For now I’ve added a Live Vid screen in the 4.30 page.  I’ll try to use this for any Vincent related activities that might be worth sending out live instead of recording / editing up.

Till next time…

So far I have an even 50 apps on the phone and have probably downloaded twice that.  I look at the apps in 3 categories, Everyday Use, Rarely Used (but it’ll be cool as hell when I get the opportunity) and Crap.  For now, we’ll focus on the Everyday Use apps.

Twitterific – I’ve downloaded about 10 twitter apps to do some comparing and for awhile I had this one and Twitterfon both on the phone.  Finally Twitterific won.  I wish I had a better reason but it really came down to the icon (lame I know).  If you use Twitter you’ll know 75% of what’s in this app.  The surprises came with integrated TwitPic and TwitVid to embed pics and vids directly into twitter posts without leaving the app, the ability to use the GPS to put your location right into the post and the Nearby feed that shows people’s posts that are within 5 miles of me.

One of the cooler parts of the app is that I can tap a post and pull up details about the author or the ability to retweet where it’ll paste their post into a new one.  It also gives the option to replace the screen names with the people’s real name which is a nice addition.

Pandora & Last.fm – These two are similar enough to group together but they are two separate apps (if that needed to be said).  I’ve used both of these apps to death and they give the Zune a nice break during the work day.  Both apps allow you to search for a song, artist or genre and then stream accordingly.  Songs that you want to save for later can be tagged or bought immediately from iTunes (which is no longer a bad option since Apple finally gave up the DRM).

The only difference I’ve found is that Last.fm defaults to lower quality sound unless you’re on wifi but you can turn this option off and force it to give up the higher quality sound over 3G.

Ghostly Discovery – This app is similar to the other radio apps.  The two big differences are that this app focuses on electronic music and it allows more customization to select your mood as well as organic / electronic or slow / fast songs.

That’s it for now.  There are more that get heavy use but I don’t think you need me to explain what AccuWeather or WordPress do.  Next time I’ll focus on the apps that rarely get used but are drop-droppers when they are.

The next beef with iTunes is the syncing.

I’ve been using a Zune for the past few years so that’s what I’m comparing the syncing to.  The Zune software monitors folders that you specify.  Since most music / videos download into subfolders in the My Music or My Videos folders (the subfolders represents the store you bought the content from) you can simply tell Zune to monitor the My Music / Video / Pictures folders and it’ll catch everything regardless if you buy it from iTunes, Zune, Amazon, etc.  Zune sees new content immediately, loads into the Zune software and (assuming the hardware is plugged in) syncs it to the player.  The entire process to buy a song and get it onto the player takes about 10 seconds, depending on download speed and 1 click.  Songs you buy on the Zune player itself are also transferred back to the PC when synced.

That’s Zune… which has existed for only a few years and has single digit market share.

The iPhone / iPod syncing process is another aspect of iTunes that is painfully outdated.  When you buy content its downloaded to the computer.  You then need to tell iTunes to sync. Its annoying but where it breaks down completely is for podcasts and apps.

Apps cant run on the computer so they need to be on the phone to test them which means you need to sync every time you download a new app.  If you don’t like the app, you can delete it directly from the phones interface but that doesn’t remove it from iTunes even by syncing.  So if you frequently clean out apps on the iPhone itself… you’ll be left with a ton of zombie apps in iTunes that aren’t being used for anything.

Podcasts are another nightmare due to the size of the files (specifically video podcasts).  If you’re unable to continually sync, as iTunes stays open and refreshes podcasts they begin to queue up and can create a lot of data to sync at once. Especially if you’re opening iTunes fresh and it hasn’t been able to keep the podcasts updated it will download all of the updates, which takes time and when they’re downloaded you’ll need to manually sync, which takes more time.  Granted an auto-sync feature wont reduce download time but if the podcasts are moved to the iPod / iPhone immediately after download that cuts the process time significantly.

To Summarize

The iPhone is damn near perfect and the apps are the icing (or are THEY the cake and the iPhone is the icing… hmmm). I don’t think the phone itself revolutionized smartphones as Apple simply pulled together existing ideas, polished them up and made them sexy and unless you live in a cave you know that Apples Marketing Machine is one of the best in the industry (see: Reality Distortion Field or iSheep).

iTunes however hasn’t kept up. Apple simply doesn’t put the emphasis on iTunes the way it does on the hardware that works with it and as the hardware advances the gap only grows bigger and much more painful.

Rumors have been circulating lately that Apple requested developers to begin submitting keywords for their apps and that iTunes 9 will have the App Store completely overhauled and I’m definitely hoping for it. Until then there are plenty of websites that allow browsing.

The Bad

There’s really little bad to be said about the phone itself.  I wish Apple would mandate that apps using the keyboard would give a landscape option but right now that’s a feature a lot of apps hold out on unless you buy the upgraded app.  In the few days Ive used the phone that’s really the only negative I have about the actual hardware and once past the learning curve of the keyboard typing becomes much easier.

The gaping hole in this entire experience is iTunes.  Giant, painful, gaping, hole.  Flat out, iTunes is broken and the iPhone shines a spot light on its flaws.  Where to start…

Once in iTunes it becomes obvious that the software is bloated and has grown well beyond its intended purpose.  Apple also states openly that theyre only interested in iTunes because it helps sell iPods / iPhones which is where they really make money.  It shows.

We’ll start with the App Store.  They claim to have thousands of apps however they’re categorized into approx 15 categories.  Once you click the category you can select Free or Paid For to separate the apps further.  Beyond that… you only have access to the Top 100 Free and Top 100 Paid For apps.  You can flip through pages of apps at random but there is no way to easily search for others. If you don’t know the app specifically by name you cant find it.  Not only is this painfully annoying but you can start to deduct how this affects the entire eco-system of the store.  Highly developed apps that might cost $10+ will have serious difficulty gaining the mass-appeal needed to be in the Top 100.  So whether Apple intended to or not, the App Store puts a significant preference on Free / $.99 apps that are basically junk. Count how many Lighter / Flashlight apps are in the Top 100 and you’ll see what I mean.

You can search for apps but the search engine doesn’t use keywords so results are only based upon the name of the app.  I’m sure it creates a gold-rush for developers to secure specific words because if you have an app used to locate WiFi hotspots but cant get WiFi into the name, you’re screwed.

In my opinion, this is inexcusable.  Any online retailer has more SKU’s than what they can easily display on one page yet they’re able to be found through keywords, Browse All and a near infinite amount of ways to sort through the content (price, release dates, etc.).  Why Apple seems so far behind in this baffles me.

The hardware is awesome. Its sleek and simple to use.  The original iPhone had a metal back which they did away with on the 3G and the 3Gs continues this trend with a full plastic case (to support better cell reception).  There are 5 buttons on the outside of the phone but really only 1 of them will be used regularly.  On the top right is a lock / power button, top left is a switch for silent / ring and below that are the volume + / – buttons.  On the bottom on the face of the phone is the home button which is the only one needed during navigation.

The rest of the phones interface is all apps.  The home screen contains the default apps and the other screens (accessed by swiping left and right) contain apps that are user-added.  There are 4 primary apps on the bottom that go with you as you swipe left and right (they default to Phone, Email, Safari and iPod but can be changed).  The apps open quickly, respond really well and despite reviews I haven’t had any crash or hang up yet.

The GPS and compass work really well and integrate into mapping apps almost seamlessly.  The only hang-up I have with the GPS is that any app that grabs your location from the GPS asks your permission first.  This is done for legal reasons so you cant fault Apple for it but I wish there was a Yes To All option instead of being asked each time you open an app that wants your location.

The catalog of apps is huge and popular apps have multiple versions and variations (how many Twitter apps exist???) which is a big plus.  It allows you to take them for a test drive and decide which features are really important.  There are also a lot of quality free apps, some of which are developed by popular retail chains.

Some of the better apps fully utilize the hardware as well.  For example the Barnes and Noble app allows you to take a photo with the phone of any Book, CD or DVD which the app then uses to determine the price and availability at your nearest store (based off of your GPS coordinates).  Another app allows you to take a pic of a video game, cd or dvd and it’ll tell you which stores nearby buy have it in stock and what the price is.  You can tap the store to call it or map directions to it.

ATT’s service has also been really strong.  Ive only lost 3G access once or twice for a few seconds and had 3G coverage during a road trip up near the Adirondacks.  The wifi definitely takes its toll on the battery but its easy to turn on / off and unless I’m streaming video I don’t notice a significant difference between wifi and 3G.  If you end up on the Edge network the performance definitely takes a hit but its infrequent enough to dismiss.

The hardware is definitely amazing and theres no question why these phones have sold so well.  Since the software is 75% apps, you really have no one to blame but yourself if you find the apps not being useful.

The Zune will still my man for music and podcasts though since my love for the iPhone wont out-weigh my complete hatred for iTunes. Im also hoping this app and the ability to post pics will help motivate more posts but lets not hold our breath.

This article from Ars Technica sums it up pretty well.

There is a pretty nice sized list of issues with these two companies but the ones that people probably care the most about are: Price fixing on SMS services, cell phone exclusivity deals, neutral networks and pro-rated early termination fees.

Most of the issues are self explanatory or covered in the article but what might be the more interesting and underlying issue here is if the internet and companies that provide access to it should become a utility in the way that water, electricity, public roads, etc are.

This definitely won’t be answered anytime soon but I think forcing the wireless companies to play nicely with customers could be a good first step in that direction, especially as cloud-computing gains steam, wireless data services improve and the internet moves beyond the computer. The argument then becomes if internet access is “essential” to everyday life and should be accessible to anyone despite their demographic.