Gadget Techie

Just received my iPhone 4 pre-order (a day early) and first thing I did was start recording some 720p videos with it. As soon as I recorded my first video I decided to share it with the world so I sent it by email and uploaded it to Youtube right from the phone. Much to my surprise however, the resulting attachment in the email was NOT a 720p video but instead it was down-converted to 568×320!

At first I thought that I was doing something wrong so I went through all the possible solutions:

• Turned on Wifi… still no 720p
• Checked Settings menu for an option to turn 720p on… no option for that
• Rotated the iPhone so that it was in landscape mode when I pressed the share button… nope
• Sent the video using various email accounts to see if it was Gmail that was limiting me… not Gmail.

Frustrated, I hit the internet in search of an answer. Seems like the only sites I could find that mentioned “iPhone 4″ and “720p” were sites that had 720p videos from the iPhone 4 which made my situation even more frustrating since somehow they were able to get the phone to upload in 720p!

Then I finally stumbled upon a few forums posts here and there of people with similar problems and from these I learned what was happening and that there are two solutions to this problem. Basically, Apple decided that because 720p videos created pretty large file sizes, they would not allow you to email or upload them to Youtube using the phone itself unless you bought the iMovie app (which by the way is not out yet). Another way to (the iMovie app is out now and it turns out that it does not let you upload to youtube or email 720p video). In order to upload or email 720p video taken with the iPhone 4 you need to connect it to your computer and have iPhoto extract it. Then once the video is on your computer you can upload it to Youtube or email it in 720p.

Needless to say I am VERY disappointed in Apple. This is a caveat that they deliberately failed to mention when talking about the iPhone 720p recording capabilities and easy to share options. I understand Apple not wanting people to upload or email these large videos using cellular data but why not let you do it when connected to Wifi? And why allow it only with the purchase of iMovie for the iPhone?

Hopefully this post will help future iPhone 4 owners discover why their phones are not working as they should without having to scour the internet like I did.

UPDATE: After careful thought, I have concluded that Apple’s decision to down convert the videos for upload is indeed a good one. 720p videos are large in size (a small clip can easily hit 10 to 20 MB in size) and so uploading them would take a considerable amount of time even on wi-fi. Couple that with the fact that the average user would most likely hit the upload button on the iPhone and then forget about it , possibly walking out of range of their wi-fi, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. People would start complaining about failed uploads, uploads taking too long, extreme battery consumption, etc. I just wish Apple had made it clear that it is not possible to upload/email 720p videos from the iPhone.