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.

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.

1. It only syncs Outlook events I schedule, so all the meetings that people set up that I need to attend I still have to manually sync.
2. It only syncs the primary Google calendar.

Well it looks like issue number one no longer exists. I am not really clear if this an update or just a case of poor documentation, but looking around today I found out how to make this work. Item number two on this page explains it in detail but the short is this:

1. You must first associate your Outlook email address (this is my corporate address) with your Google account.
2. When setting up the syncing program on your Windows machine, enter this address as the one to sync AND NOT your Google Gmail address as you would think.
3. Run sync. This will add all of your Outlook appointments that you either organized or are a guest on to your Google Calendar. It will also pull down all your appointments on your Google Calendar primary calendar and place them in your Outlook calendar.

While still lacking in the ability to sync multiple calendars from Google to Outlook or to add to Google those meetings set up on a distribution group, this is much closer to the holy grail and accomplishes what I was trying to do. I now have the ability to automatically sync my work calendar (in Outlook) to Google which I then use the iCal subscription URL to import to my Mac’s calendar and sync to my iPhone. Now I have my complete calendar (with a few minor exceptions) on my phone (my true goal) and accessible via the web if I don’t have my phone (Google Calendar).

This tool should allow me to no longer manually sync work to Google, but it has two major drawbacks:

1. It only syncs Outlook events I schedule, so all the meetings that people set up that I need to attend I still have to manually sync.
2. It only syncs the primary Google calendar. I have 11 calendars I use. One for home events, like kids activities. One each for bills, birthdays, weekly menus, paydays (I can separate income from expense this way), work (now), work sync, and several public calendars including Christian, Jewish and US holidays. While I wouldn’t mind if the public calendars don’t get synced, I should at least be able to sync calendars I make like my Home one.

I am rather disappointed with this first release as it really doesn’t achieve much in the way of getting things done and staying organized. I still don’t know how the Google accepting other calendar invitations piece works which of course could alleviate this whole mess as well.

Adding email addresses helps Google associate useful information with your Google Account. For example, Google Calendar can show invitations sent to any of your addresses.

I thought this was genius. I am constantly having syncing issues with my calendars. I bought the iPhone in September because I thought it would be the solution, however the solution is to export my work calendar (from Outlook) and import it to Google Calendars which I have a feed imported into my Mac iCal. The loop hole here is that I don’t like exporting my work calendar daily.

This new feature could answer that. I associated my work email address with my Google account but when people sent me meeting invites, nothing happened. So I tried my Yahoo! email address and sent an invite to myself. Still nothing happened.

Has anybody gotten this to work yet? Is the invites thing something “coming soon”?