Month: June 2009

iPhone works for me

A year ago, I was comparing mobile phones, I bought a Touch Diamond and regretted it and then I bought an iPhone 3G which I used for a year and now I even upgraded to the 3GS. Now that I just got yet another comment to my post about the Touch Diamond, I thought I should recycle that comparison table from a year ago, but this time I’ll compare my assumptions about the iPhone back then with how it actually turned out.

So, here’s the table:

assumed actually
Phone usage
Quick dialing of arbitrary numbers actually, using the favorites list, and even using the touch keypad with its very large buttons, I never had a problem dialing a number.
Acceptable battery life (more than two days) ? meh – two to three days, but as I’m syncing podcasts every day, I get to charge the phone every day as well, so this doesn’t matter as much
usable as modem probably not it is now (using a little help for my Swisscom contract). As I was bound to my old contract with sunrise until may, I would have been able to use my old phone in an emergency, but that thankfully didn’t happen.
usable while not looking at the device I got really dependent upon the small button on my headset plus the volume hardware buttons on the side of the device, both allowing me to do 90% of the stuff I was able to do on the old phone without looking at it.
quick writing of SMS messages actually, I’m nearly as fast as with the T9 – having all keys at my disposal eliminates the need to select the right word in the menus, but not having the physical keys lets me wrestle with typos or auto correction which removes a bit of the advantage. It’s not nearly as bad as I have imagined though.
Sending and receiving of MMS messages works now. I missed the feature about once or twice in the 2.0 days, but usually sending a picture via email worked just as well (and was cheaper).
PIM usage
synchronizes with google calendar/contacts maybe yes. Since the beginning of the year, this works really well because Google just pretends to be Exchange
synchronizes with Outlook maybe yes, directly via ActiveSync – but since February, our company went the Google Apps route, so this has become irrelevant.
usable calendar yes yes
usable todo list
media player usage
integrates into current iTunes based podcast workflow yes yes
straight forward audio playing interface yes yes (see my note about the button on the headset above)
straight forward video playing interface actually, the interface is perfectly fine
acceptable video player limited kinda yes. Using my 8 core Mac Pro, it’s quick and easy to convert a video, but lately I’m using my home cinema equipment for the real movies/tv series and the iPhone for video podcasts which already come in the native format. Still, it’s no generic video player capable of playing video in the most common formats and it doesn’t really support playing from any server in my home network.
hackability
ssh client maybe yes. TouchTerm works very well – much better than any of the mobile Putty variants (Symbian an Winmob)
skype client maybe note quite. Actually usable with the speakerphone or headset, but not as useful in general use due to the inability to run in the background
OperaMini (browser usable on GSM) not needed any more due to UMTS and near-flat rates.
WLAN-Browser yes yes

Nearly all my gripes about the iPhone have either become irrelevant or turned out not to be a problem after all.

Combine the very acceptable performance as a phone with the perfect performance as a podcast player, music player, acceptable gaming platform and perfect mobile internet device, then it becomes clear that the iPhone has become the perfect phone for me.

I upgraded to the 3GS mainly because of the larger capacity, but now that I have it, the speed improvement actually matters much more than the capacity increase as 32 GB still is not enough to fit all my audio books, so I’m still limited to all my music, all unlistened podcasts and a selection of audio books.

But the speed improvement from the 3G to the 3GS is so incredible, that I’m still very happy I made the purchase. All the other features are either not quite ready for prime time (voice control) or not really interesting to me (video recording, compass).

Still. After looking for the perfect phone for 8 years now, I finally found the hardware in the iPhone.

802.11n, Powerline and Sonos

I decided to have a look into the networking setup for my bedroom as lately, I was getting really bad bandwidth.

Earlier, while unable to stream 1080p into my bedrom, I was able to watch 720p, but lately even that has become choppy at best.

In my bedroom, I was using a Sonos Zone Player 100 connected via Ethernet to a Devolo A/V 200MBit power line adapter.

I have been using the switch integrated into the zone player to connect the bedrom MacMini media center and the PS3 to the network. The idea was that powerline will provide better bandwidth than WiFi, which it initially seemed to do, but as I said, lately, this system became really painful to use.

Naturally I had enough and wanted to look into other options.

Here’s a quick list of my findings:

  • The Sonos ZonePlayer actually acts as a bridge. If one player is connected via Ethernet, it’ll use its mesh network to wirelessly bridge that Ethernet connection to the switch inside the Sonos. I’m actually deeply astonished that I even got working networking with my configuration.
  • Either my Devolo adaptor is defective or something strange is going on in my power line network – a test using FTP never yielded more than 1 MB/s throughput which explains why 720p didn’t work.
  • While still not a ratified standard, 802.11n, at least as implemented by Apple works really well and delivers constant 4 MB/s throughput in my configuration.
  • Not wanting to risk cross-vendor incompatibilities (802.11n is not ratified after all), I went the Apple Airport route, even though there probably would have been cheaper solutions.
  • Knowing that bandwidth rapidly decreases with range, I bought one AirPort Extreme Base Station and three AirPort Expresses which I’m using to do nothing but extend the 5Ghz n network.
  • All the AirPort products have a nasty constantly lit LED which I had to cover up – this is my bedroom after all, but I still wanted line of sight to optimize bandwidth. There is a configuration option for the LED, but it only provides two options: Constantly on (annoying) and blinking on traffic (very annoying).
  • While the large AirPort Extreme can create both a 2.4 GHz and a 5 GHz network, the Express ones can only extend either one of them!

This involved a lot of trying out, changing around configurations and a bit of research, but going from 0.7 MB/s to 4 MB/s in throughput certainly was worth the time spent.

Also, yes, these numbers are in Megabytes unless I’m writing MBits in which case it’s Megabits.