iPhone heaven
I've had my iPhone for about 5 months now. I really like having the
web in my pocket all of the time. But when I take my nightly walk, I
often leave my iPhone behind and bring along my dusty old 3rd generation
iPod. My iPhone, with its smaller memory, never seems to have the
right songs on it. I've tried to make smart playlists that freshen the
iPhone with new tracks while keeping many of the old favorites - but it
always seems that when I'm a couple of miles from home I get a hankering
for a song that just isn't on my iPhone. And so I bring along the big
old iPod. With its 9,000 tracks, it almost always has what I'm looking
for.
I make my living thinking about how to use technology for organizing and discovering music. If I can't keep my iPhone fresh with the music that I want to listen to, then it is probably hard for most other people too. It is just too hard to manage a device that can't hold all my music. So I'm hoping that the next generation iPhone will have much more memory. I'd really like to see the iPod classic combined with the iPhone - 160gb of music would be iPhone heaven.
I've more or less decided that 32GB is the minimum based on the fact that I'm pretty content with the capacity of my current 40GB 4G iPod. Of course if I got a touch or an iPhone I'd take up space with videos and the like too.
Posted by Gordon Haff on May 20, 2008 at 09:18 AM EDT #
Would an alternative be to turn your logic on its head and get along on your walks by thinking and planning what you want to listen to before you set off? It's an extra discipline, I admit, but not one that may have benefits as well as costs.
I get by just fine with a 500 MB iPod Shuffle (my 2G iPod died years ago). Every time the battery needs to be recharged (after about 10 hours of play), I refresh the music on the iPod -- mostly with my latest emusic downloads, plus any new CDs I've acquired recently. Do I have instant access to whatever song I want wherever am I am? Obviously not. But I've found this is quite a satisfactory way, first, to make sure that what's on my iPod doesn't go stale, and, second, to work through my 'in tray' of new music. This works for my tastes and purposes -- others' mileage may vary.
Posted by David Jennings on May 20, 2008 at 08:10 PM EDT #
David: I find that discipline of picking my songs before I take a walk to be too hard. First of all, any extra barrier (the 5 minutes to build a playlist and resync) could potentially derail my exercise completely (ah ... lets make a playlist ... hmm while its syncing lets check boingboing ... oy ... there's an interesting steampunk flashgame .. woah its midnight, time for bed).
A bigger barrier is that I can never pick what I want ahead of time. It's like trying to pick Friday's meal on Sunday at the grocery store. I just can't do it (which is why we often have Pizza or Chinese on Fridays). Tonight is a good example, I started with a tour through my teen years - Rick Wakeman's Journey to the Center of the Earth, and ended up spending the evening scouring through all the live bootlegs of Keith Emerson playing the Moog and torturing the L-100. I probably walked in extra 20 minutes waiting for the Carmina Burana and Bach quotes.
Posted by Paul on May 20, 2008 at 09:03 PM EDT #