Butterscotch Tutorial Special
iPhone 3 GS New Features Overview
Part one of five: "The S is for Speed"
Sean Carruthers: Hi I'm Sean Carruthers and welcome to the first in the five part series on the new iPhone 3GS. Now the 3GS is the new hardware version of the iPhone, the previous version the iPhone 3G and then the iPhone 3GS, the S is supposed to stand for speed. Now you can't really see much difference on the two of these things with the quick look, they actually look fairly identical with a quick glance. So you can tell just flipping over to the other side again there's not a whole of difference here. This one has a white lettering for the iPhone, this one is shiny and it's a little bit harder to see under our lights here. This one maxed out at 8 and 16, this on goes to 16 and 32. Camera looks the same, the connectors on the bottom look the same. There's again very little hardware difference except for the fact that new one is a slight bit thinner and it's really hard to tell.
It fits in most accessories, cases may be a little bit looser, thanks to the thin design on this. Now where you can really start to tell the difference between these two is when you start running applications. Now with the pervious generation when you press on an application it would take a little of time to fire up, even if it was just your calendar. Now the best way to show this off is by doing a head to head here. So I'm going to flip this into landscape mode here because we're going to fire up an application that goes into landscape and it's a game called Peggle from PopCap, a very fun game. I'm going to click both of them at the same time here and you'll the difference in speed between the two.
So both launch, now the one on the left very much slower, this one is already ready to play, so you can press go, press adventure and we're already playing by the time this other one is still going. You get the idea, so this is ready to go and this other one took a lot longer to get even to the point where you were ready to be able to start the game. So again speed is a huge, huge concern with the old one and the new version, the 3GS has dealt with a lot of those issues. It isn't completely fixed, there's still times when you have to launch an application that takes a few seconds to go, it's just the nature of the beast, but this one actually does cut down on it quite substantially.
One other thing you may notice quickly here is this one actually has a battery indicator on the top and in percentage, this one doesn't. The old one doesn't even allow it, even if you upgrade it to the 3.0 OS for the iPhone that you can do that, get all of the new software features, but not that one because it's slightly hardware based. Now when you fire that up for the first time, you won't necessarily see that battery percentage indicator. If you are looking for the battery indicator you can go over to settings, go into general and click on usage of all things and you'll see a battery percentage slider up the top here, so you can slide it off or you can slide it back on again.
The other thing with the new generation of the iPhone is it has gotten something called A2DP. A2DP is Bluetooth and it's a new stereo profile that is being sued by accessories that use left and right channel. Now if you've tried streaming music from the old iPhone to one of these new devices you'll probably notice this is very tinny, it doesn't sound very good and it's usually monophonic, it only comes out of one ear. The newest generation over here actually supports stereo streaming and it sounds a whole lot better. So if you have one of those headsets that has two years, rather than just a standard old Bluetooth headset it actually will sound a whole lot better.
There's a few other features that we're going to talk about in upcoming episodes of this, including voice control, new camera, the compass and some accessibility features, so stay tuned for additional episodes in this series.
iPhone 3 GS New Features Overview
Part two of five: Voice Control
Sean Carruthers: Hi I'm Sean Carruthers and welcome to part two in a five part series on the iPhone 3GS. Today we're going to talk about voice control. Now using your voice to control a phone is nothing new, other phones have had voice dial for a while. The iPhone, this is the newest generation and this is the first it's actually had this and it doesn't just control the phone itself. We'll give a couple of examples here. So to access voice control on the phone you have two options, you have the button at the bottom here, you just press and hold it or if you're using the headset that comes with the iPhone it has a center button on that and you press and hold that instead and you'll press and hold it until it engages. So we're going to press and hold until you see the voice control icon pop up, it'll beep and it'll listen to what we're saying here and we're not saying it recognizes at the moment so it's going to fail on this, but we'll try again in a second.
Dial 416-555-1212. So you can dial a number just like that. I'm going to end that call, because it's going nowhere. You can also go back to the main screen and press and hold. Dial Matt Harris mobile. Once again we'll dial through to him. Actually going to cancel that right now. Now that's what you can do with the phone itself. Now it's not just the phone as I mentioned, you can actually control your iPod with it. So you have a few ways that you can do it. Same way to interact with it, you press and hold, but you say different things. So we'll try this. Play album junior. So this is doing now is it playing Norwegian band called Röyksopp, I'll play it in the background here so that you can actually do other things or just continue to you know leave the phone in your pocket and walk down the street while you listen to your music.
Now if you're playing something like this already and you're not sure what it is, you do have options again using voice control. So again press and hold. What song is this? Okay it'll identify it for you. The same sort of functionality that you see on the new iPod Shuffle where you can press and hold and it'll voice over what you're actually playing, but now you actually specifically ask for it. And one of the other nice functions is you can press and hold and you notice if you don't press it long enough you'll actually the Spotlight features, so you have to press and hold. Play more song like this. So it'll take song that you were playing and asked to play more songs like and it'll actually create on the fly other songs in your play list that are like that and will play them all to you in a row.
Anyways there you go, that's the new voice control feature on the iPhone 3GS. Stay tuned for more episodes in this series where we'll talk about the camera, the compass, accessibility and more.
iPhone 3 GS New Features Overview
Part three of five: New camera features
Sean Carruthers: Hi I'm Sean Carruthers and welcome to part three in a five part series on the iPhone 3GS. Today we're going to talk about the camera built into this. Now it looks very similar from the outside to the camera on the old version of the iPhone 3G, but this one is actually 3.2 megapixels and it actually some other functions built in that are a little bit more impressive than just straight up higher resolution. Going to press the camera icon here and we'll get started taking a look at this. Now again the interface looks fairly similar, you'll notice one tweak down here, which we'll get to in a second. But the fun starts when you start moving this. Now we actually have an autofocus camera built into this now. So we've got the ability to change your focus point and not just change your focus point by moving the camera, like we have before us, we've got a couple of things here. It actually identifies various things.
Now we've got two of my favorite Home Star Runner characters here and if we want to focus on this and take a picture, we can just trust it to do what it does best or if we actually want to select something, so we can actually press on the thing that we want. So right now it's selected the cheater upfront, we can press on that and it'll focus on that or we can actually choose to focus on Home Star and it'll refocus on that and then we can take the picture and Home Star will be in focus as opposed to the cheater upfront. And again you can focus on anything that's on here and it will focus on that point, so we can focus midway in between if we choose to.
Now we notice that it also has at the bottom a switch here that goes between camera and video. So we can switch this like so and now instead of taking a photograph we're in video mode. So I'm going to flip it into this right here and we are now shooting a video of our friend the cheat walking around; da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Anyone that's seen him knows he doesn't sound like that, but I'm not going to try to attempt his voice there. So now we've finished recording that we'll notice, we'll have the camera role placed in the same place over here and actually flip it back into that. So we have this role here, so we can actually watch the video we did, shameful though it may be.
And you notice at the beginning we were setting up and I got my finger in front of the lens which is not so good. So we want to get rid of that potentially. So what you can do is you can load this up on to your computer and get rid of it that way, but you can also go this time line up here where you can see what's going on and instead of doing this over on the computer, you can actually just a bit of trimming here, so we'll get past the point where my fingers has got in the way, at the beginning and at the end. You notice that it zooms in a little bit if we press and hold, so now we've got something that's more like the video with actual one single press, trim, it'll trim it right here on the phone itself and now when we play it's just the Cheat walking around with my hand helping him as opposed to all of the set up as well. Here you go. And that is the camera on the new iPhone 3GS.
iPhone 3 GS New Features Overview
Part four of five: The Digital Compass
Sean Carruthers: Hi I'm Sean Carruthers and welcome to part four in a five part series on the new iPhone 3GS. Now one of the things that people have been talking about, because they are excited about, is the new digital compass that's built in. GPS was built into pervious generations of the iPhone, which allowed you to position yourself in space and position yourself on the map. But the compass actually now allows you to point in the proper direction, which can be very handy. So if you're lost out in the forest you can actually use this to figure out which direction you should be going. So we're going to press the compass here and there we go and it'll locate us in space here. Sometimes you need to calibrate it, by waving it in a figure eight motion, because it'll give a special interference saying that it can happen for a number of reasons; electrical interference, magnetic interference.
It just occasionally pops up, so you can wave it and recalibrate it. Right now it's actually showing us where we are. So we can spin this and you can see the compass is continuing to move as we spin this back and forth. So it takes a couple of seconds to kick in, so give it a little bit of time. Now again that's very nice. But where it really comes in handy is inside the maps application. So if you are in a place that you have never been before and gotten off the subway or a train or just generally have no clue where you are, it can come in handy here. So this is going to place us in -- where are right now at the studio and when we press that button not only does it locate us, but it actually spins the map in place, so we actually know which direction we are.
So if you have no clue which direction you need to head, you can just tap on the beacon there that used to just only located you and now it'll located you and point you in the proper direction. That's the compass on the new iPhone 3GS. Thanks for watching and be sure the check out the other episodes in the series.
iPhone 3 GS New Features Overview
Part five of five: Accessibility Feature
Sean Carruthers: Hi I'm Sean Carruthers and welcome to fifth in a five part series on the iPhone 3GS. Today we're going to talk about accessibility features. Now you may know accessibility features from Windows or the Mac, on a full size computer, they have been introduced into the iPhone 3GS now. Now what accessibility features do is they allow people to interact with the phone in different ways depending on their needs. So incase you have a visual disability or in case you can only hear in one ear or can't hear at all, then the phone will actually deal with that in various ways. Now the way you get to it is by going into setting, scrolling to general and then scrolling down to accessibility, it's a slightly awkward placement if you're turning it on for the first time, but now we have a few different options, now again depending on your needs you can set these things up in various combinations.
So let's talk about things in the middle first, because they're fairly quick. The white on black. So if you find the screen too bright and need it inverted, as many people do, you can just flip that switch and now its whiter text on a darker background. So it might be easier to make out the text in this case. So you can just flip that on and off. Mono audio incase you cannot hear in one year, you can flip that and now anything that comes through the phone, through the speakers or through the earphones will be the same in both ears. So if has listened to the Beatles "Yellow Submarine", you'll know what I'm talking about. It's pretty hard and that'll actually put everything into the same channel.
And speak auto text and by flipping that one on you can actually have the phone read out any corrections that it makes. So if you're in mail or you're from the notepad and it is automatically making corrections it will actually tell you when it's doing so. A couple of other features here that are little bit more involved, talk about zoom. So by clicking through the zoom it magnifies the entire screen. So you know that you can do the pinch and the zoom in things like photographs or in the web browser, but this will you to do it across the board here, so in case you have a bit of trouble seeing things, you can actually magnify it. So by turning that on you have the ability now to zoom in on anything.
So to zoom you double tap with three fingers and it'll zoom right in, to scroll around you do this with three fingers and to change it, now this is the one that's a bit tricky, you double tap with three fingers and then hold and move it around up and down and it'll actually change the size. So tap, tap and then you can actually zoom anywhere between 100% and 500% on this. So if you really need to get in close, by default it's 200%. But you can zoom way in or back down to the regular 100%. So that's the zoom feature and you do that anywhere on the iPhone. So again it's not just on the zoom screen, you can actually go in here, double tap and zoom in, scroll around or zoom out. And we don't we see that. So triple tap to get back out, go back into settings and we'll disable that again. I'm getting used to some of these for the first time, it can take a little bit of work. But once you have this down you're good to go.
Now the voice over feature is for people that maybe can't see the screen at all. So what it'll do is it'll read what's going on the screen by enabling this. So we're going to click this, now this one actually does take even more getting used to because it changes the way the iPhone itself works. So this could be a little bit of fun here. So to enable it, it will reading in voice and it'll tell you want you want to do. So it will in fact change your gesturing base system that you're used to. So you'll notice that when we did that accessibility up at the top, got highlighted. When you want to do something else, you move your finger around on the screen and it'll change the options here. Click that.
So you'll notice you can't actually just flip it off, like you would under normal circumstance. Now what you have to do is you need to find it and hold it and you need to double tap on things. So instead of flipping the switch you actually double on the switch itself. So now what that will do is it will do that anywhere else on the iPhone again as well. So you go back to your main screen. So again you double tap things now to open. And again you just double tap now, double tap to open and there you go. So again it takes a little bit of getting used to. It is a different way to interact with the -- interact with your iPhone. So if you have turned this on by mistake it'll start interacting in a much different way than you expect and again select what you need first before you can double tap and double tap it to open things as opposed to single tapping, select, and I'm showing you how to turn it off just in case you've gotten into that mode. Scroll, select, double tap, select, select the button itself, double tap and now it's back to the regular way it operates. So there you go that is the voice over function and that is the accessibility features on the iPhone 3GS.
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