Linkstew

Believe it or not, I'm not getting an iPhone. That's right: I, apple fan boy, the owner of six iPods, and recent obsessor over cell phones, am not getting an iPhone.

The thing is, I really like it; half the time when my roommate is showing his to someone, I'll interject pointing out a few of my favorite features [1]. And I'm sure I'll end up with an iPhone eventually -- just not version 1.0 and all of its limitations.

As for the limitations? There are only really about 2 absolute deal breakers, though let's enumerate four. First there are the things that I do with my current phone that I would not be able to do with the iPhone:

• I can't tether my laptop to an iPhone to get an internet connection. I use this feature at least twice a day with my E50, and I'm using it right now.
• I can't connect my bluetooth GPS to my iPhone to get a number of features I use every time I travel.

And then there are the more common complaints:

• It's only EDGE and not 3G. My E50 only does EDGE so I wouldn't be downgrading, but it still seems silly when I can probably just wait for 3G.
• Without a proper SDK, there just isn't going to be a killer app. For example, one of the more killer apps on my E50 is the Nokia Sports Tracker; given that it's tightly integrated with the GPS and needs to record data (and ideally I want it to work when I'm roaming internationally, so recording to the network would be prohibitively expensive), it's just impossible on the iPhone given the current solution.

There are a couple of other issues like the fact that the Gmail experience on the iPhone is crap and the headphone jack situation is borderline consumer hostile, but that's basically my iPhone story. Don't let it stop you from getting one, but if you're an advanced user, it seems like you're going to run into at least a couple of these issues.

[1] My personal favorite is "flinging" a list to send it scrolling, and then touching the screen to stop it suddenly at exactly the point you touched it.

It's hard to believe (and a little embarrassing to admit), but at this point, I've gone through six iPods. The very first one, a 20 GB, a 60 GB that died on me, a short lived iPod mini which was quickly returned (due to the mini lacking a album line on the "now playing" screen), a 60 GB color, and now a 2G 8GB black iPod Nano; And so far, this is easily my favorite iPod yet:

It has an awesome form factor, the battery life is amazing, it holds as much music as I actually need (for awhile I was obsessed with being able to fit all of my music onto the device, but I've long since blown past that being a possibility and have learned to make do), and I basically have no complaints that would actally stop me from recommending the device.

A couple of comments:

While I was excited about the included "search" feature when I read about it, in practice I have never used it. On the other hand, I find the displaying of the current letter you're viewing when you're scrolling to be super useful (even with only 8 gigs) and I don't know how I lived without it before.

Not about the iPod in particular and I'll skip on the details, but the new iTunes interfaces fix a number of my long-standing issues with some of the configuration interfaces, even if a few of the annoying behaviors when plugging in an iPod remain.

And the battery life is simply amazing. I only charged it twice during my entire three weeks in India -- and one of those was right before I left for the plane trip.

However, there are two features that they've broke since previous versions of the iPod that I would like to see fixed:

1. It's no longer possible to turn on/off the backlight by holding down the menu button. I don't like the backlight on all the time, and I want to easily turn it on when I need it.

2. It's no longer possible to add anything *except* an individual song to the on-the-go-playlist. Not being able to add an album or an artist pretty much completely neuters the on-the-go functionality for my purposes.

But you know, bugs happen. I'm sure they'll be fixed.

4 minutes.

So you want to jump on the "I'm not renewing .mac" bandwagon, eh? It only took me three attempts over the course of two days to figure out that following the "click here to update your Renewal Settings first" link in the auto-renewal notification email followed by clicking on the prominently displayed "Choose your renewal settings" link only allowed me to renew. But wouldn't you have clicked on this link, too?

At this point, whatever my reasons for not renewing were have been replaced by "It shouldn't have been this tricky to disable auto-renewing."

Admittedly, the checkbox is only one page away from that "Account Settings" page (under "Credit Card Info," obviously), and it turns out they cover it in the .Mac FAQ, but that doesn't make me any happier about it:

Q: How do I turn off auto-renewal and cancel my .Mac membership?
To cancel your .Mac membership for the following year, go to Account and click the "Credit Card Info" button. Uncheck the "Auto-Renew" checkbox and click "Submit". The main Account page will then show that your account is set to expire on your anniversary date. Your credit card will not be charged for the following year, and you will receive a notice on your anniversary date that your account has expired.

It only took them 3+ years, but as a comment on an old post points out, iTunes 7 finally has "Skip Count" and "Last Skipped" counters.

Apple enhances PowerBooks with higher-res displays - When I saw this headline, I was so ready to drop everything and immediately order a new 12" PowerBook with a higher density display... except the 12" is still stuck at 1024 x 768. Big let down. It seems like that'd be a pretty obvious and easy way to upsell people from a 12" iBook to a more expensive PowerBook.

Okay, so this isn't going to be the epic analyses that my first two iPod reviews were, but here are my impressions on my shuffle now that I've had it for about a month.

Honestly, I like the shuffle for what it does, but it's really not cut out to do everything I need in my primary music player. Here's a brief run down of my primary issues:

• My biggest complaint is that while the shuffle increments the play count, it does not update the "last updated" field. This kind of turns out to be the death blow for my using the shuffle to listen to the 5000 some odd songs in my library that I haven't actually listened to yet. I would have even settled for iTunes setting the "Last Played" to now on sync, but as is, it's a huge pain to figure out what I just listened to, which kind of defeats my ability to use the shuffle as a tool to weed out my library.
• The number of times I've wanted to know what song is playing has got to be in the several dozens already, which translates to "I want a screen." However, it is worth mentioning that half of the music on my shuffle is specifically music in my library with playcount = 0, which makes the wanting to know what song is playing a lot more common than when I'm listening to the "all my favorite snowboarding music" playlist.
• Generating an appropriate playlist out of my 15,000 song library can be a little tedious. I've resorted to a set of nested smart playlists for my "every day random use," and I have a custom "active" playlist I use otherwise. Unfortunately, without "last played," my smart playlists playlist isn't as smart as I want it to be.
• The feedback when first starting up the shuffle is pretty terrible. For some reason it can take several seconds after hitting play before it starts, and in that time the feedback about what its doing is very unclear ("wait, what's that green light mean again?"). I often end up hitting play/pause several times until I finally hear music. "Just hit play for awhile... when you hear my voice, you've pressed play enough."
• And an absurd detail: the shuffle is too small to actually wrap the headphone wire around, so I keep ending up with knots in my headphone wire when I stuff the shuffle into my pocket. Annoying.
• Speaking of the headphones, I've been using the white iPod headphones with the shuffle because my old earbuds finally died, and I've got to say, they make me feel remarkably self conscious. I don't like showing off my hip iPod! (And by the way, I had an [iPod] before you know what one was)
• And then, of course, there were the weird issues I had with beepy skipping, etc, when I used it while snowboarding a couple of weeks ago.

Other than those little problems, I do like it for what it does. It's so small and light that you don't notice you're carrying it at all, the song shuffle is kinda fun when you know all the songs that it's shuffling through, and I like it for what it does. That said, I can't help but admit that I miss my full featured iPod.

Maybe tomorrow's rumored announcements will yield something that will actually meet my non-snowboarding needs.

The second sentence of this Mac mini review made me chuckle. Mentioning that Steve Jobs can make someone want a one button mouse in a review about the first Mac to not come with a one button mouse struck me as amusingly ironic. But once I started thinking about that, a few more ideas occurred to me.

Not only does the Mac mini not come with a one button mouse, but Jobs' was encouraging people to use the mouses and keyboards they already have. Jobs was encouraging switchers to use the multi-button mouses they already own and are comfortable with. And why not? OS X supports multiple buttons and scroll wheels great.

Combined with the touchpad scrolling on yesterday's latest PowerBook, and it looks like Apple may be on the verge of getting over its fear of multiple buttons.

Oh, there's a lot I could say, but let's leave it at this: I already ordered an iPod shuffle (the "Do not eat iPod shuffle" footnote is pretty great), I kinda want a Mac mini to use as a home server, I'm going to wait for iPhoto 5 to actually deal with all the Europe pictures (and yay, it also finally stores movies, too!), and I really really can't wait for Tiger.

Folklore.org: Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh computer.

Wow. There's some really inspiring stuff here about the creation of the Macintosh. It makes me wish I could change the world.

Feel Free to Jack Into My iPod

This article discusses an intriguing iPod social phenomenon. It's so intriguing, in fact, that I wrote part of an article about this more than a year ago -- I'll have to polish it off and post it sooner or later.

iPod: Battery And Assault

On the one hand, I can totally sympathize with this because my original iPod's battery was dying when I got my new 30 gig iPod in May. On the other hand, I already have a new 30 gig iPod.

If He's So Smart...Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation

This article was quite good, and now I can cross the article discussing Microsoft "innovation" vs. Apple innovation off my list. Definitely worth a read.