The iPhone should not enable mail accounts that were not enabled in mail.app

From Matt: 1. Insert iPhone into Dock 1. iTunes comes up 1. Click on iPhone in the list 1. Click the Info tab 1. Under Calendars… at the bottom, Change “new events created on this iPhone into the calendar:” to something other than “Home” 1. Note that the popup menu never changes from Home

I changed the contact list to short and display First Name, Last Name. The sort is totally messed up now. Under “L” I have H R (first last initials), then I L S, then D I B, I S, I S, I & O, etc. Makes no sense for being in the “L” grouping. So I set it back to Last, First sort order, then back to First, Last sort order, and now it is displaying properly. Weird.

When setting the time zone, I entered Portland and iPhone only offered Portland, USA. There is a Portland, Maine so I didn’t know which one iPhone had suggested. Accepting Portland showed it is indeed Portland, Oregon. Maine may take a quibble with this.

Update: I have tried this five times now and its worked all five times since this initial issue. I think it was happenstance and that due to a weak signal the call dropped at the same time.

I now consider this a non-issue.

I was on a call and realized bluetooth was off. So I enabled it via General settings, but the panel for the call did not change from “Speakerphone” to “audio sources.” I pressed the button on my Jabra JX-10 and the sound transferred and then the call hung up.

Twice now I have been using my Jabra JX-10 while on a call and surfing the web via WiFi on my Airport Extreme N router to watch the wifi totally drop on the iPhone, come back and have errors loading web pages. I then switched to the headphones, turned off bluetooth during the call and I was able to surf for 50 minutes with no drop outs.

(Original post to bug above) While on a conference call and using my Jabra headset, the WiFi connection to my Apple Airport N router kept dropping out. While trying to use Google maps, I’d continually get “Cannot connect to Edge” because I was on a call and WiFi had dropped. So I went to the wifi screen and could see three routers (two are mine) and watch them them go away and come back about every 20 seconds. I am not sure if this is because I had a laptop, Jabra, Express, Wii in the living room and two routers downstairs (one for the OLPC which does WEP only) or what, but it was sure annoying!

Yes indeed, the iPhone suffers from Bluetooth and WiFi signal overlap. While 5 feet from my Apple Router, and on Bluetooth, using both a Jabra and Jawbone, the wifi would consistently drop out, reset or never reset. As soon as I turned off the headset, the wifi and 5 other networks showed up (with some coercing from WiFi off/on button). This is now the most serious flaw of the phone as far as I am concerned.

Update: Barry points out that it seems that EDGE crashed. Thanks barry!

On the way home with my third Jawbone I was stopped at a light in my neighborhood, which according to AT&T is “marginal” (Damnit). I decide to check mail and it says “Could not activate EDGE.”

Well hmm. I have 5 bars. Cingular raised those bars. I have a “E” icon for Edge. But no Edge.

Then Mail complains that I can’t reach my mail server. Well yeah ok. I then turn on airplane mode and turn it off, to reset the radios. Same deal. I power the phone off and back on, same deal. Every light on the way home, could not activate EDGE.

I did learn that the tasty Nonna Emila’s Italian Restaurant has a wifi network named “Nonnas,” however.

Now that I am home I disabled WiFi and EDGE connected fine. Go figure.

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.

Update:

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.

Apple iPhone FAQ

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 Bandwidth Place I got the following speeds:

WiFi - 1.9mbps
Edge - 91kbps

Ouch

From the Apple Phone Show:

• Be careful of leaving your phone in your car - it is rated to 95f only!

• Do not use the included cloth while the phone is on. Even the manual says so. Static could harm the phone.

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.

Jawbone. Rocks. Check it out

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.

iPhone: $599

Sunday trip to Apple Store to buy accessories: $170.

Incase case (Yes that is my 56″ TV reflected in the iPhone over the MacBook Pro):

Jawbone Bluetooth Headset:

Full Album Here

The list of bugs in this blog entry has been replaced by a iPhone bugs category

Someone is going to write a piece like this so I thought who better than an Apple fanboi? Why wait for an industry pundit who is paid to write hate pieces when you can get it here first!

The iPhone sucks! Here is why:

• They only sold like a bazillion phones. There are still phones in stores! Clearly Apple overestimated how popular the phone would be.

• Some people are having activation issues. Of course when you launch the most sought after piece of technology ever and you do it needing to work with a cellular provider (We all know cell companies are perfect after all), that if things are not 100% smooth, you have failed. Shame on you AT&T and Apple for those hundred, maybe one thousand out of five-hundred thousand people having issues.

• Edge is slow! Its so horribly slow! OH MY GOD its so slow! Edge is so slow that KGW in Portland reported it as slower than dial up. Wow! That is slow! I mean it’s so slow that I was only able to show two you tube movies from my car to the McDonald’s workers at the window. That is damn near useless!

Let’s see, what else sucks. Oh yeah.

• There are issues, like the speaker volume, some web browsing crashes, etc. Clearly this phone was not tested.

• AT&T Plans are confusing. This has never happened before and clearly Apple dropped the ball.

I could go on and on, but I’ve got to get back to enjoying my iPhone. After all, it sucks.

Very nice indeed, I’m going to sleep better knowing how much abuse they put the phone through and it came out ok.

Watch

I am going to make these posts shorter and more often just so its easier for others to track updates.

Pros

• You get a nice little “E” or WiFi icon in the status bar for Edge or WiFi. Really easy to tell which network you are currently on.

• Setting per contact photos and ring tones is super easy. Now where is that iTunes update that lets us use our own ring tones

Tips

• To get the text editing loupe, You must tap and hold between letters. You cannot tap in the whitespace at the end of a field and drag back into the text.

Bugs

• I changed the contact list to short and display First Name, Last Name. The sort is totally messed up now. Under “L” I have H R (first last initials), then I L S, then D I B, I S, I S, I & O, etc. Makes no sense for being in the “L” grouping. So I set it back to Last, First sort order, then back to First, Last sort order, and now it is displaying properly. Weird.

• When setting the time zone, I entered Portland and iPhone only offered Portland, USA. There is a Portland, Maine so I didn’t know which one iPhone had suggested. Accepting Portland showed it is indeed Portland, Oregon. Maine may take a quibble with this.

Missing Features

• Voice Dialing

• Voice Memos

• Video recording