Back during the 2008 Macworld Convention in San Francisco, I made friends with a guy named JC, who turned out to be the Apple iTunes Content Quality Czar. Once he told me his title at Apple, my first question was about the Beatles and iTunes: our meeting was just on the heels of Apple and the Beatles settling their infamous logo issue, and he assured me that their song catalogue would be up on iTunes “sometime in 2008.” That was two years ago, and still no progress has been made to add the most influential pop group of the 20th century to the world’s most relevant music retail repository. For a long while, other highly influential acts, like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Radiohead, were also holdouts from iTunes. But at the beginning of 2010, only the Beatles remain absent from the ubiquitous iTunes music inventory, and recent comments by the executors of the Beatles brand show no immediate signs of joining the roster.
Continue reading ‘"We Can Work It Out?" 2009 Passes, Still No Beatles on iTunes’
Recently, a friend of mine who produces the Dennis Miller Radio Show told me that he and his crew would be attending the CES electronics trade show in Las Vegas this year. As part of a sponsored publicity stunt with Apple, he told me that they would record, shoot, and edit all of their audio and video interviews using only the iPhone 3Gs. Even though we all know that the iPhone 3Gs’ camera, microphone, and editing apps cannot measure up to professional-grade equipment, the sheer boldness of this promotion only further proves that the iPhone 3Gs is the Swiss Army Knife of the 21st century.
For my part, it took me a while to come around to the usefulness of the iPhone 3Gs and the iPod Touch. At first, the notion of having an onboard .mp3 player on my mobile phone didn’t really impress or appeal to me. After all, I had grown up in the Sony Walkman generation, and for me, the .mp3 player was nothing more than the continuation of an otherwise arcane technology. When I was a kid, it was a great thing to be able to listen to music via headphones on the school bus, while riding my skateboard, or whatever else I was doing. But nowadays I mainly listen to music in the car or on my computer at home. Why would I need an iPhone? Isn’t it just a glorified .mp3 player?
While the apps that you see in the Apple commercials seem fun and novel, it is often the simple, inexpensive accessories for the iPhone and iPod that really transform them from being a quirky gadget into a useful device that can improve your job or school performance, shrink your DVD collection, or make listening to music in the car a snap.
Continue reading ‘The Working iPhone: Inexpensive Accessories That Make Your Apple Gadgets Useful’
