1. The iPhone’s silent switch has behaved the way it does for 4½ years, and we’re only now having this conversation? Because some guy got a brand new iPhone and embarrassed himself at the symphony the same day? And people want to change the behavior because of one (well-publicized) incident of user error? Seriously?

   There’s no better indication that the behavior should remain the same than the fact that we’re only now discussing it.

2. Flipping the ring/silent switch is a casual act. You can do it without looking at your phone. You can do it without even taking it out of your pocket. You can do it unintentionally, digging something out of that same pocket.

   Setting an alarm is a deliberate act. I defy anyone to do it while their iPhone is still in their pocket. I defy anyone to do it accidentally. If you forget you have an alarm set after going through the process of setting it, and get embarrassed at the symphony, shame on you.

3. If you think the ring/silent switch should override an alarm you have set, causing it to not make sound, there’s an easy way to do that: don’t use the built-in Clock app. Many third-party alarm apps respect the ring/silent switch. I like Night Stand. It’s pretty, and when silent mode is enabled, it vibrates but doesn’t ring. Solve your problem for 99¢ and move on.

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This is about as stupid as saying a swimming pool is like a giant bathtub.

I’ll be the first to suggest that two people in a bathtub can be a lot of fun, but you’re not going to play Marco Polo or do a swan dive into even the biggest McMansion whirlpool tub. Sometimes size does matter.

The 9.7" screen size of the iPad is not an accident, Apple did extensive testing to arrive at that size. Below that, you either have to make the user interface too small to use with normal fingers, or it really is just a big smartphone.

The 7" screens coming with the Samsung Galaxy and other would-be iPad competitors are only 45% of the size of the iPad’s 9.7" screen, and that makes a difference for most kinds of applications. Look at a side-by-side size comparison of a Galaxy to an iPad to get an idea of that difference. The 7" screens have a wide screen aspect ratio, which makes them great for watching widescreen movies, but that’s about the only use where they are equivalent to the iPad.

By the end of 2011, “Like a Giant iPhone” will be in the same class as CmdrTaco’s legendary “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.” assessment of the original iPod.

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Now, San Francisco presents some unique challenges, such has high-rises and famously steep hills. But solving those reasonably straightforward RF challenges is what AT&T gets paid the big bucks to do. After almost four years there has been some improvement, but reception is still a major issue, with some parts of SF being almost completely dead zones. (I believe this has more to do with the tinfoil hat crowd than AT&T’s lack of effort and investment, but that’s a post for another day.)

AT&T reception in our house, while not awful, has been spotty, and seems oddly worse since we gave up our land line in January. It has definitely been an issue, with dropped and “one-way” (you can hear someone but they can’t hear you, or vice versa) calls being a regular occurrence.

AT&T has a solution for that problem. It’s called the AT&T 3G MicroCell, which puts a mini cell phone tower called a “femtocell” in your house, and no less a personage than the NYTimes has written about it. Their first article, Bringing You a Signal You’re Already Paying For, is a bit snarky, but does a good job of covering the details of the technology, and why you might want it. Their second article, Dead Zone Doldrums Test Skills of iPhone Customers, is more pragmatic, focused on usable ways to improve your reception, including the MicroCell.

Ultimately, finding a usable solution is more productive than pointing fingers. While the 3G MicroCell does cost $150, there are no monthly fees, and I can attest to getting at least three, and mostly five bars everywhere in my ~1400 square foot house. The MicroCell hands off smoothly to a standard AT&T tower when I move to my back deck, where reception was already excellent. Call quality has been excellent. Once set up, there is nothing to do. It Just Works.

There were two tricks to getting the MicroCell working. The first was actually getting one. They are not yet available for ordering online, at least not in San Francisco. But, after reading a tweet that AT&T Wireless retail stores were selling them in Santa Rosa, I stopped by a store in downtown San Francisco. Yes, they had them in stock, and so did the second store I visited. So, if you want a MicroCell today, you may need to visit your nearest AT&T Wireless store. For me, this was only 10 minutes out of my way, not a big deal.

My second issue was activating the MicroCell. It needs to have a reliable two-way connection to the Internet. For you to receive calls, the AT&T network needs to be able to reach the MicroCell, that is, connect from the Internet to inside your home network. This is something that a good firewall will normally prevent. I assume that the MicroCell uses UPnP or NAT-PMP to attempt to automatically open appropriate holes for itself, but my decidedly non-standard firewall software and even more unusual hardware don’t support either. So, I had to put the MicroCell outside the firewall, which is easy enough if you have a simple home network…and a pain in the ass if you have a fully wired house. For most people, this won’t be an issue, but I would appreciate a way to manually configure my MicroCell, or at least the technical information to open the right holes. Currently AT&T wants the 3G MicroCell to be a black box that requires no direct configuration by the customer.

In the end, I’m pretty happy with the 3G MicroCell. It’s set up, it works as advertised, and I didn’t need to wait for AT&T to put a new cell tower nearer my house, or for Apple to launch a Verizon iPhone.

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1. If you have seen other Apple product introductions, the format is familiar, and they are never less than well executed. Of the intros I’ve seen, nothing has come close to the introduction of the iPhone. (I saw the original Mac intro years too late to fully appreciate its true impact.) But what the introduction of the iPad may have lacked in shock and awe, it made up for in the completeness of the story. The iPhone was on stage by itself, just the software that came on the phone. The iPad arrives with an entire ecosystem, of new and existing applications, third party developers, accessories, etc.

   People who were expecting to get the stomach drop of excitement that the iPhone intro produced (at least in me) were certainly disappointed. But that’s misplaced, the iPad is a far more advanced product and story than the iPhone was when introduced. It’s like the difference between the excitement of crushing hard on someone new, versus the comfort and trust and love that comes after many years of marriage. One’s more exciting, but the other is richer and more fulfilling.

2. Another disappointment, or fear, that people have expressed is the lack of “openness” or “freedom.” I’ve got a different word for that concept: “complexity.” You can call that spin if you like, but I’ve spent 20+ years showing people how to use computers, and they’ve never been easy to use. Even today, 25 years after the concept of clicking and double-clicking hit the mass market, I see people confuse the two, and that is the most trivial of examples. It’s easy to come up with dozens more serious.

   What Apple is doing, first with the iPhone and now with the iPad, is offering a new model for computing, one that allows more direct interaction with objects on the screen, while at the same time simplifying away huge amounts of complexity, things that most people will never care about.

   Those of us who are “computer sophisticates” think those things are important, but when the iPad arrives, and normal people love them, and rave about the user interface, and buy them by the millions, we’ll see what’s really important, and it’s not the “freedom” to fuck around in the file system, or the “openness” to go out onto the Wild Internet and download and install random software.

   Try this exercise: every time you hear an expert say the iPad isn’t open, change “open” to “complicated.” Every time they write the iPad is “locked down” subsitute “simplified.” When the gurus get detailed about “important” three letter acronyms or random tech talk, hear “blah blah blah,” because that’s all it matters.

   Gruber put it best, it’s the arrival of the automatic transmission for computers. Those of us who are enthusiasts and experts will have access to manual transmissions for decades — regular computers are not going away. But for those folks who only care about getting to their destination, it just got a lot easier.

   Update: Here are some terrific articles that tackle this topic in depth, and in different, complementary ways:

   • “Future Shock” by Frasier Speirs suggests that existing computer experts are suffering from future shock.
   • “The iPad Is For Everyone But Us” by Mike Rundle argues that “Most people who … are now writing about the iPad are misunderstanding its intended audience because they’re not in it.”
   • “On iPads, Grandmas and Game-changing” by Rob Foster illustrates the reaction normal people are having to the iPad.
   • “iPad Snivelers: Put Up or Shut Up” by Joel Johnson calls the whiners out on the bogus parts of their arguments, and suggests they compete with Apple, instead of just complaining.

3. If you want to really understand this, and get an idea of just how much Apple is leading by example, watch the segment where Phil Schiller demonstrates the iPad versions of the iWork suite (a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation tool). Apple has completely re-thought the way that you interact with these tools, and except for the on screen virtual keyboard, it surpasses the desktop experience in every way. Really quite extraordinary, it was here that I got genuinely excited about what is new in the iPad, and what it means. A small taste of The Future.

4. Scott Forstall offered developers a big incentive to build apps specifically for the iPad: separate, prominent placement in the iPad App Store. The phrase “a new gold rush” was used. Is that sound in the distance the clatter of Android and web OS and Blackberry phones being dropped by developers? Maybe not, but Apple is certainly building tremendous momentum for their platform. Competitors will not be catching up for years.

At $500, the iPad will be $100 cheaper than the original iPhone I lined up to buy. I may not line up for an iPad, but I’ll certainly be buying one. Yes, the 2nd generation will be even better. That’s always true. So what. I don’t think the iPad is the grand slam home run I wrote that the iPhone was, but it’s most definitely a hit that will score runs. I want one.

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In my review of the Bookmark iPhone app, I noted that for the long tracks of an audiobook, the standard controls of the iPod app, optimized for 3 minute music tracks, can be frustrating. Bookmark is one solution to this issue. Another comes in the form of self-contained audiobook apps from Recorded Books.

These audiobook apps are found in the App Store section of iTunes, rather than in the Audiobooks section. You are buying not merely the audio portion of the audiobook, but also an app that will play it back. Indeed, you can only play the audiobook from its dedicated app; you cannot use the iPod app, or Bookmark, etc.

These apps are the iPhone equivalent of the Playaway format: player and book baked into a single device. The idea is to make an audiobook as easy to use as a regular book — a single (physical, for the Playaway) object that you pick up and take with you, no other items needed. The self-contained audiobook app makes the experience of buying an audiobook, getting it onto your iPhone, and playing it simple and straightforward. In theory.

The experience goes like this. After you have purchased the app and synched it to your iPhone, you will find the app’s icon on one of your home screens (here, the bottom left corner, above the Phone app). For the high-quality commercial books, the app’s icon is a miniature version of the book cover, a nice way to spot the book easily. (On the other hand, if your home screens are anywhere near as crowded as mine, giving each book a spot on them would be a serious organization issue.)

When you first launch the app, it will flash the book cover, and then go to the main app screen, which is fixed in landscape view, and begin playing the book:

Only the first chapter of the audio is included in the app itself; when you start the app, the rest of the audio will be downloaded automatically, in the background. You can only listen to parts that have finished downloading. The app can (apparently) download parts over a WiFi, 3G, and even EDGE connections. I write apparently because it gave no warning when I was downloading on a slower connection, and simply allowed it. While I experienced timeouts on non-WiFi connections, there is no way to know if this is inherent to the app, or if I was just getting a bad mobile connection in my house (AT&T in San Francisco is notorious).

Feedback about the download consists of text progress messages, “Part 2 of 54”, alternating with an estimated time remaining (though I saw estimates only while on WiFi, never for slower connections). Depending on the length of the book and the speed of your connection, downloading could take 20 minutes, or hours. If you are sitting in your easy chair listening to the book, the background downloading is unobtrusive and won’t bother you at all. But be sure to plan ahead if you’re expecting to listen to your book on a plane, or where you otherwise won’t have a connection. And understand that downloading only occurs while the app is running, and only while your device is “awake.”

Controlling Playback

The app controls for play/pause, skip backward and forward, and volume are obvious and intuitive, in box #3:

The skip buttons take you backwards or forwards by 30 seconds, probably the most useful interval for a skip button. The progress meter in box #2 is a slider that allows you to drag the playback point to any position in the current chapter. Less obvious, you can drag through the table of contents, box #1, and clicking a chapter title takes you to that chapter. Very nice. These controls allow you to easily reach any point in the book with just a few clicks or drags.

There is a sleep timer, which can be set to turn off the book after 15 or 30 minutes, and a playback speed button, to allow you to play the book at 1x or 2x speed (box #4). The double-speed playback is clear and understandable, but loses some of the nuance in the narrator’s performance. If you’re in a hurry to finish a book for a reason (due date, book club meeting, etc.), go for it, but otherwise, hey, this is supposed to be enjoyable, why are you trying to make it end faster?

The user interface is attractive, and in terms of layout, very well designed. If it were not all crammed onto one screen, it would be terrific. Unfortunately, the main playback control buttons are too small, and it’s very easy to hit the wrong button even when giving the screen your full attention. It would be impossible to control while driving a car without dangerous distraction.

The two halves of the screen, table of contents and the main playback controls, should be separated onto individual screens and enlarged, with controls for moving back and forth between them. This would be easy to do, and would give you a way to use the app in portrait (normal) orientation, too. Some performance optimizations would be good; I found the interface to occasionally be somewhat sluggish, which made the small buttons doubly irritating, because it was not clear if it was because I missed the button, or because the app was slow in responding.

Finally, the worst controls issue for me: the start/stop button on my Apple headphones do not work to control the audiobook playback (instead, it starts/stops the iPod app). This is a killer, because the button on the headphones is the main way I stop playback of a book when I’m ready to go to sleep, or need to talk to someone, etc., because it’s much faster to reach than to unlock the iPhone, find the right screen, and hit the stop button.

Audiobook Playback

The recording quality is fine. There’s no way to tell what the files are encoded as (at least, not without technical digging that’s more trouble than it’s worth for this review). From listening it seems to be roughly equivalent to Audible’s Type 4 format, which is pretty good (I have listened to dozens of books in Type 4 format), but I now prefer Audible’s Enhanced format, which has twice the audio resolution, and sounds noticably better, even to my poor ears.

More seriously, you can only listen to the audiobook while you are in the app. There is no background playback, so you can’t e.g. switch to Bejeweled to play a game or three while listening. If you leave the app, the audiobook stops. Period.

There is no bookmarking capability. The app saves your position in the book when you stop playback or exit the app, just like the iPod app, but otherwise you can’t save locations in the book. There is no way to take notes about the book while you’re listening, and you can’t even exit the app to use the Notepad app. If you need to take notes on the book, it’s back to pencil and paper.

A few more minor notes.

• The audiobook I tested, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, was $14.99 as an application, and $19.99 as a standard audiobook. The master recording for each is the same, the only difference is the format, app or audio track. Both are a good value (the book is over 21 hours long, less than $1/hour), but the app is $5 cheaper.

• There is a very limited selection of audiobooks in app format, a dozen or so quality commercial recordings, and a few dozen more which package the less polished LibriVox recordings of books which are in the public domain. Also, audiobook app entries on the iTunes store often neglect to give details about the recording, like if it’s abridged or unabridged, length, who the narrator is, etc. All standard stuff when you look at regular audiobooks.

• Audiobooks purchased as apps present organization issue. As noted above, they go into the Applications list, not Audiobooks, in the iTunes library. There are fewer viewing options for apps, and a much lower limit on number of apps you can put simultaneously on an iPhone (though practically speaking, the real limit is storage space, not app slots). More seriously, audiobook apps can’t be in smart playlists, which I use extensively to manage which audiobooks are on my iPhone at any given time, and for other organization and management tasks.

• I experienced a problem where I could not get the app to load; it would crash back to the home screen after a few seconds. Rebooting my iPhone didn’t fix the issue. I had to delete the app, reload it, and redownload the book’s audio to be able to get back to my book. That would suck if I had been on an airplane.

Summary

Version reviewed: v1.0

If you are new to audiobooks, these self-contained recordings are a great way to try them out. The self-contained recording is cheaper, and the dedicated audiobook controls make it easier to enjoy your first audiobook, without having to learn the escoteric iPod app controls that you need to know to keep from being frustrated when playing the long tracks of a standard audiobook.

But if you are an experienced audiobook listener, especially if you have been listening to them on your iPod for a while, you will probably find these audiobook apps extremely frustrating. Although the lower price is tempting, you will almost certainly be happier in the long run continuing to buy standard audiobooks. I personally found listening to a novel in this format to be quite frustrating. (But then, I’m an expert on the “right” way to do it.)

Summary of the summary: good for beginners, bad for experts.

Pluses:

• Simple controls are easier to figure out than built-in iPod app controls for handling long audiobook tracks.
• Easy access (no need to find the Audiobooks section in the iPod app).
• Less expensive than standard audiobook.

Minuses:

• Controls are too small, and sometimes sluggish.
• No background playback.
• Requires time and planning ahead to download audio.
• Cannot use standard iTunes tools to organize a larger collection.
• Frankly, for true beginners, a real Playaway audiobook is a better bet.

More Information:

• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle app, $14.95
• Other Recorded Books apps

Editorial Note

I paid for my own copy of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, and I received no compensation for this review. I add affiliate links to products mentioned on this site. I only add such links after writing, and they don’t influence what I write about.

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Bookmark is an alternative audio player dedicated to audiobooks, based on the insight that the iPod is great for music, but not very well-suited to audiobooks. Bookmark was designed around the central concept that, when listening to a long audiobook, you want different controls for moving around in the much longer tracks, and tools for marking positions in the recording that go beyond just saving where you left off. If you’ve ever listened to a long audiobook track on an iPod, and especially if you’ve ever thought “I want to go back and hear that part again,” you know what this is all about.

Using Bookmark is simple. Start the app, choose a book from the list of titles (Bookmark filters out everything but audiobooks), and press play. In this regard, Bookmark is much like the built-in iPod app. The basics of playback are pretty obvious, with standard controls for play/pause, volume control, and track progress.

Where Bookmark begins to differentiate itself is with the “Time Ribbon” controller, which is a very simple and clever way to skip forward or backward in a track, in increments of 30 seconds, 1, 5, 15, or 30 minutes.

This is a precise method of jumping around in an audiobook, that is more approachable and discoverable than scrubbing in the standard iPod app. If you’ve ever been frustrated trying to go backwards by a minute or two, or dozed off listening to a book in bed, this is for you.

“Heads Up” mode is terrific for listening while driving, when you cannot spare your attention to control the iPod app, or even Bookmark in normal mode. An iPhone or iPod touch normally demands that you look at it to control it, because there are no physical buttons to feel your way around. In Heads Up mode the controls are simplified to only two swipe gestures, which are easy to accomplish without taking your eyes off the road: up and down to pause and resume playback, and side to side to skip forward or backward 15 seconds. This mode could literally save your life. It is the only safe method I know to control a touch-based iPod while driving, unless you have physical controls built into your car stereo or iPhone mount.

The other major difference from the built-in iPod app is the app’s namesake: bookmarks. It’s easy to figure out how to set a new bookmark (though the bookmark editing panel could be simpler). You can create as many bookmarks as you like, give them meaningful names, and add notes to bookmarks, perhaps to remind you of why you saved that position. You can also save notes on the book (track) itself. It is possible to send yourself (or anyone) saved bookmarks and notes via email; this is the only way to export this information from the app.

Like the built-in iPod app, Bookmark can play audiobooks in the background, so you can use another app (say, Bejeweled) while listening. This goes beyond just backgrounding; you can actually switch to the iPod app, and control the audio from there using the standard UI, and then switch back to Bookmark, and use its controls. Switching back and forth is seamless, never pausing or stuttering audio playback.

Bookmark does have a few modest flaws that you should be aware of:

• I dislike the current visual design of the application. Textured backgrounds and non-standard buttons are mixed with standard iPhone controls. While there are some applications which have successfully departed from the iPhone platform UI standards, it takes a strong visual designer to carry it off. Bookmark 1.1 does not, but I have seen a mockup of a forthcoming version, and it looks fantastic. Something to look forward to.

• The bookmarking interface needs some work. You should be able to simply tap into the Notes field, instead of needing to hit the Edit button. It would be nice to be able to hit the Next button to move from the bookmark name to the notes field. It’s usable, but this panel feels like a “rough draft” of what the developer eventually intends.

• The current release has a few other user interface issues, which I expect to be resolved in the next release. The main player window is entirely reworked, resolving issues such as Heads Up mode being buried in the More panel, etc.

• Unlike the iPod app, Bookmark does not combine multiple tracks from a single audiobook into a single entry in the titles list. This makes the list unnecessarily long, and is especially problematic for audiobooks which have many shorter tracks, such as from MP3 CDs or eMusic. For this reason, the developer currently recommends Bookmark only for audiobooks which come in long tracks, such as those from Audible or the iTunes Store. This issue is intended to be resolved in the next release.

• There is no way to view or access existing chapter marks in an audiobook. This is no big deal for many audiobooks, which either don’t have chapter marks, or have them in silly places, but for those that do, it’s extremely irritating to not be able to use them. Unfortunately, this is a limitation of the iPhone SDK, so it’s in Apple’s hands to resolve.

• The Time Ribbon controller, while very interesting, suffers from some implementation flaws. The biggest is that audio playback is immediately affected when you hit a skip level, which can be jarring. I think it would be better if the app waited until you let go of the controller to jump the appropriate distance. At the very least, a half- or quarter-second pause to see if you were moving past a skip level to a greater one would be a good idea.

• While you can move back and forth between Bookmark and the built-in iPod app while a book is playing, unexpected position changes are almost inevitable if you do it when a book is not playing. This is because by default Bookmark stores its own Last Played position for each book, instead of sharing it with the iPod. (The alternative, sharing the position, has other issues, due to iPod app bugs that unset the Last Played position after syncing. Damned if you do…) The next release will have a work-around that should handle this better. In the mean time, you can avoid it by sticking exclusively with either Bookmark or the iPod app for your audiobooks.

• Stability and glitches are an (occasional) issue. I crashed the application once, and encountered another oddity, where navigating from the current book to the list of titles whirred for a while, and then reported that I had no titles on my device yet (this is reportedly an iPhone OS bug). I’ve encountered incorrect cover art in the titles list and on the playback screen. And occasionally saving a bookmark would silently fail, requiring me to re-enter it.

To reiterate: these are all modest issues, and many of them should be resolved in the next release. Bookmark works well most of the time, and has no severe flaws.

Summary

Version reviewed: v1.1.1

Overall, Bookmark represents a useful tool for regular audiobook listeners, especially if you listen (and re-listen) actively, or are using a book as a reference or object of study. Being able to set more than one bookmark, and name and annotate them, is invaluable.

Bookmark is also great if the standard iPod playback controls frustrate you when listening to audiobooks. The Time Ribbon is extremely approachable and usable, and most people will like it better than the (non-obvious) scrubbing controls in the iPod app.

Heads Up playback mode is worth the price of the app all by itself, if you listen to books while driving alone.

Bookmark has a few flaws, but if you listen to audiobooks regularly, it is easily worth the $3 purchase price.

Pluses:

• Innovative “Time Ribbon” controller.
• “Heads Up” mode.
• Multiple bookmarks and notes.
• Can play audiobooks in background mode.

Minuses:

• Non-standard UI, and occasional polish issues.
• Cannot use or display embedded chapter marks. (SDK issue.)
• Minor bugs and stability problems.

More Information:

• Bookmark in the App Store
• Bookmark web page
• Bookmark on Facebook
• Bookmark on Twitter

Editorial Note

I paid for my own copy of Bookmark, and I received no compensation for this review. I did share a draft of this review with DockMarket, the developer of Bookmark. A “real” journalist would not do this, but I believed that getting feedback and a peek at the next release was more important than “pure” journalistic integrity.

Also note that I add affiliate links to products mentioned on this site. I only add such links after writing, and they don’t influence what I write about.

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But the most interesting news, to me, was about the iPhone, at the end of the event. From Steve’s lips to our ears (via Macworld):

“We’re on track to ship our millionth iPhone by the end of this month, and so to get ready for the holiday season, here’s what we’re going to do: The vast majority of customers want the 8GB iPhone. So today, we’re going to focus on just the 8GB model. [And] the 8GB isn’t going to sell for $599, it’s going to sell starting today for $399. We want to put iPhones in a lot of stockings this holiday season.”

So (a) the iPhone is selling incredibly well, getting to a million units in under three months. And (b) if they were selling well before, how well are they going to sell at $200 less? I predict 4-5 million iPhones sold by the end of the holiday season.

Beyond that general impression, I have a few specific things I thought would be worth writing about.

Buying and Activation Was Painless

I wasn’t willing to camp out or wait in line more than an hour prior to the store opening. But in spite of having 200-250 people ahead of me (a line long enough that it had to be split into two, with us “overflow” people being in a second line outside the mall), once the store re-opened at 6pm it only took about an hour to get to the front of the line, and about 4 minutes to actually purchase my phone. My overall time commitment was about 2 hours. Apple, and presumably the mall folks as well, did a terrific job of managing the external queue, and the customers inside the store.

Once out of the store, I actually had Real Life Activities planned, so I didn’t even open the box to look at the unit until almost midnight. My activation process, unlike a few I’ve read, was quick and smooth, no hiccups. And although I was transferring my number from another wireless provider (goodbye Verizon!), it transferred with no further intervention from me; within an hour I could make calls, and about a day later I could receive them. All in all, a very satisfying and convenient process — which is kind of amazing given that there are three major businesses involved, including one (Verizon) who has every incentive to make the process hard.

What Other People Are Saying

There are a number of other online reviews and personal experiences; here are a few that are both thoughtful and I (mostly) agreed with:

• Daring Fireball’s iPhone First Impressions
• The Official stevenf iPhone Review
• James Duncan Davidson’s iPhone Lists
• Glenn Fleishman’s First Days with the iPhone

(The NYTimes and WSJ reviews are also good, but their for-pay nature makes them harder to link to…)

Audiobooks on iPhone Notes

A few things I haven’t read elsewhere. First of all, the main reason I got the phone was to keep Aldo on Audiobooks current on listening to audiobooks on an iPod. I’m happy to report that the iPhone is a superb audiobook playback device. It is in most ways a major leap forward, making my 2nd generation iPod nano look primitive. There are also a few serious flaws, which I hope will be corrected. I’ll have more details on both sides of the coin in a post tomorrow Sunday soon.

Second, getting the 8 gigabyte version of the iPhone is a no-brainer. Previously I recommended the 4 gigabyte iPod nano as the best iPod for audiobooks. 4 gigs of memory is plenty of room for audiobooks, podcasts, and a modest collection of music. This is because the iPod nano’s screen is small enough that it’s not very interesting for photos, and nanos cannot play video at all, so you don’t need much, if any, room for these media.

The iPhone’s screen and features, however, are such that you’ll almost certainly want to have a collection of photos, and videos have never looked so good on such a small device. As a result, the percentage of space I allocate to audiobooks has gone from 75% to 50% of the total capacity, making the extra space much more necessary. For only 20% more cost, you get double the capacity. Yeah, it’s an extra $100, but if you’re already spending $500 on a phone, you can spend $600 just as easily. Get the 8 gig model.

Third, you can listen to an audiobook over the speakerphone. The audio fidelity and volume are not good enough for music (IMHO), but are decent for listening to spoken word, at least in a reasonably quiet environment. This is really cool, especially because…

Fourth, while the built-in microphone and click-control of the included iPhone headphones are very, very cool, I had forgotten how much I hate the standard iPod earbuds. Uncomfortable, and they won’t stay in my ears. Just awful. But I don’t want to give up the microphone or one button control; it’s far too useful when listening to audiobooks, where you need to pause playback to talk to someone. Audiobooks are different from music; you can’t just pull out an earbud and miss a few minutes of the track while you talk. But hitting pause on the iPhone itself is a multi-step process, once the screen sleeps and locks. The click-control makes that a non-issue…except it means you have to use the included headphones.

This is a huge opportunity for Shure, Etymotic, and the other makers of high-end headsets (my wife likes her Shure E3c set, and I was about to buy the new Shure SE210, which fit great at Macworld Expo, but they don’t have a mic or controls). I am totally ready to buy a whole new set of nice headphones to work with my iPhone, but only if it has the built-in mic and controls.

Other iPhone Notes

Fifth, while others have complained about AT&T’s “2.5 gen” EDGE network, my experience has been better. Maybe my expectations were lowered by the universally negative comments, but personally I found it amazing that I could be on vacation in a semi-rural town (~2500 official population) this past week, and have a usable version of the Internet in my pocket. Yes, it could be faster; I wouldn’t want to do my daily surfing on it. But to pull out the phone to get a definition of “second cousin, twice removed” while drinking margaritas on the deck, or to read MacInTouch while lying in a hammock, it was a perfectly adequate implementation of a capability that is, or ought to be, mind-blowing.

Finally, 373 contacts on my phone is too many; finding a phone number on the phone is slower and harder than it should be. Not horrible, not hard, just not graceful. (Favorites are only useful if you keep the list very short; I’m trying to keep mine to one screen, no scrolling.) My first attempt to improve this was a Smart Group in Address Book that only included contacts that were useful on an iPhone, that is, those with a phone number, email address, or URL:

This reduced the total number of contacts to 363 — not exactly a huge improvement.

More fine-grained groups on the iPhone do help, but Address Book needs some small-but-significant improvements to make my groups more useful with my iPhone. Specifically, I want to be able to exclude a set of contacts that are not useful on my phone, because they are old or or people I am not ever likely to call (but need to keep for e.g. twice-yearly mass mailings).

To do this, I need a way to create Smart Groups that exclude contacts which are in another group. That is, I have an “Old / Hide” group of contacts, that I manually maintain, of those contacts which I want to hold onto, but which I don’t want to carry around with me. But for that to be useful, I need to be able to create Smart Groups that subtract this group out of it. You can do this with Smart Playlists in iTunes, but there is currently no way to do it with Smart Groups in Address Book.

Want. Want. Want!

I agree with everything he wrote

That doesn’t change my conclusion that I won’t buy any more content from the iTunes Store until I can play it on my Sonos and TiVo systems. I don’t care if the source of the issue is Apple or the record companies, I only care that I can’t play it on devices I own and enjoy using.

If Steve is serious about offering non-DRM-wrapped content on the iTunes Store, there should be non-DRM-wrapped content on the iTunes Store

There are non-big four labels ready to do away with DRM yesterday, including those behind artists like Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies, and Avril Lavigne. Steve’s letter is currently undermined by the lack of any unprotected content on the iTunes Store. If he’s serious, that should change. That would put additional pressure on the big four labels to think about dropping DRM, as well as reduce pressure from the groups that are currently after Apple to open up FairPlay, redirecting it at the same big four. That seems like such a big win for Apple, I expect it to be their next move in this particular game.

The “big four” have to change something

The heart of Steve’s argument goes basically like this: (a) All DRM systems rely on secrets. (b) Once the secrets are known, it is possible, common, inevitable that the DRM will be broken, worldwide. ( c) If the DRM is broken, Apple is required by contract to rapidly fix it, or lose the ability to sell the majority of the music in the iTunes Store. (d) Licensing FairPlay means more people have the FairPlay secrets, which increases the risk of the secrets escaping. (e) The increase in risk is not acceptable, which is why Apple won’t license FairPlay.

That’s a pretty strong argument. It’s hard to suggest that Apple should significantly increase their business risk to assist their competitors, by licensing Apple technology to let those competitors improve their products. Yeah, it would be good for customers too, but the current situation, as Steve points out, only causes problems for 3% of people’s content. It’s a trade-off, and it’s reasonable for Apple to come down on the side of Apple.

The big four record companies are already suggesting that Apple is wrong and should work to license FairPlay. Fine. All they need to do is take ( c) above out of the equation. That’s something totally under their control, and if they are serious about wanting to see interoperability, instead of dropping DRM entirely as Steve suggests, then they need to put their lawyers were their mouthpieces are.

As Roman Strauss said in Dead Again, I think this is all very far from over.