Wesley's Tool-Box

As a smart device that's nearly always on your body, it has the potential to extend or replace existing things better than a smartphone, lessening the need to pull out or find the bulkier device to do the same thing. As I've moved to a fairly large smartphone - iPhone 6 Plus - this is something to look forward to.

One of those things I thought up was the flurry of membership cards that once occupied the wallet. Most of them now sit in a barcode form inside my iPhone, making the wallet considerably thinner. But now those could be moved to the Apple Watch, and I could just pull up my wrist to accrue reward points instead of reaching for my phone.

Because the Passbook app only sent QR codes to the watch, I looked around the Apple Watch App Store and found a couple of apps that can put the card number and the barcode on both types of devices. Eventually, I settled with Stocard, as you can see above. The cards stored on the iPhone app are automatically sync'ed to the Apple Watch app, enabling you to display the wanted barcode from either of the devices. Or, at least that was the idea.


As I loaded up the card data, I noticed that the barcodes were fairly small. It was only about 20.5mm (0.81") wide on my 42mm Apple Watch, which is even smaller than the UPC barcodes found on a product. I wondered if this would be scanned at all.

As a field test, I tried out on two of the biggest hypermarket franchises in Korea: Lotte Mart and Emart. To my surprise, the barcode readers at the stores were able to pick up the numbers without a problem as long as the reader was held close to the watch. The high-density 326ppi display may have helped this.

It's not all completely convenient at this point, though. Because the Apple Watch app has to rely on the iPhone to provide the data due to current SDK limitations, loading speed is slow with my 24-card collection. I have to load the app and make sure the barcode is up before going to the cashier. Hopefully, this will be resolved with the SDK updates later this year.

Rear camera on iPhones doesn't seem to have any gaps for dust to get in, but for some reason it gets in on rare occasions. You could take the phone to an authorized service center for either cleaning or refurbishment, or if that's not a viable option like my case, you could do the cleaning yourself.

To do that, you need to first open up the phone and separate the display assembly from the rest of the phone. The cables connecting the two are held by five screws and a cover plate, so once you take them out, the four cables can be popped off with a spudger.


To access the rear (back) camera, you need to remove two screws that hold the cover plate for the camera on the top right area of the phone. The screw on the left is obscured by a black pad, so you need to lift it slightly with something like a flathead screwdriver while you unscrew. The cover plate may not completely become loose, but it does not need to be.

Apple introduced low-light photo mode on iPhone 5, enabling the device to boost the ISO to 3200 in order to take brighter photos in the dark. The quality was obviously grainy, but at least you would be taking a recognizable photo. Default camera app would slow the shutter speed down only to 1/15s, while 3rd party apps that could go into "night mode" could do 1/4s to 1s depending on the model, brightening the photo even further.

With the introduction of the Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) in iPhone 6 Plus, even the default camera app could slow down to 1/4s shutter speed because the OIS was expected to compensate. As I confirmed in my review, this definitely helped enhancing the low-light photo quality. But I came to notice a strange behaviour after trying to take a lot of photos in dark places.

In a really dark place, iPhone 6 Plus camera maxes out at ISO 2000 and 1/2 seconds, as you can see here. You can either set this manually if the camera app supports iOS 8 API, or automatically if the app supports the night mode. The ProCamera 8 app that I used has both modes. After noting the brightness of the objects in the preview screen, I took a snapshot.


But the photo came out quite darker than the preview. To see why, I checked the EXIF data. It showed that the camera limited itself to ISO 500 and 1/4s shutter speed instead of the ISO 2000 and 1/2s setting that I set. To see if the high ISO mode wasn't working, I manually set the ISO to 2000 in a brighter room, resulting in a much faster shutter speed. The camera had no problem obeying the ISO setting in this case. Then I tried the ISO 500 and 1/8s setting to take a photo in the dark. The result was that the actual settings decided by the camera was ISO 250 and 1/4s.

It seems that, when the camera feels that it's in a low-light environment, it automatically decreases the shutter speed to 1/4 seconds and use as low ISO as possible, and only up to 500. The manual settings are overridden. Most camera apps in the App Store that support manual settings or night mode seem to be affected by this. I've seen the same problem in VSCO Cam, Manually - Manual Focus Camera, and ProShot, so it's definitely not a bug in the individual app.

I've checked for this problem with the other iPhone 6 Plus units and they exhibited the same behaviour, while the iPhone 5S did not have this problem. I'm suspecting that the OIS function that allowed the 1/4s shutter speed in the default mode may be the culprit. I've filed a bug report to Apple. The issue has been observed in iOS 8.0, 8.0.2, 8.1, and 8.1.1 beta.

P.S. If you do need to take low-light photos on the iPhone 6 Plus right now, there is one series of apps that seem to be either unaffected by or circumventing this problem that you can use - NightCap (both regular and Pro versions).