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Three things I'm looking forward to with the iPhone 4.1 update.

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There are three things I'm looking forward to with the iPhone 4.1 update coming this week:
1. The thing that has irritated me most with the iPhone 4 is that it's been hard to use it as an iPhone.  Nothing to do with antenna issues, but a major issue with the proximity sensor, what this means is that you would put the iphone next to your head, and in previous iPhones this would disable the keypad, but with the iPhone 4 it didn't seem to acknowledge existence of my head, so I'd often find myself on speaker phone, hanging up, trying to make a facetime* call or punching in random numbers on the keypad.  It was enough to make me call apple support to make sure I could return the phone if this update doesn't fix it.

2. Audio/Video Remote Control Profile (AVRCP) support.  AVRCSP is a protocol standard that lets bluetooth devices control media playback on paired devices.  So what this means is that my Plantronics BackBeat903 track buttons will now work to control playback on the iPhone.  Lots of people bitched that this was a BackBeat problem, I wonder what they will say now that apple have fixed it?

3. High Dynamic Resolution (HDR) support for photos, in theory this should lead to better photos. with HDR, three photos are captured when you snap a picture, the three pictures are captured at different exposures, so if you had for example a picture of a mountain against a blue sky, in a regular iPhone photo you'll typically find the sky overexposed leading to the mountain appearing dark.  With HDR, the three images are kind of merged so your sky remains blue and your mountain can be built from the underexposed image leading to a much better photoe.    See here for some examples of differences http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/09/hdr-photos-ios/

*Facetime - this feature is a waste of space as it currently stands, the Nokia N800 years ago had video chat on a mobile device, but it suffered in that it only worked with other N800s and people that had installed specific software. Apple Facetime is even worse as it only works with other iPhone 4 users that are connected to a WiFi network, it can't even chat to a user using an apple mac computer.  Facetime will be dead as soon as Skype bring out an iPhone version that works wither other skype users.  If apple are smart, they'll bring out a Facetime update that lets it work with skype and ichat users pretty sharpish.

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - 1. I've had my iPhone 4 since early July and never had this problem. Weird. I've read the complaints so I'm sure it's true but I wonder if it's device or person specific.

3. There's an HDR app in the App Store that I've used. Very slick. Built-in HDR support will be a nice addition.

We've played with FaceTime a few times but since it can only be used with other iPhone 4 users, it's of limited use to me. It's okay but Skype and/or iChat support would be much more useful.

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