A couple of handy things about the iPhone

[pm]

As I was riding my bicycle into work this morning, I wanted to change the song. I started to pull over so that I could reach into my backpack, and then I remembered the voice control. So I held down the microphone button on my headset and said "play playlist top rated" and then it started playing my top-rated playlist. The voice control thing is often problematic - "play Creed" somehow morphs into calling a co-worker whose last name (Kisch) is nothing like Creed. But when the voice control works, I have to say that it's pretty cool.

Another thing, I'm leaving work a couple of days ago and I'm listening to NPR using the NPR app over 3G with my headphones and I get in the car, and I unplug the headphones and plug in my car 3.5mm headphone jack for the Aux input and I noticed that the volume changed from the low setting that I had it on for my headphones to the max setting for the aux input (max volume works best with it). As a test, I unplugged the car aux plug and plugged it back into my headphones and the volume dropped down to the near bottom again. Back into the car and it's max'd. How does it know to do that? It can tell the impedance difference? However it works, it works well. When I get out of my car and put on my headphones, my eardrums don't blow out from the max volume.

That's it. I complain about my iPhone a fair bit, but there's a few little things that make it clear that they put as much thought into it as they are putting into hyping it.

Now I just need a Google Voice app like the Android guys have, a good GPS app with real-time traffic updates and lane assist, and for them to magically give me an SD slot and a battery with better battery life and I'll be pretty content with it.

I saw this new GPS app:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/0...-we-go-hand/#continued

if it had traffic updates, I'd buy it. Although the fact that an incoming call takes you out of the GPS app would be annoying. Ok, add a multitasking OS to my list above.

 

[RandomFool]

I don't like using the iPhone as a mp3 player at all myself. It's wicked inconvenient not having physical buttons I can press without looking. It's great as a portable computer/phone though.

 

[SunnyD]

I've been toying around with my new (old 2g) iPhone that I got earlier this week. It's been a blast, though I'm sure the novelty will wear off. My main goal though is to make it as inexpensive as possible to use. To that end I've already installed an assortment of the IM apps and VOIP apps trying to see which serves me best. Yes, I've jailbroken the phone with the intention of using VOIP over EDGE if it's capable enough. Coupling that with T-Mobile's prepaid sidekick plan, I should be able to keep my cellular bill down to $365 a year, given that I hardly ever make voice calls - and if the VOIP side works well enough I shouldn't have to pay a dime for a call other than what amounts to a $30/month data plan. And Google Voice will just make it all that much easier (have had a Grandcentral account for > a year, and also have about 3 fresh invites laying around).

The only thing I'm missing with the 2g is going to be GPS, but I hope to remedy that as soon as preowned 3g's or 3gs's start selling at a "reasonable" price.

 

[pm]

Originally posted by: RandomFool
I don't like using the iPhone as a mp3 player at all myself. It's wicked inconvenient not having physical buttons I can press without looking. It's great as a portable computer/phone though.

Well, that was part of my post - you can talk to it. "play <artist/album/song>", "play playlist", "next track", "shuffle". There's a pause while you put it in voice recognition mode, but it does work - at least most of the time. Asking it to play a specific artist rarely works for me, but the shuffle command, next track, and play a certain playlist all work fine. Plus the pause, skip and volume buttons on the wired headset work pretty well too.

 

[gorcorps]

Originally posted by: pm

Originally posted by: RandomFool
I don't like using the iPhone as a mp3 player at all myself. It's wicked inconvenient not having physical buttons I can press without looking. It's great as a portable computer/phone though.

Well, that was part of my post - you can talk to it. "play <artist/album/song>", "play playlist", "next track", "shuffle". There's a pause while you put it in voice recognition mode, but it does work - at least most of the time. Asking it to play a specific artist rarely works for me, but the shuffle command, next track, and play a certain playlist all work fine. Plus the pause, skip and volume buttons on the wired headset work pretty well too.

I was going to say that I believe there are wired remotes with buttons that can control the ipod function too. They shouldn't be terribly expensive either.

edit: yup, they make them
http://www.usbfever.com/index_...ew.php?products_id=549

So there ya go. Cheap and easy way to control iphone without looking. I personally don't like the iphone as an mp3 player because of the sound quality, which is something that can't really be fixed... but for the average user I think it makes a decent mp3 player.

 

[abaez]

Originally posted by: SunnyD
I've been toying around with my new (old 2g) iPhone that I got earlier this week. It's been a blast, though I'm sure the novelty will wear off. My main goal though is to make it as inexpensive as possible to use. To that end I've already installed an assortment of the IM apps and VOIP apps trying to see which serves me best. Yes, I've jailbroken the phone with the intention of using VOIP over EDGE if it's capable enough. Coupling that with T-Mobile's prepaid sidekick plan, I should be able to keep my cellular bill down to $365 a year, given that I hardly ever make voice calls - and if the VOIP side works well enough I shouldn't have to pay a dime for a call other than what amounts to a $30/month data plan. And Google Voice will just make it all that much easier (have had a Grandcentral account for > a year, and also have about 3 fresh invites laying around).

The only thing I'm missing with the 2g is going to be GPS, but I hope to remedy that as soon as preowned 3g's or 3gs's start selling at a "reasonable" price.

Interesting, can you get the sidekick plan without a sidekick? Wouldn't they verify it when you signed up? Anyway, I'd be interested in knowing whether VOIP would work with EDGE.

Edit: Apparently it's easy to get the sidekick prepaid without a sidekick. Now just need to know whether EDGE can do VOIP.

 

[pm]

In my experience EDGE can't do VOIP very well at all. I used Skype on an iPhone on T-Mobile to make Skype calls over EDGE. Over WiFi they sound clear - although sometimes there is a bit of an echo. Over EDGE it would sound good briefly but most of the time was so garbled that it was unusable, and there would be a couple of seconds of silence about once a minute. I only tried it a couple of times (my wife in Europe would SMS me and I'd call her back on my iPhone using Skype over EDGE). I had all bars showing on the iPhone when I tried.

I will say that it got slightly better when T-Mobile rolled out their epc.tmobile.com EDGE gateway, before that it never even connected. With the newer epc gateway, it works but it's barely usable.

Looking at it from a technology perspective, EDGE latency is ~800ms, and peak throughput is ~120kbps, and there's a bit of packet loss (~3% the one time that I measured it). These are all not good numbers for trying to do VOIP.

from: http://i.dslr.net/tinyspeedtest.html

Statistics..
alltime
GPRS 39 kbps / 1487 ms
EDGE 123 kbps / 883 ms
3G 694 kbps / 381 ms
Wifi 2150 kbps / 128 ms

today
GPRS n/a
EDGE 117 kbps / 1068 ms
3G 733 kbps / 366 ms
WiFi 1887 kbps / 125 ms


It's bad form to edit posts after someone has posted below - so please forgive this breach of AT ettiquette but I'm on a roll here.

http://www.satmagazine.com/cgi....cgi?number=1027051061
http://www.bandwidth.com/wiki/..._for_a_VoIP_Network%3F

Latency on VOIP - should be less than 150ms
Packet loss - should be less than 1%
Bandwidth - should be more than 60kbps

So, EDGE meets the bandwidth requirement but fails the latency requirement really badly and has higher than acceptable packet loss. There's also a quality called "jitter" that I never measured when I was on T-Mobile - not actually sure how to measure it.

To measure all of these - particularly packet loss - you want to install command line and ping and some other apps using Cydia. Then run some experiments. As I recall doing a traceroute was an eye-opener.... there were a lot of hops.

 

[SunnyD]

Originally posted by: pm
In my experience EDGE can't do VOIP very well at all. I used Skype on an iPhone on T-Mobile to make Skype calls over EDGE. Over WiFi they sound clear - although sometimes there is a bit of an echo. Over EDGE it would sound good briefly but most of the time was so garbled that it was unusable, and there would be a couple of seconds of silence about once a minute. I only tried it a couple of times (my wife in Europe would SMS me and I'd call her back on my iPhone using Skype over EDGE). I had all bars showing on the iPhone when I tried.

I will say that it got slightly better when T-Mobile rolled out their epc.tmobile.com EDGE gateway, before that it never even connected. With the newer epc gateway, it works but it's barely usable.

Looking at it from a technology perspective, EDGE latency is ~650ms, and peak throughput is ~120kbps, and there's a bit of packet loss. These are all not good numbers for trying to do VOIP.

For as much as I actually do voice calls... this isn't likely to matter much to me. Just nice to have. On top of that, being a flat $0.15/min for calls will do just fine for me. I'm really MUCH more interested in the data services in general, rather than voice.

I'll let you know how it works out tomorrow (my SIM is supposed to be here tomorrow according to UPS).

 

[Pliablemoose]

I got very frustrated with Edge data over my iPhone 1st gen, it worked, but not fast or well.

 

[RandomFool]

Originally posted by: gorcorps

Originally posted by: pm

Originally posted by: RandomFool
I don't like using the iPhone as a mp3 player at all myself. It's wicked inconvenient not having physical buttons I can press without looking. It's great as a portable computer/phone though.

Well, that was part of my post - you can talk to it. "play <artist/album/song>", "play playlist", "next track", "shuffle". There's a pause while you put it in voice recognition mode, but it does work - at least most of the time. Asking it to play a specific artist rarely works for me, but the shuffle command, next track, and play a certain playlist all work fine. Plus the pause, skip and volume buttons on the wired headset work pretty well too.

I was going to say that I believe there are wired remotes with buttons that can control the ipod function too. They shouldn't be terribly expensive either.

edit: yup, they make them
http://www.usbfever.com/index_...ew.php?products_id=549

So there ya go. Cheap and easy way to control iphone without looking. I personally don't like the iphone as an mp3 player because of the sound quality, which is something that can't really be fixed... but for the average user I think it makes a decent mp3 player.

Those are both options but the easiest thing for me to do is to continue using my Zune as my mp3 player and my iPhone as a phone/everything else.

 

[abaez]

Originally posted by: SunnyD

Originally posted by: pm
In my experience EDGE can't do VOIP very well at all. I used Skype on an iPhone on T-Mobile to make Skype calls over EDGE. Over WiFi they sound clear - although sometimes there is a bit of an echo. Over EDGE it would sound good briefly but most of the time was so garbled that it was unusable, and there would be a couple of seconds of silence about once a minute. I only tried it a couple of times (my wife in Europe would SMS me and I'd call her back on my iPhone using Skype over EDGE). I had all bars showing on the iPhone when I tried.

I will say that it got slightly better when T-Mobile rolled out their epc.tmobile.com EDGE gateway, before that it never even connected. With the newer epc gateway, it works but it's barely usable.

Looking at it from a technology perspective, EDGE latency is ~650ms, and peak throughput is ~120kbps, and there's a bit of packet loss. These are all not good numbers for trying to do VOIP.

For as much as I actually do voice calls... this isn't likely to matter much to me. Just nice to have. On top of that, being a flat $0.15/min for calls will do just fine for me. I'm really MUCH more interested in the data services in general, rather than voice.

I'll let you know how it works out tomorrow (my SIM is supposed to be here tomorrow according to UPS).

What you COULD do is get one of those verizon MIFI things - $40/month unlimited data. You'd have to carry it around along with your phone, but everything else would essentially be free.

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: RandomFool
I don't like using the iPhone as a mp3 player at all myself. It's wicked inconvenient not having physical buttons I can press without looking. It's great as a portable computer/phone though.

Jailbreak + Poocket Touch = better than any physical buttons. Pocket Touch is easily one of the coolest apps for the iPhone. A shame it's not on the iTunes store. It seriously makes my iPhone much better than any other mp3 player for navigation without looking.

 

[gorcorps]

Originally posted by: RandomFool

Originally posted by: gorcorps

Originally posted by: pm

Originally posted by: RandomFool
I don't like using the iPhone as a mp3 player at all myself. It's wicked inconvenient not having physical buttons I can press without looking. It's great as a portable computer/phone though.

Well, that was part of my post - you can talk to it. "play <artist/album/song>", "play playlist", "next track", "shuffle". There's a pause while you put it in voice recognition mode, but it does work - at least most of the time. Asking it to play a specific artist rarely works for me, but the shuffle command, next track, and play a certain playlist all work fine. Plus the pause, skip and volume buttons on the wired headset work pretty well too.

I was going to say that I believe there are wired remotes with buttons that can control the ipod function too. They shouldn't be terribly expensive either.

edit: yup, they make them
http://www.usbfever.com/index_...ew.php?products_id=549

So there ya go. Cheap and easy way to control iphone without looking. I personally don't like the iphone as an mp3 player because of the sound quality, which is something that can't really be fixed... but for the average user I think it makes a decent mp3 player.

Those are both options but the easiest thing for me to do is to continue using my Zune as my mp3 player and my iPhone as a phone/everything else.

Well yeah. I still don't care for the iphone as an mp3 player any way you cut it. But for the casual music user or those who'd rather have an all in one device something like that would help. I'm a stickler for audio quality so I'll take my Cowon over any Apple product, but that's just me.