed carriers who want a jailbroken iPhone, given the new activation policies, there could just be a resurgence…)

Engadget honcho Ryan Block got his techie mitts on a pre-release version of the iPhone 2.0 firmware, and here are the highlights (and lowlights!):

Exchange over Wi-Fi is not instantaneous (!). No contact search he could find. New button in Calendar don’t do nothing for him yet. App Store error’s out. Cisco branded VPN screen. Parental controls are good-to-go. Wi-Fi order can be specified in prefs. Calc has new widescreen scientific mode and icon. And his favorite new feature — Multi-Select in Mail!

Head on over for a full rundown and gallery o’ pics!