c0t0d0s0.org

What is habituation? When you borrow a portable navigation device from your brother, try to scroll through the menus and twitch through the maps like on your iPhone and think at first: "Fsck ... the display is broken" ... i want an iNav!

I wrote some days ago in Twitter, that i purchased some Ultimate Ears super.fi 4vi as my old original iPhone phones. This was a little bit tricky, as i wanted headphones with an integrated mic for telephone calls.

Now i used them for a few day and it´s time for a recommendation. These headphones are excellent. Good sound, good bass. I suspect, that the users complaining about a weak bass weren´t able to seal the ear with the ear pieces. In-ear headphones need to seal the ear to get good bass. Once this seal is closed you get a good and precise bass response from the headphones. My tip: Throw away the original headphones, they are an insult to the sound of an iPhone or iPod, there are much better alternatives.

The build quality seems to be good from my view. The metal casing of the drivers looks excellent. There is a big disadvantage with this ear phones. They close out the ambient sounds around you very effectivly. Nice for hearing music, but somewhat disturbing when you stand on the platform for your train, and you wonder from where all the people come because you didn´t heared the incoming train on the other plattform.

They are not effective as active noise cancellation headphones, at least in a turboprop Dornier 328. My QC2 are better in this category, but the sound of super.fi´s is better.

The Ultimate Ears burn quite a big hole in your pocket. I´ve paid 129 Euros at Amazon. That´s an huge price tag for some in-ears. But at the moment i think the headphones are worth each Euro i´ve spend.

Apple announced a beta program for their new Software for the iPhone: iPhone in Enterprise. The new features sound really promising for enterprise usage: From push services to a mechanism to wipe the phone from remote.

An iPhone is nice, but an jailbreaked iPhone with third-party software is much better. In the last few days, i´ve installed some additional software on my phone and the gadget gets better and better:

• Installer.app: by nullriver. An absolutely essential software for an easy installation of all the software.You find the packages of the all other applications in this tool. Installer.app downloads the packages and installs them on the phone.
  
• Summerboard: Summerboard is an extended version of the normal springboard with scrolling to access more than 16 application from the front screen
  
• Apollo IM: Apollo IM is a instant messaging tool for the iPhone for multiple protocols. Nifty tool, but the screen keyboard of the iphone is nothing for long chat sessions
• MobileScrobbler: Updates your last.fm profile while you hear your music on your iPhone.
  

I will try the Firefly Media Server as soon as possible. With this application your iPhone can stream music to iTunes running on a Mac or a Windows system. Sounds weird, but an easy way to use your music on other notebooks or our machine at work without copying it to the system.

Neat idea. A daemon for the iPhone to log phonecalls into a calender. Would solve my problem to remember when i called someone the last time ....

Das iPhone ist ja ein richtig schoenes Telephon. Vor allen Dingen, weil es sozusagen das mobile Internetterminal "for the rest of us" ist ... nungut ... nichts ist aber so gut, das die T-Mobile da nicht wieder ein Argument liefern koennte, sich das Ding nicht zu kaufen: T-Mob hat genaueres ueber die Bedingungen ins Netz gestellt. Volker verweist auf diese in seinem Blog.

Die Preise sind schlicht indiskutabel und ab abhängig vom Tarif wird relativ schnell auf 64 kBit/s inbound 16 kBit/s outbound gedrosselt. Ganz ehrlich, bei diesen Preisen und Bedingungen darf man später nicht wundern, wenn die Hälfte aller iPhones in Deutschland gehackt werden.

Ich bleibe bei definitiv erstmal bei meinem E61i ....

Einer der wichtigsten Aspekte des iPhones kann jetzt überprüft werden: Wie sieht das iPhone mit Kratzern aus? Oder mit Fingerabdrücke? Bei Bram.us findet sich ein Tool zum Selbersiffen.

I think we are at the brink of an development, that leads at final to the fullfilment of the vision of John Gage: The Network is the computer. This blog entry is a summary of some comments i´ve made in the last few days in my blog and in discussions. There were several comments, that the iPhone will fail, because of it´s lack of an open programming interface. But all this critics looks at the wrong angle. You don´t need an open programming interface when you have network connectivity and a browser. Because your applications run on central server resources. And the quote of Steven Jobs "Nobody uses Java" makes sense from a special point of view. Do you know a actual application in the nternet that uses a Java GUI? And i have several customers that think about web-enabled interfaces for their core applications.

When you look at this angle to the iPhone, all things get clear: Applications you need local ... the basic communication infrastructure is installed as local programms. The browser, the mail client, the address book, the calendar. Stuff, you possibly need even without network access.

For all the rest, you use the internet, or your own networks: Bookmarks? del.icio.us! RSS Feeds? Google Reader! You get the idea? You don´t need expandibilty on your phone. You need a stable, comfortable internet plattform. Your application runs somewhere else. In a more effective manner.

Example: Syncing the RSS clients on dozens of workstations? You don´t need it anymore. As there runs a single instance of your environment on a central server, you don´t have the problem of syncing. I don´t want another client, that has to synchronize it´s read/unread information. As i use regulary four devices (lorien (my Nokia E61), hadhafang (my Mac Mini), silmarillion (my venerable G4 Powerbook) and Sun Ray Server with a really boring name) this would get really nasty. To be honest ... even syncing NetNewsWire between hadhafang and silmarillion doesn´t really sync in realtime. It´s a mess to use two machines in parallel, don´t speak about four. Google Reader solves the problem.

It was no coincidence that the CEO of Google and Yahoo were on stage with his Steveness. Both companies drive forward the concept of central applictations in the network.

I have the impression, that most of the industry pundits didn´t understand the concept behind the iPhone. It´s smartphone for the rest of us. It´s a mobile keyboard,mouse and monitor. It´s not your computer. Your computer is in the network. The network is your computer.

PS: When you think about it, the bet of Sun makes perfectly sense: Central IT for millions of user is parallelism to the extreme. Niagara, Niagara II and Rock are designed to be the technological spine for such a world. Maybe not the fastest on asingle task, but this will be your smallest problem in the future.

Nun regen sich wieder allerortens berufene und unberufene Schreibe darüber auf, das es wohl nicht möglich sein wird, eigene Programme auf einem iPhone zu installieren. Okay, das ist doof, bietet weniger Möglichkeiten zum Rumspielen.

Aber wenn ich jetzt mal in meinem Bekannten- und Kollegenkreis nachdenke: Wozu wird ein Handy benutzt? Zum Telephonieren ... ja klar, zunehmend um auch Mails abzurufen und um ins Internet schnell etwas zu gucken. Man will einfach, das das Handy funktioniert. Man will, das die Synchronisation perfekt funktioniert, ohne das man da noch gross irgendwelche Beschwörungstänze um das Handy machen muss. Er will ein Handy, das sich einfach bedienen lässt. Die einzige Applikation, die nachinstalliert wird, ist bei den Kollegen mit Nokia E61 Google Maps, wenn ich das mal auf meinem Handy vorführe.

Für den intendierten Kundenkreis ist ein iPhone ohne eigene Erweiterungsmöglichkeiten völlig okay. Man darf nicht von technikliteraten Menschen auf die breite Käuferschicht schliessen. Viele iPod-Nutzer sehen schliesslich ihren Computer auch nur als bessere Schreibmaschine. Und die gleichen Käufer sollen durch das iPhone angesprochen werden, denn dort steckt das Geld.