iPad Live, the best damn iPad podcast on the ‘net — is on a timeout this weekend so we can bring you a special edition iPhone Live. iPhone 4S Live to be specific. So ditch what you’re doing and show up to chat because we’re going to tell you everything you need to know about Apple’s latest mobile!

Time: 9pm ET, 6pm PT, 2am BST.

Place: http://www.tipb.com/live

If you have any questions or topics you’d like us to discuss, just leave them in the comments then come be part of the show!

(And yes, you can watch from iPhone via Ustream Viewer app (here’s how) — just search for “mobilenations” and iPad (we recommend Duet Browser.)

The folks at Timeflies have made a unique tribute to the late Steve Jobs for one of their Tuesday songs.

All of this was shot on an iPad 2 and edited using iMovie, recorded, mixed, and mastered on an iMac. The beat was made using samples from OSX and iOS – everything on a Tuesday.

Check it out, below.

One of the new features of the iPhone 4S is an 8 megapixel camera equipped with a fast f/2.4 lens. Without question, this was the feature I was most excited about, and I almost immediately started snapping pics.

For sample photos and a summary of my thoughts, follow along after the break! (All photos are original; none have been edited in any way beyond being resized to fit the page.)

Landscapes

The iPhone 4S does a phenomenal job with landscapes. These have the potential of being tricky for cameras because of the broad range of lights and darks, but even with HDR turned off, the iPhone 4S produces great results. The two photos above were taken without use of HDR.

HDR

That leads us to HDR. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and refers to the range between the darkest part of the photo and the brightest part of the photo. Camera sensors can only record so much of this range, so if a photo’s dynamic range is too big, darks will be too dark and brights will be too bright. With HDR enabled, however, the iPhone 4S will take two photos, one exposed for the darks, and one exposed for the brights, and merge them together as one photo.

The photos above, although not the most interesting of subjects, does a great job of demonstrating the capabilities of the iPhone 4S HDR. The first photo was exposing for the shade, and thus blew out the sky. With HDR turned on, both the shade and sky look good.

Movement

Since the iPhone 4S is equipped with an f/2.4 lens, it has the ability to let in more light and speed up the shutter speed. Theoretically, this would mean that the iPhone 4S should do a better job of freezing motion. Without having full control of the settings, however, this can be hard to achieve.

In the end, I’m impressed with how the iPhone 4S handles motion. The above pic does have a little motion blur, especially on my face, but it’s not too bad. Below is a picture of my daughter that I took while she was bouncing up and down. On the iPhone 4, it would have never come out that clear.

Face Detection

The iPhone 4S now has the ability detect faces and use them as the focus and exposure point. It works great! I was impressed with how it recognized my daughter’s face even when she was moving around or when I was taking a profile shot with only one eye visible.

Macro

The Macro capabilities of the iPhone 4S camera are very impressive – when it can lock a focus, that is. Unfortunately, I was continually disappointed with the iPhone 4S’s inability to focus. I understand for objects that are very tiny and blend in with the background, but the camera even struggled with focusing on larger items that stood out from the background, like in the following image.

Digital Zoom

First of all, it’s important to emphasize that the iPhone 4S is equipped with a 5x digital zoom, not optical zoom. The difference is that the lens is not capable of zooming, but the software is. So using the digital zoom on the iPhone 4S is equivalent to taking the photo without the zoom and cropping it. This greatly reduces the quality of the photo and there are very few situations where you would want to use the digital zoom.

However, since the iPhone 4S has been upgraded to an 8 megapixel camera, there is an improvement to the digital zoom over the iPhone 4. The first photo above was taken with 0x zoom and the second one was taken with 5x zoom. You can see obvious damage done to the quality of the image, but it is, admittedly, better than I was expecting. I also believe that this is an example of a situation where you might want to use the digital zoom if you wanted to, say, show your kids a picture of the duck you saw earlier in the day.

Low Light

The iPhone 4 has a great camera, but it was always lacking in low light situations. I was very excited to test out the iPhone 4S in low light since it’s equipped with an f/2.4 lens and better sensor. I am definitely impressed with the improvement. My living room has the worst lighting on the planet and I could never get a decent photo of my daughter with the iPhone 4 while indoors at night. But with the iPhone 4S, I was able to capture the above shot! It doesn’t take much movement to make your shots blurry, however, but that should be expected.

Here’s an example of a macro shot in low, bad light.

Flash

The last thing I tested was the flash and it worked well! Just as with the iPhone 4, it is very slow and your photos are guaranteed to show any small amount of motion blur. I tend to hate camera flashes, but if you’re trying to capture a memory in a dark environment, it’s often times your only choice. For those times, the flash on the iPhone 4S will get the job done.

Conclusion

The iPhone 4S is equipped with a very nice camera that takes beautiful photos. The macro lens has the potential to be incredible, but struggles with focus more than I was expecting. At 8 megapixels, the iPhone 4S has the ability to produce nice 8″x10″ prints that can be displayed in your home.

The camera was the feature of the iPhone 4S I was looking forward to the most, and it has delivered – it turned out to be my favorite feature of the iPhone 4S. Yes, I like it even more than Siri.

Have you been taking some amazing shots with your iPhone 4S? Head on over to our forums to show them off!

BT has confirmed that the release of iOS 5 caused the highest ever internet traffic spike in the UK.  We knew that Apple's servers were under immense pressure last week with the release of iOS 5 and other updates. Even Rene joked on the podcast that Apple had brought down the internet!

Traffic levels were at their highest level ever seen within BT's UK broadband network (wholesale through BT Retail and other content providers) on Wednesday night – this was sustained from the launch of Apple's iPhone OS 5 until past midnight. Last night (Thursday) saw the 2nd highest we've ever seen on the UK broadband network, less than 10Gbits/s lower than Wednesday and sustained for a longer period of time. This exceeded previous peaks seen during Wimbledon and major England football matches.

BT claims that it was seeing more than 80Gbits/s of additional traffic; which is around double the previous maximum spike. It also claims that it had very little issue with network congestion. Not sure if everyone trying to download the updates would agree with the last part!

Source: Cult of Mac

According to The Wall Street Journal, a private memorial will be held for Steve Jobs on October 16, with invitees to include close industry friends.

The event will be held at Stanford University’s campus Sunday evening, according to the invitation.

Guests to the invitation-only service were asked to respond to Emerson Collective, a philanthropic organization established by Laurene Powell Jobs, Mr. Jobs’s wife.

California Governor Jerry Brown has also announced October 16 will official be “Steve Jobs Day” in the state.

Meanwhile, 9to5Mac reports that Apple’s internal celebration of Steve Jobs’ life on October 19 will include Apple Retail employees.

Apple Stores will be closing for one hour (1-2 EST, 10-11 PST) on that Wednesday in memory of Steve Jobs. Apple Store employees will use that one hour to view a live webcast of the Cupertino-based celebration.

The public continues to mourn by leaving cards, flowers, and notes at Apple Stores worldwide, and many wore Jobs’ signature black tops and blue jeans to the iPhone 4S launch last Friday.

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Sources: Wall Street JOurnal, 9to5Mac, TUAW

So… how’s the battery life on your brand new iPhone 4S? We’ve already asked you about battery life under iOS 5 in general, but now that you have that Apple A5 processor to power and the Siri voice assistant feature to play with, battery life could be getting hit harder than ever.

Now a new phone, especially one that talks back to you, is so fun to use that we might not get back down to every day levels for a while still. But if you’re not talking to Siri every minute, if you set up as new rather than restoring from backup, if you’re not lighting up all the new location-based Reminders and Find my Friends, and your Notification Center isn’t set to the full fire hose, how do you think battery life compares to your previous phone?

Is it great, gets through the day, no problems whatsoever? Is it about the same? Is it so bad you’ve stopped using Siri, turned off location services, disabled push notifications, and gone to commiserate with your Android wielding friends?

Vote up top and give us the details, including anything that’s helped you improve battery life, in the comments below!

Google has voluntarily pulled its Google Voice application from the App Store due to an incompatibility with the just released iOS 5 software.  If you search for Google Voice it can no longer be found in the App Store.

Vincent Paquet, Senior Product Manager for Google Voice confirmed that the app had been pulled, explaining “our last update of this week had a bug that caused the app to crash at sign in. We removed it so it did not affect additional users until the fix gets published.”

Google has not released any information as to when the bug will be fixed or when Google Voice will return to the App Store. We will let you know as soon as we hear. Is anyone experiencing this problem?

Source: Engadget

 

One of the new features of the iPhone 4S is a 1080p HD video camera. This new camera sports an f/2.4 lens and improved sensor to capture more light. It also has video stabilization to steady those shaky shots. To see me put this new camera to the test, check out the video above.

Extreme lighting

The first thing I tested was how well the camera deals with harsh lighting – meaning environments that have both dark, shaded areas and brightly lit, sunny areas. The iPhone 4S did a fantastic job of adjusting the exposure to bring in more light in the shade and less light in the sun. However, I did notice that if I was filming my daughter in an area that had bright backlighting, the video was a little underexposed even if I tapped to expose on my daughter’s face.

Video Stabilization

The next thing I tested was video stabilization. First I tried out a non-extreme situation that has a similar amount of movement that the average person may experience – walking backwards while my daughter runs towards me. There was definitely still some camera shake present in these shots, but it wasn’t too bad. My stomach tends to be pretty sensitive when it comes to bouncy film, but these clips didn’t affect me.

However, the next test I did was to run down the street, and this one was pretty bad. It was still very shaky and I couldn’t image watching an entire video like that, but I also couldn’t imagine filming an entire video like that. This was an extreme scenario that expect not too many people will find themselves in.

The video stabilization performed best when panning the camera around. I was particularly impressed by the clips of me panning around the camera to follow my daughter as she walked past me. These were nice and smooth.

Low light

Next up was low light. The quality of the video in the low light environments of my house were not the best, but they weren’t particularly horrible, either. Camera shake was a little more obvious and the clips were grainier, but overall, I was satisfied with its performance as a cellphone camera. I was particularly impressed with how the camera was able to compensate for the pink lighting in my daughters room and choose a good white balance setting. This was a huge improvement over the iPhone 4.

Macro

The macro lens on the iPhone 4S camera is incredibly sharp – when it’s able to actually lock focus. On larger items, like leaves, the iPhone 4S has no issue focusing, but with smaller, skinnier items like twigs and sticks, the camera really struggles with grabbing a focus and often times never does. I tried to focus on some berries hanging from a bush for several minutes with no luck. It doesn’t seem to make a difference between direct sunlight, shade, or overcast light, the iPhone 4S seems to frequently have issues with focussing. This is a huge disappointment.

Conclusion

Overall, I am very impressed with the iPhone 4S video camera. It handles the changes in harsh lighting, poor lighting, and movement quite well and also has great audio quality. The biggest disappointment is that the macro lens frequently has issues focusing. However, when the lens does focus, it looks amazing.

It’s time to retire my Flip Video camera for good.

Have you been recording some amazing video with your iPhone 4S? Head on over to our Photography and Video forum to show them off!