A couple of weeks ago I went to Pittsburgh for what I thought would be a day trip.  Since I was headed back that evening, I didn’t take my laptop, but because of thunderstorms across the Eastern Seaboard, my sojourn turned into an overnight stay.  So I had an opportunity to give a good workout to something I had received the previous day:  a review unit of Apple’s eagerly awaited (boy, that’s an understatement) iPhone.

During my travels and airport delays, I was able to keep up with my e-mail, negotiate my way around the downtown, get tips on the city from an old friend whose number I don’t normally have handy, check the weather conditions in New York and D.C., monitor baseball scores and blogs, listen to an early Neil Young concert and amuse myself with silly YouTube videos and an episode of “Weeds,” all on a single charge before the battery ran down. Now, just about all those things could have been done by devices that are already out on the market. But considering I’d had the iPhone for just a day, and never taken a glance at a manual, it was an impressive introduction.  In contrast, I’ve had a Motorola handset for two years and am still baffled at its weird approach to Web browsing and messaging.   What’s more, with the exception of learning to type on the iPhone, which requires some concentration, doing all those things on that five-ounce device was fun, in the same way that switching from an old command-line interface to the Macintosh graphical user interface in the mid-1980s was a kick.  And when I showed the iPhone to people during that trip and in the days afterward—especially people under 25—the most common reaction was, “I have to have this,” sometimes followed by a quick, if alarmingly reckless,  consideration of what might need to be pawned in order to make the purchase.

And there it is: one of the most hyped consumer products ever comes pretty close to justifying the bombast.  Apple has a history of using cutting-edge technology, slick design and friendly software to break the common logjam in which our machines have the capability to perform certain tasks, but developers haven’t figured out how to make the experience easy, even pleasurable, for users. That’s one reason why people, especially the tens of millions who love iPods, have been so eagerly awaiting the iPhone. “Everyone we talk to hates their phones—it’s universal,” Steve Jobs told me on a call to my iPhone a couple of days ago.  (The control-freaky Apple CEO was just checking up to see how I was doing.) If you’re looking for quibbles, flaws and omissions, you’ll certainly find them in this first version of the iPhone.  (I’ll get to these below.) But the bottom line is that the iPhone is a significant leap. It’s a superbly engineered, cleverly designed and imaginatively implemented approach to a problem that no one has cracked to date: merging a phone handset, an Internet navigator and a media player in a package where every component shines, and the features are welcoming rather than foreboding.  The iPhone is the rare convergence device that actually converges.

Read the rest of the review 

 

In today's User Notes, Sarina Rosenberg recounts her experience with Verizon's V Cast Song ID.

I was skeptical when I first saw the ads for Verizon's V Cast Song ID. In the TV spots, a guy slickly uses his cell phone to identify the title and artist of a song he hears blasting from a convertible full of--you guessed it--flirtatious twenty-somethings. But this service is for real. Hear a song, open the application on your phone, identify it for free (some carriers charge a texting fee) and then pay ($1.99 per song on Verizon) to download it as a ring tone or MP3 file. Verizon offers the application, V Cast Song ID, on a slew of new phones, including the Chocolate, the enV by LG, the LG VX8700 and the VX9400 ($99.99-$199.99). Sony Ericsson announced their first phone with their music ID application, TrackID, in 2006, and some of the phones in the new Walkman series ($199-$499) come equipped with the application. Cingular and T-Mobile carry the Sony Ericsson line. Each service sets its own fees for the application.

Music recognition is finally going mainstream in the world of mobile. But the feature is simply a new twist on a relatively retro technology. These phones link to the same databases that supply the song information for applications like iTunes and Windows Media Player so that they can provide you with the artist, album and track information of a CD you slip into your laptop. Verizon's service uses the U.K.-based Shazam database; Sony Ericsson links to Gracenote.

In cell phones and laptops alike, the key to unlocking a song's identity lies in a six-second, incredibly specific music sample. "It's a finger-printing technology," says Ty Roberts, Gracenote's chief technology officer.

Once I first got my hands on Sony's PlayStation Portable back in 2004, I tossed the flash music player that I'd been using in favor of the new gadget on the block. But I quickly discovered that the PSP wasn't exactly a booming system when it came to audio output. For music and videogames, turning the sound all the way up mostly did the trick when armed with regular or noise-canceling headphones. But for video, typical New York subway noises would overwhelm its dinky maximum volume, to say nothing of the engine sounds on a cross-country flight. What to do?