Apple Stuff

I love it. I may sounds like a fanboy, but I’m really not. I realise they have downsides, and features missing. But no other company does things quite like them. Ease of use, packaging, design. It’s all brilliant.

I just got an iPod Shuffle today. Comes in this cool little pack with it on display. I take it out of the pack, plug it into the included dock, plug it into my mac, and it just loads stuff on automagically. People complain about how they want to be able to drag and drop, or have more control. I’ve had players before that did that, and I just never ended up updating it, because it took too long to figure out what was already on there, and I couldn’t just drag my entire collection across. iTunes, for all its shortcomings, just does it for me. There were some things I wish it would do, like proper ID3 tag editing, but its work-around-able.

I might try some of the other ipod syncing solutions, just to see how they are. Foobar2000 and Mediamonkey seem to, along with Winamp. Might give Amarok a try too, when I get around to installing Ubuntu again.

But…back to Apple. I’m also getting an iPhone this week. I know it has its problems, but it seems one of the best phones on the market still. There are better specced phones (Like the N95) but they will not come close to the iPhone GUI in terms of usability and coherence between features (something which I always talk about). I looked at getting a HTC Touch Diamond, but I really cannot be bothered with Windows Mobile anymore. I’ve had it on my last two phones, and it’s awful. Unresponsive, features missing (I had to install a program to send files via Bluetooth) and everything just seemed…tacked on. It’s like Windows on PCs, actually.

For example: the calendar app and todo list seem to be entirely seperate. You can’t add tasks to one from the other. Things like birthdays randomly show up twice in the calendar. It doesn’t seem to sync properly with other calendars (although, admittedly, I haven’t really dug into that). The software to sync is awful (although in Vista it is marginally better). It just feels like an unfinished, beta product. But it’s been out for years. Even Android looks years ahead of it, and that’s not even out yet!

I was considering waiting until an Android phone was released in the UK, but after seeing the first phone, I decided against it. It looks massive and a bit ugly. Hopefully they’ll come up with some better phones soon though, because Android looks to be the future.

I’m sure I was going to add something else to this, but that’s it for now. Will update when I get the phone.