Gadgets
« Previous Entries Next Entries »V-Moda Vibe Duo earbuds
Friday, September 14th, 2007
As I mentioned in my last post I just picked up a pair of V-Moda Vibe Duos at the Apple Store with my $100 iPhone store credit. The Vibe Duo’s sound great (almost as good as my Etymotic ER-6’s), are the most comfortable earbuds I’ve ever used, and feature a microphone for making hands-free calls on the iPhone. The Vibe Duos come with three pairs eargels (small, medium, and large) in both white and black for a perfect fit for almost any ear and your choice in colors to accessorize with your outfit should you be so inclined.
The cloth-wrapped cords, metal construction, and extended plug (for easy use with the iPhone’s recessed headphone jack) all add up to a stunning package. The build quality on the Vibe Duos is great and unlike some previous earbuds I’ve owned I’m not in the slightest concerned about breaking them or tearing the cord if they get caught on something.
Sadly they lack the microphone button on the official iPhone earbuds for answering calls and pausing the music, but that’s a small sacrifice for the vastly increased comfort and sound quality. Now that I’ve tried them out I realize it’s well worth the $99 price tag and wish I had bought them earlier!
Consumerist pleasures
Friday, September 14th, 2007As stressful as work has been the last couple of weeks I’m actually having a good couple of days recently. Today is the first day of my 3 day weekend (which was supposed to be a 4 day weekend but things are too busy at work to take the 2nd day off) and I’ve been taking advantage of it to catch up on some tasks around the house and play with my new toys.
Toys you say? Why yes - I’ve been playing the good consumer and picked up a few things in the last couple of days. Yesterday I picked up a Canon EF 20mm f2.8 lens for my camera from a co-worker. It’s a fun lens, but I can tell I have a lot of learning to go with it. I’m so used to using 50mm lenses (both my EG 50mm f1.4 lens and my Lensbabies) that it’s almost a little disorienting to use. Below is the first shot I processed (and my favorite from todays shots), taken at the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park.
While out and about I dropped by the Apple Store to claim my $100 store credit for being an iPhone early adopter. I had been looking at the V-Moda Vibe Duo earbuds and with their $99 price tag it worked out to being quite the steal when I factored in the store credit - I paid about $8 out the door once tax was added to the purchase price. I wrote a quick review of the Vibe Duos so check it out!
“Ironwork” by sparktography
iPhone ringtones now available through the iTunes store
Monday, September 10th, 2007Just as I was heading to bed I connected my iPhone to sync and charge for the night when iTunes informed me that the ringtones feature of the iTunes store has gone live. Not many of my tracks supported ringtone creation, but one of my old favorites (Bytecry by Weevil’s Drunk on Light album - the OS X 10.4 intro music) was eligible so I decided to take the plunge and convert it.
After clicking through an obnoxiously long EULA I was able to click “Create Ringtone” to begin the process.Once clicked the main ringtone authoring pops up. The ringtone authoring interface allows you to select how long you want your ringtone to be (up to a maximum of 30 seconds), and position where you want the start and stop of the ringtone to be within the track. There are also fade-in and fade-out options to help the ringtone sound smoother as it comes to life on your precious, shiny iPhone.
After previewing my ringtone to my hearts content I clicked the “Buy” button and was charged the ass-raping $0.99 for a track I “already owned”. It’s a pity that Apple decided to cash in on the multi-billion dollar a year ringtone market - offering them for free on any track you own would have been a great differentiating feature for the iPhone.
It’s as easy as Steve made it sound in his keynote address - making my ringtone took less than 4 minutes including a fair amount of fussing around with the preview to get it just the way I wanted it. A quick sync later and now my phone erupts into a glorious chorus that’s far more unique and “me” than any of the included by default iPhone ringtone. Hazaa!
Steve Jobs: PR ninja
Thursday, September 6th, 2007Not only can he keynote like a rockstar, not only can he make the right technology and style choices to please consumers, and not only does he understand and connect with his customers but Steve Jobs knows how to make brilliant business moves. Yesterday he rocked the digital media ecosystem by releasing a whole new line of iPods for the holiday season, but he also dropped the price of the 8Gb iPhone by $200 and dropped the 4Gb iPhone entirely. This move will help move units and solidify Apple’s place in the cellphone marketplace early and strong.
Unfortunately a lot of early adopters were a little peeved to have paid a $200 ‘early adopter tax’, but again Steve managed to turn this around and make it into another business gem: in an open letter to iPhone customers he has promised a $100 store credit to all early adopter iPhone purchasers. This move not only appeases the early adopters, but will help capitalize on the iPod/iPhone halo effect (many Mac switchers introduction to the world of Apple has been an iPod) by encouraging more new-to-Apple consumers to spend a little more money. Yes it’s $100 that Apple won’t make in profits, but how much do you want to bet that a majority of these new customers are so impressed with their iPhones that they go the extra mile and put the $100 credit towards a new iMac, Mac Mini, or Macbook and give OS X a spin as well. Given the margins Apple makes on their computers a $100 hit cuts into profits in the short term, but will likely increase profits in the long terms as more and more consumers “join the Mac club” and help grow the Apple user base.
Bravo Steve, bravo!
The iPhone: laptop competitor?
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
I just sat down to watch another episode of the Planet Earth on HD-DVD, and reached for my Macbook only to discover its battery was entirely dead. In thinking back I suddenly realized that whereas once I used both my iMac in the bedroom, and the Macbook in the living room on a day to day basis I haven’t actually touched my Macbook in well over a week. Strangely my iPhone is to blame!
Back in my Windows Mobile days I treasured the mobility offered by my cellphone - being able to check my email and do basic web browsing is a modern marvel indeed, but the experience was clearly that of a cell phone - second rate at best when compared to a full blown computer with a big screen and full-blown keyboard. While checking a movie time on the go was possible (and useful) with Windows Mobile and Symbian devices it simple wasn’t the fun, easy experience one looks for in a portable computing experience.
The iPhone makes it easy to browse the full blown web and communicate quickly without getting in my way that it’s overcome the arms reach barrier and become my device of choice for quick internet tasks even with my perfectly serviceable laptop sitting next to me. Since both devices can accomplish the task with similar ease why reach over and open the laptop when the iPhone is already in hand, just begging to be used. The overcoming of the arms reach barrier has reached further than my living room - I now find myself doing almost 50% of my personal communications via my iPhone.
One might say that not reaching for the laptop is the heights (or depths) of laziness, but I’d much rather point the finger at the wonders of engineering that Apple managed to cram into their diminutive ultra-portable computer, the iPhone.
Is the iPhone honeymoon over? It’s more than two months later and I’m still writing blathering blog posts about how great it is, so I guess not!
YouTube on the AppleTV and the iPhone
Sunday, July 8th, 2007
I’m never was a terribly heavy YouTube user but now that it’s both always in my pocket and on the nice Audio/Video system at home I find myself filling a spare moment here and there with random videos. Most of these videos fall into one of four categories - cute, funny, cute and funny, or the largest category: paper-thin mid-to-post teens producing mostly random and meaningless content. I’m not entirely sure if the world is a better place having been subjected to the last category but I’d rather have crappy user created content be king than populate an internet based on censorship where such drivel isn’t permitted.
Content gamut aside one of the things that has struck me as odd over my past week of using my iPhone is how differently implemented the YouTube application is on my iPhone versus my AppleTV. They both allow for the browsing of a partial selection of the YouTube library streamed directly from the internet, but they both have some features the other lacks. Here is a breakdown of client-specific features that have puzzled me:
AppleTV:
- On my AppleTV I can sign into my standard YouTube account using my Google credentials.
- Because I can sign into my YouTube account I can rate videos.
- I can save videos to my accounts ‘favorites’ list for later viewing on either the AppleTV or in a web browser.
- Unlink the iPhone there is no way to share videos with friends. Although I understand that there is no built in web browser one would think you could at least sync the recommendation to iTunes and have iTunes send a mail using your default mail client on the desktop PC.
iPhone:
- I can’t sign into my web-based YouTube account.
- There is no way to rate videos, however I can view what others average rating for a video is.
- Because I am not signed in I cannot mark a video as a favorite. There is a bookmarking feature which serves a similar need, however bookmarked videos do not show up in my favorites list on the YouTube website or on my AppleTV.
- I can send links to YouTube videos from the mail client on the iPhone via the ‘Share’ button in the YouTube UI. Sharing is fun and creates a very social experience out of it.
All in all I think YouTube was a great addition to both product offerings, but I’m puzzled as to the disparity in the feature lists. I will be interested to see if future software updates for both platforms bring their feature sets closer together. Google’s “cloud of data” and Apple’s experience in creating engaging and intuitive user interfaces making for a market juggernaut that will be hard to beat.
One week with the iPhone: an in-depth review
Saturday, July 7th, 2007
Now that I’ve spent a full week with the iPhone I wanted to put pen to paper (or should that be fingers to keys) and write a more in depth review than my initial impressions. Needless to say Apple generated a lot of hype with the iPhone and many feared it would flop in the face of near impossible levels of pre-release fanaticism. Thankfully I am glad that after a full weeks usage I can attest: Apple actually pulled it off. They lived up to or exceeded every single promise they made about the iPhone.
My impressions are obviously quite favorable over all, but the iPhone does have a few flaws. Regardless of it’s flaws I think this will be an industry-changing phone and will raise the bars for Microsoft, Symbian, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and other competitors in the mobile marketplace to produce better phones featuring integration, ease of use, and stability all orders of magnitude ahead of what they now offer.
Things Apple got right with the iPhone:
The experience
Using the iPhone is just plain fun. Apple has managed to take something fairly common like a phone and completely revolutionize it. From the simple fades and transitions between modes to the delete animations the whole device feels very modern and high-tech. It’s a thin and highly attractive device that attracts attention and feels a little like something from a few years in the future - particularly compared to the industrial design of its main competitors. It’s a simple interface to learn (more so than any previous OS I’ve used before - mobile or desktop) and has playful feel that just begs to be explored.
The iPhone provides a fun to use and mostly consistent experience end to end. In all previous smart-phones each different feature had a different experience: you could use it as a phone, or as a browser, or as an email client but each different application and experience has a very different feel to it. With the iPhone you don’t use a phone, browser, or email client - you use the iPhone. Everything feels very well integrated, and intermeshed. It does have a bit of a learning curve for the device as a whole, but once you learn it you can have any of it’s features at your fingertips. The closest competitor they have in this space is the consumer-oriented Sidekick from Danger, but the iPhone puts even that to shame.
The screen
The screen on the iPhone is crystal clear and very high resolution. It features a 480×320 screen (more than twice the resolution of your standard 320×240 screen), but at a very high DPI so text, images, and video looks stunningly crisp. The screen has an ambient light sensor so it’s always the perfect brightness for your environment. The brightest setting is stunning and makes the iPhone’s screen completely visible outdoors in bright sunlight - a feat most phones (smart or otherwise) can’t lay a finger on.
The browser
The Safari browser on the iPhone is simply stunning. Not only can it properly render websites that previously been completely impossible to view on mobile phones, but the intelligent zooming, rotating, JavaScript/AJAX support makes the Safari browser the pinnacle of the iPhone’s applications. While viewing a web page simply rotating the iPhone to either side rotates and re-zooms the section you are viewing. A quick double tap on any section of a web page (for instance a column, image, or form) zooms to that section for readability, and then you can either scroll to other sections or double tap again to go back to seeing the entire website. The Safari browser included in the iPhone even has a multi-window feature allowing you to browse multiple websites at the same time, or handle popups if a site requires them (and it blocks the popups you don’t want).
The advanced Javascript and CSS/DOM included in the Safari browser make some amazing applications possible. People have already written browser based interfaces for SSH, IRC, and other chat programs. Obviously a web application can never be quite as integrated as a thick client can be, but this browser proves it’s a fairly minor distinction at this point. I expect to see a large crop of iPhone web applications springing up in the next few months as developers hone their iPhone web development skills.
Mapping by google, interface by Apple
Apple’s much vaunted Google Maps application delivers as promised. The pinch and zoom features are well implemented, although it’s usefulness is limited without some sort of geo-location feature, be it actual GPS or based on cell towers/Wifi access points. One of the ‘hidden gems’ of the Google Maps application is it’s traffic feature - on the way down to my car every morning a quick click into the iPhone’s mapping experience and I can see which of the freeways has the least congestion for my morning commute.
Talking about talking
When it comes to being an actual phone the iPhone delivers above expectations. Sure, I’ve used better ‘dumb’ phones in terms of signal strength or voice quality, but as smart phones goes this is well implemented and very usable as a voice communications device. Conversations are easy to hear for both parties and the interface for dialing is very slick looking. While you can’t type out someone’s name to call them the scroll by letter feature is well implemented and you can set as many contacts as you want to be favorites and show up on a short list of people to call. Since I use my phone to make and receive calls so infrequently I’ve not found this to be a problem.
Messaging
Further on the topic of the iPhone as a phone the new Visual Voicemail feature is stunning. Rather than having to call up my provider and navigate through Byzantine phone menues with a dial-pad AT&T sends the voicemail to my phone using the data network, and I can browse, play, replay, call-back, and delete all without calling my voicemail. The Visual Voicemail feature brings more of an email paradigm to voicemail and makes someone like me who usually HATES voicemail find it pleasant to use and entirely tolerable.
In addition to making voicemail a pleasant experience Apple chose some highly tasteful alerts. When an SMS, calendar alarm, or missed call occurs the lock screen displays a visual history since last unlock on translucent blue pads. Sadly emails (and their subject lines) are not privy to the same unlock screen notifications and must be accessed via the email application.
The mail client is a well implemented piece of software. While it’s still not perfect. It’s better than all mobile email solutions I’ve seen, and a good number of desktop mail clients. It lacks true push capabilities with most email servers making the iPhone not the ideal solution for many enterprise customers, but it more than makes up for it in my book with near perfect IMAP support. I can have it check my inbox regularly (every 15, 30, 90, or 120 minutes) as well as browse my entire IMAP hierarchy and browse my last 10 years of mail, pulling down emails and attachments from the server on demand.
Many of the initial nay-sayers of the iPhone were focusing on it’s virtual keyboard. Having come from several years of QWERTY phones I myself was more than a little worried about this. Luckily Apple pulled it off and I’ve found that after a few days of getting the virtual keyboard into my head I actually like it as much as a physical keyboard. While it lacks tactile feedback it does offer the ability to change the keyboard depending on the task (adding a .com button to the keyboard while in the browser for instance), and it’s predictive text corrects pretty much every ‘fat finger’ mistake I’ve thrown at it. After a while you learn to just trust they keyboard and grind away at typing as fast as you can and magically what you meant to appear on screen does - just be prepared for a couple of days of re-learning the skill of typing on QWERTY thumb boards.
The iPhone as an iPod
The iPod portion of the iPhone is extremely well implemented. It’s more intuitive than even the 5.5G iPods which preceded it. While I barely use Coverflow at home in iTunes I’ve found it to be a very natural way to browse the 20 or so albums that I have selected to bring with me. There are other nice touch based interface tweaks which make selecting music easier, and allows for a ton of eye candy. I have a few minor complaints about the iPod interface, but I’ll leave those for the ‘what Apple missed’ section later in the article.
There are a lot of nice audio touches like slowly fading the music when a call comes in, and pausing the music entirely when you accept the call. When you hang up the music un-pauses and gracefully fades back in. Most alert sounds (new email or a calendar event for instance) are accompanied by the music fading down just slightly to make sure you hear the alert but without jarring you out of your music listening experience. These touches make using the iPhone in a car with an auxiliary input or iPod integration fun and far less jarring or complicated than dealing with a separate iPod and phone.
The iPhone features a standard headset jack so you can theoretically use it with any headphones, not just the manufacturer provided ones like so many phone manufacturers force you to by using a non-standard jack. This let’s the audiophiles of the world ditch the built in earbuds for some high end headphones. Doing this loses out on the built in microphone, but gains a lot of quality. So far the audio quality has been fantastic and even when hooked up to my high-end home stereo system the output sounds great! See the ‘what Apple missed’ section below for some more comments on the headphone jack.
Connectivity
The network for the iPhone is both a good thing and a bad thing. The inclusion of EDGE data (it’s faster than dial up was way back in the day - but not by that much) for getting the internet from ATT&T was a surprise, and makes browsing out on the road somewhat painful. Luckily Apple made up for this by adding a great WiFi implementation. The handoff between WiFi and EDGE is seamless if you have previously approved a wireless access point, and the WiFi power consumption actually appears lower than EDGE to me.
As much as some might gripe about the EDGE data connection it’s obvious that they did it for battery life. 3G networks like AT&T’s HSDPA network use far more power than EDGE modems do and would have significantly reduced the fantastic battery life the iPhone offers. On my old AT&T 8525 (an HTC Hermes) I was lucky to get 12 hours of use out of my phone between the occasional phone call, some web browsing, and a few hundred emails. The iPhone makes it through all that (and a lot more web browsing because the experience is so much better) and still has 40-50% of it’s battery life left at the end of the day. Apple quotes 8 hours of talk time and over 24 hours of music playback - very impressive numbers for any phone.
The camera
The 2 megapixel camera included with the iPhone is definitely a camera phone and can’t hold a finger to a dedicated camera device it still takes some impressive photos. Like all digital cameras it does best in bright, evenly light scenes, but even in unevenly lit scenes (like the shot below) come out looking halfway decent. The iPhone camera falls flat on it’s face in dimly lit scenes though, and produces something that could be considered modern art of sorts: black canvas with slightly less black blobs hovering over it like ethereal souls from our ancestors.
YouTube is nice, although unless you are within range of a WiFi access point be prepared to both wait a long time and get very poor quality video. The fact that the videos are encoded in both EDGE and WiFi friendly versions is a nice touch, but the limited availability of the YouTube library is a bit annoying at times.
And one more thing: syncing
A final slick little touch iPhone has over previous iPods and competing media-centric smart-phones is that you can sync an iPhone to multiple computers at once. For instance I was able to sync my iPhone with a Windows PC running Microsoft Outlook to get my contacts and calendars onto the iPhone, but sync music, podcasts, and video from iTunes on my mac. This is a slick little touch and one that will make it easy for people to keep their contacts at work, and their media collection at home.
Things Apple missed with the iPhone:
No IM client
No instant messaging application. The SMS and email clients are very well implemented (chat bubbles aside in the SMS client) but with todays youth generation ditching email for IM I’m surprised to see it not included at launch. I am guessing that iChat will be one of the earlier software updates - sadly that will likely continue with the chat bubbles, and be AIM only - a tough pill to swallow for a heavy MSN Messenger network user. The good news is that various clever web guru’s are already working on hacking IM, SSH, VNC (done by my uber-geek friend Nate), and IRC onto the iPhone via web interfaces.
No 3rd party applications
No SDK for building full blown iPhone applications for 3rd parties yet. A lot can be done with a Safari web application, but there are a lot of Mac applications that I think could port fairly well to the iPhone - Adium, Ecto, and NetNewsWire to name a few. Hopefully Apple will amend this shortly and release a full blown SDK for the iPhone to the legions of hip cool Mac developers.
iPod niggles
The iPhone features a standard headset jack so you can theoretically use it with the headphones of your choice. The only problem is that the headphone jack is recessed slightly more than normal headphone jacks are so some headphones require an adapter to work properly. I was able to trim down the rubber hump on one of my headphones with a sharp knife, but for my metal tipped Grado SR225’s and Etymotic ER-6’s I’m out of luck until I get my hands on one of the adapters.
Another miss is that while locked in iPod mode the unlock screen fails to show a scrubber (a bar representing the track with a ball on the track to show the current play position), the length of the track, and other information so I see everything about a track without having to unlock the iPhone. It’s nice that the unlock screen shows my album art and the current time, but I’d like to get more information about the track I’m listening to than just the name.
It’s also mildly annoying that while playing audio you can have the scrubber or the rating of the song visible but not both at the same time. I have a large music collection and I’ve been working to slowly rate it all for future use - with the current iPhone music interface it takes several more ‘clicks’ than I would think necessary. These are both such minor gripes that I’m almost certain Apple will address them in a future build of the iPhone software.
More connectivity
The inclusion of slower EDGE data rather than AT&T’s high-speed HSDPA connection. AT&T ramped up their EDGE network for the iPhone at launch to 200kbps, which is 2-3 times faster than dial up, but nothing like the 700-1,000kbps connections I regularly saw with my HTC Hermes on AT&T’s network. I’m listing this as my last “thing Apple missed” because with the seamless transition to wifi, and increased power consumption of HSDPA I think Apple may have made the right decision in the short term - but keep an eye out for a 3G iPhone once the chip-sets become more power-friendly and as battery technology improves.
Conclusion:
My goodness run, don’t walk to buy an iPhone. I bought it with reservations - particularly about the EDGE data, yet everything else about the iPhone makes me feel so warm and gooey inside that I’m keeping the iPhone for sure. The iPhone will revolutionize the mobile industry and for once I’m pretty damn proud to be an early adopter and on the bleeding edge of tomorrow. I can’t wait to see some of the new phones Apples competitors will be coming up with in the next few years, and what kind of long term impact the iPhone will have on the mobile phone market as we know it - consider the bar officially raised!
The iPhone is the first phone I’ve ever used that works as advertised, offers a great mobile web browsing experience, great battery life, and is fun to use. I give it a solid 8 out of 10 Stars of Sparky, and would have given it the 10/10 Stars of Sparky had the iPhone featured a true SDK and high speed data out of the box.
First iPhone post
Saturday, June 30th, 2007I have simply to say that the iPhone rocks! I picked one up today and although the learning curve is steeper with this thing than I usually like, but it’s hands down the best phone, browser, and media device I have ever used!
Posted from my iPhone.
Update: Now that I’ve had my iPhone for about 24 hours I’m still very impressed (particularly with the Safari browser experience), but I find myself wishing they had already released the API. A few select features are missing and those could be met (for me at least) by adding an SSH client, Adium, and MP3 ringtone support. Still - big concerns given how impressed I am with the rest of the device and it’s high level of integration of features and ease of use for switching between them.
The Pizzazz pizza cooker
Monday, April 2nd, 2007
After discovering its existence a mere week ago on Boing Boing I decided I had to purchase Presto Pizzazz Pizza Maker from Amazon. It’s the best of “Buy now from TV” come to life - nearly instant pizza, with no muss, no fuss. It’s designed to cook 7 to 12 inch pizzas from start to finish in under 15 minutes and does a damn fine job of it.
How sad is it that I cook frozen pizza frequently enough that it’s worth spending nearly $50 on a device aimed at cooking pizza faster (and better) with less cleanup when I have a perfectly servicable oven. Heck - as you can see from the above in-process photos I even put the Pizzazz on my oven to cook it.
I wrote a review of the Pizzazz on Gear Live if you want to learn more about my experience.
“Pizzazz process” by sparktography
« Previous Entries Next Entries »