I love to travel… I don’t get to head out of town often, but when I do, I need my technology. Being away from my computer for more than a few hours gets me a little twitchy, so road trips have traditionally been hard to deal with. With the iPhone and the almost unmanageable list of applications to choose from, things have gotten much better. I just got back from a road trip from Phoenix, AZ to Long Beach, CA, where Michelle and I stayed on the Queen Mary for an extended party, and my iPhone helped a lot when it came to relaxing and getting things done. Here’s a list of ten must-have iPhone applications for your road trip.
Google Maps
One of the original built-in applications in the iPhone’s OS is the Google Maps app. With it, you can quickly search for your destination and map your route to get there. With your trip all mapped out, you can relax and just check in once in a while for any freeway changes or other details. Of course I’m still waiting for Google to give us turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone for free (yes, I AM that spoiled by Google), but there’s a few (not free) apps out there to try as well. I use Google because it’s incredibly simple and I can jump right to street view to see what the building I’m looking for looks like.
Pandora
My favorite source for streaming music on the web is also my favorite source on my iPhone. What I didn’t know was how useful it could really be on a road trip. I intended to make a note of where in the desert it stopped working, but it just kept working the whole time. Other than a couple times cutting out for about 30 seconds, Pandora streamed brilliantly over AT&T’s 3G network the entire drive. Now if AT&T could just get my phone to reliably make phone calls where I need it to…
Email
Another standard app on most smart phones is an email application and the iPhone has a pretty complete email program and it handles multiple accounts. The thing that I used to hate is coming back home to find thousands of emails to go through. This weekend, I was able to keep up with my two important email accounts and respond to people in a timely manner while removing all the spam from my server to only sync valuable emails when I get home.
TweetDeck
While I tried to enjoy my vacation more than Twitter, I still have thoughts and photos I want to share while out of town. Vacations also offer lots of fun things to tweet about. I’ve tried a few of the top Twitter iPhone apps, but this one is my favorite. Just waiting in line for tickets to the aquarium, I was able to check for new tweets, mentions, and DMs and reply to a couple in just a couple minutes. Then I globally marked the rest as “read”. Easy.
Weather
It’s always important to know the weather where you’re going, and if you’re on a long road trip, this can be tricky. When we drove to Detroit and back last summer, we passed through several states and the weather app was very useful to plan out our wardrobe as well as touristy events.
Safari
Despite the completely unexplainable fact that I still can’t view flash in a web site in Safari on my iPhone, it’s still a great browser. It’s pretty fast and renders very nicely. Best of all, it’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to a real web browsing experience on a phone (except sites with flash). Wireless access in many hotels will run you about ten bucks a day and in the Queen Mary, it didn’t matter because I got almost no wifi signal in my room. Browsing the web over 3G in my room was a huge convenience on many occasions.
Gazette
I read a lot of blogs. I try to stay on top of industry news and events and still read blogs of colleagues and influential bloggers. I could lock down an hour in my room to do this on the laptop, but then I wouldn’t be vacationing, would I? Instead, I prefer to skim my preferred feeds in the frequent spare moments when I’m waiting for Michelle to get ready, the elevator is taking forever, or, dare I say it… the bathroom. Catching up in these otherwise wasted spare minutes leaves that hour free for vacationing.
Camera
I have a digital camera and it takes better pictures than my iPhone, but it also runs on AA batteries, is inconvenient to tote around, and lacks the luxury of instant sharing. With the iPhone’s camera, I can snap off a shot any time and I can take thousands before I run out of space. There’s tons of ways to share my photos, from the Facebook or MySpace apps to Twitter apps to Flickr apps like the one mentioned below. Additionally, with the 3G S, I was able to shoot video, which I found myself doing a lot more on this trip.
FlickIt
One of the apps I use the most, vacationing or not, is FlickIt. It just uploads your photos right to your Flickr account. You can add detailed information and tags to each photo, but I usually just do that later from a PC. The only thing missing is the ability to upload videos to my Flickr account. Then it would be perfect.
WiFiTrak
WiFi is almost always a better option than 3G in terms of speed, but when you travel, you often have to wait until you’re at the hotel or near a hot spot and even then, it will usually cost enough to make you grimace a bit. One way around this is to leech off someone else’s WiFi. Just fire up this app and find a suitable (and open) connection and use it. As seen here, you won’t always find an open router, but when one is nearby it helps to have a fast way of knowing and connecting to it.
Bonus : RDP
What if that piece of information, email, phone number, etc is only available to you from your home or office computer? This happened to me over the weekend. I can’t think of a better test case. Servers were about to be moved and I needed quick access to some IP addresses that were in a list only on my computer at the office. I was on the beach with no other electronics than my phone, but I opened the RDP app and connected to my computer at the office, got the information I needed, and went back to enjoying the beach. The alternative would have been to catch a cab, get back to the hotel, fire up the laptop and pay for the WiFi access. I have only needed this app twice and it could use a little bit of tweaking, but both times it was a life saver.
I’m no DJ, but I know cool tech when I see it, and when I was sent a Tonium Pacemaker to review, I had a good feeling I’d like it. The Pacemaker is essentially a music player with dual outputs, a large hard drive, and mixing capabilities crammed into a tiny package. It’s like a DJ’s travel kit. Having mostly no clue how to really DJ, I decided to enlist the help of local musician and club DJ, Brian Forge for this review.
It’s got the look
Part of being a DJ is your image and who doesn’t want hardware that looks cool? From the pacemaker itself right down to every detail of the packaging, Tonium put out a great looking product. When you open the box, everything in it is in it’s own special place and in it’s own smaller black box, including the user manual which is also black and made to look cool. This thing oozes cool every step of the way. The Pacemaker is all black and it’s small… like, cell phone small. Well, maybe a little bigger than my iPhone, but for DJ equipment, that’s not much of a footprint.
Immediately noticeable are the two main components of the Pacemaker on its face: the display on top and the touch control on the bottom. The color display packs in a lot of information while you’re mixing, and looks pretty good. The touch interface is pretty smooth after you figure it out. Before you figure it out, it’s pretty frustrating trying to make anything happen, but it doesn’t take long to learn. Between the display and the touch pad is a touch slider to control the blending of the left and right tracks and with it are some more controls. On the side is a button that you can slide up for the headphone output. One end has the output and power jacks while the other end has the power button, a menu button, and the USB port. Inside this tiny package they’ve crammed a 60GB hard drive and I’ve seen other reviews with claims of 120GB drives.
The software and community Speaking of the internal hard drive, that’s where the software for your laptop or desktop is kept. No CD needed. Just plug the Pacemaker in and it prompts you to install the mix software on your PC. Don’t try it on Windows 7 RC1, though, because Brian did and it did not play very nice. It’s not an official release of the OS, so I didn’t expect it to. On XP, however, the software installed and offered some pretty cool features. It did have some problems dealing with us loading up the same track multiple times and trying to overlap it, but it also smartly prevented us from adding conflicting affects to the same spot on the timeline. The software, like the Pacemaker, is well-designed and has a lot to offer the rising DJ.
Better still is the mix community. Tonium is plans for this device to not replace all the expensive pro equipment, but rather to provide an open doorway for amateur DJs and those of us who just want to play. One of the great things about the device is that, aside from the obvious loading of tracks onto the Pacemaker, you can import and export mixes, completely layered with the cue points and blends you or another mixer created. So let’s say you throw down an awesome mix and you’re proud of it and want to share. You can export the mix to your computer and upload it to the mix site where others can listen, download and rate it. How’s that for community interaction? If it’s good enough, your mix might get featured and linked to from the newsletter. The mix site is a great idea that will surely help some newbies feel more comfortable with the Pacemaker.
Forge to the rescue
When found this thing in my mail box, my first thought was of how cool it was and if I could keep it (sadly, no), and my second thought was, “I’m not a DJ. How am I going to really review the capabilities of this thing?” So I called in a DJ. Brian Forge has been DJing for a long time and has been asked to guest DJ in other cities and over the weekend, he was nice enough to drop by the office for a few hours and try out the Pacemaker.
The Pacemaker is a great little piece of equipment. It features many, if not more, features than you find with standard CDJ units. All the basics are covered and there are many other FX available to play with. The interface does take some time to get used to though. I only had a short time to familiarize myself with the features and functions but as I caught on, I was able to navigate rather well. I could easily see myself using this while traveling. Whether to practice certain mixes, experiment with ideas, or even practicing and keeping myself entertained, this would come in handy. I do feel there are certain limitations though. I was not impressed with the way their cue system is set up. It makes it difficult to properly set cue points. It is a bit cumbersome to navigate a track once you set a cue point and even more difficult to reset one once it is laid. As with CDJs, you can only lay down one cue point at a time. Because navigation is a bit tricky, controllerism is a moot point with the Pacemaker. You will not be able to scratch or bring in FX on the fly. You have to hit the switch, and perform the most accurate of finger movements to just bring up the right FX, let alone control them. However the touch interface does seem to work well for basic DJing. Especially the crossfader. With proper practice, the sensitivity allows for some clean and accurate cutting between tracks.
Overall, I think this is an amazing little device. The limitations I have seen I believe are purely because of how hard it is to pack everything in to such a small, sleek little package. I definitely see myself wanting to pick one up as a “toy” and as a backup device, should my primary decks fail. I could easily see this being used by DJs on the road, by rising DJs honing their skills on the fly, and even people that host parties who want a DJ without going through the effort of hiring a professional.
Thanks, again, to Brian for his insight.
Conclusions
The first thing I think about is the price. It’s not exactly cheap, but it’s not expensive by comparison, either. For an aspiring DJ, it’s a pretty good price and a nice portable device. For a pro, it’s a great travel companion, like Brian said. If nothing else, you could save a mix and DJ a party at the drop of a hat. The usefulness of it seems to stop just short of professional needs, but is pretty complete for a beginner and I really enjoyed the amount of attention Tonium payed to details ever step of the way. Definitely worth the money if you have it to spare.
Pandora.com, for those unaware, is a site that allows you to listen to the music you like while suggesting new music. The only downside is that I had to go out and buy a bunch of new music I ended up liking. They even have an iPhone app, so I can listen in the car and jack it right into my auxiliary input. It’s a great service and it’s free (mostly) until now.
Thanks to some new(ish) royalties legal magic, they’ve had to dance around with Capitol Hill to find a decent solution that involves money exchanging hands for this copyrighted material. To summarize the email below, you can either pay for the $36/yr premium (ad-free, high-quality) service or pay about a buck if you listen to more than 40 hours in a month. Really? Seriously? That’s not bad. I’m fine with paying the $0.99 for being a power listener. Are you?
Hi, it’s Tim -
I hope this email finds you enjoying a great summer Pandora soundtrack.
I’m writing with some important news. Please forgive the lengthy email; it requires some explaining.
First, I want to let you know that we’ve reached a resolution to the calamitous Internet radio royalty ruling of 2007. After more than two precarious years, we are finally on safe ground with a long-term agreement for survivable royalty rates – thanks to the extraordinary efforts of our listeners who voiced an absolute avalanche of support for us on Capitol Hill. We are deeply thankful.
While we did the best we could to lower the rates, we are going to have to make an adjustment that will affect about 10% of our users who are our heaviest listeners. Specifically, we are going to begin limiting listening to 40 hours per month on the web. Because we have to pay royalty fees per song and per listener, it makes very heavy listeners hard to support on advertising alone. Most listeners will never hit this cap, but it seems that you might.
We hate the idea of capping anyone’s usage, so we’ve been working to devise an alternative for listeners like you. We’ve come up with two solutions and we hope that one of them will work for you:
* Your first option is to continue listening just as you have been and, if and when you reach the 40 hour limit in a given month, to pay just $0.99 for unlimited listening for the rest of that month. This isn’t a subscription. You can pay by credit card and your card will be charged for just that one month. You’ll be able to keep listening as much as you’d like for the remainder of the month. We hope this is relatively painless and affordable – the same price as a single song download.
* Your second option is to upgrade to our premium version called Pandora One. Pandora One costs $36 per year. In addition to unlimited monthly listening and no advertising, Pandora One offers very high quality 192 Kbps streams, an elegant desktop application that eliminates the need for a browser, personalized skins for the Pandora player, and a number of other features: http://www.pandora.com/pandora_one.
If neither of these options works for you, I hope you’ll keep listening to the free version – 40 hours each month will go a long way, especially if you’re really careful about hitting pause when you’re not listening. We’ll be sure to let you know if you start getting close to the limit, and we’ve created a counter you can access to see how many hours you’ve already used each month.
We’ll be implementing this change starting this month (July), I’d welcome your feedback and suggestions. The combination of our usage patterns and the “per song per listener” royalty cost creates a financial reality that we can’t ignore…but we very much want you to continue listening for years to come.
Please don’t hesitate to email me back with your thoughts.
Michael Jackson has been with me, musically, my whole life. As a child, I listened to his songs on the radio and watched as he transformed into the “King of Pop”. I remember every media-covered event of his life and career, good or bad. His life was a legacy of firsts and his music will undoubtedly live on forever. To some, Michael Jackson will be the greatest musician they’ve ever heard. Today, Tweetdeck made that familiar little chirping noise to indicate that an update was posted from an account I follow. It was @CNNbrk, announcing that Michael Jackson had just been rushed to the hospital in cardiac arrest. I retweeted the news with a link to the story. Shortly after, people began to speculate and the word had already begun buzzing about the news. Then TMZ announced his death (I’m told they announced it before he actually died). Then other sources slowly began to confirm his death until it was finally confirmed moments ago by an L.A. county coroner. Here’s the timeline of reports from @CNNbrk:
As all this happened, the internet buzz about the story quickly built up to monumental proportions. The celebrity gossip new site, TMZ reported that social media sites were crawling at a snails pace and that Jackson’s death brought the internet to a grinding halt. A little curious myself, I decided to see how many tweets were floating around Twitter about the horrible news.
I headed over to Twitter’s search page and searched “Michael Jackson” Then I watched as the number of new tweets just grew and grew. After about 20 minutes, there had already been over 50,000 new tweets and as I type this, it just broke 60,000. We are in an information era. These social media sites are quickly becoming the fastest source of breaking news. One thing this tells us for sure is that Michael Jackson’s death has been a shock to the world and the world has been and is still letting their voice be heard.
One of the cutest little gadgets I’ve gotten in my mailbox is the Speakal iBoo, a little speaker, shaped like a ghost and available in red, white or blue. The one they sent out was blue and has become device number two that my wife claimed as her own on sight.
What’s in the box?
It can be frustrating to find the right speaker system to match not only your needs, but also the connection requirements of the device providing the music. It’s worse when you upgrade from one iPod to the next just to find that the new one doesn’t fit in the speaker system you already own. A lot of systems that are geared towards iPods take this into consideration and so does the iBoo. It comes with a bunch of adapters to make any iPod fit. One difference here is that they provide a prying wedge to remove the attached iPod adapter and replace it with another one. It also comes with a kind of cap for when you don’t want any adapter.
Also in the box is an audio cable, the power adapter, user manual, and a small remote control. The remote is a nice addition. Although not necessary, the remote could be handy when you place the iBoo on a shelf or otherwise not easily within reach. The remote also has more functions on it than the iBoo, itself, so it’s good to have even when the iBoo is right next to you.
Appearances aren’t everything, but…
Honestly, of the three colors they offer, blue would be my preference, but I also think any decent sound system should come in sleek black, silver or titanium. That’s just my opinion, and apparently, blue isn’t all that bad, either. Michelle took her new iBoo in to the office to replace her existing stereo speakers and it was, as I’m told, the talk of the office, briefly. Everyone loved it. It is pretty cute, and the design is sleek enough, even in blue. The most thoughtful aspect of the design is that it doesn’t really have any protruding buttons or controls. The play/pause and volume controls are easy to find if you’re looking and not too easy to see if you’re not looking. They’re part of the iBoo’s surface, so you just have to touch the right area on iBoo to control the audio in various ways. It’s not like some small controls sticking out of iBoo would make much of a difference, but it’s the little details that count, sometimes.
How is it as a sound system?
Something that I always fear with devices that are made to fit a theme like this is that they focus too much on making it look cute and not enough on making it sound good. Luckily, that’s not so here. Speakal offers up a system that looks cute and sounds good too. I already mentioned that it takes all the iPods as input but I also mentioned an included audio cable. That cable is for the auxiliary input so you can hook up a game system, stereo, television, etc. Where it failed was with my iPhone. When I plugged the iPhone in, it displayed a message on the screen indicating that the device wasn’t made to work with an iPhone. It’s not the first device that has been rejected by my iPhone and I’m sure it won’t be the last, but it’s worth noting. Michelle pointed out that you can’t grab it by the top (because of the touch sensitive controls) to turn it off, although that seems like a minor inconvenience.
Conclusions
iBoo is supposed to be cute, but I want one in black or titanium and I want it to work with my iPhone, but did prove itself as device that can easily please an office crowd and it sounds good. For the money (about $80), it’s a great way to free your music from your standard ear buds or replace larger speakers for more desk space. They also have iPanda and iPig, but I’m holding out for iNinja.
