iPhone calls with your favourite headphones

At last! No longer will you be tied to using the standard iPhone headphones to listen to your music while your fantastic headphones remain unused. While the iPhone 3G allows you to use regular headphones to listen to music - if you are interrupted by a call you have to pull them out to chat. Things are about to change now that Monster have brought out the iSoniTalk Microphone headphone adapter for iPhone.

There is already NewerTech Mic Extender Cable for iphone but to be honest it looked a bit naff. Now this new adapter from Monster is available I am not stuck with either paying for overpriced headsets designed for iPhone or poor audio quality standard iPhone headsets. Although there is a negative review for this item on Amazon UK, Monster have a good rep for quality Audio/video cables so will give them a try.
Technorati Tags: iPhone, headsets, Monster

BBC Music Beta Launches

The BBC have launched their new Music site. It is still in beta but already looks pretty polished. You can find out more about artists that have been played on any of the BBC radio stations. You can see how many times they’ve been played this week, which radio stations have played them and how many times since records began for that artist. You can even see which DJs plays them the most. Apart from a stat fest you can get links to other useful information such as the artists website and wikipedia page and find similar artists that you may like. Artist details also include a discography, photos and more. Much of the content is powered by Music Brainz which the BBC link to for further info or to add your own input.

The styling of the site matches well with the excellent 2008 look BBC homepage but doesn’t have any snazzy, technical wizardy just great content.

There are a lot of music sites out there - many with a lot more artist info and the ability to sample tracks or music videos. In fact the only content BBC is providing is the artists play stats on it’s Radio stations the rest is from wikipedia or music brainz but it is presented really nicely and the unique BBC stats can help you pick a radio station that suits your music tastes or it can help you discover similar artists you may like.

If you are keen to find more artists you may like and suggested artists on BCC music beta aren’t enough check out last.fm
Technorati Tags: BBC, Music, Beta, Feeds

iPhone: The Phone of Choice for Super Heros (and Villans)

This weekend I spoted the iPhone being used by various celebrity heroes and villains. Seems to be all the rage:

Lord Vader still can’t get used to working without a stylus

Supergirl calls up Superman and complains about him swapping costumes again:

Batgirl checks where she parked the Batmobile on google maps:

Captain America watches videos of Wonder Woman on YouTube:

Batman likes that it comes in black (matches his outfit) but still keeps his in his pocket:

For a more serious look at iPhone 3G check the reviews at testfreaks.co.uk

The App store spells death to Jailbreaking the iPhone?

I’d love to say that the quality of Apps on the Apple App store is so superior to those made for jailbroken iPhones that no one would bother jailbreaking anymore. However, this is definitely not the case. While a few of the apps are quite polished a lot are on par with their jailbreak equivalents and many jailbreak apps will never make it to the Apps store as they will upset network providers or apple - e.g. the app that allows you to create multiple iTunes library’s on the phone so you can sync with more than one computer, or VoIP apps that allow you to make calls without getting charged a penny by your mobile provider.

Add to this the fact that most of the apps on via AppTapp on a jailbroken phone are free and it makes jailbreaking your new iPhone 3G very tempting. Some have already managed it as seen in this video:

So what are we waiting for - lets unlock our phones and get lots of free App goodness. BUT WAIT Jailbreaking was tolerated before and some of the jailbreak app developers have been welcomed on to the App store… however, before Apple had no competing service to rival the jailbreak apps and now they do. They will not want users to be able to choose between a free jailbreak app when they are trying to sell a similar App for $9.99 in the App Store.

So what will Apple do. Expect a lot tighter policing of iPhones. Regular updates closing loopholes that hackers have used to jailbreak, and even bricking of phones that it detects have been tampered with. While not illegal it will be a lot riskier jailbreaking your phone this time round.

Email - it’s the new SMS

With Mobile me up and running and Push working my iPhone 1 (the 3G just arrived and is syncing) Email is the new SMS/Text message. If your a heavy SMS user and burn through your free texts each month then having your most frequently texted buddies on Mobile me could save you. I know find it just as quick and easy to email my @me.com friends as texting them - plus I can add photo attachments. It’s not quite picture messaging but it’s getting there.

Not too impressed by the me.com site though. Some featurs appear to be broken in Firefox 3 such as the ability to add things to the calendar. Other browsers are greated with a message advising them to use Safari or Firefox as Apple can’t be bothered to support them. But rather than saying they can’t be bothered to make the effort that us web developers have to to support IE and others they simply say the features are too flashy for your browser and blame IE for not supporting modern web standards properly. I wish I could do that - if enough sites did do that rather than spend hours or days working to make IE happy or removing features because they cannot be supported in IE6 then maybe those users might upgrade to Firefox and save me having to support IE.

Anyway - back to enjoying 16gb of iPhone 3G goodness. If you haven’t managed to get hold of one yet don’t panic and pay mad fees for them on ebay - more are coming and their is no rush - their is hardly any decent apps on the App store yet.

App store vs Jailbreak

so I’ve had time to play around with a dozen or so Apps from the iTunes store and scanned through the rest.

Is there a giant leap in quality/selection compared to the mostly free Apps on AppTapp? Surprisingly - not really.

Since doing a restore and moving to firmware 2.0 I’ve had more crashes and restarts than when using Official Apps than on firmware 1.14 using jailbreak Apps. The range available is significantly smaller but that will change as more Apps are added.

there seems to be an App store equivalent to many of the jailbreak apps such as mobile flickr replacing iFlickr and in general the quality is higher. in some cases the Apps are identical apart from the fact you now have to pay.

While there are a few gems in there you’ll find some of the best apps like Fring and Video recorder absent. While useless apps like alarm and phonesaber have made it onto the store.

I will give a run down on all the apps I’ve tried soon, as well as which apps will never make the cross over from AppTapp/jailbreak and why. So check back in a few days.

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wordpress from iPhone using ShoZu test

iPhone disappointment continues - Delivery Fail

Looks like between O2 and DHL they have mis-routed my parcel. It’s in Dartford instead of Vauxhall and so I have been told I have to wait until Monday for it. Not impressed.

I will be trying to collect from the depo but I won’t hold my breath.

Apple Store Activation FAIL

It appears that UK iPhones require a PC to activate so the Apple store ran into trouble on today’s launch as all their systems were running on Mac and couldn’t activate the phones.
LMAO.

Full story here

O2 loses iPhone 3G order

After both my brother and I received a confirmation email from O2 for our iPhone order we were both happy and expecting delivery of our phones today.

It seems a confirmation email is not enough. Concerned that I had received a follow up email confirming dispatch of my phone and he had not he called O2 today. Despite his confirmation email they explained they had no record of his order and they were out of stock so couldn’t help him! He now joining the queues outside an O2 store somewhere.

I double checked tracking on my order and it still shows my phone has been dispatched and picked up by DHL at 12:15 yesterday and it has reached Dartford at 6:21 this morning so fingers crossed.