VLOG: Apple iPhone Announcement Reactions

Compsoft Creative Reacts: Latest iPhone Announcements from Compsoft Creative on Vimeo.

 Video transcript:

Daniel: Hi there and welcome to this video log. From Compsoft Creative the awesome mobile app development house. I have with me two colleagues, two friends, two other human beings, two lovers at times - George ‘the londone’r Smith, and Michael ‘I look like Ed Sheeran’ Burgess.

So this is our very first v log, where we are going to talk about a number of things and we’ll be covering a bunch of stuff in these as we move forward, everything and anything goes in the world of mobile technology

iOS 11

Daniel: I felt, slight underwhelming kind of announcement, certainly for a phone anyway,

George: There’s not a great deal more than iOS X. They’ve redesigned mission control

Daniel: Do you mean the control center?

George: Control center sorry, not mission control

Daniel: That is beautiful. When I am fumbling around in the dark at night, don’t worry I’m 42, it’s normally fumbling for tablets. It used to be trying to turn the screen brightness down as I’m getting elbowed in the back because i’m trying to read a book. I love it now. The area where you can tap to get the screen brightness and volume is so chubby, whereas previously you’d have to be like-

George: - a smurf

Michael: I wasn’t sure to begin with because I quite like the multiple panels that it used to have in the control center because I was a heavy kind of podcast user, audiobook user, so it was quite nice for those apps to have those separate audio areas that I can interact with in more detail but actually having used it for a while now, I really do like it and you can tap and hold to get to those more detailed views

Daniel: I like that as an update. There’s the kind of do not disturb stuff, photos, big update on photos and the stuff you can do with photos

George: and photo filters. I know development-wise and our developers do harness the true power of their imagery API, that’s kinda nice.

Daniel: And actually that’s a big thing on iOS isn’t it? Kind of imagery and photography

Michael: I think the biggest gain though has definitely come from the iPad side. Whilst iOS interface hasn’t really changed much; there’s nothing to inspiring, there’s definitely a big move towards desktop environment and move to this sort of keyboard and mouse setup of the whole Android operating system turns into more of a desktop OS ‘cause there’s phones, let’s not forget now are pretty much as powerful to do all your sort of work related activity, and certainly we’ve seen on the ipad now that you’ve got the dock as much as you have on the mac, multi-tasking is much better supported, and they’ve really created new interfaces to allow you if you’re going to sit down with something for 30 minutes and work on it they’ve allowed you some sort of power tools in there to really make that much more efficient than the current systems.

IPHONE 8

Daniel: The iPhone 7S that they’ve announced under the guise of the alternative name the iPhone 8 but we all know it’s basically an S evolution. If we WERE underwhelmed with iOS 11 for me, the same with the iphone 8

Michael: It kind of falls into no mans land of it’s not a brand new evolution on the existing phone. It looks the same, it pretty much is the same. I think if a user picked both up side by side, they would be hard pressed for a long time to find out what the differences were

George: until they *hand flipping action*

Daniel: so glass back! But you’re also going to be a loser because you don’t have the X. Will iPhone 8 users be ostracised because they couldn’t get the X?!

Michael: That’s something we certainly said around the office, is who is going to buy this phone? The people on the 7 are already on the bleeding edge of apple hardware, they’re going to be looking at the 10. If you’re going for an 8 now, you’re already going to feel like you’re behind the curve. The only people that are really going to pump for this are maybe people that are on the 5 or 6 still

Daniel: The nice thing about the 8 is it does bring you chip and it does bring wireless charging.

Michael: But those kind of upgrades again, the CPU upgrades, the graphic chip upgrades are always incremental

George: that’s the sort of incremental upgrade that normally comes with an S, which is why you made the joke about that being the 7S

Daniel: Hilarious, wasn’t it?

George: not quite the S C because i think the S C was brought out because some people like a smaller phone, Donald Trump, the smurf that we mentioned earlier

Daniel: but anyone with real proper sized hands will go for the larger one

George: exactly, I think they were hidden their bets. They didn’t know how well received the facial unlock and the lack of home button, more significantly

IPhone X

Daniel: so this is edge to edge, eh Mike?

Michael: edge to edge. So, this is something that was a real gripe for me. So, in the office we’ve kind of had the latest samsung edge 8 really beautiful phone, I’m an apple user but I’ve really enjoyed having that one around the office and using it, and it’s really made me consider moving across, was waiting for these announcements because I heard the rumours obviously because of Apple doing an edge to edge screen. It’s quite clearly not edge to edge. It does fill up a lot of real estate, it pretty much is as good as I suppose but i really do love the fact that the samsung does fall off of the edges and gives you that full screen experience

Daniel: and actually, this is interesting, we’re seeing a pattern more and more often where you see Android doing things ahead of iPhone, whereas iPhone clearly was the pioneer in touch right at the very beginning, it was the first device, in this case it feels like they’ve come a little short, so to speak, I mean quite literally a little short from the edge. The thing at the front, we’re going to have to consider that in our design.

Michael: it’s really interesting, so in terms of the user interface design guidelines that Apple have put out for the X already, there’s quite a few considerations that we haven’t had to worry about up until this point. Obviously Apple are getting large device fragmentation but this brings all kinds of other design considerations into the case. They’ve basically brought out this concept of safe areas that we need to avoid which include the edges and the curved corners and obviously the top. While they want use to make use of all of it and have laid out guidelines in which we can do so, it’s something we’re really going to have to design for and consider when we’re developing.

Daniel: and the swipey up from the bottom-ey gesture. If you’ve got anything where you’ve got a gesture from the bottom *laugh*

George: it’s a substitute for the home button, essentially

Daniel: and so then we look up here which is the other substitute for the home button, which is the facial recognition, it can scan my face with 30 gazillion points and allow me to unlock my phone with my face. I love it. I think that’s amazing

George: I’m not so sold. Don’t get my wrong, the tech behind it is all very impressive, we haven’t had our hands on it yet so we don’t know how quickly this is going to work. My only gripe is that it’s a substitute for the touch iD, which was flawless

Daniel: flawless unless you had superglue on your fingers

Michael: yeah but if you’ve got a bag on your head!

George: which we encourage you to do, if you’re going out in public, Daniel!

Michael: does it recognise you if you’ve got a hat on?

Daniel: yeah, well according to the videos

George: I might have to eat my words here but I just don’t think it’s going to be as seamless as touch ID, especially when paying for things with Apple Pay. You don’t want to be standing at the bar like a lemon and pointing the phone to your face before you then have to pay, you use to just go in there and ‘boop’

Daniel: I mean, it’s not a big deal, it’s like, “hello, yes, I’d like a pint of coca cola, please excellent, yes, I’ll just pay for that”

Michael: there’s no more subtly if you’re in a really boring meeting, there’s no more subtly just checking your emails

Daniel: that is a fair point. You’ll just have to go, just a moment -

Michael: you really are going to look like you’re considering your life choices when you’re unlocking your phone

Daniel: although that wouldn’t even work anyway because it doesn't activate the scanning unless you lift it

George: or you could just pin in your code i guess

Daniel: but the tech behind it, I mean, what they’re doing is incredible and I know that we think it’s a bit gimmicky the way they can track faces but frankly, how awesome is that?

Michael: applications wise, it’s great to have the more detailed camera, and the more detailed facial recognition going on and I think there’s going to be tonnes of great uses for that down the line but yeah, just in terms of the unlock and pay and stuff, I just don’t really like it for authenticatio

Daniel: What about the watch? ‘cause obviously you can still pay with that

Michael: the watch hasn’t been something which has excited me before, it didn’t do enough, I wasn't hearing good enough things, I’m a late adopter of tech in terms of, I wait and see what the initial wave of fanboys do. I’m not a watch wearer so it wasn’t exactly replacing something I was already using, but actually the fact that they’ve now announced 4G in their watch is a really exciting prospect. Y’know it’s that tetherless experience, you can leave your phone at home which I think will be great for the people that are out and about running. You just need the basics and it does the music streaming and the direction, getting notifications, make your phone calls, I think it does all the essentials that you need when you’re out and about

George: but you can’t replace the phone though

Michael: but you’ve got your wireless headphones, you’ve got your kind of bluetooth headphones, those are going to start to become more common, especially as they start ripping the phone jacks and all the peripheral integration off of their devices

Daniel: I think that’s been a wonderful summary, thank you so much and I hope you guys have enjoyed it as well. If you want more information do check out our blog, and do check back here for more things, one of which, will hopefully be, if it ever gets released the iphone 10 unboxing. See ya later. 

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