On Sunday I bought a Jawbone bluetooth headset. The audio quality is fantastic. The construction, not so much.
The first one broke during the first day, or was broken when I got it, I was so busy all day hard to tell. The power connector snaps over the end of the Jawbone, which I love, but that end is also a button (for pairing and toggling noise cancellation). Apparently its very fragile and you need to remove the charging cap “like a piece of celery and snap it in two” according to Jawbone support. If you wiggle it side to side, it’ll pull on the tabs that hold the end button on and potentially break them.
Oh well, fine. Really the audio quality is fantastic.
So I drive back to Apple this am and exchange it. They are out of black units on the shelf, so the employee goes back and finds one for me. He processes the return and sends me on my way with my new unit.
I get home and open the box - Something didn’t seem right, but whatever, I have a conference call and gotta work. After a couple of hours the headset is charged (You have to charge it fully before using it, according to the manual) and I get a call. I press the talk button - Nothing. Sigh. I reset it. Nothing. Talk button is DOA.
I call Jawbone support and they of course say this is unheard of, but whatever, return it. Alright, fine. Really the noise cancellation is worth it[1]. I drive back to the Apple store after lunch and hand the guy the second dead unit and receipts. He says “Did you pay for this one?” “I think so? The other guy asked if I wanted to keep it on the same card, handed me two receipts and off I went.”
I guess I got the second unit for free! Bummer it was dead. Heh. Alright, I get a third unit from the shelf and he has me buy this one, then return it, then exchange it for itself, just to keep the books straight. Fine.
I get back to the car and decide to charge it using my Griffin car charger and it hits me. This thing, like the first one is covered in tape. On the sides, on the top. Hard to get off tape if you don’t have fingernails like me. But the second unit, the one the guy got from the back, was not sealed. So apparently I had been given a previously returned unit.
So Jawbone is not doing very well in the quality of hardware area. Hopefully this one works.
[1] I will do a recording via the Jawbone and Macintosh once its charged to demo the unit. If it works that is.
While demoing the iPhone at PMUG, some nice person pointed out that you can press and hold the fast forward/rewind buttons to scan audio and video! This trick apparently works on most iPods as well. Who knew? Not me! This is why I love PMUG and meeting other users face to face.
On an iPod, when you are listening to a 2 hour podcast, or anything for that matter, if you want to scrub[1] through the music, you click the Select button then turn the wheel. Turning the wheel moves the playhead forward or backwards and the longer you turn the wheel, the amount of time the playhead skips accelerates.
On the iPhone’s iPod user interface, the wheel is obviously gone and is replaced by a scrubber. When you tap the album art, a horizontal bar shows up which is about as wide as, say 80% of the width of the iPhone in portrait mode, with a little playhead that you tap to grab and then slide back and forth.
This sounds fine in practice, but the problem is that you have a fixed number of pixels for the scrubber. Thus the longer (in time) the piece of audio you are listening to, the more time each pixel on the scrubber represents.
If the audio you are listening to is a 3 minute song, for example, there is no issue. You can nicely scrub back and forth through the song to find the bit of the song you want to hear.
However, if the audio you are listening to is an hour or two hour long podcast or audio book, then sliding the scrubber’s play head jumps you in minutes, not seconds through the audio. This can make it very hard to find the start of a topic on a radio show, for example. You may even skip over an entire interview with someone you are interested in. For example, on this hour long Mac Break Tech show, tapping the scrubber at 38 minutes and barely, carefully moving my finger to the right jumps the playhead to 39 minutes, 10 seconds! Some shows or books are 2 hours or even 3 hours, so that same gesture would jump 2 minutes, 20 seconds or 3 mins, 30 seconds respectively.
Off the top of my head I am not sure what Apple should do about this, but they are smart folks, the should come up with something. Somehow the user interface should scale.
Maybe if you tapped and held, like you do with text, a loupe would show up with a finer resolution time scale that you could make finer audio adjustments with.
Perhaps you could tap a button and a virtual scroll wheel, in homage to the iPod could show up for scrolling through the audio?
What do you think?
[1] Scrub - to move forwards or backwards through time
Hmm, I am not sure what to think about this, its basically $10 a day if they live up to the 3 day business turn around, however its cheaper if you have the phone over a weekend. I suppose if you don’t need a phone, you say $29. If you do need one, its not bad I guess. Also, this means you get YOUR phone back with a new battery, etc. Nice.
Hello! I thought i would drop a note off to your company. I honestly don’t know which artists are under the UMG umbrella, but I do know that you need my business. I don’t need any artists content.
Should you decide to not renew your iTunes contract, I will simply not have your music to choose my purchases from. My new iPhone needs some new tunes, and I am really liking the new iTunes Plus from EMI. I am sure they will be happy to have my business.
Maybe I was too harsh on the speaker volume. Tonight, because I could not use my in-car audio adaptor, I listened to today’s TWiT via the speaker. I sat the phone on the passenger seat which stayed perfectly still thanks to the rubber case I bought for it.
I paused it while in the store, but on the way out, I started it again and put the phone, top down, into my wallet pocket. This meant the speaker was facing up. While driving around the show was perfectly audible. Once I reached home, I got out of the car, got all of the groceries, still listening just fine, put the food away and just sat down.
Interesting.
As a side note, I have decided to turn off auto sync because A) It’s a little slow and B) It pauses the iPod. Thus, when I plug the phone in to charge (my lap desk has plenty of room for the iPod and cable), it won’t stop the iPod. I’ll just sync when I need to. I do this manually anyway as if the phone/iPod is plugged in and synced, and then you listen to a podcast, the phone/iPod is not updated unless you manually sync.[1]
[1] For example, you have a playlist that lists unplayed podcasts. Listening to the podcast in iTunes will update the playlist, but not sync to the phone. It only syncs on connection. Thus, I have to manually sync sometimes anyway.
According to Apple Insider, Apple will be releasing new iPhone features, including an IM client, “very, very soon” and also along with Leopard in October.
I hope so, that would really push new customers to the platform. Seeing a phone actually updated and new features added easily could easily sway even more people into the iPhone family.
John, a friend who is a Mac geek and trucker, uses this blue parrot B150 and I must say it sounds pretty damned nice. If you spend a lot of time in a truck or noisy environment, this might be the one for you.
Jott rocks. I left this jott to myself via a bluetooth headset.
I used jott to say this from my jabra headset. Amazing how well it translates.
Jott To Self
Hey man, I am now headed to the AppleStore in Washington Square. I am driving in my car along Baseline highway and I am going to use this as a comparison to see how the job one[1] sound compared to the job row(?)[2] later today after the job owner starts[3].
Set reminders, assign, and manage this jott on Jott.com
