Okay, so back in November, I scooped up Mrs. Ubermick an iPhone for her birthday, and after playing with it for a while, wasn’t as big a fan as I hoped. But them crazy folks over at Apple seemed to have listened to me. (That’s what I’m telling myself.)

The recent Macworld Expo saw Steve Jobs annouce that Google Maps now had a triangulation feature included. Not exactly GPS, but as close as you can get on the iPhone, without Apple having to release new hardware. Now, that was nice, but another feature that flew completely under the radar was the release of iTunes 7.6 to accomodate Apple’s new movie rental service. What nobody announced about this update, is it now gives iPhone users the ability to manually manage their iTunes and movie libraries!

Gadzooks!

Egad!

So to view over my hatin’ on the iPhone post from November, most of them have been resolved (including the custom ringtones issue – see here). Still no 3G or true GPS, and you still can’t record video, but the little gizmo just got a WHOLE lot more attractive to me. (Especially with $150 in Apple gift cards sitting next to me leftover from Christmas!)

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Now playing: Eddie Vedder – Tuolumne
via FoxyTunes

Christ, this blog has become a way of letting people know that there’s nothing going on. And yet another week of that here in glorious San Rrrrrrrafael. Head down and working, that’s about it. No new developments on the housing front, which we sort of expected coming up to Chrimbo, and I’m off to DC tonight for a week.

I did come close to lobbing my Mac through a window this past week tho… I made the upgrade to Leopard, but discovered that Quark 6.52 doesn’t like it. So had to downgrade back which has caused all sorts of problems. Which I eventually fixed, but a dumbass moment from me saw me bollix it completely (I changed the ownership of the hard drive from system to me, but stupidly clicked the “apply to all contents”) so now a format and reinstall of everything awaits me when I come back. Although I did have work order the Quark 7 upgrade, so first I’ll try hopping back to Leopard and doing that instead.

Anyways, that’s the current ska – we’ve been so busy with work, we haven’t even gotten pressies or cards in the post to Ireland and Scotland, which is shameful on our part – I’ll be expressing everything out when I get to DC in the morning…

Okay, Mrs. Ubermick’s birthday was last week, and her thoughtful hubby went out and scooped her up an iPhone to mark the monumental occasion. We have wireless at home, she can’t check her email at work, so I figured this’d be a useful thing for her to have. And yeah, I want one too, so it gave me a chance to check one out in it’s working environment. And I have to say, I’m not quite as impressed as I hoped I’d be.

A search of the ‘net turns up a lot of issues with the iPhone that I… well, have issues with. The first, the biggie, is the way the iPhone handles your music. Given that it’s got 8gb of storage, I had made the assumption that this would replace one’s iPod, and as such, have the same functionality. Not the case. With my beloved U2 pod, I can drop songs in and out of it, make playlists, rearrange or rename songs on there, all with supreme ease. The iPhone, alas, requires syncing. For EVERYTHING. No creating playlists on the go, no editing MP3 info, no more drag and drop. The only way to handle the music on your iPhone is to set up a dedicated playlist in iTunes, drop your songs into that playlist, and then set up your iPhone to sync only to that playlist. Otherwise it just starts pulling songs in order from your library until it’s full. Which sucks. Wanna delete (or add) one single song to your iPhone? You gotta do it from your home computer (yeah, because it’s all sync-based, you can only use one computer!) and resync EVERYTHING. Talk about a pain in the arse.

Second annoyance. You can’t manually drag and drop MP3’s to it. Okay, this is the same annoyance as number one, but it’s such a BIG annoyance, I thought I’d mention it twice.

Okay, real second annoyance. I have a set of Shure headphones (which I have now broken, so it’s moot point) which would need an adapter to work with the iPhone. Cause, y’see, the audio connection is slightly different, and causes the iPhone to act up when a call comes in while listening to music if you have standard headphones attached.

Third annoyance. Coming back from the cabin yesterday, I tried to check my email on it via it’s EDGE connectivity. Granted I was going through the central valley, but there were four bars on there, and it was SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW.

Forth annoyance. Ringtones. This is theoretically minor, at least for me. Personally I can’t stand weird ringtones, and stick with the bog standard double-beep ring on my Motorola SLVR. But I do have a couple of custom ones I made using sounds from Anchorman and 40 Year Old Virgin… which you can’t use with an iPhone. Ringtones can only – ONLY – be made from MP3s purchased from Apple’s iTunes store. Even more annoying is that only certain MP3s are categorized as “ringtone eligible”. So all the music I’ve downloaded from there, including the entire U2 catalog I paid $150 for, can’t be used as ringtones. There is apparantly a workaround somewhere, but for Apple to do this is frankly… well, it’s more like something Microsoft would do.

Fifth annoyance. Even though the iPhone has the same dock connector at the bottom as the iPod does, they’re wired differently. Which means the audio interface you use in the car? The iTrip you use on your iPod? None of them will work with the iPhone.

Sixth annoyance. Can’t record video. The iPhone has a camera – and you can send video mail. But you can’t use it as a video camera to shoot short bursts of digital media the way you can with most cellphones. WTF Apple!?!

So there ya go. A half dozen extremely annoying points with the gadget that’s being heralded as the greatest invention of 2007. There are other ones – like the fact that scrolling through long lists can be REALLY tedious – but most of these can be regarded as not that big a deal, apart from the first one. And these are all issues that Apple could conceivably address via patches. But given that at the moment, the iPhone wouldn’t replace my iPod yet, given it’s lack of management or car capabilities, my desire to get one has dropped off considerably. Maybe in the New Year, after a few more patches, and perhaps a version with more storage pops out, but until then, since all I’d use it for is phone calls, I don’t really see the need.

Unless someone buys me one for my birthday. That’s a different story, hahaha…

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Now playing: Michael Franti & Spearhead – Everyone Deserves Music
via FoxyTunes