V-Moda Vibe Duo: Good sound, poor durability, and worse support
I got a pair of the positively-reviewed V-Moda Vibe Duo iPhone earbuds for Christmas last year. I’ve been meaning to blog about them for a while, but am only getting around to it now that I have a problem with them.
The short take: Good sound, poor isolation, shoddy construction, worse support.
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If you’re like me, you just upgraded iTunes to the newly-released 8.0.1 version. And then you plugged in your iPhone and were greeted by repeated popups telling you your iPhone “cannot be synced unknown error (13014)”. And then you cursed Apple for screwing simple things up.
But have no fear, there is a simple fix! Just quit iTunes and start it up again. Everything should now be fine. You may have to restart your phone, too, but I didn’t.
Apple is recalling every iPhone 3G power adapter with American-style (NEMA 1 or Type A) plugs
Wow! Apple is recalling and replacing all of the compact power adapters shipped with every iPhone 3G sold to date in many countries! According to Apple’s support release, the prongs can break off and become lodged in an outlet, posing a risk of electric shock. And of course, inconveniencing the person who wants to keep their iPhone charged! American-style two-blade adapters in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Japan, and several Latin American countries are affected.
Looks like Apple is trying to make good on their defective power designs. Let’s hope they learn from this and the MagSafe debacle and make better-quality devices in the future!
I sure hope the iPhone is ready for the enterprise! VMware CTO, Stephen Herrod, just announced at VMworld that a new version of VMware Infrastructure Client was being developed for the iPhone and “other mobile devices”. This software allows an administrator to manage virtual machines hosted on VirtualCenter servers.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been using apps like pTerm (SSH), Remote Desktop (RDP), and Mocha (VNC) to manage my network devices. Throw in VI Client and you have a formidable mobile management device!
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one thinking of keen uses for the accelerometer in system management…
As impressed as I am with Apple’s iPhone App Store, with its simple purchasing and automated installs and upgrades, it would be better if the thing actually worked reliably. Along with sometimes forgetting song purchases, there seems to be some gremlin that causes the App Store to forget that certain apps are installed and not check for updates. This left me scratching my head, as updated apps like Super Monkey Ball, Facebook, Evernote, and Cube Runner remained in their previous state.
I suspect that the App Store did not update its internal record of my purchases when I wiped and re-set up my iPhone shortly after upgrading to OS 2.0. When I did this, I reinstalled all the apps from iTunes’ backup copy rather than re-downloading them from the App Store, and perhaps this caused them to be overlooked.
Chicago O'Hare Airport like you've never seen it before!
This time, instead of turning green, my iPhone snapped this oddly discombobulated photo. The very next shot was perfect, but how can one explain this? Whatever the cause, it’s certainly interesting!
Seriously, folks, this is the exact image from my iPhone, no editing involved! And it did this again this afternoon!
You've got voicemail!
This is part of an ongoing series of longer articles I will be posting every Sunday as part of an experiment in offering more in-depth content.
I have long felt that voicemail was archaic. Like fax machines, voice mail systems seem stuck in an earlier era, with arcane controls and so little feedback that the user has no idea if their attempt at communication has been successful. In fact, I was long loath to trust voice mail systems at all, instead just asking people to call my other numbers or email me.
With this in mind, I was impressed by Apple’s reinvention of voice mail with the iPhone. Although the Visual Voicemail feature is widely recognized as referring to the interactive table of voice messages shown in the phone, their implementation goes well beyond that, offering all I wanted in a voice mail system. Indeed, although I was considering other systems prior to getting the iPhone, I have since settled on Apple’s simple but effective system.
Sprint USB EV-DO + Cradlepoint personal hotspot = sweet!
Goodbye, AT&T 3G! After a year of hoping coverage would improve, I finally jumped ship from AT&T’s 3G network and moved my mobile wireless broadband service to Sprint. I grabbed a refurbished USB EV-DO device and signed up through a no-contract reseller and couldn’t be happier with the service so far. And I picked up a Cradlepoint router at the same time, giving me a portable Wi-Fi hotspot so any device I have (or a friend has) can get online at broadband speed from anywhere. Awesome!
So, yeah, my headline is a little misleading. But it’s true - rather than buy a 3G iPhone in my 3G-starved hometown, I decided to kill all of my mobile connectivity woes at once, including stepping up to 3G speeds on the iPhone. Read on for details about what was wrong with AT&T Laptop Connect, why I selected Sprint, the Cradlepoint PHS300 router, and how to get all of this with no contract.
Here’s a surprise benefit from the iPhone 2.0 Exchange ActiveSync ability: I was able to finally move my iPhone’s “home” sync from the PC to the Mac!
I’m a long-time iPhone user and new Mac switcher, but since I use the phone for business (read Exchange) email, contacts, and calendars, I was stuck syncing it to the (work) PC instead of the (home) Mac. This really wasn’t optimal, as it meant I needed to load all of my songs and movies on the work machine, which is a serious no-no for my “keep ‘em separated” computing preferences. But the iPhone has to be synced to a single machine, and since I needed to be able to keep my contacts and calendars up to date, I was stuck.
All this changed with 2.0’s over-the-air sync ability, though. Once you enable Exchange ActiveSync (or MobileMe, for that matter), you no longer have to tie the iPhone to Outlook. So now I am able to sync my work contacts, email, and calendar to Exchange and my songs, ringtones, apps, and movies to my Mac! Joy!
I first noticed this shortly after my 2.0 upgrade and ActiveSync activation. I docked the iPhone to the Mac to download some photos with iPhoto, and I noticed that iTunes would let me “sync” it there, even though it was “paired” to the PC. Although I had selected “manually manage music”, I couldn’t drag and drop songs or videos, but I noticed that the calendar, contacts, and mail sync settings were now grayed out. This got me thinking, so I decided to take the plunge and blow away all of my content in order to really sync the phone to the Mac. Sure enough, my mail, contacts, and calendars remain connected to Exchange, but everything else now lives on the Mac.
I wonder if Apple considered this implication when they released Exchange ActiveSync. After all, it would seem to tie the phone more strongly to Microsoft but actually has the exact opposite effect. I don’t need a Windows PC at all anymore!
Ok this is weird. Anyone ever have this happen to their iPhone camera? Everything is green! Rebooted, still green. Took some photos and it went from green to striped to fine. Weird!
Enterprise Storage at FriendFeed
