Background

Unless you’ve been living in Vega, Texas, you’ve probably heard the iPhone does not have a replaceable battery, meaning you can’t bring a second (or third etc.) to pop in that iPhone when you run out of juice, like you can with a notebook computer.

I just got back from a 3-day camping-at-night roadtrip, and I had my iPhone on me. Here’s what I learned about power management.

iPhone Travel Tips

So what can you do on the road? Here’s some quick tips:

1. bring a car charger Pretty simple stuff. We had a Belkin iPod charger that worked fine for my iPhone. It’s just slow to charge the iPhone.
2. bring your wall charger and grab AC power whenever you can The iPhone recharges much faster from AC wall power than it does from a car charger. As few as 15 mintes can give you a 1/4 to 1/3 charge. We’d stop at restaurants and I’d find an AC outlet and pop the phone in it.
3. turn off WiFi while driving You won’t need it, and it sucks juice.
4. dim the display I had mine on auto-dim, and realized I could really conserve battery by turning this off and moving the slider as far left as I could stand.

Next time I’ll come equipped with a solar charger, an external USB phone charger, or both. Fighting for  car charger time (vs. another iPhone owner and an ancient MP3 player) was no fun.

How cool is merging two cards? Just Command-click two cards in the list and execute that command.

But why would I have two cards for one person? You might ask. Here’s the answer: you might have Bob with his phone number, and then one day add Bob from Mail.app’s “Add to Address Book”.

http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phone-details/?device=Apple+iPhone+-+16GB+(Refurb)&q_sku=sku2530221

via Ars Technica

NBC and Miscrosoft may team up to create a content owner’s dream device, one that will provide “filtering technology that allows for playback of legitimately purchased content versus non-legitimately purchased content.”

My take? NBC and MS will gratify each other in an Alcatraz-like Zune yin-yan, one that’s sure to provide a pretext for private lavish director-level NBC-MS lunches, gushing press releases, demonization of fair use, and circle-jerky boardroom meetings that will make defense contractors blush.

And the public will continue to ignore the Zune because of it. These companies just don’t get it.

A future update of the software for Microsoft’s portable media player may well include a feature that will block unauthorized copies of copyrighted videos from being played on it.

Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it would start selling video programming for the Zune, mainly TV shows. These include programs from NBC Universal, which has pulled its shows off Apple’s iTunes Store.

Late Tuesday afternoon I reached J. B. Perrette, the president of digital distribution for NBC Universal, to ask why NBC found Microsoft’s video store more appealing than Apple’s.

He explained that NBC, like most studios, would like the broadest distribution possible for its programming. But it has two disputes with Apple.

First, Apple insists that all TV shows have an identical wholesale price so that it can sell all of them at $1.99. NBC wants to sell its programs for whatever price it chooses.

Second, Apple refused to cooperate with NBC on building filters into its iPod player to remove pirated movies and videos.

Microsoft, by contrast, will accept NBC’s pricing scheme and will work with it to try to develop a copyright

I’m not going to pull punches. In my opinion the iPhone is the coolest consumer gadget that man has ever produced. Following up on What I Don’t Like About the iPhone, here’s what I do like about it, and what I think Apple got right.

Integration

The iPhone is stunningly well integrated. It’s a phone, music player, web browser, light emailer, SMS’er, map utility, calendar, weather updater, alarm clock, and game player, and all these features work well together and blend visually and conceptually.

Example: do a search for a shop on Google. If like most business searches on Google these days, it’s under “Local results for [business name]” (has a tiny map icon next to it), click the link

1. you’re taken to the iPhone’s Map application and the store is centered, and “pinned” with a standard Google pin marker
2. a tap to the flag for the pin takes you to a Contacts-style page with the phone (just tap to call), store URL, address, and some map buttons including Directions to Here
3. a tap on Directions to Here will do a faux-GPS of your current location and mark the route to the shop on a Google map from wherever you are
4. Holy F#ck!

Continue reading »