Hasta La Gadget!

The third iteration of iPhone software doesn’t just add features (more here) like copy and paste. There’s a lot new going on in terms of usability and interface that every non-power user will appreciate.

Search Everything With Spotlight
Instead of digging through 10 screens for your apps, search them out just like in OS X through Spotlight.

Upgrade Applications Within Applications
Now, apps can solicit your business through in-app prompts. A game developer could offer to sell you more levels and a magazine could add issues to your subscription. The implementation could be annoying, like shareware and absurd microtransactions, or useful, seeing as you can buy desired upgrades within the application, bypassing the App Store when it’s unnecessary.

Use Custom Accessory Controls
New custom applications can be designed to work with specific accessories. Your iPhone can become the control panel for any participating manufacturer’s device.

Navigate Google Maps In Any Participating App, Along With Turn By Turn Directions
Do you like Yelp but you hate leaving Yelp to go to the proper Google Maps? Now that developers can embed Google Maps directly into their applications, complete with pinch zoom functionality, hopefully these days of inconvenience will be over—especially when coupled with new turn by turn directions support.

Cutting, Copying and Pasting Now Possible
Sounds simple enough. Double tap text to bring up cut/copy/paste options and drag left or right to expand your selection. Double tap again to paste, or shake the phone to undo. Since CC&P is part of the core software, it should work in all apps that want to use it.

Email Multiple Pictures At Once
Thanks to CC&P, users can copy multiple pictures and then paste them in an email to send all together. We don’t have a nifty photo of this just yet.

Write Emails/SMS in Landscape Mode
Before, you had to use a third party application to write emails in landscape mode. Now, the wide keyboard comes to all core iPhone applications.

Send Photos and Audio Over MMS
The iPhone gets photo and voice recording support for multimedia messaging. Plus, you can forward messages and stuff, too.

Stream Music In Stereo Over Bluetooth
This small distinction snuck in amongst the bigger announcements, but the new software will allow Bluetooth audio to stream in non-gimped, A2DP stereo audio. This should be great for peripherals/accessories.

No, Apple did not reskin the iPhone UI, but they did make a few handfuls of little tweaks, many of which we’ll end up using on a daily basis.

Apple’s updated its Wi-Fi router and backup drive combo, Time Capsule, with a guest mode and simultaneous dual-band wireless. I was pretty surprised at how wireless performance has increased, too.

Before I start explaining little things like speed, it’s important to understand that the main reason why Time Capsule is cool is that it’s the most easy to use device lazy Mactards like myself can back up their machine to. To do so, you just run a OS X Leopard program called Time Machine, which finds your Time Capsule—or any locally connected hard drive—and uses it as a backup HDD. Every day, more or less, by wireless or wired network, Time Machine (the software) and Time Capsule (the Wi-Fi router with a HDD in it) will continue to log changes you’ve made to your data. The physical drive inside comes in 1TB or 500GB capacities, and is a server drive rated for continous 24/7 use for quite awhile. [UPDATE: Jason just reminded me that last year, some people found the drives in the old Time Capsule to be rated for as a network server drive, but also, for consumer machines. So it’s not as robust as some drives you’d find in, say, a data center.] Last fall, the Time Capsule saved my butt when my laptop’s drive died overnight. Miraculously, after dropping in a new HDD, the OS X install discs asked me if I wanted to restore from a previous Time Capsule/Machine backup, and ended up losing only 2 hours of data. Two hours!

There’s more on the Time Machine and Capsule relationship in our intial walkthrough review.

So, if you want Mac backup in one simple unit, there is no better solution than a Time Capsule. And this one is slightly improved over the last. But unlike a year ago when the first generation drive came out, there are other options that are slightly cheaper. More on these later, after the TC performance tests.

First, let’s look at the improvements Apple has made in this hardware and to the previous generation’s via firmware.

• Dual Band: Two radios instead of one so you can run in 802.11n on both the 5GHz frequency (very fast, although not as interference or wall/door resistant as 2.4GHz) and on 2.4GHz, while older devices with 802.11b or g simply run on the 2.4 band. The last generation of Time Capsule had both band options, but you had to choose one, and that meant almost always choosing 2.4GHz for max compatibility. Having dual channels—which show up as separate Wi-Fi access points but are on the same network—gives you another lane to drive in while the one is saturated with media streaming, a backup or giant file transfers. Somehow, the new antennas are 6DB stronger than the previous antennas, according to the AP Grapher program.

This resulted in an outdoor walking test of about 100 feet of usable range vs 70 for the old unit, about 30% in a sparse area with few other Wi-Fi signals around. (I tested using the 5GHz N mode on both Time Capsules, and 2.4GHz mode on the second band on the new Time Capsule. In the above chart, you can see the DB ratings, with closer to zero being stronger. In the chart, the SSID “APL-N” is the old Time Cap, and “Network” is the old WRT54AG Linksys router.)

The computers connected to the Time Capsule’s N network at between 300 and 270mbits per second. I sent some a file—a 150MB 1080p quicktime trailer to JJ Abram’s new Star Trek movie—over the network to a computer on the same type of wi-fi connection and found the new Time Capsule to be slightly faster than the old one and even faster than a top-line Linksys router.

*Shorter times are better.

*One caveat on the newer Linksys WRT610N results—Jason Chen helped me test the new Linksys which he has at his house: The wi-fi congestion in his area is undoubtedly greater in his urban living space, compared to the cabin in the woods where I tested. I’d expect the score to be closer if not on par with the Time Capsule in the woods.

• Remote Disk: If you’ve got Apple’s useful $100 per year Mobile Me service, you can access the data on your Time Capsule’s drive from anywhere you’ve got an internet connection, without knowing your IP address.

Mobile Me‘s service keeps track of the Time Capsule’s address and passes it onto your machines that are registered with the service. It shows up as a drive on your Finder’s side bar. Handy! But testing showed that the drive did not always show up on remote machines, and there’s no clear way to force the remote drive to mount.

• Guest Mode: Guest mode is extremely simple, creating a different network SSID and security key (optional) on the 2.4GHz band, while keeping the other two access points for your personal use. It separates the network from all your private network’s disks, computers, and shared resources by using a different subnet. Guest mode does not include things we’d like to see, like a way to throttle guest bandwidth. It’s not an important or useful feature, unless you’re making a habit of letting people you don’t trust use your internet. Unlike the Mobile Me remote disk function, guest mode is not a feature available to the old Time Machine by software update.

As before, the Time Capsule also has a USB port which can be used to plug in a second disk or printer, which can be shared on the network. I did not test the USB port with a printer, but our previous tests showed this function to be buggy at times. Using Time Capsule with a secondary storage device is not a bad idea, because Time Machine backups cannot be size limited; they’ll use whatever disk space you have available to store the incremental changes in case you want to restore a file’s version from a specific date in history. Time Machine backup software can also bog down the network when doing a backup, saturating the airwaves. Other machines in the house can now use the second SSID in such a case, but we also recommend Time Machine Editor, a third-party program that allows you to schedule backups whenever you want them. I use it to schedule backups at 1am when I’m usually not working. (These are annoying shortcomings of Time Machine software, and so not something we can blame the Time Capsule hardware entirely for. Not entirely.)

As before, Time Capsule has one ethernet port for your internet connection, and three gigabit ethernet jacks. That’s one too few, in my book.

The unit runs very quietly, and sometimes you can hear the disks spinning up or seeking data, but its quiet enough for the notoriously anti-cooling-fan Steve Jobs. The unit’s top runs, according to my heat sensor gun, between 100 and 120 degrees. It’s warm, so I wouldn’t rest anything on it, which would exasperate the heat build up.

Time Capsule is $500 for a 1TB and $300 for 500GB of storage. That’s not a ton of storage for high-end machines these days, and multiple machines will almost certainly require the 1TB setup if you want to keep a moderately detailed history of your computers’ data changes. As you’d expect from Apple, that’s more than the cost of a 1TB external drive and a nice Wi-Fi router. Unlike when Time Capsule’s first-generation box was released, you have options now.

If you have an AirPort Extreme, you can plug in a USB disk to the port on it for Time Capsule backups. If you want a NAS that can do Time Machine backups but also act as an iTunes music server, this HP media box will do the trick (although won’t act as a Wi-Fi router). Since the new Time Capsule gets a bit more speed and distance out of it radios, and gets the useless guest mode, a refurbished Time Capsule could be a smart budget buy if those things aren’t on your “must have” list. If you’re a PC user, there’s no Windows equivalent of Time Machine back up software included, nor is there a way to use Time Capsule as a remote disk from across the internet, so this product is not for you.

Regardless of my caveats, I just prefer the Time Capsule to these options as it fits a lot of back up functionality and network performance in one box.

Top wireless performance

Server grade hard drive…maybe

Quiet

Easiest backup hardware ever for lazy mac users

Mobile Me remote disk function

Costs a bit more than separate Wi-Fi routers with a USB drive plugged in

Guest mode can’t throttle down bandwidth

Remote disk doesn’t always mount

PC Support is non existent for back up and remote disk

Are you secure in your masculinity, or are you just insecure? Against all odds, the following gadgets will help you retain your manhood while doing extremely wussy things.

Zero buttons. That’s as minimalist as it gets.

Removing all buttons—or to clarify, moving them to the headset—shrinks down the size of the new iPod Shuffle dramatically, but it also creates control problems when running, snowboarding or doing anything other than sitting.

Design
This new iPod shuffle is about half the volume of the previous iPod shuffle. HALF. By moving all the controls from the face onto the headphone cable, Apple was able to reduce the width and thickness to almost 50%, even if the length grew slightly. This wasn’t totally sensible: Although the headphones do offer a comprehensive control scheme, the button position on the headphone cord becomes really difficult to use unless you’re sitting still. It also limits your choice of headphones to the ones Apple gives you, or new shuffle-specific ones made by other manufacturers.

But there’s one point where this shuffle beats the hell out of the previous shuffle, and that’s the audio feedback interface. Apple calls this UI, which speaks to you, VoiceOver. It’s a set of text-to-speech files transparently associated to each track on your iPod that will speak the title and artist of your current song. Hold the button down long enough, and the voice will cycle through all your playlists, one by one, reading the names. Hit it again to jump directly to that playlist.

The player itself is also fine, even if the blank, monolithic face takes a while to get used to (and stop reaching for when you want to change tracks). Yes, it only comes in black and silver, instead of the whimsical shuffle/nano palette we’re used to.

Its front and back are made of aluminum. And just like the nano (and the previous generation shuffle), the edges are a little too sharp. The clip is made out of stainless steel, like the back of the iPod touch and older generation nanos, so it attracts fingerprints and gets scratched up incredibly easily. The front, luckily, does not have this problem.

The package comes with headphones and a three-inch USB connector. Apple’s tendency to remove stuff from the iPod package continues with the removal of the free dock; which is a shame, since you’ll instead be leaving this strewn about your desk, and because it’s so damn tiny, you’ll have probably have a hard time finding it again.

Syncing and Playback
The entire iTunes sync screen is improved. There’s now support for podcasts and playlist syncing. Yeah, you don’t have to use autofill or manually drag tracks and playlists over one by one, because you can now jump between playlists using the VoiceOver feedback system.

These voices, which are generated and synced on the fly when you choose playlists, sound pretty great, assuming you have Mac OS X Leopard. Those who do will get to take advantage of “Alex”, the newer text-to-speech voice shipped in the OS. If you’re on Windows, or if you ever want to use the 13 languages other than English, you’ll default to the VoiceOverKit downloadable pack that comes with iTunes 8.1. Even the supposedly lousier TTS agent works decently enough, because these are your songs and you should be able to at least guesstimate what artist/track it is. But Alex prounounces stuff like “Yeah Yeah Yeahs” and “Jamiroquai” correctly, whereas the other one (a lady’s voice) doesn’t.

Voice data is fairly small, with 400MB worth of songs only taking up about 20MB of voice track data. That’s going to be about 175MB of voice data if you fill up all 3.5GB of usable space.

I tested actual Chinese and Japanese track names and artist names and they all came out sounding correct, if a bit robotic. You can override language selections by song or globally if you want all your music to be read back to you in the English voice—for example, if you have a bunch of classical music labeled in Italian. But if you have a mix and match song, with a Japanese title and an English artist name, the iPod will pronounce everything using the Japanese voice, including the English portion. Which is funny if you’re an ass (like me) that gets a chuckle from non-native English speaker accents.

The 255-character limit to song and artist fields still applies, so you can’t shove lyrics or eBooks in there and expect your iPod to read them back to you. And blank data in both fields results in complete silence; it doesn’t say “untitled track” unless the track name is actually “untitled track.”

It does say other things, however, including its battery status, if you flick the hold switch off and on again. This chart displays the possible blinks and audible alerts.

As for the shuffle’s sound quality, since the shuffle only works with the included headphones and not any other regular set of headphones, we ran a couple playback tests as best we could. The frequency response, using a specially-encoded frequency sweep MP3, was decent but not phenomenal. The start of the sweep was at 16Hz, and we couldn’t hear anything until half a second later when it got above 50Hz. It definitely peaked well under 20KHz (probably close to 16KHzish), but some of that could be due to my own high frequency hearing loss. And, because these headphones are quite lousy. When I compared frequency response to the old shuffle and to the nano with the same earphones, they were all about equal.

Max volume definitely was louder on this shuffle than the 2G version. It wasn’t quite as loud as the latest iPod nano, but it was damn close. Again, since we could only use the default headphones to test, there wasn’t any real difference in audio quality, even with high-quality 320kbps MP3s.

We’re also going to check whether or not the 10-hour battery life claim is accurate, but Apple themselves claim that it’s down from 12 hours in the previous generation.

Usage
Because the shuffle’s now only half as wide as the old one, the clip is only about half as strong. There’s less surface area, and it’s no longer jagged—it’s just two bits of metal on top of each other. There’s still quite a bit of strength in it, but you’ll be able to yank it off from your jeans using just the headphone cable, so it could mean trouble.

Since one of the major uses of the shuffle is for exercise, we had to take it on a 30-minute run, testing usability in active conditions. Although the clip is fine, the controls are pretty crappy. The stock headphones suck because the controls are up on the right hand cord, up near the ear. You pause, forward, rewind and seek by hitting the middle button in various ways. This is fine when you’re sitting, but when you’re running, it’s really hard to hold your arm still up in that awkward position to change tracks. And when you’re really tired, your arms start flailing and it’s very, very difficult to not yank the earbud out of your ear when you’re changing songs.

Here’s the solution. Apple should move the controls down to where the two earbud cords split. It’s much more convenient down there, plus lefties wouldn’t have to suck it up and use their right hand. This major problem might get fixed by one of the major headphone manufacturers releasing their own compatible pairs. I’d pay $100 for a good pair that doesn’t have the controls placed in a lousy place, or maybe even has larger controls on the cable.

I don’t have a pair of snowboarding gloves, but I do have a pair of regular gloves, and when using the shuffle with them on, it’s hard to feel where the groove of the play/pause button stops and the volume +/- buttons start. It would be much worse for even thicker gloves that offer zero tactile feedback. But on the bright side, the body itself is at least as water-resistant as the old shuffle. Probably even more so, since there are fewer cracks and openings for water to leak into.

So where’s this all headed? If Apple wasn’t so absolutely married to the fact that physical controls need to be in a trademark click-wheel shape, they could have easily spread out the five play/next/prev/vol. up/vol. down buttons along the smooth face of the shuffle. But they didn’t.

There’s also a limit to how much smaller the shuffle can go. I wouldn’t expect such a dramatic decrease next time around. In fact, I predict a re-emergence of the wheel, so that the entire player is thinner, but squarish with only the wheel on the front. After all, the previous generation’s wheel wasn’t even a real wheel anyway because you couldn’t actually scroll with it by thumbing around in a circle. Apple seems to enjoy alternating between different design shapes in their iPod nano (2G nano was thin, 3G nano was fat, 4G nano was thin) line, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility that they’re going to do this with the shuffle as well.

If you need something like this for exercise, or if you just hate the fact that there are no buttons on this one, buy the last-gen shuffle before they’re all gone, or wait till next year when Apple changes its mind. To tell the truth, this new shuffle is just okay. We don’t know what kind of a statement they were trying to make with it, but suffice it to say, the message wasn’t received. [Apple]

VoiceOver text-to-speech feedback is neat, and improves usability dramatically

New 4GB storage means more songs for about the same price

Half the size of the previous generation shuffle

Default headphones have the controls placed in an awkward position on the cord

Battery life has decreased from 12 hours to 10

It’s very difficult to work the in-line controls while running or wearing thick gloves

You can only use proprietary headphones, or buy one of the as-of-yet unreleased adapters

Like a predatory loan officer or an unstable partner, technology companies have an obsession with locking you down. Here are some of the worst examples of proprietary products that leave you trapped, broke and angry.

The iPod Plug

While it in some ways seems like an example of a proprietary technology done right (it’s solid, supports lots of connection types and has become basically ubiquitous), Old 30-Pin has quite a bit to feel bad about. Consider this: It single-handedly obliterated the non-iPod accessory market. Almost every MP3 player dock, FM transmitter or interfacing device supports this port exclusively—or with some feeble aux plug (cable not included) in the rear. And why shouldn’t they? There are more 30-pin-jack iPods out there than there are all other MP3 players combined.

But it means Apple is stuck. An abrupt switch would be a disaster for third parties and customers alike (consider the outcry when the iPhone 3G wasn’t compatible with some older 30-pin accessories) and it’s not clear what they could switch to. Micro-USB probably doesn’t have enough pins for all the various functions the port should serve, and switching to a solution that would, say, force users to connect both a power plug and and audio cable to a dock would seem like a step backwards. But hey, just because it’s currently practical and ubiquitous doesn’t mean it isn’t evil. It’s because of you, iPod jack, that my Sansa has about as many docking prospects as the average Giz writer.

Sprint and Verizon’s Secret Shame: CDMA

To the end user, CDMA and GSM don’t seem very different—Sprint, a CDMA carrier, offers the same services as AT&T, a GSM carrier—except when it comes to how they handle phones.

GSM phones are identified by the SIM card that they carry, which can be moved between phones at the user’s will. Not so with America’s other wireless standard. Effectively, a CDMA phone is like a GSM phone with the SIM card welded to its socket. Your CDMA phone is permanently locked to your carrier, and your mobile connection is permanently bound to your handset—unless your carrier is kind enough to authorize a transfer to another phone.

The presumably intentional effect is that there’s no market for 3rd party hardware in CDMA, which is fine for carriers, shitty for customers. Worst of all, there’s no good reason for this. CDMA SIM cards exist. They’re called R-UIM cards, but US carriers are in no rush to implement them.

The Battle of the Redundant Audio Formats

There was a time when it wasn’t clear which stupid format would reign supreme, Microsoft’s WMA or Apple’s AAC. [Note: Yes, Apple didn’t invent AAC. However, they are the only reason any of us have heard of it.] While each technically brought improved sound quality, they were both bastards born of the same greedy combination: the desire for DRM and the unwillingness to pay MP3 encoder/decoder royalties. Your AACs wouldn’t play on your Zen; your WMAs wouldn’t work on your iPod; your ATRAC3s wouldn’t work on anything. These formats only grew popular because people accidentally used them to rip their music, and later, because they were an unavoidable part of the digital music purchasing process.

With wider format support in new players, the slow death of the all-you-can-download rental WMA stores and Apple’s new “our bad!” attitude towards audio DRM, it seems like we’re taking a healthy step back to good ole’ em-pee-threes. And while iPods will never play WMA, iTunes does convert ’em. And it’s nice to see more Microsoft products supporting AAC, which Apple still won’t shake off.

A Unique Phone Charger for Every Phone

Even—or rather, especially—when phone plugs were only for electricity, every goddamn manufacturer had their own exclusive, silly connector for dumping current into batteries. Today, little has changed, and as virtually anyone who owns a cellphone knows, this sucks. A lost charger means your phone is out of commission, and because of carrier subsidies, a new charger sometimes costs more than the phone itself did.

And that’s how we arrive at the reason for this stupid situation: Unique chargers=$$$ for cellphones makers. This would explain why the first substantive call for standardization came so recently, and why Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Apple and pretty much everyone else still, in 2008, enforce phone-charger monogamy. And if you think phones are a pain, try finding a replacement charger for your Bluetooth headset. Good luck.

A Raw File By Any Other Name…

R-A-W. If you care about digital photography, these three letters form the most beautiful sound in the English language. Raw images, supported by almost every new DSLR and an increasing number of point-and-shoots, are made up of the ‘raw’ image data, pulled directly from your camera’s sensor, letting you change all kinds of parameters—white balance, exposure and noise reduction, to name a few—instead of letting the camera pick them automatically during the shooting. And you can make infinite changes and tweaks long after the photo has been taken.

It would seem that by now importing raw files should be as easy as transferring JPEGs. Well, it’s not. The problem is that almost every camera maker has insisted on using their own slightly different version, meaning that you either have to use your camera’s supplied raw conversion software (almost always a steaming pile) or invest in a wide-support program like Photoshop, Aperture or Lightroom—and make sure it has the right compatibility. Come on guys, Adobe gave you a perfectly fine, royalty-free raw format back in 2004. Use it.

So Many Memory Cards

For years, everyone had their own memory card format: Sony products used Memory Sticks, Olympus used xD, Fujifilm used SmartMedia and so on… they all thought they had the heir to the 35mm/CD/Zip Drive throne. It was adorable! Now, it’s not. While we were all busy stockpiling one soon-to-be-obsolete memory cards and multi-compatible (bit never totally compatible) readers, most of the electronics industry was aligning itself with a winner.

Two, actually—or maybe three. SD cards (backed by Panasonic) are cheap, compact and capacious and only getting better, with MicroSD as its tiny phone version. Meanwhile, beefier, more durable Compact Flash cards suit the serious photogs. The rest of you: You all do the exact same thing! Please die.

For Our Earphones Only: Non-Standard Headset Jacks

When a little metal trim kept the original iPhone from accepting regular old 3.5mm headphones, a lot of people almost blew a gasket, and rightfully so. It seemed hopeless: Even a phone that was more iPod than handset couldn’t resist the allure of proprietary earphones.

Phones have always been terrible for this. The same varied, awkward orifices that charged your old phone probably served as its headset connector too, leaving you stuck with the flimsy, tinny OEM earbuds or an easy-to-lose adapter to deal with. For a while though, it seemed like companies were starting to catch the drift, as standard 3.5mm headphone/mic jacks became more and commonplace in music phones. But a Nokia or two is little comfort; HTC’s newest Android phone, a multimedia powerhouse, only has a USB port. Apple’s new Shuffle—a friggin’ iPod–only works with the supplied earphones or special replacements. Grief ensues.

Sony’s Entire Oeuvre

The story of Sony is like an exaggerated summary of the history of proprietary goofs. Sony entering a new market=Sony introducing a new, frustratingly exclusive format, plug, codec or device standard. With audio, it was MiniDiscs and ATRAC; on the PSP, you got UMD; for cameras and other portable devices, the Memory Stick. In video, there was Betamax, Laserdisc, HDV, and now Blu-ray. Yeah, this last one is sorta successful, but only because Sony decided to fight like there was no tomorrow to beat its rival format. [Blam: I’m not apologizing for the past, but Sony’s promised to better about open formats going forward.] It worked this time, but God only knows what Sony labs have in store for us, and our shrinking wallets, next.

Did we leave out any nasty ones, like Nintendo’s many accessories, or an Apple USB port that doesn’t take all USB products? If you have a good one, throw it into a comment below.