Results tagged “iphone”

Apple's big iPad announcement last week has been sinking in for the past few days, and I've concluded that the iPad sucks. I could live without multitasking if push notifications work (with only one exception). The lack of a camera and the silly USB and SD card adapters were dumb design choices, but the iTunes syncing bothers me the most. iTunes is slow, bloated, and horrible.

And the iTunes syncing proves to me that Apple really doesn't understand what makes Amazon's Kindle so great. Yes, the eInk screen is awesome for reading in direct sunlight (except in temperatures below 41° F), and yes, the free wireless 3G service is a nice perk. But there's one reason why the Kindle is a perfect gift for anyone in the family:

Kindle owners never need to connect their device to a computer.

Until this is true of the iPad too, I don't see it mimicking the success of the Kindle.

Apple unleashed the 3.0 software update upon iPhones and iPod Touches everywhere yesterday. I've been enjoying all the new goodies, particularly search, copy and paste, and landscape keyboards, which you can read about elsewhere.

This iPod feature caught me by surprise! Apple finally revamped the podcast playback controls, eliminating the repeat, genius, and shuffle buttons that made little sense for audio podcasts. The new left button e-mails an iTunes link to the podcast. The center button leaps backwards thirty seconds, an operation I've frequently needed with audio content. The right button doubles or halves the playback speed, a feature I've quickly come to love. The position slider has been revamped too: while seeking to a new position, I can slide my finger down the screen to reduce the speed of movement. This makes finding a particular spot in a long podcast tremendously easy!

Expect my next several posts to be about the iPhone. My favorite IM client has yet to be updated for push events and my new iPhone 3G S is sitting in a box in Kentucky. I'm quite excited to finally be retiring my well-worn nerd taxed model.