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.

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.

I rebooted the phone, but there was no change. I restored the phone, but there was no change. I couldn’t imagine being without a phone for any period of time, so I scrambled to see if I could get into the genius bar that afternoon. It was 3:30 on Sunday afternoon, the store closed at 6:00. I was lucky enough to be able and get an appointment and grabbed the kids (who had to skip swimming because of this) and scrambled to the store.

It turns out that dust had gotten into the headphone jack (probably when I went to the gym that morning and used my headphones). This caused a short circuit that fooled the phone into thinking headphones were still plugged in. The great people at the genius bar (they have been very helpful to me on many occasions) took my iPhone  in back and used a special machine to remove the dust putting my phone back in action. Since my phone was fixed I began to walk away, but then I turned around to ask if there was any technique to clean it myself so that next time it happened (I am confident it won’t be the last) I didn’t need to scramble up to the Apple Store to get it cleaned. However, Apple doesn’t recommend doing this on your own. The genius that helped me did recommend looking online for a plug to cover the ports when not in use.

Most cell phones have a rubber or silicone protector to go over their ports, but the iPhone doesn’t come with them. I looked online at over 40 pages of results for various Google inquiries and found no plug of any kind for the headphone jack. There are companies that make them for the dock connector, but not the headphone jack. I found several articles that homebrew solutions using erasers and other paraphernalia, but they seem like they will just cause more problems over time. Has anyone found these plugs anywhere?

UPDATE:

It looks like Apple is struggling with keeping their servers up. I was able to get to the SDK page a little while ago, but a lot of the links were broken and I didn’t try downloading it (I am away from my Mac at the moment). Sporadic attempts to get through to the proper page may occur.

You also need to have an Intel Mac in order to proceed, so if you are like me and waiting to buy a new Mac, now is the time.

It looks like Apple took the store down this morning and when they brought it back up they increased the memory options on both the iPhone and iPod Touch. The iPhone is now available in a 16GB version for $499 and the Touch comes in a 32GB also for $499.

It doesn’t appear any other items were updated, so those waiting for a multi-touch MacBook Pro or even a speed bump will have to wait a little longer.

If you haven’t experienced either of these devices, I suggest you run out to your local Apple store and spend some time with them. I truly fell in love with my iPhone and wonder how I got by without it. Warning: if you happen to be a bit of an internet junkie and don’t already have a smartphone, these two devices are not conducive to your social interactions.

I started my investigation into the smartphone market. The big that I found is that I had to buy additional software to get one to work cleanly with my Mac, and even then there was much to be desired. I was convinced that maybe the Blackberry Pearl was for me. It was compact, the syncing was pretty decent to Macs and there were some really good deals going around.

I wasn’t ready to bite the bullet yet. In August my iPod started really acting up and skipping tracks when they were halfway through. I took it in to the local Apple store. I waited for my appointment for 20 minutes during which time I played with the iPhone more extensively than I previously had. I found overall the interface was very nice to work with, however the keyboard was a little funky. My feelings towards the device shifted from pure hatred to mere dislike.

So I stepped up to the Genius Bar when my turn came around and the techs there diagnosed a hard drive problem with my iPod and replaced it right on the spot. I was shocked. I thought for sure I would have to mail my iPod in (and would be lucky if they did it for me) and be without the thing for a week at least. Then the tech said something that made me go from disliking the iPhone to considering it.  he informed me that when the iPhones act up and need replacing they swap them out right on the spot just like they did with my iPod. I have been back a couple times since and have seen it with my very own eyes.

Well this is customer service! Realizing that if I bought an iPhone I would not be dealing with AT&T for tech support, but rather Apple, I reexamined the iPhone.  i started piecing together what I needed the phone to do, what I felt was a fair price for data access, and what the cost of the handset was going to be.

turns out I wasn’t going to be eligible for any handset discounts form AT&T. This moved the price of all smart phones to $300 minimum. The Blackberries started at $400.  The data plans for the Palm, RIM and Windows smartphones started at $40 and were not unlimited. Apple just knocked the price on the iPhone down. I could find the 4GB for $300 now. And the data package was just $20 more than what I was currently paying for voice.

My biggest problem is I wasn’t going to be able to sync my iPhone (without losing some data) with both my work PC and home Mac. However Google came to the rescue. I was able to export my calendar to Google on a daily basis and use Google’s subscription to iCal format to sync Google and my Mac, which of course allowed me to get my entire schedule on my iPhone.

With just about 6 weeks under my belt with the device, I wonder how I ever got along without it. I build all my to do lists, grocery lists, shopping list, weekly menus and other notes on it. I can find out movie listings in a couple clicks if on the road. I am constantly up on the news and mail. I have saved a few car rides that kids get bored on by playing a movie. In short, it is a huge benefit. My job as a User Interface Designer became more interesting when I realized how badly normal websites are on small screens.

The down side: I could really use the ability to extend it without hacking. I look forward to the SDK in February.  I should have gone for the 8GB as i quickly fill up the hard drive with just music. The camera could use a zoom. I am an internet junkie now that it is on my hip. It needs Flash.

Is it right for everyone? No. Am I happy with my choice? You bet. Like anthing out there, if you are considering it, make a list of pros and cons and see who wins.