Late to the Party

If you’re not, then read this MSNBC/Newsweek article reviewing the iPhone.  So far it’s the most frank and detailed review I’ve read from the lucky mainstream journalists who got an eval unit.  Again, I’m not going to be buying an iPhone for a while, so I’m just living vicariously through these articles.   My brother’s planning on lining up for one on Friday (but he’s not so crazed about it that he’s going to take the day off; he plans to get in line after work), and hopefully he’ll have one by Friday night that I can oooh and aaaah at.

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I don’t think so…  But I did just buy a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet from Woot.com a few minutes ago. *sheepish grin* I couldn’t resist it at $129.99 + $5 shipping!  Granted, it’s not exactly chump change, but considering what the device is, $130 is a rock-bottom price that I’m sure wouldn’t see anywhere else for a new (supposedly) 770.  It has a successor, the N800, of which many of you have seen my reviews, so it’s not like I’m getting the bleeding edge for super cheap.  However, I did like the web browsing and PDF viewing on the N800 the best, and I think that even with the 770’s “last year” technology, it should do quite well as an occasional browser and e-book reader. 

One thing I hated on the N800 was the fussiness of trying to get some of the Linux apps onto it (if it didn’t have a simple installer program already), so I fully expect to have that same annoyance in the 770, but hopefully it won’t be too bad.  I think some of the issues on the N800 were 770 apps that weren’t properly ported over, or the firmware being too new (it’s ridiculous that firmware that’s too new should be a bad thing) for some apps that hadn’t been updated, so perhaps the older firmware of the 770 might work to its advantage in those cases.   One other thing that might be a caveat, besides the 770’s overall slowness (so many reviews have mentioned), is its memory card support.  It only supports RS-MMC cards, which seem to be hard to find right now.  I’ll have to scrounge around for a 2GB card; a quick Google search showed links to eBay for a 2GB card for about $25, so it might not be that big a deal.  People complain about companies like Sony using proprietary memory cards, but at least with “non-standard” cards like Memory Sticks, I can actually find those at the store!   Oh well, once I get one 2GB RS-MMC, that’ll be the last I’ll need to worry about it, I hope.

This 770 Internet Tablet is my first Woot! purchase.  I hope all goes well with the order processing.  Supposedly it’ll be shipped within 5 business days, but I don’t even know what method of shipping they’ll use.  I guess I should just expect  it in a couple weeks so that I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it shows up earlier.   I’ll try to post some kind of comparison with my experiences with the N800.  I’ll try to wrestle with installing 3rd-party software on the 770 and see if it annoys me as much as it did on the N800.  Maybe that’ll jog my memory for the 4th part of the N800 review I’ve been promising all this time!

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Being a big devotee of using the Google suite of web apps, this Read/WriteWeb article about web apps for students really piqued my curiosity.  Though it’s supposed to be student-oriented, this list of sites could be useful for those of us in the “real world”, too.  The list is broken down into categories like Office Replacements, Notetaking, and Studying, with a lot of well-known and not-so-well-known sites from Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Facebook to NoteMesh and Calcoolate.  Take a look, this list is a pretty awesome resource for those of us who like to live online in “the cloud”.

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Late last night I posted the following to Twitter and Jaiku after an hour or two of wrestling with Rhapsody to try to get subscription tracks to work on my N95 after I read that the N95 supports Rhapsody:

“Oh for crying out loud, I HATE Rhapsody. I’ll be canceling it ASAP. (I’m a poet and didn’t know it)”

Today one of my Jaiku friends asked me why I hate Rhapsody since he loves it. Below is my response that I started typing as a reply in Jaiku, but realized it was rather lengthy, and decided to blog it instead. *smirk*

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Well, back when I bought my iRiver Clix 2, I signed up for Rhapsody To Go so I could try out subscription music on the device. I bought the Clix 2 2 or 3 months ago, and up until now, I have not yet been able to actually play subscription music on any portable device except for my computer. And the software is so bloaty and crashed so many times when I tried connecting my Clix 2 that for a long time I just left it alone and never tried much to figure out what was going on. I had thought I had a workaround by downloading the tracks on Rhapsody’s client and then transferring them over using MediaMonkey (another music management app that supports PlaysForSure devices) or even using Windows Media Player itself, but that didn’t work. When I tried to play the subscription tracks on the Clix 2, they wouldn’t play because of licensing issues, even though transferring the tracks over with WMP is something that other people have vouched for. At least when I tried out the Sandisk Sansa Connect, I was able to listen to Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription tracks both from transferring them to the device from my PC, and from downloading them directly to the Connect over its WiFi connection.

I’d read that the Clix 2, while compatible with PlaysForSure, had some issues with Rhapsody, so I forgave that, even though some people have gotten it to work on their Clix 2s through various methods (that didn’t work for me). But when I tried to put subscription tracks on my Toshiba Gigabeat S, that failed. And I excused that because I tried it at work a while back, and I thought that perhaps something in our firewall was blocking the licensing info or something, even though I’ve been able to play subscription tracks on my laptop just fine from work. I hadn’t bothered to follow up on this at home until last night.

I read that the N95 could play Rhapsody tracks, so I thought I’d try it. Everytime I tried transferring files over, I got “insufficient rights” problems. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software, deauthorizing and reauthorizing both my laptop and the N95 multiple times, I deleted the Rhapsody directory in the Application Data folder, as one of their troubleshooting tips suggested, and tried various other things. I have not once been able to get the subscription tracks onto a portable music device even though I’m paying extra to do so. I shouldn’t have to work so hard to get this stuff working in the first place. Obviously the DRM is a problem, and until they make it absolutely transparent to the user, if they’re going to insist on using this crap anyway, I’m not going to be paying for it.

It’s a shame because I really liked the subscription model, being able to pull up music that I hear about, or remember, or whatever, and usually being able to listen to tracks fully (not a 30-second sample, though I guess now that I think about it, some songs on Rhapsody are limited to 30-sec samples…) right away. I guess I have been thoroughly annoyed at certain albums being “purchase only” and having some albums not even fully available for subscription usage (only a selection of tracks available, often not the popular singles from the album, of course), so that’s another fault I see with subscription models in general. Feh. I have wasted a lot of time trying to make Rhapsody work, a lot more than I think it deserves. It works great if I just listen to it on my little laptop, or even logging on to Rhapsody.com on my iMac and streaming music through the web interface, which I did for a while. But I mainly listen to audio on my portable devices, so seamless listening on my laptop or online doesn’t help me a lot. Plus, I’m paying for the privilege of transferring those tracks over to my portables (up to 3, they claim), and Rhapsody has not delivered. So I’m dumping them very soon.

P.S. Rhapsody doesn’t even provide a way for canceling your subscription online; I checked. I may have been really annoyed with Yahoo Music Unlimited because of their annoying, bloaty software, but they at least had an option for me to cancel my trial subscription directly online, no hassle.