September 20, 2007 at 9:53 am
· Filed under Apple, iPod / iPhone
The iPhone comes with nice iPhone earphones, but they’re not ear-blocking like my old Shure E3cs or my Ultimate Ears. This makes hearing TV dialog of video on the subway significantly harder, and the UEs don’t fit the iPhone’s headset jack. Now, of course, there are many 3rd-party headsets with iPhone-style stereo + microphone connectors, but they were rare (nonexistent?) when I got the UEs for my birthday. Ouch!
I used the UEs with the Treo 650, using a $5 Radio Shack 2.5mm-3.5mm converter to connect the 3.5mm earphone plug with the Treo’s 2.5mm phone jack. Rather than un-wedge the UEs, plug in a standard single-ear-plus-microphone voice headset, make a phone call, then remove the phone headset in favor of the UEs, I just moved the connector from my iPod (for music) to my Treo with the adaptor (for video or voice). Now I wear one headset and it does everything without switching. This is good. It’s also nice that I can hit the mic bump on the cord to pause the music/video playback in favor of answering the cellphone, and when the call ends playback resumes.
It will be good when I replace these earphones with a louder/noise-blocking set, but in the meantime I’m appreciating the convenience, and using the mic bump to pause video playback whenever there’s loud subway noise or glare prevents me from seeing the screen.
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September 20, 2007 at 1:59 am
· Filed under Apple, bug, computers, iPod / iPhone
Tuesday, I got a new SIM from an AT&T store (they’re all over — the AT&T rep on the phone apparently just randomly picked Fulton Street, rather than one nearby). The card didn’t help.
Then I went to the Apple Store, where they rushed me through (in only half an hour!) before I had to get back to a staff meeting (reorganizing our group, so I did not want to be late). Tuesday afternoon I activated my new iPhone via iTunes. After a brief period where it was configured with a brand-new 646 number, AT&T correctly assigned my cellular number to the iPhone.
Tuesday night I plugged it into my home Mac and restored my configuration & data. This missed a bunch of minor things it should have restored, including alarms, audio settings, time zone, and “Ask to join networks”, but these are all easy to fix.
Hooray!
Since I got the iPhone back on the Internet, I have concluded that all the established “Web 2.0″ social networking sites have put their existing work on hold to focus on iPhone (and more generally mobile) interfaces. Vineel countered with Facebook, but that appears to be a different group of mostly unknown people & projects trying to break through, using Facebook as a venue. Different than the iPhone-friendly sites like:
It’s great that Facebook can automatically import ExtraPepperoni posts as news items, but why can’t it automatically pick up my status from Twitter (even with the Twitter app installed)? RFE filed @ Twitter.
I have been delighted to discover that after I moved all the web sites I regularly read from Safari on my Macs into NetNewsWire, and synched that with NewsGator, I can read news on a Mac or the iPhone, avoid reading stuff twice, and get more fresher content than Plucker. Plucker was much faster because all the content was already on the Treo, and it worked on the subway, but the Plucker project is not too active right now. Newsfeeds without full content are now quite annoying — I may look for full-content feeds with similar coverage (specifically a Register replacement — I really like their sense of what to write about, but The Register has many serious problems).
I really want Copy & Paste for responding to what I read on the iPhone!
I have been carrying a stylus daily since the Original MessagePad (Newton). I haven’t yet adjusted to doing without.
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