6 posts tagged “ipod”

This is pretty ballsy. Steve Jobs is putting public pressure on the record companies to give up DRM.

Wow.

I was out of the office last week and all sorts of fun stuff happened when I wasn’t looking. If you’re looking for a nice, neat synthesis of the Apple announcements last week, check out this New York Times article. Totally new iPod nano and shuffle, better battery life all around, movies on iTunes…hot damn.

I have a friend who may be in the market for one of these so I just wanted to throw this out there…it does actually exist.

I’m not afraid to steal my own thunder with a kick-ass subject line, but that’s essentially this post in a nutshell.

To go into a bit more detail, a while ago I noticed my 2nd gen iPod mini acting up, battery-wise…it would run out of battery life after a minute of play just after charging, then it would never think it was fully charged ever, etc. It was pretty much toast.

So I went to the Apple Store and they told me to do a Restore on it. Essentially, this is just erasing everything on it, including the iPod’s own software, and then putting everything back. The dude at the store offered to do it for me but I said I could handle that on my own. I went home, did that, and it was no better.

Then, I went back, told them the story of what happened, and he said, “well, what we can do is go ahead and get you a new one.” Freakin’ sweeet. I wrote down my phone number and e-mail on a non-scary form and the guy actually called me back in a week when it came in.

Interestingly, they gave me just the iPod itself…no cables, software, nuthin’. It was actually shipped in its own little barebones cardboard box.

One thing that’s worth mentioning here is that I got this iPod free when I opened a bank account, but that did not complicate things one bit. They were still more than happy to help me out and I didn’t have to show any receipts or anything.

Apple is cool. :)

I really wanted to pick up where I left off yesterday talking about Google Search History, but the new iPod caused a slight change in plan.

The new iPod does look nice, and if you were thinking about getting a “regular” iPod (vs. an iPod nano or shuffle) you will want to get the new one instead. I probably won’t get this new iPod, at least not until my 20GB 3rd gen iPod dies or someone figures out a way for me to hack my TiVo and watch my saved shows on the iPod.

What I really want to get out there is that you might want to watch out for the upgrade to iTunes 6. If you’re not planning on using the new features right away you may be able to save some headaches by waiting until iTunes 6.0.1. Other people had complained about the upgrade to iTunes 5 causing a variety of problems and it’s not entirely unreasonable to assume there may be some of the same issues.

I had a little trouble myself…I have a printer hooked up to my wireless network via an AirPort Express and after installing iTunes 5 on my Dell laptop it could no longer print to that printer. The Dell was printing to the laptop via Apple’s nifty Rendezvous protocol, which allows connections between devices without static IP addresses. Apple actually released some “technology preview” software for Windows to allow this kind of functionality, which is very cool of them.

After that software was released, Apple got into a legal spat with some other company that has a trademark on the term Rendezvous, so they changed the name to Bonjour and also got around to releasing the “1.0” version of this software for Windows. (Bonjour is built into the Mac OS, so no extra downloading is needed there.)

iTunes 5 installed some part of Bonjour so that it can do the nifty music sharing thang, but unfortunately this somehow disagreed with the Rendezvous technology preview stuff I had installed, so no printing for me. Luckily, installing the 1.0 version of Bonjour for Windows cleared the problem right up, and the install neatly replaced the old Rendezvous stuff.

But, if I hadn’t been paying such close attention to the iTunes 5 install, and noticing that it was installing Bonjour, I’m not sure if I would have known what to do. Plus, you have to be a pretty big geek to know what all this stuff is in the first place. So, this leaves me feeling like Apple dropped the ball a bit.

What’s even more sad is that messing with Rendezvous/Bonjour on Windows sorta seems like an “advanced” maneuver and I almost feel like “this is what I get” for pushing the limits. This is what I’ve learned from Windows. How unfortunate.

With that out of the way, tomorrow we will finish the Google story.

Here’s a quick follow up on iTunes 5…in this post I lamented the fact that you don’t seem to be able to do anything with the new Lyrics functionality in iTunes 5. Well, today I found out what it’s good for: the new iPod nano can display the lyrics as the song is playing.

I should have known it all along: it’s the iPod, stupid. Everything’s coming up iPod. Not that I’m complaining, really..the iPod nano is definitely drool inducing. My rational mind will be doing its best to beat down the voice saying ”I’m so cool and pretty…yes, that’s it…buy me buy me buy me HA you bought me.”

If they release one that’s maybe 6GB or 8GB than that will be my next iPod. My current iPod is a 4GB mini that I got for free by opening a checking account at CitiBank. (Seriously.) It’s one of the 2nd generation minis with the longer battery life, which is nice. Although, something that’s been making me frown lately is that my mini has developed serious battery meter calibration issues. It looks like I have about 30% battery life left and then all of a sudden it’ll go dead, saying that I need to plug into a power source. (If I was a conspiracy theorist I might point out the “coincidental” timing of my mini all of a sudden having battery problems with the release of the newer, cooler, non-free model.)

Actually, it’s kinda sad that there’s no more iPod mini…I really like mine and it’s the device I use most often to listen to music. But again, I really want more storage space, even if it’s just a little more. Photo capability is kinda cool, but again, storage space has to go up for me to use that in any significant way.

The iTunes phone is a mixed bag…it may be good for some people but I’m just not one of them. Steve Jobs said it best, saying it’s like having an iPod Shuffle right on your phone, which I’m just not interested in. Also, it’s too bad it isn’t a quad band phone. Ah well…I’ve stopped caring already.

Anyway, the mystery of the Lyrics feature is solved. Now I just have to stop wanting that nano…