This electronic version is enhanced with full color, high resolution photographs and drawings. Rather than just convert the original book’s black and white images, I wanted to add a little extra and really take advantage of the iPad’s beautiful color screen (can’t get that on a Kindle!). I think it turned out great. Here is a screen shot of my iPad and iBooks:

Here is a screenshot of one of the pages with a color photo:

This new camera is 5 megapixels (back, the front camera is VGA) and shoots HD Video – yes, HD Video! The same touch to focus interface works in still and video mode – one of the coolest features of the iPhone camera. The back-side camera also has a 5X digital zoom – however, I recommend not using a digital zoom, take your shot and crop later. The other new – and cool feature – is a built in LED flash on the back!

I’ve started to assemble a collection of iPhone photo apps that are worth considering. Here is what I use:

Camera+ – I use this instead of the built in camera for several important reasons. The first is, Camera+ allows you to tap-to-focus AND tap-to-set exposure! Using a 2 finger tap, one finger sets the focus and the other the exposure, the newest release allows you to move these separately after setting – way cool. Another great feature is “fill light” mode for the LED flash. Basically, you can turn on the LED continuously. Great for focusing in the dark and other tasks. The software also has a stabilizer which works reasonably well. Finally, it supports cropping and dozens of photo effects. For $1.99, it is well worth it!

360 – this new app takes 360 degree panorama photos just like that Sony camera in the commercial with Taylor Swift! Very cool and works great.

Pano – a traditional panorama stitching app that works very well. Overlay of the previous frame helps you align the next frame in the pano.

NightShot – improves the night time performance. Sometimes useful.

iMovie – Apple’s iPhone iMovie app for editing movies right on the phone! Still simplistic but you can see where this app is heading. You can make a decent movie with it though.

Finally, myZenfolio. I use Zenfolio as my photo sharing (and remote backup) site. This app gives me direct access to my photos. Very cool!

Well, I just had to get the new iPhone 3G S. I’ve been an iPhone fanatic since the original came out 2 years ago. Last year, I upgraded to a 16 GB 3G and loved it. The GPS feature has been great. Well, when I heard that the 3G S has a 3 megapixel camera AND a video camera, along with a real compass, I just had to have one. In addition, the 3G S is supposed to be 2X faster than the 3G.

I normally do not pre-order things but this time I did. AT&T promised overnight delivery shipped the day before the official release date. Today is the day! The phone arrived this morning and 30 minutes later, I had transferred all of my “stuff” and was on the net. That was very easy. Now that I’ve had the phone for a few hours I can say, “Wow!”. It really is faster than my 3G. Everything loads so much faster – email, web pages, apps start up faster.

The new features in OS 3 are also nice – I had updated to it on Wednesday when it became available. First there is sideways text entry in Mail, Notes, and Messages – the keyboard flips to the landscape orientation when you rotate the phone. Nice feature, makes typing even easier. Then there is Copy, Cut & Paste! The real thing! The UI is very well done – not an easy task for a handheld device with a touchscreen.

That stuff is nice but get this – Voice Control! It can dial phone numbers, look up names in Address Book, and play music music by saying the artist’s name, a playlist, and even control the songs playing – and it can tell you what song is playing. And, it works amazingly well! The voice dialing alone is worth its weight in electrons! Then we have Compass – it basically turns your $299 iPhone in to a $20 compass. But it is pretty and it works really well. It can tell you exactly which way you are facing. Goggle Maps is compass aware too, when you tap the location icon a 2nd time, Google Maps rotates as you move around! I can’t even tell you how cool this is!

Ok, but it keeps getting better! There is a new Spotlight application built in to search for things on the phone. You get to it by flicking left from the main page. If you look at the little page icons at the bottom of the home pages, the one on the far left is the Spotlight magnifying glass icon. Nicely done! And there is now a built in Voice Memo application that records audio and then lets you share it or email it. I make audio notes to myself all the time in QuickVoice but I’ll try the new Apple recorder.

There are a number of other enhancements too – Stocks has a new graphing mode, updates to Calendar, Find my iPhone shows you where your phone is and Wipe lets you wipe it clean – all from MobileMe. There is also built-in support for the Nike iPod sensor. Internet Tethering and MMS  are built in to OS 3 but not supported by AT&T yet. MMS is promised for late summer, tethering is not mentioned by AT&T.

And now we get to the new camera and video camera! The camera is MUCH better than the original. At 3 megapixels, it is actually usable and it has a new autofocus feature with a really cool manual focus feature. Simply touch an object on the camera preview and iPhone focuses on that object! Including exposure and white balance. This is a very neat feature, I won’t be surprised if some digital camera companies steal this idea – it’s that good! Video is also very usable. 30FPS VGA recording when the phone is held horizontally (wide screen mode). And, it has built-in video editing! How cool is that! The editor is a simple “clip” editor but it is simple to use and nicely implemented. Video can be shared or emailed right from the Camera application too. The camera is much faster too, so you can capture sequences of photos.

The iPhone 3G S is a winner! Not revolutionary but a great evolution from the original iPhone and iPhone 3G!

The way it works is quite easy, when you attempt to connect to the Web in a Hotspot (with Wifi enabled of course), an AT&T page asks for your iPhone’s telephone #. A few seconds later, you get an SMS message with a link to click to enable your access at that Hotspot. Took all of 15 seconds for the entire sequence.

I give AT&T a lot of credit for taking this big step to support their iPhone customer base.

The Boston Harbor sunset cruises head out to the Boston Lighthouse – which is located on Little Brewster Island out on the harbor. Our boat was delayed and we got a really late start. By the time we got to the Lighthouse, the sunset was almost over. The view was spectacular and the lighting on the Lighthouse was amazing. I know the iPhone camera sucks in low light, but it was all I had. I took a couple of shots trying to time getting the beacon light in view. Here is one of the photos:

Boston Light – original iPhone Photo

Nothing to write home about, but look at the lighting on the left side of the Lighthouse and the Keeper’s home! I couldn’t just let this photo go to waste so I loaded it in to iPhoto to see what magic I could do.

First, I did a crop just to see what I had to work with:

Boston Light – simple crop

Still nothing to write home about. Normally I would use Photoshop to work some magic but I was curious about what can be done with the simple tools in iPhoto. So I applied 3 effects and also tweaked sharpening and noise reduction to create the following 4 “art photos”.

Boston Light – Black and White

Boston Light – Antique

Boston Light – Edge Blur

Boston Light – Noise Reduction and Sharpen 100%

You can click on the above to see the full size final result. I think I like the last one, oversharpened and over noise reduced, the best. How about you? Anyone have any other interesting, simple techniques to recover iPhone photos?

Free Apps

• AIM – instant messaging client for AOL and Apple’s iChat
• AOL Radio – reviewed yesterday BoxOffice – find out what movies are playing and buy tickets
• eBay Mobile – find, bid and buy stuff on eBay
• Facebook – reviewed yesterday
• Google Mobile App – Google desktop for the iPhone
• NetNewsWire – an RSS reader for iPhone
• Remote – control your iTunes or AppleTV from your iPhone
• Twinkle – geotagged twitter
• Weatherbug – displays weather along with radar maps and webcams from your location

Purchased Apps

• AccuFuel ($.99) – keep track of gas milage and cost for multiple vehicles
• Chopper ($7.99) – reviewed yesterday
• Dot Game ($1.99) – play a game of dots anywhere
• G-Spot ($1.99) – position sharing
• NetSketch ($5.99) – network aware sketch pad (very cool)
• QuickVoice ($1.99) – audio recorder
• Starmap ($11.99) – great for all of us amateur astronomers!

Next up is Chopper – a very addictive action game. I am not a big video game fan (actually, I am a recovered Gameaholic from the early 80s) but it is good to have a game or 2 ready to fill in a boring wait or keep the kids occupied. This game is relatively simple – guide a helicopter by tilting the iPhone to make it ascend/descend and move forward/backward and hover. There are 60 missions (levels) to complete. The basic idea is to rescue little people while avoiding missiles and bazooka fire. Enimies can be crushed by landing on them! Fun, and addicting.

If you are a Facebook fan – like me – then you will really like the iPhone Facebook app version 1.1. Sure, the Facebook Webapp has been around for a while but this dedicated app has some great features and is fast. Some differences from the Webapp are: it supports Facebook chat, it is integrated with the camera and photo album on your iPhone so you can take a photo and immediately share it right from Facebook, you can alos write on your friends’ walls, and the coolest feature – photo tags are displayed when you touch a friend’s photo! This 1.1 update is siginifacntly more stable than the first version too. DId I mention it is free?

And let’s not forget the WordPress app! This little gem finally takes blogging on the road. You can use this free app to edit and create new posts on WordPress.com blogs or your own installations of WordPress. It supports multiple blogs too. A nice feature is its camera and photo album integration. Not a bad 1.0 product!

Now, compare that to my iPhone 3G experience.

I walked in to my other local Apple Store in the Rockingham Mall where there was a line of 7 people in front of me before the store opened. “No problem” thought I, there should be plenty of phones so it should only take a few minutes.” Boy was I wrong. I timed an average of 20 minutes for each transaction. 4 of them had some sort of activation issue that required calling ATT – myself included. After waiting for 45 minutes, I stepped up to the plate. Got my 3G upgrade for myself and that took 5 minutes. “Cool” I thought. Then it was time to buy an iPhone 3G 8GB for my son and add a new line to my ATT Family Plan. That is where the hassle started. Firstly, the Apple system rejected my line addition so the salesguy had to call ATT. ATT could not locate my record – even with my cell #, billing address and zip code. The lady at ATT could not find my town in MA! I assured her that I lived there with about 10,000 other residents. After 30 minutes, she finally found my record and proceeded to add the line. 20 minutes later, the transaction was complete. The salesguy asked if I wanted him to activate the phones. I asked if I could do it at home, myself, since I had been at the store for 2 hrs and really needed to get back to work. He let me leave the store unactivated.\

At home, I was able to activate the upgrade to my phone with no issues. The new iPhone on the new line was a different story. The voice service activated but the data service did not. I logged in to my ATT Cellular account and saw that the new line was configured with the original iPhone $20 data plan with 200 text messages. I then noticed that my Unlimited Messaging Family Plan was missing from my account. I called ATT. Basically, the activation of the new phone caused a conflict resulting in my messaging plan being canceled! The ATT rep fixed that but could not fix the data issue on the phone. I need to go back to an Apple store or ATT company store to fix that.

Stay tuned…