nick peelman

re: Different Levels

I’ll stand by my previous statement that this is a huge bane for the iPhone. Elegance through simplicity works in some places, this isn’t one of them.

thedov:

Basically, the iPhone has two different volume levels: your ringer volume, and your audio playback volume. When audio is playing, or when an audio-centric app is open, the hardware volume buttons change the volume of the audio. When at the home screen with no audio playing, the volume buttons change the ringer volume. The audio level can go to 0, but the ringer volume can only go to 1. The turn the ringer off, you have to use the hardware switch.

iPhone Mute Switch Dilemma…

So if you’ve been living under a rock, an iPhone alarm went off during a performance at the New York Philharmonic, and the conductor went as far as to stop the show and berate the guy.

Gruber notes that he thinks this is an edge case that can’t be easily addressed. I’d argue otherwise. The concept of a Sound Profile is non-existent on the iPhone, and with good reason since it can get excessive (most feature phones and all Blackberries ship with several), but it shouldn’t be.

I should be able to define a quiet profile, a loud profile, a vibrate-only profile, and hopefully an outright off profile as well as a bedside profile, or i should be able to stick with the default 2 (Noise, Vibrate). Profiles should control ALL sound output from the phone that is considered an Alert. Music, game sound, etc., would all be classified separately, but alarms, calendar and task list reminders, message/call alerts, and third party notifications would all fall under the concept of the profile.

Yes, this is like the system RIM has on the Blackberry.

Yes, they had a shitty UI on it that made it slightly painful to set up.

Yes, I understand it would add a layer of complexity to the average user.

No, I don’t give a damn.

Being able to only switch between a vibrate profile and a “make noise” profile is one of the lamest fucking features about my iPhone, and I’ve ranted about it before, to anybody who will listen. Would a more flexible system have saved the poor chump at the Philharmonic? Reportedly he only had received the phone earlier in the day/week and wasn’t fully versed in its functions yet, so probably not. Does it have the potential to allow me to receive a critical phone call in the middle of the night? Yes. Right now, if I forget the mute switch before I go to bed, the phone could vibrate for hours and I wouldn’t hear it. Whereas my Bold’s Nightstand mode let me block out the pings of Emails (except critical ones), quiet the sounds of text messages, and blare the sound of a phone call.

Now i’m stuck getting a loud PING every time an email comes in, or hearing nothing at all until the morning.

Siri Hell

So the guys at Rooster Teeth made an interesting point during this week’s podcast.

They basically asserted that Siri is getting dumber, and its all because of us. And sadly, I agree with them. Siri, in my usage, has gotten worse since the iPhone 4S launched. Dictation fucks up almost every sentence, and queries almost always fall back to misinterpreted words in a Wolfram or Google search. And that’s if it works at all, which often times it doesn’t, either due to Siri being down, or faulty cell service.

Having just gotten a Kinect for our Xbox, I can without a doubt say that Kinect’s voice recognition is a lot better than Siri’s. And I’m willing to bet they are doing more of that locally and not shipping it off to a server farm, but I have nothing to back that up. Burnie also says his Ford’s SYNC system has much better voice recognition, and in my limited experience with that as well, I’d have to agree. No surprise there; willing to place a bet there as well that its using the same or similar code as Kinect, since both SYNC and Kinect are born of Microsoft.

So is this a ‘gets worse before it gets better’ thing? Is Siri going to continue to dwindle? Or is this problem in our heads? (for a while I thought it was just me, but hearing them bring it up and discuss it made me feel a little more sane)

A day with the iPhone 4S…

So its been just over 12 hours since UPS dropped off my iPhone 4S.

It took roughly 2.5 hours to activate, since AT&T dropped the ball on having enough resources to handle the massive slamming of their activation servers. The experience so far has been phenomenal.

Compared to my iPad, everything is snappier, animations are smoother, and its just overall a much more satisfying experience. That’s saying a lot, because I love my iPad.

Compared to my Blackberry, there really is no comparison. I loved my Bold 9700, and I’m still going to miss aspects of it considerably. Most notably the battery life, keyboard, and holster. The battery life I’m almost willing to trade off, just because of how much more usable the iPhone is, but time will tell. I’m just going to have to get into the habit of never passing up the chance to charge it.

iCloud has worked beautifully thus far. Once everything synced down, I have been updating contacts and calendar events, etc., on three devices (Mac, iPad, and iPhone), and everything has been keeping up wonderfully.

Seymour is currently stuck with EDGE service, so once you get away from Wifi here the experience falls away pretty quickly.  That was one other advantage of RIM’s hardware, was it was much more adept at dealing with slow networks, thanks to RIM’s constant tweaking of things up there in Canada before final delivery to the device. The theory is that we’ll see this whole region/area upgraded and bumped directly to 4G. That move should also enable 3G HSPA+ for us here, so here’s hoping AT&T gets their head out before too long.

I had ordered an OtterBox Impact case for it last week, which has proven to be an attractive and protective addition. We’ll see how well it goes, I’ll be experimenting with carry methods and cases for a while from the look of things. Its hard giving up carrying a phone on your hip when you’ve been doing it for a decade.

Siri is truly something out of science fiction. There is much work to be done with advancing the technology; improving its resistance to outside noise, its “learning” ability, and the ability to more easily correct misinterpreted phrases or words. But even with those issues, it is still an amazing feat of engineering. And with sites like ShitSiriSays, it is quite amusing as well.

One issue that i do expect to be remedied in the near future is WiFi syncing. Currently, it isn’t working for the iPhone, but works peachy on my iPad. These first few days (or even weeks) i don’t mind the extra cabling effort for the phone anyway, so its not a huge deal. I’m really looking forward to it though, not only because I’m lazy and don’t want to mess with cables, but also because of the autonomy it brings to the iPhone. Playlist updates, new music, play counts, podcasts, etc., all happen automatically, the only thing i have to do is dock my phone once or twice a day.

Thus far I’m happy with the switch. I’m glad I waited until now though, as there are several features that just arrived with iOS 5 that I’m certain I would have been unhappy without.

Once I get some more use of it, and give it a fairer shake, I’m going to revisit my thoughts on the battery life, keyboard, and holster, and post some updated ramblings.