If you want something that is ugly and hard, which may be used in some fashion to eviscerate a ripe banana, then you’re the perfect candidate for a Motorola Droid. I think they were going for edgy on this one, but what this ad does is continue the string of puzzling positioning ads for what may have been a promising phone. Until parts started falling off of it.
I bought a D3 when it first hit the streets and I’m stunned by it every single time I hold it in my hands. Then I take pictures with it. This thing belongs squarely in the middle of the secret lair of the League of Awesomeness.
Looks like the D90 is in the wild and Chase Jarvis and team take it for a hell of a test run. Of note: the D-Movie feature is absolutely stunning. 12.3 megapixels (kudos to Nikon for not shooting for the ridiculous 20). High ISO/low noise (the thing that most impresses with the D3 moves down to the D90).
Seriously considering:
Photo J possibilities. This camera will be a great second body for pro photojournalists. Commercial guys like me will be loyal to the D3 and its future, but for any PJ shooter, all the bells and whistles we’ve discussed already– especially video and audio capture–make this a no-brainer as a backup body.
Definitely worth checking out at chasejarvis.com.
Interface Design and the iPhone
I found this thanks to John Gruber at Daring Fireball and have been waiting days for the video to come back on line. It’s Edward Tufte performing a superficial dissection of the iPhone’s human interface design choices.
It’s a treat to hear someone as adept in the field pulling apart the elegance of the iPhone and finding — largely — very little fault in the choices the design team made. He makes an point between the iPhone’s use of “image resolution” and “Cartoon resolution” that I don’t get completely — that it’s somehow a bad thing that the Stocks widget looks cartoony compared to his example of a stock chart, which looks more like Excel. His re-imagined Weather app compared Apple’s elegance to something you might see on a screen at NIST.
It’s short, and worth watching if you’re an iPhone aficionado.
For years, Apple’s made waves by wholly replacing successful products with radical revisions that truly evolve the product line. Today’s “Classic” announcement is an interesting departure. I’d fully expected the company to discontinue the current larger iPod with Video in favor of an iPhone-form factor phoneless iPod. They did introduce the phoneless iPod, the iPod “Touch”, but left a slight revision of the old school iPod in the channel.
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