07.16.08
Into The Rabbit Hole
So. A few days have passed since I made the jump to the Appleologists’ communication tool of choice, the much-vaunted iPhone 3G. It’s probably not a big surprise that the device has seen almost constant use in that time– heck, I’m using it right now. I want to touch on some of the differences between the iPhone and my previous primary music device, the iPod Touch, and make a few comments on the features of the new device that make it a sweet, but ever so slightly sour, experience.
First, let me say this: the iPod Touch is almost not worth it unless you live in a very heavily tech-savvy area or have access to a WiFi subscription service like T-Mobile’s or AT&T’s. The only benefit it confers is the WiFi capability, and WiFi in the US is almost impossible to find even just yards away from a city center. When you do find municipal hotspots, they’re usually so congested as to be completely useless. Which makes the Touch’s capability to download from the iTunes store over WiFi somewhat suspect. This feature is unchanged in even the new iPhone– likely this was a concession to AT&T, to protect their own music download service for non-iPhone devices. It’s frustrating, but it doesn’t affect me nearly as much as I thought I would. It manages to save me some cash, in point of fact.
That said, I recently experienced the difference between the EDGE network (the previous iteration of data-over-GSM, analogous to Sprint’s Power Vision service) and the unimaginatively-named 3G network. Hands-down this is the biggest reason to make the jump; 3G even makes voice calls sound far, far better. Even more, data services may be used while on a 3G call, while EDGE is one-or-the-other; I’ve yet to have occasion to need to simultaneously talk and surf, but I can foresee it being an option I would want to have available. The reports about speed jumps between 3G and EDGE are not exaggerated: I ran a speed test and came up with about 600 Kbps on 3G; the EDGE test crashed, but a later building-induced EDGE bounce showed me slow speeds while downloading mail.
So why should I need all this speed? As it turns out, having access to the internet pretty much anywhere means that I apparently find the flimsiest excuses to use the internet everywhere– I just need to remember that I can. Case in point, on Saturday, someone asked a question about the distance between two cities, and it took Pez to say, “Oh, if only someone had an iPhone!” before I realized I could look it up. This was after I went to Best Buy Friday afternoon, saw a game, and made a note to double-check its reviews when I got home. As I walked to the door, I made a u-turn when I remembered that I could check it right there. As horrible as that makes me sound, it can be used for non-trivial purposes as well– directions and getting me un-lost, as the primary example.
One other thing that I like about the iPhone over the Touch is the external controls for stuff like volume and silence mode. The supplied headset also have a pause/next button built into the microphone, which would be great if the earbuds weren’t more or less lousy. I’m looking for some better iPhone-compatible ones eventually.
The star of the 3G launch is the element of most benefit to every iPhone (and iPod Touch) owner, the 2.0 upgrade and the App Store. The majority of the applications available for the devices are free, or at the very least low-cost. With a few exceptions, the apps I’ve obtained so far are all useful. One at a time, then:
Twitterrific: (Free) This was, literally, the first thing I downloaded. First, the complaints: Yes, it is a little slow. But it works, and it’s a wonderful way for me to feed my crippling Twitter addiction. The only complaint I have is that if Twitter is down (surprise surprise), there’s no feedback that a tweet failed. Disregarding the ads is easy and enough to warrant sticking with the free version for the time being.
Evernote: (Free) Just started with this on Sunday night; I’ve not played with it too much just yet but it’s far better than the built-in Notes app. Apple seriously dropped the ball and didn’t create a way to upload notes to the device. I need to do more looking into Evernote’s syncing abilities, but we’ll see.
Remote: (Free) Pretty much something I expected to have on even the original iPods– a way to remotely-control an iTunes installation. The problem is that it relies on WiFi, and not the dock cable. Otherwise it’s a fairly decent accessory and worth the minimal space required.
AOL Radio: (Free) Wow, what a letdown. One of the more interesting applications to be available, it wound up being easily the most disappointing one. See, it does offer CBS Radio stations as streams across a 3G connection, but those make up a handful of the app’s initial library. The rest are available over WiFi only. I gave up on this only a few hours into Day One simply because of the WiFi requirement.
Pandora: (Free) I haven’t used my Pandora account in years. After the colossal failure that was AOL Radio, however, I dusted it off and found that it was last used back before I became very diverse in my listening habits. I updated it (via the web) with some newer artists and soon it became far, far smarter. The app itself is pretty standard, but the fact that it works even over EDGE makes it my #2 choice for now.
Tuner: ($5) The only paid app I downloaded (so far), this was easily the best one of the lot. It’s the Winamp stream tuner on the iPhone. There’s a few hiccups– it doesn’t marquee long station titles, and it can’t support WMA or Real streams yet– but all I really wanted was Digitally Imported anywhere, and now I have it– and almost any other stream I can think of. Can’t beat that for five bucks.
Eventful: (Free) You know, this one’s hit-or-miss. On the one hand, it’s not intuitive at all. There’s no sorting, no clear instructions, and the interface for importing from last.fm isn’t in the mobile app. On the other hand, it does import from last.fm, which is cool, and it did alert me to a Bang Camaro concert in September, so I’ll hang on to it for now. I fear it will be quickly disregarded, though.
Jared: (Free) This ten-year-old meme just keeps going and going. I fail to see the appeal that would prompt spreading this, aside from wasting at least three minutes of someone else’s life that they will never ever get back.
The built-in apps are kind of nice as well, for the most part. I’m getting the hang of Safari, and feel a bit more comfortable with it now that I have a purpose to it– I just wish that there was a way to specify that a site bookmarked to the main menu replaced the current Safari session and not added a new ‘tab’. Calendar and Contacts are fairly standard; I dig them enough to use them (though in the case of the contacts, there’s little choice). I was surprised at how nice the camera is– fairly high-quality photos, and the photo viewer is noce– prompted me to fire up iPhoto for the first time in, well, ever. The Mail app is pretty spartan, but it works well enough. Maps and the GPS are, as noted, a key component, and in that regard they’re the proverbial huge success I expected (it even covers traffic!). The Youtube viewer is… well, it’s Youtube. Of the rest, Clock and Calculator are of marginal utility, Notes has the flaw of not allowing uploads, and Stocks is singularly useless to me. I wish there was a way to hide those apps off of the main screen (besides dumping them to the last page), but maybe there is and I just haven’t found it.
Moving on to the actual phone part, it’s very easy to use and very intuitive. The visual voicemail feature, with its ability to rewind at will, is far and away the future of voicemail; no more listening through a two-minute message again just to hear the last four seconds you missed due to a random loud noise. Placing calls is easy, answering them even easier. I’m not going to be using SMS too often, so the ability to set a user-generated alert tone for those isn’t as missed as I would have thought it to be. GarageBand makes custom ringtone making a relative breeze; Sunday morning I put together about ten of them over the course of three hours, and they all sound excellent (and are exactly the right price, free). And as said before, the call quality is divine, even in low-bar situations. The only real phone-specific gripe is that the poor earbuds make phone calls difficult to hear in areas with even moderate levels of ambient noise. A steady breeze can sometimes overpower the weak earbuds’ output. As for the iPod part… basically, it’s an iPod. It plays music and does it with aplomb. Video is probably even better than the original 5th-gen iPod, and only marginally better than the Touch– but still better. It’s prompted me to start a full rewatch of Babylon 5– I haven’t used any iPod as a video device in almost two years, but this one is the one to do it on.
It’s not all sunshine and lollipops, though. The battery life is a bit short– maybe five hours of 3G data use before you’re done, with an unknown amount of use as an iPod. Since I tether it to an outlet at work, there’s no real problem there, and on standby it consumes very little power. I had it on me all day Saturday, from a full charge, and while it was getting a little low near the end, it held out for the full 18-odd hours. It’s definitely something that needs charged daily, though if I forget on a work night it’s of little ocnsequence. The iPhone complains about being put into an old-style iPod dock, however– while it doesn’t affect the actual syncing, it doesn’t sit well in the dock, either, and a stray wobble could disconnect the cord. The new-style docks are $50 I’m not willing to spend right now– going to look into a “cable-holder” type solution until I can get a discount. Oh, and you’re going to want a screen protector. Trust me on this.
I mentioned the poor quality of the included earphones, but Apple’s really trying to make things difficult for those folks who would love to use it as a convergence device. Right now there’s no affordable replacement that supports the click-button on the cord; the closest is the Sony-brand set in the AT&T stores for $35, which lacks that button. I imagine it’s just a matter of Apple not wanting to produce two sets of headphones, as they probably got burned by the majority of non-audiophiles not buying the in-ear version of their old earbuds, but it’s still a little rough.
Overall, I have to say that I really like the iPhone, though I suppose that’s fairly evident. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but what it provides works for my purposes, and gets me thinking about other things I could do. I think that the hallmark of a good device isn’t one which just does what you want, but also one that helps you do things you couldn’t feasibly do before. In that regard, the iPhone is perfect for me, because it allows me to expand my horizons a bit more on the spur of the moment. I’m a very spontaneous person when left to my own devices, and if I can avoid having to do hours of prep work before I take a two-hour trip out somewhere, that helps me and gets me out of my shell a bit more. And any experiences I have become fodder for your amusement: expect a lot more livetweeting, random journeys, and other weirdness on this site, folks.
Later this week, on the LJ, I’ll talk a little bit about E3. What I have to say is… unkind.