Our trip up to Sutter Creek featured two 9-hour car rides as we travelled to and from San Diego. We had my wife's iPod Touch in our car and a special connector to hook it to our stereo system. The stereo, original to the car, did not feature an audio jack, so I could not connect my Droid to it. We were short of time (of course!) leaving San Diego, so I only put a few things of my own on the iPod, but I figured that once we arrived in Sutter Creek, we could download the rest as the house we rented had WiFi.
Bzzzt. Wrong answer.
It turns out that the iPod Touch cannot download from sites like drop.io, at least not and save the file to memory. It can stream from there, but it can't store it. My laptop and Droid were loaded with good things, but we couldn't transfer them via the Interweb Tubes and we didn't have the connector cable for the iPod. Since the iPod doesn't use a standard USB cable, we were out of luck.
On the morning we left, I tried audible.com, figuring I could get an audiobook for the road. I signed up for the service and then using Safari on the iPod Touch, bought one of Rita Mae Brown's Mrs. Murphy mystery books.
Bzzzt. Wrong answer.
Audible doesn't work with the iPod Touch. I bought the book and then it just sat there on the server. All downloads have to come through iTunes (which I hate on my machines anyway). My Droid would have had no problem with this.
That does it for me. Apple's insistence on locking everything down really ticked me off. I want an Internet appliance of my own, not their Internet appliance that I just happen to be borrowing. No more Apple products in my house. Yes, the user interface and is very swoopy and cool and all, but the product isn't very usable. It's poor performance is masked by a lot of slick flashiness.
Blech.
6 comments:
Woot! Another burned customer. Only about a bazillion to go.
If you like audio books, and don't like to pay money for them, and have any interest in old (as in uncopyrighted) literature, and can handle uneven voice talent, and have an mp3 player, and have an internet connection (anyone still with me?), then I highly recommend librivox.org. All of 19th C. Brit Lit that you've heard of (and a lot you haven't) is up there, free for the taking. It's made many a long car journey tolerable.
Jeff, I've used librivox before and love it. Thanks for the suggestion!
I'm done with Apple Appliances (bad experience with the Time Capsule). But OS X is so much better than Windows 7 (I just spent 15 rounds against Windows 7 this weekend, I might have won, but I think it's a draw). Unfortunately, I don't like the direction Apple is taking with laptops. As the Time Capsule shows, form is more important than function.
"Its poor performance is masked by a lot of slick flashiness."
That's not quite the same as the description in the "Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" of the Sirius Cybernetics Co, but close enough:
"It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of their products by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words, their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."
Tim, LOL!
Very curious. If you had had an old iPod it would have been no problem - download the mp3 to your computer and import it into itunes. I guess the moral here is that the ipod/ipad isn't a computer. Its an appliance.
As for hooking your droid to a car stereo wo an audio jack, I'm really happy with my Belkin radio frequency device. Mine is designed to work with my old ipod. It plugs into the cigarette lighter for power and broadcasts to a selectable frequency on my radio.
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