This morning, I went out for my morning trip to Wawa to drop $1.27 on a medium chai. Since my return trip would take me within 500 feet of the Apple Store (Sagemore, if you care), I decided to check out the line situation. While I was there, I took a picture and talked to the guys at the front of the line.

In front of the Apple Store, there were about 25-30 people in line, mostly under the cover of umbrellas, some under the awning of neighboring store, Blue Tulip. The 2 guys at the front of the line have been there since 1:00 P.M. on June 28. Ok, not exactly iLoser style, but still, overnight in crappy weather for a phone/iPod/“miracle device” that you’ll be able to stroll in and casually buy in a few days. That’s dedication.

I then took a ride to the other side of the shopping center to check out how things were going at the Cingular, err.. The New Deathstar, err, The New AT&T. Much quieter there.

At AT&T, there were only 5 (empty) chairs, and a few cars with people in various states of consciousness.

What the heck guys? If Apple’s got enough iPhones to give one to every single Apple employee that’s been with the company longer than a year, then I’m quite sure there’s enough to go around.

Darla has this posted on her site. She credits “Joe” for the image.

Wow. Holy half-truths Batman.

While there are technically no lies on that image, it doesn’t really seem to tell the whole tale. Let’s see..

• GPS and turn-by-turn directions – Yes, it’s indeed true, the N95 has a built-in GPS. During the nearly a month that I had an N95 (and no, it wasn’t a proto), I found the GPS nearly useless. It was unbearably slow to lock on. I’m talking like 5 minutes guys. And the turn-by-turn directions – those cost extra.
• Wireless stereo – A2DP is indeed present on the N95 and is missing on the iPhone, at least at launch. Since Nokia was able to add A2DP to recent N73 firmware releases, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to think that we may yet see A2DP on an iPhone software update. Regardless of the device in question, A2DP will drain your battery.
• Second camera for video calling – Since the iPhone is (thus far) only for sale in the US, this is a non-starter. The N95 can only do video calls on a 3G network. The only UMTS band supported in the N95 is 2100 Mhz, not available in the US.
• Video-out port – I believe, like other video-capable iPods that have come before, the video output comes via the headphone jack.
• Removable battery – I’m torn here. Yes, it’s true, the N95’s battery can be swapped, and the iPhone’s cannot be swapped. However, this fails to address the abysmal battery life afforded to N95 users. Less than a day on a single battery? That’s just bad, like on an epic scale.

Kids, there’s room enough for both of you. There are lots of things that both camps can learn from the other.

I’m a big S60 user (work phone is an E65, home phone is an N73). I’m also a fan of Apple products. Neither side has the perfect phone. Fanboi-ism doesn’t help, regardless of what side it’s coming from.

Wow. I’ve got a new definition for “devotion.” You decide to tattoo the logo of your MP3 player on your arm.

I can only hope it’s a joke and photoshopped.

Dude, go outside or something. And next time, wait until something is going to be sticking around before you go tattooing it on yourself, if being stabbed thousands of times is your thing… I’m not even to go into the list of how many ways the iPod is better than the Zune. At this point, it’s been beaten to death so badly, that I’m surprised “Zune” is not synonymous with “bad tech”.

Welcome to the social, indeed.

I loved the N95. I hated the N95. I returned the N95 to the Nokia Flagship Store.

What did I love? The convergence. Extreme Convergence, as Dameon calls it. There was a lot to love about the N95:

• Great camera (and I mean great – the best I’ve ever used on a phone, nearly standalone quality)

• Good music player. For a week or two, I left my iPod at home and listened to my N95. It was nice that it had a 3.5mm jack on the side for “normal” headphones. I never bothered with A2DP.

• Built-in Wifi

• Played video from the N95 on a TV a couple of times. It was neato.

There was also a fair bit of stuff I didn’t like about the N95.

• No Access Point Groups – come on, this one’s so easy to implement (and already done in the E-series phones!) and so useful.

• While the music player worked well, the controls were a bit obtuse, like trying to find the “shuffle” feature for a playlist. You have to actually be playing a playlist before you can tell the device to shuffle it. Seems sort of a ham handed way to do it.

• Slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow GPS lock-on. We’re talking in minutes here. I wound up picking up a Garmin Nuvi, which locks on in about 15 seconds if I’m not driving when I turn it on. If my car’s already moving, it takes about 30 seconds.

• Battery life. This was the true deal breaker for me. I just couldn’t take it. If I was actually using some of the device’s potential (not all either!), my battery was out of juice before the end of the day. What was I doing? IMAP mailbox with auto-retrieve over EDGE or Wifi (30 minute sync interval), talking a bit, playing music on the train (1 hour one way), and a bit of web browsing. Maybe a picture a day, on average.

I had shuffled my devices around a bit to accommodate the N95.. My work phone, the E61 is on loan to a friend traveling in Europe. My work SIM migrated to my N73 Music Edition, and my home SIM went to the N95. After the return? I traded in the N95 and left the Flagship Store with an E65, in which my work SIM lives, sending my home SIM back to the N73 ME.

I’ve got an E65 review coming one of these days. It’s probably 90% positive. The other 10% is stuff that will (hopefully) get resolved with firmware updates.

Clearly, the guys at Motorola have gone off the deep end, lost it, gone ‘round the twist, lost their marbles, gone bonkers or whatever.

Eh? Moto has patented a phone that releases a scent while the user is talking. As if there weren’t enough features on a phone to chew up batteries, now we’ve got to expend power to heat a scent pack too.

I’m so not kidding either. Really, I’m not late for April Fools Day here. I’m particularly fond of the name that Engadget hung on the phone.. The MOTOSNIFR.

So, save your pennies kids, it won’t be long until you’ll be dying for a phone that smells like lilacs or vanilla. Or not.

Big thanks go out to Phil A, who yesterday pointed out to me the method by which music tracks can be shuffled in the N95’s music player.

So, you go into your playlist and start playing it, then go to the menu, choose shuffle and do what comes naturally. It’s shown here..

While this wasn’t a difficult thing to figure out, per se, it wasn’t obvious, at least to me. I guess I’ve been using an iPod for too long. On the iPod, you setup shuffle before you start the playlist, not after.

Phil, good luck on your quest to find the perfect phone too. For the remainder of the population that wasn’t on the phone with the two of us yesterday, Phil’s in search of his ideal phone:

• Works well on Cingular or T-Mobile US (so it needs the 850 Mhz band)
• Good quality phone first
• 3+ MP digital cam with autofocus
• Mini or MicroSD storage
• HSDPA nice, but EDGE would be fine as well
• Wifi not needed
• Bluetooth a must, of course
• Charge/Data over Mini-USB would be ideal

That last one makes most Nokia devices a bit harder to swallow with the big, ugly, gangly Pop-Port interface. Yes, Nokia gives you the cable in the box with the phone (finally!), but it’s still yet another proprietary cable. So, to my former employer from Finland, I’ll say what I’ve been saying ever since I saw the hugeness of the 9500. Mini-USB kids! Dump the stupid proprietary connector that nobody on the planet uses. Also, while I applaud Nokia for only having two charger types (the thick & thin barrels) – and even including free adapters to convert your thick barrel into a thin barrel, it’s time, boys & girls. A single, Mini-USB port for data connection & charging is the wave of the future, at least until we’ve got super cool inductive surfaces on tables that charge devices based on proximity.

Ok, so it’s been about a week since I got my Nokia N95, and wow, it’s quite a phone. Before we go on, I should mention that up until recently, I was employed by Nokia (in the ES group, not Multimedia, where N-series comes from). That ended on March 17. Consider yourselves disclaimed appropriately. I got mine at the Nokia Flagship Store in NY. The $750 pricetag, while steep, was certainly far more palatable than the $1300+ that other stores are offering, not to mention prices upwards of $1000 on eBay. At least the eBay prices have dropped closer to the Nokia store’s pricing in the past few days. When I got mine, however, the prices were still sky-high.

The specs are very impressive. Rather than bore you with all of them, here’s the highlight film:

• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE
• WCDMA on the 2100 Mhz band, with HSDPA
• 802.11g Wifi
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
• Built-in GPS – real GPS, not A-GPS
• 5.0 MP digital cam with auto-focus
• Front cam for video calls in 3G areas (i.e. not the US)
• MicroSD expansion slot
• 3.5mm headphone jack
• Dual-slider (slides one way for the dialing keypad, the other for media playback controls)

For the past couple of trips into NY on the train or the bus, I’ve left my iPod at home, in favor of the music player on the N95. It’s a good player, but lacks certain basic features, like the ability to shuffle the tracks in a playlist. Well, either it lacks that function, or I just can’t find it. Either way, if it’s not able to be found, it might as well not be there, right? Otherwise, it works pretty well. Check out the image above to get an idea of what the interface looks like.

The idle screen is pretty much standard S60 v3, with the standard add-ons you’d expect to see – the wifi wizard, integration with the music player, calendar, etc. As usual, you can customize the soft-keys as well as the applications shown in the middle of the idle screen for quick access.

What’s good? Built-in wifi, SIP stack (which integrates with Asterisk with a bit of manual config, or Gizmo with the help of a little application you can get from the Download! application), S60 v3 FP1 browser, IMAP-IDLE support in the mail part of the Messaging app, support for POP3, IMAP and SMTP with both SSL and TLS, as well as every radio under the sun. The 16 million color QVGA screen is quite nice too.

Also included is a new version of Nokia’s “Barcode” application, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It uses the main camera to read barcodes. You can read the barcode in the sidebar of my site with it. So back to the what’s good about it? It actually seems to work this time around. I’ve got Barcode installed on my N73 Music Edition, and while it works, it’s very hit or miss (mostly miss) when it comes to reading a barcode. On my N73, I feel like a bunch of stars and planets need to be aligned, along with some sort of ritual sacrifice to get a successful barcode read. On the N95, that’s not the case at all — it seems to just work. Things that “just work”, as always, make me happy.

Speaking of just working, iSync. While the N95 isn’t directly supported by iSync, there are 2 sources for plugins to make it a “just works” affair. Nokia has made some plugins available, but I chose instead to go with the plugins from the UK-based S60 Themes site, as their plugins work for a wide variety of devices, not just a 1-plugin, 1-device model, like Nokia’s plugins seem to have done. And as always, PC Suite works as well.

What’s not so good? No US 3G bands (850 & 1900 Mhz), battery life, lack of shuffle features in the music player, very slow GPS lock-in. How bad is the battery life? If all I do is make a few calls and leave my mail connected over either EDGE or wifi, I get a bit over 24 hours. If I mix in some web browsing on top of that, just about a day. Throw in a few hours of time on the music player, and I get about 12 hours total. It ain’t pretty kids, but it’s also not the ugliest I’ve seen.

I was also disappointed to find that while my N95 (and N73 for that matter) both work with my Garmin Nuvi 660 GPS for hands-free calling & caller-id display, they do NOT allow the contacts database to be accessed from the Nuvi. Bummer there.

If you don’t need the wifi and/or GPS, go for the N73 or N73 Music Edition. You’ll save a few bucks, get better battery life, give up a bit of screen size, and have 3.2 MP instead of 5. And you’ll keep a few hundred bucks in your pocket.

Today, EMI announced that their entire catalog will be made available on the iTunes store without DRM. So, you want to just know the deal, rather than read the whole release, eh? Ok, here it is.

• 128k AAC with DRM – $0.99 | € 0.99 | £ 0.79
• 256k AAC without DRM – $1.29 | € 1.29 | £ 0.99

Looks like the Euro folks are still getting a bit hosed, but not too badly.

Yes, that second one is a higher bit rate too. Why? Lots of folks have complained about low bit rates on the iTunes store. Personally speaking, I don’t care about the higher bit rates, but I’m jazzed about freedom to move my music around to devices other than my iPod. Speaking as someone who’s got a Nokia N95 in his future, this will be a big win.

Yes, the price has increase by $0.30, but I’m willing to pay a small premium for keeping all of my fair use rights intact.

Update: I updated the post to reflect the proper bit rate – 256k instead of 224k.

Currently playing in iTunes: (Nothing But) Flowers by Talking Heads

Forget about Mactomster. While it was donationware, it was great, but now that it’s just another overpriced solution, there’s moving on to be done.

Enter super-nice guys from s60themes.co.uk with their brandy-new and free iSync 2.4 plugins. There’s also iSync 2.3 plugins as well for a variety of S60 (mostly N and E series) and even some S40 devices.

Say thanks to the guys there and be thankful!

So last night, I was setting up Heather’s new MacBook, migrating her data from her old PowerBook. It came time to pair her Nokia E50 with the system and setup iSync to sync her phonebook, calendar, etc. Naturally, I went over to the Mactomster website to grab the latest iSync plugin for the E-series devices.

I found that the download links now point to a Store page that offers the plugins for sale for 7.49€ each. Each plugin only seems to serve a single device, rather than the previous model of a plugin serving multiple devices. That’s almost $10 per device.

Suddenly, 9.95€ for the Novamedia plugin doesn’t sound so bad. On the Novamedia side, you pay once for the plugin that works for all supported devices. You don’t have to pay again for a second device.

The only thing I find a bit insulting is the fact that on the Mactomster site, the PayPal button requesting donations is still there. If you’re asking for donations, you shouldn’t be asking people to pay for the plugins. Now that both Heather & I are using the Mactomster plugins, I was planning to donate to support the work. Now, my money will be going to Novamedia to purchase licenses for their plugins, giving greater flexibility.