Review: iPhone Stencils

I woke up today to find these waiting for me:

I bought two so I could have one on my desk and one in my bag at *all* times. You never know when a creative idea might strike! I’d also imagine losing one wouldn’t be too hard at all.

There’s not really an awful lot one can say about these iphone stencils, they’re metal templates which help designers draw concept iPhone apps. Containing most of the elements an iPhone app designer would need: buttons, icons a slider etc.

The first thing I noticed as I opened the minimal packaging was the pencil. I love that they included a mechanical pencil – the idea, its sound and very nice. In practice however, I hate this pencil – its plasticky, its cheap and its utterly useless to me. A simple run-of-the-mill pencil would have satisfied me more than the cheap feeling and poor performance of this pencil. More than anything, it made the few rough edges around the stencil even more pronounced, which is kind of odd considering none of my pens or pencils seem to suffer from that.

Moving onto the stencil itself, as a design tool its perfectly balanced. it has the right number of shapes, does the job admirably – though I would’ve liked a square cutout to mimic the home button square, but its not like its necessary. There were a couple of issues however: it sucks up finger prints worse than anything I’ve seen in recent memory, which is disappointing considering the pictures on the store suggest that its almost a matte-type surface, which I would have preferred.

Smoothness is also a bit of a nagging point, the edges on the outside are not quite up to my standard of ’smooth’. Its rough enough to make your writing impliment jut out – at least in one place, where they’ve clearly cut out the template from the rest of the stock. I expected more from seeing the pictures of it to be perfectly honest. However, like I mentioned earlier, it all depends on your drawing implement of choice; with most I’d imagine the minimal roughness will not be noticeable – its just a little irritating for the needless perfectionists. uh huh… me.

Finally, the metal stock is really too thin. I’m sorry but this I just had to bring up, its incredibly thin – too thin in my view. It would take nothing to bend it out of shape, in fact so much so that I can see it easily being bent out of shape if left in a bag without being protected inside a hardback book. For $16 US each, plus the international shipping costs, I would have hoped for something a little bit more sturdy.

All things considered however, I think these stencils are a wonderful aid for sketching up iPhone app designs. I usually prefer photoshop to anything else, but sometimes you need that hands on-touch.

On that note, its time for bed. I’ve spent all day playing with these things, my desk is a mess and its well past 2:30 on a weekday!!

** Updated to include links to Design Commission website

iPhone 3GS Problems

Yes that’s right, the iPhone 3GS I got on launch day (26th June) is already useless.

The iPhone3GS is now completely unresponsive to input on the top row of icons on the home screen and has intermittent responsiveness everywhere else. At one point it even opened spotlight search, and typed ‘ipo’ by itself!!

I believe this was an existing issue with the device which was made worse when it dropped on the ground as I was getting out of a car, it fell all of one foot into concrete/grass (only slight cosmetic damage). But ever since, its just gotten much worse, ever since I had the iPhone it was opening apps every now and then without my input. I would take it out of my pocket and somehow it had opened some app or other while in the locked mode.

So, now I’m waiting for apple to send me the coffin to send to them for it to be replaced. Will try to put a hold on my o2 contract as soon as possible – theres no way I’m paying for repair time!!

iPhone 3GS vs BlackBerry Storm 9500 Camera Shootout

The title says it all.

I took a Research In Motion BlackBerry Storm 9550 and an Apple iPhone 3GS (just released in Ireland) and took pictures of various subjects in typical situations – outside, inside and with sub-par lighting conditions. The rules are eleganty simple:

• Take 3 Pictures of any given subject with each device, try to move as little as possible.
• Pick the best representative sample of the three photos.
• Compare….

The following images are direct from the devices, no manipulation was performed. This explains why some photos are oriented in a different direction:

iPhone 3GS	BlackBerry Storm

* I made numerous attempts, but it seems anytime I take a photo of the iPhone 3GS with the BlackBerry, the screen has a significant green hue.

Expect a video comparison soon also.

iPhone 3GS hits Irish shores tomorrow at 8am

The latest and greatest phone to come out of Apple’s iPhone camp, the iPhone3GS will hit O2 stores from 8am tomorrow morning.

Apple’s iPhone3GS (‘upto 2x faster’) brings with it a faster processor, more ram, slightly improved battery life, video recording and editing, MMS, Copy & Paste, voice recording, improved GPS thanks to the included compass and more from €199 for the 16GB and €299 for the 32GB models on billpay starting at €40 p/m or alternatively €519 and €609 respectively for speakeasy customers.

Unfortunately, only black models will be available at launch. Customers prefering a white model may request one from staff in participating o2 stores or online.

For eager iPhone3GS customers, the following stores will open at 8am to cater to your technolust:

• www.o2.ie/iphone
• 50 Grafton Street, Dublin
• 87 Grafton Street, Dublin
• 5 Henry Street, Dublin
• 52 Henry Street, Dublin
• Patrick Street, Cork
• Shop Street, Galway
• Williamsgate Street, Galway
• Cruises Street, Limerick