Recently Apple, as with every new game changing product announcement, has come under fire from a number of media outlets. It seems there are as many people out there that want to hate them for their success, as those who will inherently love them for the new innovative products they create. I would like to state that I’m in the later group and am less critical and skeptical than I probably should be. I switched 3 years ago after a boss made me use a Mac, after 20 years of being a hardcore PC guy and hating the idea, I was sold in less than a month. I digress.

source: cnet.com

The point of this rant is that Steve Job’s incredible stage presence has garnered it’s own place in tech lexicon; his “reality distortion field”. While negative, that’s pretty badass. He’s just that charismatic and real that you just can’t help but watch in awe. This year he walked on stage to a standing ovation where someone yelled “Steve we love you!” to which he replied “Thanks! I think?”. In the history of me being a self proclaimed computer geek, I’d never once heard or wanted to follow a big company announcement on a live blog. Apple fans have been doing this for longer than the term blog has existed; there is absolutely a reason.

This year’s Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference 2010 (WWDC) was about iPhone 4, their new tagline “This changes everything. Again.” Brilliant! Many in the media are quick to point out that many of the features/enhancements in the next iteration of iPhone have been done before or are underwhelming, most like to state the year and which device had achieved such a feat. Sure, this one phone, this way past year had video conferencing and this other phone, this more recent year, had video recording capability.

No other phone in the history of phones, be they smart or other, has ever had this combined set of features. More importantly, no other phone in history has ever done this many things so damn well.

For example, Steve Jobs stated in his keynote that the new “retina display” is 4 times as dense in pixels (pixels per inch or ppi) as the current iPhone screen and beyond the human retina’s capacity to distinguish pixels (eye = 300ppi : iPhone 4 326ppi). Gizmodo put this criticism out quoting “president of DisplayMate, which is known for its analysis of screens”, he states that Jobs’ claims are far fetched and that the real resolution for the eye’s ability to distinguish pixels is based on the viewing distance of said screen. Specifically that the iPhone 4 would need to be viewed from 18″ from the retina for their claim to valid and went on to declare the normal viewing distance of a phone to be 12″. I’ve tested this (very scientifically and extensively in the last couple minutes) and my average viewing distance is around 17-19″.

source: apple.com

The new, FaceTime standard they’ve come up with for video calls is awesome for a number of reasons. It’s open and they’re doing their best to make it a new standard. Think back to the old days of cell phones, you could send a “text” to people on the same network as you only, until SMS emerged as the standard. Now you can text anyone on any device. Standards are good. The demo was impressive, far better than anything else i’ve seen before on cellphone or for that matter a video chat.

source: apple.com

Apple continues to climb on the awesomeness chart because they (Steve Jobs in particular) continues to challenge the company to do one thing: Put out compelling and innovative products. It’s that moto and focus that make the iPod, iPhone and now iPad such a success. By the way, their computers are pretty sweet too. They only do it if they can do it right. It’s expensive because they don’t half ass things at the expense of user experience period

But that’s fine, you want to complain about the iPhone’s lack of Flash then go buy a Droid. Have fun with a crappy user experience when you do get to use flash on websites. Steve Jobs says, “I told you so.”

Note: Gizmodo is one of my favorite blogs (since years before the recent leaked iPhone 4 prototype story). If you’re waiting in line June 24^th in King of Prussia, PA I’ll see you there… Who am I kidding, there are only a hand full of people (my immediate family) that actually read this blog. None the less, I’ll be there every bit as excited as my first iPhone (3G) that I waited in line for.