2009
03.21

The New iPod Shuffle: Building a Better Chip Clip

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A few weeks ago Apple introduced a new iPod shuffle…you guessed it…now with less buttons! No buttons on the unit, in fact. Just a switch to toggle between stright, shuffle and off. The new form factor is long and slender, reminescent of a new iPod nano, just without the screen or the click wheel. If you’re looking for capacity, the little guy fares well: 4GB of storage means that, two hours later, you still haven’t found what you’re looking for…found a song that is, not necessarily that song.

So where are the controls? Conveniently placed on the earbuds. Ergonomics win, right? Maybe, if you like Morse code…one click to play/pause, two clicks to go to the next track, three clicks to jump back a track, or to the beginning of that track, three long clicks, three short and three long for SOS. Sorta like the iPod touch, but with no screen. You do get two volume buttons nearby, but of course there’s no right-click :p.

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2009
03.21

Third Time’s The Charm: iPhone, now with copy and paste!

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So Apple finally decided to, two years after the iPhone’s initial release, come out with a few features that smartphones elsewhere have had for years. In their new 3.0 software will be such amazing features as:

  • Search (Palm circa late ’90s was awesome)
  • Copy and paste (from the people who brought you Ctrl-X, -C and -V…anything daring to call itself a computer has had this since the dawn of time)
  • MMS (granted, the iPhone MMS app has contact and location attachment, but 99% of phone have had this feature for six years or so, albeit with the main not-have being smartphones)
  • Reading and composing e-mails in landscape, and having a landscape keyboard standard in all Apple apps (really, was it that hard?)
  • A2DP Stereo Bluetooth (wireless headphone support, something every $50-with-a-contract phone, and 99.9% of smartphones, have supported since the iPhone came out)

There are some features of the iPhone that are the wave of the future, to be sure, and Apple’s leadsership brought in an era of truly usable smartphones and truly high-end feature phones. I’m also happy to see these rather glaring omissions added to the docket of iPhone features. However I’m still left scratching my head at how Apple leaves out obvious features on their products, putting them in only after a revision or two that may just be in software.

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