However, when the iPhone 4S came out, I migrated back to the iOs world. So when they made the announcement yesterday, I of course checked it out again. Overall rating: C.

The upside:

First the platform is unchanged except it isn’t beta and you can upload 20,000 songs for no cost. This is pretty good if you ask me. I have about 6,000 songs up there now. They have added a more comprehensive music store and just like iTunes they are giving away free music all the time. The quality is better on the tracks though as they are 320kbps versus iTunes 256kbps.

The downside:

There is no native iOs application. However there is an iOs friendly HTML5 web app. This uses the HTML5 audio tag to stream music. When you first load the app, you are shown artists and can see albums, songs and playlists if you slide left and right. There is search, a right hand alpha listing to jump around and logout. Thats it for initial controls. No “play” fromt he top level meaning you can’t just jump into playing a random song (I like that on the web and in iTunes). Upon finding you artist, you have to click to open the artist, then the album, then the song before you get a “play” option. What if I want to play all songs by the artist? Clicking play and letting it run on the first song will automatically go to the next track when the first completes.

Since this is a web app, it doesn’t respond to the play controls available in the iOs compatible headphones. This is a feature I love in iTunes, especially when its cold out or I am at the gym. Pandora even has pause/play working via the headphones. Since it is a web app streaming over the internet, use it on wifi. over 3G, due to the high quality of the tracks it stutters and buffers like crazy. In addition, one of the issues I had with Pandora’s HTML5 solution and the beta google Music is sometimes the next song just won’t play. This happens in the iOs web app as well.

The big downside:

So I bought a bunch of the free albums at launch and even paid for the new Coldplay ($4.99). However they didn’t show up on the iOs web app to play. Messing around with it for a while I decided to erase any content related to Google Music and see what happens. When you first launch the app, it asks you to authorize allowing the database to be up to 25 mb. In order for new music you just bought to show up you need to delete this library/database and start over. In addition the UI is slow to respond, sometimes doesn’t render anything, and crashes frequently. While some of the labels are readable by VoiceOver, they are the labels that are not rendered on the current UI, therefore I deem it inaccessible. Don’t even try to listen to it read you the name of the album art image.

Summary:

If there was a native iOs app, I would use this all the time. Maybe more than iTunes as I don’t have enough room on my iPhone to hold all my music. But to make it good, they need to work on compression schemes for the music over 3G. I certainly like this over iTunes Match as it is free and DRM free, it just isn’t usable on an iPhone yet.

I never knew the man. I never visited the campus he worked at, but I feel a kinship to him and find myself choked up over the loss. I wish his family the best and I while he will be missed in geekdom and beyond, he finally doesn’t have to live with what I am sure was a painful disease. Rest in peace Steve Jobs.

Is this good for Android? Will Google be sacrificing search revenues for hardware revenues? Will hardware makers become more reluctant to use Android now?

With Mozilla working on a mobile OS “more open than Android” and Google competing in the hardware market, I think we will see some manufacturers (HTC, Samsung, LG) start to work with other OSes. HP has been slammed on the hardware, I think this creates an opportunity to license WebOs.

I do think this will be good for Motorola. The injection of Google cash, mindset and push can revitalize the company. I also look forward to being able to upgrade phones on Google’s schedule and not the carriers. I am still waiting to upgrade my Droid 2 to Gingerbread (really I have given up and look forward to a new iPhone this fall).

With the launch of MobileMe they pitched that they would “push” my calendar down to my phone from the MobileMe cloud. Problem is that it doesn’t push down my subscribed calendars. There have been many work-arounds people have suggested, but none of them are clean , easy, and free as of yet. Apple does sync these calendars between computers (if you have two Macs for instance), but doesn’t push the events to prevent duplicating.

Why can’t Apple treat the iPhone/iPod Touch like another Mac and sync the subscribed calendars but not the events? Both of these devices have the ability to connect to the internet and retrieve the feed data so MobileMe doesn’t need to push the data down. This avoids the duplication issue and still allows us to have our subscribed calendars. At this point my trial period expires on October 9th, and while I enjoy all the features it does have, I am finding it doesn’t replace my web hosting package (I did think I could do more with iWeb) and without my calendars it doesn’t seem worth the cost.

Which brings me to another issue I only thought of today. Once I signed up for MobileMe all my music and applications I bought through the iTunes store were being logged under my MobileMe user name and not my Apple ID that I had previously established. If I let my MobileMe account expire, will I still be able to use my applications and get my application updates or will Apple no longer recognize the user name? If the application is free it doesn’t matter, its the ones I paid for that I want to make sure work.

UPDATE:

After writing this post, I began digging around my RSS feeds and trying to catch up. I came across a reference to the service Calgoo being free now. Using Calgoo and Google’s Outlook sync I was able to achieve my holy grail of sync. Technically I don’t need the Google product, but I was already using it, so there was no need to change. Google also supports CalDav now, but requires that you be on iCal 3.x which is only available to Leopard owners (I am still running Tiger) and has several known issues.
Calgoo offers a desktop application that creates connectors between calendar services. It works with Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, 30 Boxes and Sunbird. I set up the application on my Mac at home and connected a new calendar called Work to the feed from Gcal for my synced work calendar. So on a regular basis (every hour) the Google sync grabs my Outlook calendar and puts it on Gcal. Then (also on an hourly basis) Calgoo grabs the feed from Gcal and puts it on my iCal at home. When MobileMe sync runs it updates the web calendar and my iPhone. The caveat is that my Mac has to be running at home in order for me to use Calgoo.
While this solution does work for me, it would still be simpler for Apple to allow the iPhone to fetch calendar feeds like iCal does. And It still hasn’t convinced me to pay for MobileMe yet.

After about three hours I tried plugging it into the charge. No fire erupted (I wasn’t sure if it would or not) and the little LED indicating it was charging came on, then went out. I left it on overnight. The next morning I took the headset of the charger and tried to turn it on…. Success! It turned on and connected to my phone with no problems. Ten minutes later it let me know they battery was dead and promptly turned off.

Last night I put it on the charger again, this time the LED stayed on until an hour later which is the standard time it takes to charge. Trying the headset this morning it not only turned on, but stayed on, and made calls that sounded fine. Either I got extremely lucky or LG build quality devices. Whichever it is I don’t recommend washing your Bluetooth headset with your laundry.

Over the course of the five years, I have had a total of 5 defective phones. The first was not diagnosed as being defective until 6 months after the warranty was up, but 5 months before I was eligible for an upgrade even though I brought it into AT&T 6 times complaining. Eventually I signed a new contract and upgraded the phone, but that upgrade was replaced 4 times in 4 months. AT&T tried to charge me for the phone twice. Each time I had to replace it I spent an hour on the phone being bounced around to 3 or 4 customer service agents to get the transaction completed.

When the original iPhone price was cut, I decided to buy one and change my plan again because I knew if there was a hardware issue I would be working with Apple and not AT&T. Approximately two months ago I changed my plan again to a family plan and gave my kids a phone. Since this was before the change in pricing and plans with the 3G iPhone, the whole process was a little bit of an ordeal. AT&T at the time couldn’t have the iPhone be a primary phone on a family plan. So I set my kids phone up as the primary, but I couldn’t set it up as a family plan with the iPhone yet. I had to first assign it a standalone plan (450 Anytime minutes, my previous plan) and then call in and have them change the plan to a family plan and add the iPhone. Well this is where things fell apart. Due to all the prorating going on I didn’t notice that they screwed up the first month’s bill. I certainly did when I went to pay my June bill though.

AT&T ended up signing my kids’ phone up for the 450 Nationwide Anytime minute plan, the iPhone for the Family Plan, iPhone data package, Extra line, and the Smart Manager so I can limit the text messages and downloads my kids use. Yesterday I called to correct this error and spoke to someone in billing, which for some reason was the wrong department so she transfered me to sales. I did have to wait for a total of 10 minutes to get into the problem. Once I explained my problem to the rep, she put me on hold again to investigate. When she came back on the line she told me that I did indeed overpay and she had issued credits to my account and set up an alert because another credit would be needed in the next billing cycle. Looking on the website to pay my account at that moment I saw the new balance immediately reflected. Before this incident I would have to repeatedly argue my case to get resolution which was usually a compromise. When I did get a result I was satisfied with I was always told it wouldn’t show up on the website until my next billing cycle. Clearly things are changing. I am not saying AT&T is the best cell phone provider, but they are hearing people complain and it appears they are taking action.