Droid Replaces My iPhone

Friday, I went out and got a Droid to replace my iPhone (which I've handed down to someone else). My first impression is that its very nice, but for every iPhone annoyance that the Droid fixes, there's a new one to replace it.

Here are a few:

• Keyboard is far too prone to multiple keypress
• Camera is slow, and prone to blurry images
• The iPhone had a sleep function (timed shutoff) that Droid lacks
• Music management is horrible
  
• Apple's smart playlists are clearly a killer feature
• Recovery from a dropped wifi connection is not as graceful
• No popup SMS/messaging notifications (brief scroll on top bar instead)
• Google Voice / built-in messaging can be confusing (which one am I selecting?)
  

On the other hand, it has:

• An open app store
• Free turn-by-turn navigation with a fairly cheap car-mount
• A keyboard at all (narrowly a win over none... narrowly)
• Great email/SMS integration if you use gmail and Google Voice
• Search by voice for nearly everything
• "Back" button works across apps

Some things that I think would improve the experience:

• Add a countdown timer that kills the browser and music player when it goes off
• Make the music player automatically create playlists from directories on the SD
• Add smart playlists (see my other post)
  
• Build in some software guards against multiple keypress
• Improve guessing with respect to poking at links on the Web browser (I often get the wrong link)

Overall, it's a great phone, but in some respects, it leaves me longing for my iPhone. I'm sure that over time it will become my favorite phone, but it's not a clear iPhone killer.

How To Use Smart Playlists In iTunes

Do you have an iPhone and many more Gigabytes of music you love than you can fit on it? Do you get frustrated over having to choose what to put on the phone? Here's a way to never compromise your collection while still carrying around only a trivial number of tunes:

• Create a playlist for a kind of music you want to listen to. You can use one of the built-in smart playlists like "Highest Rated" or build your own (for example, I have a "Quiet" playlist of songs I like to go to sleep to)
• Now create a new smart playlist and give it the rule: "Playlist", "is", and the playlist from above.
• Select the checkbox next to "Limit to" enter "50" or "100" for the count and for "selected by" use "Least recently played".
• Now when syncing your phone, go to the "Music" tab under the iPhone's entry in iTunes. Select the option to only place selected playlists on the phone, and select your new smart playlist.

(more...)

Blackra1n, Cydia and SBSettings

I've just re-jailbroken my iPhone (mostly to fix a problem introduced by upgrading to 3.1 without first uninstalling the jailbreak - never do that), and I ran into an SBSettings problem. It installs fine, but once it's done installing, it doesn't do anything. I swipe across the top of the screen and nothing happens.

If you just used blackra1n to jailbreak, and SBSettings won't work for you, here's what you do (props to this forum for the fix):

• Re-install Cydia from the blackra1n interface
• Re-install dpkg (this may show up as "Debian Package Manager" or similar) from Cydia
• Re-install SBSettings from Cydia
• Re-boot the phone

This worked for me, and got my SBSettings install working flawlessly.

iPhone Jailbreak and GV Mobile

I was unhappy enough about the lack of Google Voice on the iPhone to go out and buy an Android phone on the spot, but I figured it was the financially prudent thing to do to see what I could do with the iPhone first. I'd heard that the jailbreak community had put out one of the now-banned AppStore apps for Grand Central (now Google Voice) called GV Mobile, so I set out to check it out. What follows are my experiences and what I think of the whole thing.

First off, I hit Google, searching for jailbreak walkthroughs and found a page that gave some very nice, step-by-step instructions. I followed these and quickly had my phone running the Cydia installer. From there, I just had to search for "GV" and installed the app. Once installed, it shows up just like any other iPhone app. Nothing surprising there.

It did crash on me the first time I used it. If you do follow my lead, I suggest exiting and re-running the app as soon as you enter your Google Voice username and password and selecting the "remember" toggle. That way, you don't have to do that part over again if there's a problem.

So, it isn't at first obvious what this app does. It's not actually dialing out. Instead, it uses the same technology that Google Voice's "Web badges" use. That is, it's going to call your cell phone and simultaneously call your requested number and connect you. That way, the caller gets your Google Voice number as the callback instead of your iPhone number. you can also initiate a call from your iPhone, but have it ring any other phone to connect (e.g. your desk or home). That's what the "phone to ring" option is in the first menu you'll see.

The interface to the contact list and dialer are as expected. The only thing that irked me was that when loading the SMS, history or voicemail screens, it has to wait while it loads the data from the Web. I understand why this is the case, but it seems to me as if this could be optimized (e.g. by showing you cached data while it loads more in the background).

Voice mails play fine, though they have a noticeable pause before they start. Nothing I can't live with. It doesn't show me the transcripts along-side the voicemail, but I already have that sent to my phone via SMS, so no worries there.

Overall, I like the integration, and it was well worth having to jailbreak my phone. Who knows, perhaps I'll even test out some of the other features like the "modem" and running various shells and servers. There's a lot Apple doesn't let you do with your iPhone that I really think is worth doing. Sad. Maybe I'll check out those Android phones anyway....

Apple: An Android's Best Friend

Today the news came out that Apple has removed all Google Voice-related apps (including one from Google) from their App Store for iPhones. OK, that's a lot of buzz words, but what does it mean? It means that Apple has told Google and others that they're not allowed to write apps that customize the iPhone for use with Google Voice (hereafter GV). This would have included making calls from your GV number, making calls through the GV international calling plan and easing access to GV voicemail and other services.

Apple has been playing this game with Google ever since the release of Goolge's phone platform, Android, but today's move might well be the last straw for consumers. Google Voice is an extremely popular service right now, and I don't see any competing offering coming from Apple any time soon. Users want email transcription, numbers that ring multiple phones, call screening and all of the other features that come with GV. They don't want to hear "Apple doesn't think you should get that."

I know that this cements my departure from Apple products, though to be fair it was their treatment of Google Talk and Latitude that had me pretty much over the fence, especially after the disastrous launch of the Google Latitude Web app that has iPhone users looking over their Blackberry and Android-using friends' shoulders. I won't be extending my iPhone contract, not out of protest, but simple pragmatism. I can't afford to use a second-class device, and with the release of phones like the insanely sweet Sony Ericsson Xperia X3, HTC Hero and even the low-end phones that HTC and Motorola are about to push out, that will certainly be where the iPhone finds itself. Without access to Google's apps (which they're willing to hand to whoever want them, mind you), the iPhone is going to stop being the phone that technophiles like myself urge their less-savvy friends to use, but it's not all about Google. They're just getting more press than most of the companies whose apps get kicked out of the App Store for varying and seemingly arbitrary reasons.

In the past couple of years, I've probably convinced ten or more of my friends and relatives to buy iPhones either directly or just by example. What happens when people like myself stop using it, and move to more open platforms like Android? Has Apple seriously considered where this is leading?

Spurious "iTunes could not connect to the iPhone because it is locked with a passcode" Error

I just updated iTunes to 8.2, and got this error when connecting my phone for the first time:

"iTunes could not connect to the iPhone 'XXXX' because it is locked with a passcode"

with XXXX being the name of my phone. It was easily fixed by waking up the phone first and then connecting, but it's clearly a bug since my phone was not locked at all. This may happen because iTunes can't tell the difference between a phone that is scheduled to lock after some period of time, but currently is just in idle mode and a phone that's actually locked.

Anyway, don't freak out if you see this message. Just re-connect after going to the home screen on your phone.

Mt Welch In the White Mountains: iPhone Panorama

View from Mt. Welch and the Waterville Valley From Mt Welch hike 2009-05-17

This lovely picture was taken from my favorite mountain in the White Mountain chain in New Hampshire. The mountain is called Welch and the spot is on the Dickey / Welch trail loop. The high point that you can see in the picture is the summit of Mt. Welch and the low point is a cliff that overlooks the Mad River and the Waterville Valley. I just love to go to this mountain, and I try to make it at least twice a year. It's a wonderful spot for just hanging out, taking night photographs, watching meteor storms, and the like.

What really pleases me about this photo is that it was taken with my new iPhone (the old one just died a month after its warranty expired). It's a composite panorama of over 30 individual pictures that I took immediately on arriving. I stitched them together using the free autostitch demo.