iPhone
Next Entries »Vibe Duo: defective but easily fixed
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007I’ve barely had my V-Moda Vibe Duos four days and I’m already starting to develop a bit of a love/hate relationship with them. As stated in my mini-review of the Vibe Duos I love how great sounding and comfortable they are when paired with my iPhone, but what I don’t like is a manufacturing flaw that I’ve encountered on a pair of otherwise fabulously constructed headphones: faulty glue on part of the cable.
After buying my Vibe Duos on Friday I enjoyed them through the weekend until they broke Monday morning while at work. The faulty glue (or perhaps a faulty glue job in the factory) caused the the sheath protecting the connection between the headphone jack and the cable leading to the earbuds to come undone and travel freely up the cable.
I immediately took them back to the Apple store who apologized for the problem and promptly replaced them without even asking to see my receipt. I was willing to chalk it up to a single faulty pair of earbuds until the replacement pair suffered the same fate the very next day. Either the Apple store in the University Village had a bad batch, or the Vibe Duos suffer a design or manufacturing flaw leading to this unfortunate condition. If the Vibe Duos were a bit cheaper I wouldn’t mind having to DIY repair them myself, but at $100 a pop and considering how high the build quality is otherwise I’m a little disappointed with V-Moda.
Luckily there is an easy fix for this problem. This evening at home after quickly whittling away some of the old adhesive with an exacto knife I re-glued it myself with seemly better results. A few drops of super-glue spread evenly over the plug with a synthetic Q-tip (the cotton ones would have left fibers) and quickly dropping the sheath back into place have locked it into place quite tightly.
Any other Vibe Duo owners out there suffering from this problem?
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!
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!
It’s cold out here, no kind of atmosphere…
Saturday, September 8th, 2007I’ve actually been enjoying myself quite a bit the last few days. My project shipped at work, and although it was a rough couple of days it’s done now and I’m feeling much more relaxed as the result. From Friday night through to this fine Sunday afternoon I’ve been distracting myself with the Red Dwarf Complete Collection on DVD. I’d always loved the PBS Red Dwarf telethons as a kid, but am discovering I must have missed episodes as particularly some from the later seasons I hadn’t seen before.
Today I woke up early for brunch at the B&O with Brien (mmm Beni Thai Crabcake Benedict!) and then to go for a photo walk. I had to pick up some food for Skype so I decided to start out in my car and after picking up the food went back to my perennial favorite location to shoot: the conservatory.
My favorite shot of the day - a backlit palm frond in the conservatory. I actually shot it specifically with an iPhone wallpaper in mind (and tried to frame it correctly for the overlays at the top and bottom) and am quite pleased with the results. You can check out the iPhone specific version here, and the rest of the shots I liked from todays walk can be found here in my Flickr archives.
“Sunlit frond” by sparktography
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.
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.
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