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The Best iPhone Email Provider

So now that the iPhone's been available for a little over 24 hours, folks are finding out that its email capabilities will take a bit of getting used to. Ideally, whatever you do to your email via the iPhone should be reflected when you access your email via a web interface or via a desktop client (mail.app, Outlook, etc.). However, that's not always the case with the offerings available right now. Here's a run-down of the major drawbacks of each major iPhone email provider:

Yahoo
Yahoo is a strong contender for best email service as it's the only one that implements the IMAP IDLE functionality, giving the iPhone a light-weight push mail capability like the one that makes Blackberries so addictive. As soon as Yahoo's email servers receive a new email they ping your iPhone. Unfortunately, you can only access your email via the web or the iPhone for free; if you want to also work with that email via a desktop client you'll need to pay $20/year to gain POP access. You can't get IMAP access, so that means that any email you send via the iPhone or web will not get added to your desktop client's "Sent Mail" folder—this is the big drawback of POP email.

Gmail
Gmail is currently my primary email provider, and I've been quite happy with both its performance and its generous storage limits. However, it only provides POP access to desktop clients and the iPhone, so the POP sent mail problem exists here as well. Even more frustrating, though, is that Gmail automatically puts a copy of every email you send into your inbox as well as the "Sent Mail" folder. The result is that you have to delete a copy of every email you send via the iPhone to get it out of your inbox. This introduces too much overhead into the act of sending email from the iPhone and makes Gmail quite unattractive. And that's not all: The first time you setup your Gmail account on the iPhone, the iPhone will download a copy of every email you've ever sent unless you clean up the "All Mail" folder first. And, with no way to select multiple messages to delete on the iPhone you may get to practice deleting emails several hundred or thousand times to clean up your iPhone's inbox.

.Mac
.Mac offers 1 GB of email storage, along with an online address book and calendar that syncs with those OS X apps, and other related functionality, for $99/year. This price makes .Mac the most expensive email option, but it also provides IMAP access to both the iPhone and any IMAP desktop client. It also has a pretty good AJAX-based web interface, making .Mac the first email provider we've looked at that offers most of the IMAP functionality we've been looking for. Unfortunately, .Mac doesn't offer push mail, so you still have to wait for the iPhone to poll .Mac to find out if you have any new email. Also, all of the related pieces of functionality beyond email that make the annual price somewhat more reasonable are not available for Windows users, as they rely on OS X functionality. A free 60-day trial is available.

AIM Mail
AOL offers free IMAP email with a decent AJAX web user interface, 2GB of email storage, address book sync via Plaxo, and support for Outlook calendar syncing. Aside from not offering push mail, what's not to like? Well, you do get bombarded by ads when using the web user interface, and to some there's a stigma to having an "@aim.com" email address. Also, this service doesn't do a good job of advertising its functionality and the help files are minimal compared to the other services, so it makes you wonder how well they'll support the iPhone if problems crop up.

Conclusions
Right now there isn't a single, ideal email provider for everyone. Yahoo could be the one if they'd open up an IMAP interface to desktop clients, something that they've toyed with in the past. However, until they do that, their push mail functionality isn't enough to put them at the top. The best option appears to be .Mac for Mac users, and AIM Mail for Windows users, as both of these services provide both IMAP access and web-based access.

Camera Raw vs. JPEG (Again)

In preparing for an upcoming vacation I've been busy practicing with my Nikon D70 DSLR, and I've been sucked once again into the debate between using that camera's native sensor image (camera raw) or using standard JPEGs. Although I upgraded from Photoshop 7 to CS2 a while ago I haven't played with it too much, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity for me to do my own tests.

I took two sets of photos, one indoor in low light and one outdoors with bright sun. Each set consisted of sixteen photos. I used four different ISO equivalents (200, 400, 800, and 1,600) and four different image quality settings (raw, fine, normal, and basic).

After taking all the photos I opened up four at a time from the same set and ISO group in Photoshop and visually compared them. The JPEGs open up without any additional work, but trying to open a raw file invokes the Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) plug-in.  ACR wants to twiddle the color, contrast, white balance, etc. for you, but ⌘-U will undo all those tweaks and just perform the most straight-forward mapping of sensor data to visible image.

Of course, part of the problem with camera raw is that there is no "one true way" to interpret the sensor data, so every different software program will produce a different image from the same raw data. Similarly, every digital camera has its own firmware interpretation of the sensor data that it applies when creating its JPEG images. Sometimes this firmware is very good, sometimes not, and sometimes it produces something that's just not aesthetically pleasing to the individual.

The decision to take the raw data and process it outside of the camera (in Photoshop or similar) tremendously slows down the workflow, though, and storing all that raw data eats up storage space (both in the camera's memory card and on your computer) quickly as well. With my camera, the raw data takes up about five megabytes, while the normal JPEG takes only one and a half megabytes.

So how does my camera rate?

At the sizes that I'll be viewing, both online and in print, I can't see a significant difference in almost all instances. Sure, if I blow the images up to 200% on-screen I can see some JPEG compression artifacts around high-contrast areas in the "basic" quality. And, I can also see a bit more chromatic aberration in the "basic" quality as well. But, even when printed at 8" X 10" on semi-gloss paper with an Epson R800 I can't see those details.

The only images I could see a meaningful difference between was the indoor shots at 1600 ISO equivalent. Here the camera-produced JPEGs showed a lot more sensor noise than ACR showed, enough that it was visible in print at 8" X 10". So, if I'm shooting very low light and I have to max out the ISO equivalent to keep my shutter speeds reasonable, it'll probably be worth it for me to switch to raw.  I could probably remove the noise from the JPEG with a Photoshop filter, but it seems more convenient to let ACR handle it automatically.

Yea! This means I can store around 1,100 images on a 2 GB memory card—plenty of storage for even my most photo-intensive days. "JPEG Normal" for me!