While walking home this evening from the light rail stop I heard the most interesting criticism of the iPad anyone has mentioned yet:

It doesn’t even have a DVD player.

Listening to the concerns of people who don’t make their living around software or technology can sometimes be quite enlightening.

What’s the deal with the ObamaNews tweet about buying old iPod nanos?

I for some reason looked up the cost of an iPhone from Movistar, the dominant cell phone carrier in South America, and found that it was quite high. In my experience nearly everyone in Ecuador uses prepaid cell minutes and monthly plans are pretty much non-existent. The purchase price of a new 16 gigabyte iPhone on a prepaid “plan” from Movistar is nearly $900. When the per capita income of the country is $7,242 that spells capital O-U-C-H.

I just got this in an email advertising face to face training available at the apple store.  Apparently she could really use it because it’s going to be hard to use that MacBook Air with it facing the wrong direction…

I was playing around, changing the music to this iPod commercial and I came up with this.  Feel free to share your thoughts.  I think it kind of channels “iPod nanos of doom”

Nanochromatic [Justice Remix] from Joshua J. Campoverde on Vimeo.

I saw that iTunesU went up a while ago and I think it’s really cool that iTunes is making the distribution of these materials even easier than it already is.  There is actually a ton more material available available on http://ocw.mit.edu, but this is a great way to broaden the audience for MIT’s course materials.  It’s just weird to see myself in the streaming video of the 3.091 Intro to Solid State Chemistry lectures on iTunes.  I definitely never thought while I was taking that class that someday my notetaking and mid-class joking around might one day be streamed to the world via iTunes.

I recently got this promo from apple via email and just thought it was cool that MIT is right there in the center of it  .

iTunes U Ad

AppleInsider just released this article stating that Apple has announced they will extend the subscription of all .mac/MobileMe customers by one additional month as an offering for the inconvenience and downtime caused by the less-than-smooth launch of MobileMe.  I’m still very disappointed that the previously announced file-sharing features that were supposed to make distributing large files among family and friends a much smoother and easier process have no been included.  As this one month MobileMe extension doesn’t apply to people on trial subscriptions I hope Apple gets this feature included in an update to the service and they do it soon.  I joined the MobileMe trial specifically to use this file sharing feature and will be disappointed if I don’t have a chance to try it out before my trial runs out.

we’re about an hour and a half away now from the much anticipated (at least on my part) WWDC Keynote in San Francisco. I’m thinking the last thing to be mentioned will be anything regarding the iPhone, which has all the hype on the internet during the lead up, but I also think there is the possibility that there could be a pretty good revision to possibly every product in the Apple product catalog. I’m hoping for new macbook designs (I could use a new laptop pretty bad about now, I still love my Powerbook G4 though) and for the new iPhone much like everyone else. I’m really really hoping the new iPhone, if ever announced will be available for sale soon (like today). I’m pretty confident this will happen though, which I demonstrated by selling my current iPhone this past friday. Fortunately, should Steve not announce a new iPhone, the stock market is based on expectation, and when Apple’s stock tanks as a result, I can put the money I got for my iPhone into the company and recoup my losses on the next rise!

Have fun tracking the keynote everybody .

I’ve had an iPhone now since just after it was released, and aside from my usual apple fanboyness I really do think it’s a great phone, definitely the best phone I’ve ever used. Yes, I was a bit disgruntled when apple announced the $200 iPhone price drop last week, but honestly, anybody who bought an iPhone, you knew what you were getting into, you knew the price would come down at some point, so get over it, you got to be cool for a couple months at least. I wasn’t surprised by the price drop itself but more by the magnitude of the drop. I would have been impressed with just a $100 drop.

Anyways, on to my biggest gripe about the iPhone since I got it. The headphones. That’s it the headphones, not the interface, not the EDGE network, or anything else, just the headphones. Really Apple, you could have done better, you should have done better. The headphones just aren’t quite up to snuff with Apple design. There are too issues with these headphones that drive me crazy: The lack of some type of cord management to keep the headphones from getting tangled when you throw them in your pocket, backpack, etc. and the square shape of the microphone on the headphone cord.

At first it seems obvious that cord management doesn’t work on these headphones (I’m talking about the little sliding piece of plastic where the headphone cords split that helps keep them from getting tangled when you’re not using them) beacuse the mic on the headphone cable is in the way of a would slider. After a ten second brainstorming session we arive on the idea of some time of rubber or elastic material that could (expand and) slide over the on cable microphone and keep the cords from getting tangled. If you haven’t noticed this cord tangling this is ridiculously annoying to me, I have to deal with it every time i walk in and out of a class and want to start listening while walking around campus. This cord untangling user experience just doesn’t fit with the rest of user experiences apple aims to provide with their products.

The second issue is somewhat related. The shape of the on cable microphone has squared ends. This causes issues when the square end of the cable gets caught on something, say the edge of the desk you’re sitting at, and yanks the headphones out of your ears. Not only is this annoying, it can actually be a bit painful. Just rounding the ends of this microphone would have allowed the mic to slide past anything it now gets caught on and avoided this problem entirely, as well as making it easier to provide some means of keeping the headphone cords from tangling when you store them.

Now that I’ve explained what I hate about the iPhone headphones I have to say that they’re great. The sound quality of these earbuds is great, they’re very comfortable, and the bass response and general sound quality is excellent. I’ve actually had people tell me that calls sound clearer when I speak though the mic on the headphone cable, and it’s easier for me to hear the conversation that way too. So the headphones sound great, I just would like apple to clean up these little details in their headphone design for the next iPhone release, however soon/distant that may be. I guess soon.

step 1 – write a blog post about an iPhone commercial titled “there’s never been”

step 2 – watch the spam roll in…

Right now I’m in the middle of finishing up my last week here at microsoft.  Overall it’s been quite a good experience.  I’ve learned a lot about software development, and I’ve gotten to see the world’s largest development environment first hand.

I’m not quite sure what my future in development holds, but I think it’s all gonna work itself out in the end.

As for the immediate future, I’ve gotta get my work stuff organized, pack up my place and ship it up to boston for my return to MIT, and then I’m off to Hawaii next week for vacation.