iTunes Match on iOS is not for me
Have just been experimenting with iTunes Match on my iPhone 4. I’ve already subscribed to, and set up iTunes Match on my iMac and I am very happy with it. It matched the majority of my music into the Cloud and only around 1000/3945 tracks had to be uploaded.
Since then I’ve used it as an opportunity to clean up the library by removing duplicates (the Match process exposes them for you) as well as downloading the 256kbps versions of lower quality tracks. I like the feeling that it is all backed up for me, while letting me keep all of the files for myself if I want to move away from iTunes in the future.
I had reservations about enabling Match on my iPhone as I had heard from a few blogs that once enabled, it would remove all tracks. This ended up being the part that I really just didn’t agree with! But I went ahead with it anyway for curiosity’s sake.
Once Match is enabled on iOS, it starts downloading the names/artists/albums of all of your songs from Match and makes them available to you. If you want to listen to any of it, you tap it to play as usual, but now it downloads (over Wi-Fi or 3G) from Match. This isn’t such a problem if you’re at home or the office on a good Wi-Fi connection, but over 3G while out and about, it will be slow and costly if you run over your data bundle!
The worst situation is if you’re out of any network connectivity, which means you don’t have any music! Well apart from all of the music you’ve streamed previously as it is downloaded and saved locally in the background. Just not very good if you’re looking for a particular song on a plane that you haven’t listened to in a while…
After I enabled Match, I was looking for a way of downloading all of the songs at once, instead of one-by-one. I found that if you create a playlist of all your songs on the device, once you’ve swiped all the way to the bottom of that playlist, you can tap Download all songs. I did this and then realised after one song that my 32GB iPhone 4 doesn’t have enough storage for everything (I normally use the “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128kbps AAC” to fit it all on). So I scrambled to cancel the process by turning iTunes Match off, and off it has stayed.
The nice thing about the iPhone is that all of my music is there with me, instantaneously, no matter what connectivity situation I find myself to be in. So as nice as iTunes Match is on my iMac, it just doesn’t cut it for my mobile device.
Phil (currently syncing all of my music the old fashioned way)
Consumerisation
Why has “consumerisation” suddenly popped up as the buzzword for people using their personal equipment at work over the past year or so? Apart from senior staff who have been given Blackberrys for email access, lower level staff have been accessing their email, contacts and calendars using their personal phones for years now. This has been a small minority though for three main reasons:
Firstly most people bought their phones not expecting to be able to access any email, let alone work email. These devices were for making calls and sending text messages. Email was an afterthought.
Secondly, data connectivity on a phone has been expensive, so users are not willing to spend personal money for work purposes.
Thirdly, and I think most importantly, the user experience has been poor. Reading email on small screens where only 4 or 5 words fit across the screen is a lot of effort. Composing an email on a number pad using T9 predictive text or old school multitap takes a long time and is error prone. Immediate “push” email was impractical for battery life reasons. This is why Blackberry did so well, it was a device designed specifically for email.
So what has changed to dissolve away these issues? Whether you like it or not, Apple’s iPhone turned the smartphone industry on its head. User experience, not capability, was key.
Email on the iPhone was front and centre. The Mail app was on the homescreen by default. Mail was one of the key apps that was being highlighted by Apple in their adverts along with Web browsing and things like Visual Voicemail.
Because the iPhone had such a focus on data heavy applications, the networks had to respond with data friendly tariffs. Packages with unlimited data built in became the norm (although this has since changed as the networks have adjusted to match usage patterns). This made it seem “free” for the user to surf the web and get push email. Companies used to pay for internet connectivity for their staff from home for business recovery or working from home reasons, no one does this anymore since most have unlimited broadband packages.
This all builds to create a user experience that makes it easy and attractive for the user to use their phones, and now tablets, at work. They’ve realised that working with their email, contacts and calendars on their new phones is easier and even more “fun”. This is why the numbers of users wanting to use their devices for both work and play has increased dramatically over the past few years. This is why consumerisation has become such a positive trend, and in my opinion, it is doing companies a favour. Users now want to use their own devices and data packages, therefore decreasing costs.
Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors. (via Morgsatlarge – blogorific.)
Massive and informative post. Everyone should read
Blog warming party?
I’ve successfully moved my phil-leung.com domain to a new hosted WordPress blog. I’ll be reposting a couple of posts from the old one but I doubt anyone is going to miss the rest of them!
My aim, as always, is to write about what interests me; mobile devices, collaboration, travel and maybe a bit of web development!. Don’t expect massive posts, just things barely longer than a tweet!
Trying to update the WordPress installat…
Trying to update the WordPress installation on my server. Why does it always fail due to permissions EVERY TIME?!
phil-leung.me
I’ve just purchased myself a new “social media” domain to link my social networks together. I think its a great idea as most of us have presences in multiple networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Linked In.
I’ll be using it as a go to link for all of my content. Hopefully, once again, it will prompt me into blogging a bit more!
Anyway, have a look here at phil-leung.me and tell me what you think with the contact form in the lower left hand corner. I’m still trying to work out the design, so bear with me!
Sushi Hiro
Visited Sushi Hiro for the second time on Sunday. First time made a big impression on me. Don’t know if I was caught up in the hype or what, but the tastiness of the fresh vibrant sushi was hard to deny.
This time I ordered a deluxe rice. I had a craving for something substantial. It didn’t disappoint.
Bed of sushi rice, with 12 different types of seafood on top. Can’t tell you what all of them were, hard to remember, but the usual suspects are there. Tuna, tuna belly, eel, sweet prawns, scallops, salmon roe, squid etc.
It felt a far less formal way to eat! Felt like I was at home scooping rice into my gob with a few bits of fish here and there. Although, I did end up wrapping balls of rice up with bits of fish… nigiri!
Nat ordered the Deluxe Nigiri Selection
We ordered this one the last time. We also ordered a few extra a la carte nigiri.
Scallop and Mackerel to be precise. Scallop… got to be one of the best. So sweet and juicy, delicate flavour. Mackerel… full of flavour. I prefer mackerel to most of the typical nigiri (tuna, salmon) because the flavour is so distinctive and strong (is the mackerel cooked?! I swear it must be!!)
Anyway, we were stuffed, and for under £50 including drinks it was quite reasonable for the quality of what we got. Next time though, I’ll be trying Kiraku down the road. I like the look of their miso paste aubergine!!!
iPhone 3GS
iPhone 3GS
Finally, after locking myself into an 18-Month contract with Vodafone on a stupid LG Viewty, I can get the iPhone 3GS.
Back when the original iPhone was announced, I said to myself, “I don’t need a phone, I just want a touchscreen iPod”. So when the iPod touch was announced, I bought that thing up, and I’ve been very very happy with it ever since. The only thing that I wasn’t so happy with, was that I couldn’t fit my whole 19GB song library within its 16GB capacity, and that many of the apps available are so much more useful if you have an always on connection instead of just WiFi.
Around the same time, my Sony Ericsson k800i died, so I ended up getting a new phone on a new contract. I coulda got an iPhone then, but I didn’t since “I don’t need a phone, i just want a touchscreen iPod”. What a mistake that was… I got an LG Viewty, what a piece of shit. The main selling points of that thing were the “touchscreen” and “5MP camera”. First, the touchscreen required so much effort to get working since it worked on pressure and not capacitence. Second, the 5MP cam took good pictures, right until it saves the pic to the memory and adds a lovely blur effect onto it making all pics look out of focus. How useful.
I lived with that thing for 13 months until the battery started to run out within half a day. So I put it on eBay and got around £70 for it which I was happy about. Since then, I’ve been using a Vodafone *cough*Sagem*cough* 527 pay as you go phone. Its nice and small, but the functions are crap, but I expected that from a phone that costs £30. My vodafone contract ran out in May, and ever since, I’ve been holding out until WWDC for Apple to announce the new iPhone.
Now its here… it looks the same as the iPhone 3G. It adds a few features that the 3G won’t have even with the iPhone OS 3.0 update such as video recording/editing, compass, better cam, voice control and better graphics. Now if I were an iPhone 3G owner, I don’t think these extra features would make me wanna upgrade. But since I’m a new user, hell yeah do I want it! At last, I’ll be able to sync all of my songs and videos, instead of a random subset of them. I’ll be able to use connected Apps wherever I am like all of those location based apps. I’ll be able to Twitter on the go (I’m getting bored of twitter… maybe this will invigorate my interest).
Bring on Friday 19th. I’ve been waiting for over 18 months. This better be as good as I’ve hoped.
Google wave, the future of collaboration?
Google, at its Google I/O conference, has just announced a new collaboration tool called Google Wave that combines email with instant messaging… now when I first heard that, I wondered how that worked?
Turns out, they’ve come at the collaboration/email problem from the perspective of “if email was invented today, how would it look?”. Existing email works on the same principle of postal mail, a letter is sent out to one or more people. What they’ve done, is create an object (wave) thats centrally hosted on the web and added users to it. These users can then read, edit, comment and have discussions about this object online. There is only ever one wave, one version.
With email, you would reply (all) with your comments, or updates etc. With a wave, you just make your comments at the bottom of the wave like facebook…. PLUS you can do inline comments. select a part of the text that you want to comment on, and your comment will be inserted within the document.
A very cool thing about this is that if the users that are added to the wave are online, you can see them typing and making edits to the wave in real time. This makes conversations quicker because instead of sitting there looking at a “user is typing…” message like in normal IM clients, you can see the text being typed character by character. This means you can get the gist of the message before its completed, so you can formulate your reply instantly. You can of course turn this feature off, if you’re not sure about what you’re typing.
You can even embed waves into websites. Say you have a wave that contains a set of pictures, you can embed that onto your blog, and people’s comments will be reflected in all the places that the wave is being viewed from (clients, blogs, mobile devices).
I probably haven’t explained this very well, so watch the video and all will be explained. I’ve signed up for it already, so hopefully I’ll be able to play with it soon.
