One of the biggest features of Sonos that I use are the lock screen controls. My device usage has changed dramatically over recent months as I’ve been researching smart phone addiction & the problems caused by too much exposure to social media. One thing to come out of this research is that I tend to leave my iPhone docked in a bamboo dock in my kitchen at all times. This means I don’t pick up the phone at random & my compulsion to check it has diminished.

This also means that I really rely on the lock screen controls for my sonos. The hardware volume buttons are perfect to quickly adjust volume without taking my phone out of the dock or even unlocking it. I use the lock screen skip buttons & I like to view the artwork on the lockscreen. Also, I use the lock screen controls via my apple watch, which makes perfect sense as the controls are always on hand. The apple watch is a great way to control sonos, it’s discrete and the digital crown acts as a volume knob.

The other benefit is that the lock screen controls also appear on my wife’s iPhone & our iPad’s, meaning we normally have a device close at hand to control our sonos system.

This week sonos rolled out Airplay 2 support. This support meant a sonos software update & an app update. To be clear, I have Sonos Play 1’s in my home. I don’t like having alexa in every room in the house & since unplugging the Fire Stick, I don’t have any smart device which is always listening for prompts. It just doesn’t fly with me from a privacy standpoint.

The Play 1’s don’t support Airplay 2, the update only applies to the more high-end Sonos speakers such as the newer Play 5’s and the all new Sonos one’s with alexa built-in. I really wish that Airplay 2 could have been supported, but I may add a Sonos one to my system at some point which will enable it across my sonos system.

Anyway, even though Airplay 2 isn’t supported on any of my devices, the new update broke my all important lock screen controls. After contacting Sonos I was told that basically the Lock Screen controls where never officially supported by Apple & that they had been a bit of a hack (playing a silent song on the iPhone to work).

Regardless, the lock screen controls are what originally sold me into the Sonos ecosystem. I don’t like talking to my devices & it is too hit & miss at present. Furthermore most of my music is in my personal collection & my library isn’t fully supported by Alexa in the newer Sonos speakers.

And the fix for Lock Screen Controls on iOS/Sonos

After a lot of head scratching I decided to experiment with getting the lock screen controls working again. The option was still ticked in my iOS app settings, so I started poking around. I concluded that if AirPlay devices are available on the network, the lock screen controls are disabled as AirPlay takes precedent. I figured this out by unplugging my Apple TV and my Libreelec Kodi media centre on the Raspberry Pi. These two devices are my only Airplay endpoints on the network. After rebooting my iPhone and firing up the Sonos app, I was suprised to see the Lock Screen controls return.

To make the change permanent, I disabled AirPlay on my Apple TV and I also disabled it on my Kodi media centre. For some reason, the iPhone running iOS 11 will now cache any AirPlay endpoints (possibly to allow them to sleep but still be available to iOS). So once you disable AirPlay, you need to restart all of your iOS devices. Also, unplug your AirPlay endpoints until you can confirm the fix works, and turn them back on one by one to isolate any which are still broadcasting as Airplay receivers.

To find out which devices on your network are airplay endpoints, open the music app on your iOS devices (not the sonos app, but the actually music app) and click the airplay button. If you see any devices there, you need to identify them and disable airplay on those devices.

My Lock Screen controls are now working as expected on all of my iOS devices & I hope Sonos can come up with a more elegant solution in future updates.

I would love to introduce an AirPlay supporting speaker to my sonos collection which doesn’t feature Alexa, perhaps something for Sonos to consider for all of us Privacy focused tech people.

This single requirement has put me off Bluetooth and wireless headphones for a while until I came across the Soundpeats Q30 wireless earphones.

A few months ago I took a gamble on the Soundpeats P4 Bluetooth speaker. I’d been looking for one for ages and decided to give the really well priced Soundpeats P4 a go. I took the P4 on holiday and loved it, using it every day. I’ve used it every day since being home for the last few months so I can say the quality is outstanding.

I, therefore, decided to check out what Sound Peats had to offer in the Bluetooth headphone department. A few of their products are the individual earbuds, which as I mentioned aren’t suited to my lifestyle. But then I came across the Soundpeats Q30 Bluetooth headphones. The buds are joined by a wire which runs around the back of your neck. The wire also includes a mic and volume/playback controls as you would find on Apple Earbuds. The real party piece comes from the design of the Q30 though. A magnet has been included on the rear of each earbud, so when you hang them around your neck to chat with friends, they click together and form a necklace so you don’t lose them. I personally thought this was genius from Soundpeats.

They are very reasonably priced offering at £19.98 on Amazon and are currently half price so if you like the review you should be quick & grab a pair while they are on offer.

Now, to the headphones themselves. They are really well made and have a light alloy body on the ear buds. These things feel really tough. They are supplied with a range of in earbuds which are interchangeable and of varying sizes, so you can select the size which fits your ear most comfortably. I went for the biggest size so I get an almost vacuum seal fit. This, I find, blocks out most external noise and allows me to listen to music at a much lower volume and hear every note as you aren’t blocking out the environmental noises.

The fact that the earbuds are themselves joined by a wire means you don’t have any sync issues between left & right and you only need to worry about a single pairing, no chance of one ear losing signal like reports from much more expensive headphones.

In the box, you also get an assortment of ear grips, which grip onto the inner part of your ear to keep them extra secure & finally you get a charging cable, all in a neat little leather effect travel bag.

Due to the vacuum design of the earphones, the Soundpeats Q30 earphones offer a lot of clarity and bass, even at low volumes. You need to make sure the buds are positioned correctly in your ear for best results, but after a few times using them, this becomes second nature. The sound is rich and as good as a lot of much more expensive Bluetooth earphones I’ve tried out.

Having the controls on the joining wire is also brilliant. They fall pretty much in the same place as I’ve come to know from my apple earphones and the controls are exactly the same, even down to a small microphone for taking calls or talking to Siri. The volume controls and play/pause buttons are another must for me.

I haven’t had any issues with these headphones regarding pairing with Bluetooth with my iPhone 6 or my MacBook. My iPhone remembers them and instantly connects when I turn them on. I would advise you read the instructions regarding the multi-function buttons before you start. A long press of the play button is also the on/off button and as these are powered by a battery, which you charge with the supplied cable, you will want to turn them off when not using them.

I can only say good things about these Soundpeats Q30 headphones. They are comfortable, dependable and the battery life is very good. I’ve only charged them on a couple of occasions and the iPhone gives me an indication of battery life via Bluetooth in the status bar. They seem to last much longer than the 8 hours quoted on the box but I expect this will vary depending on how you use them.

Wearing them is a pleasure, they grip the ear very well and feel secure. I’ve used mine daily for all of my days around the city and they haven’t yet fallen out, even when running in the rain. The added benefit being if one falls out they are still connected around your neck & you can use the included line clamp to attach to your T-shirt collar if you need extra security.

If you are in the market for a pair of Bluetooth headphones I would fully recommend the Soundpeats Q30 earbuds. They are comfortable, sturdy, has great sound quality and features & at less than £20 they represent huge value for money.

The technical specs are very good for these Soundpeats Q30 headphones, you can check them out below:-

Specification:

Bluetooth Version: V4.1

Charging Time: 2 hours

Play Time: 7 Hours

Talk Time: Up to 8 hours

Bluetooth Mode: HFP/HSP/A2DP/AVRCP

Weight:0.53OZ/15g

  Package included:

1 x Q30 Sports Magnetic Bluetooth Headset Wireless Earphone

1 x Line Clamp

1 x USB Charging Cable

5 x Pairs of Ear Tips (XS/S/M/L/XL)

3 x Pairs of Ear Fins(S/M/L/)

3 x Slide Line Buckle

1 x Leather Bag

1 x User manual

It also feels like Apple are innovating for the sake of it. I was majorly put off the new MacBooks for their lack of built-in ports. I don’t want to use a dongle, it’s something else to carry & totally impractical. Not to mention aesthetically void. My plan is to buy a used Macbook with the ports still built into the unibody because I like a USB port & an audio jack, not to mention an ethernet port (WiFi might be fine for most users, but try troubleshooting a network or transferring huge amounts of data without ethernet, it’s painful & totally useless).

Back to the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. They have gone down the same route, by losing the audio jack and replacing it with lightning headphones. The lightning port was a pain in the arse to start with. None of my accessories worked with the port. I still have an iPhone 4 in one audio dock & a 3S in another. I now have an iPad mini 2 and an iPhone 6 with lightning so I’m getting used to it. But replacing the 3.5mm jack, for me, is a no go.

For one we have a usability issue. At the moment I can plug my 3.5mm jack into any device setup and pass audio from any app on the iPhone to any amp or device. I can use the aux cable in rental cars that don’t have bluetooth or when riding in a friend’s car. I can use my official headphones, earphones, X-mini speaker or any cheapo headphones I need to use. No restrictions. With the Lightning setup you are limited to Lightning only accessories. If you friend has an Android phone in their car and uses an AUX cable, you are screwed. If you break your headphones, you can’t just grab any generic pair from almost any shop, worldwide, you don’t need a specific proprietary cable.

Imagine, for example, you are travelling in some far-flung place. You break or lose your headphones. The 3.5mm jack has existed since the 60’s. You can guaranteed, anywhere in the world, you will find a pair of earphones or headphones. That simply won’t be the case with a proprietary connector.

Furthermore, imagine all of those people with a specific need for a 3.5mm jack. Musicians, DJ’s, hackers, makers, hobbyists, journalists, teachers with presentations. The list is endless.

Another issue with the lightning & bluetooth (ear pods) approach is DRM. More so over bluetooth with the wireless Ear Pods, but also with lightning I can see a time where DRM is used to stop you outputting audio to certain devices. Lightning & bluetooth are digital, 3.5mm is analogue, meaning over lightning or bluetooth the iPhone can communicate with the device it’s connected to. This could, for instance, stop you outputting Spotify to an amplifier. It could stop you streaming audio and then outputting that audio to recording equipment or a third-party stereo setup. Anyone who has used airplay will understand the frustrations of DRM. Try outputting video over Airplay for certain apps. it just won’t allow it (specifically the Sky TV apps for example).

The 3.5mm jack has been a bastion of audio for years. I won’t buy an iPhone 7 for this very reason, unless they produce an analogue converter, but still it would mean carrying an external adaptor or dongle. Rubbish.

I’m no Luddite. I enjoy new technology. I’ve been into tech for as long as I can remember, but sometimes I feel that innovation isn’t progress. The rest of the iPhone 7 & 7 plus is a bit meh! The price tags have gone skywards and the features are actually putting me off. Don’t get me started on the fact that the camera is still protruding. I can’t imagine that camera ever coming into existence under Steve Jobs, never mind persisting model after model. I’ve hated it since I got my iPhone 6, the flush camera of previous models was perfect.

Oh, and why do we still not have Micro SD support & dual sims. We have to pay a fortune for built in, fixed storage while the android boys can infinitely upgrade their storage capacity with cheap micro SD.

While I’m discussing gripes, don’t get me started on the bluetooth Ear Pods. I would lose them without a doubt, not to mention the requirement to charge yet another device. At the moment & for years, I rout my earbud cables from my trouser pocket, underneath my T-shirt and out at the neck. This means if I pop them out, to chat to someone or to do some work, they hang from my T-shirt neck, where I can find them & pop them back in my ears when ready. Also, when riding my bike or being generally active, if an earbud falls out, it simply swings from my t-shirt neck on the wire & I grab it and put it back in. With bluetooth, it would drop to the floor and probably end up ridden over or smashed. Plus the fact I would always be running out of battery in the bluetooth earbuds, it’s just a non starter for me.

Some things are meant to have wires. Networks are supposed to be hard-wired for reliability, security & speed. Earphones are no different for me.

I often find myself in cities & on trips without access to an outlet & I can be down to 50% before 10AM. I use my iPhone to conduct my business, manage my life, listen to music & take photos. I use it to pay for coffee, to organise meeting friends & reply to business emails on the go. I use it a lot. I don’t tend to kill time with the iPhone, I’m not a Facebook user and tend to limit my social media usage, but I still struggle to maintain battery life.

I was excited when Apple introduced their low power mode, but I’ve mostly found it useless as it manages to save very little power. In the past I’ve used low quality power banks. I had a cheap one from Primark which would give me around a 50% charge on the iPhone 6. I’ve also resorted to dropping into Apple stores in Liverpool, Manchester, London, Amsterdam & San Fransisco on my travels to replace the display iPhones with my own to sneak a charge. It would be handy if Apple provided charging bays at tables for this very purpose.

Anyway, after all of the road warrior action I decided to address the problem. A power outlet isn’t always available. You find them in places like Starbucks, but they normally have someone tethered to them for the long haul. I therefore opted for a high-capacity power bank.

After a search  & reading plenty of reviews I decided to buy the Anker PowerCore 20100 power bank from Amazon. It is currently reduced from £59.99 to £29.99 so it is an absolute bargain. This is a 20,000mAH battery pack and I’ve found it can keep my iPhone 6 charged for an entire week. The power bank itself takes a while to charge on a standard USB port or USB charger. I’ve been using my high-capacity 12w iPad charger to charge the power bank much more quickly & find an overnight charge will fill the power bank.

I do like Anker products, the build quality is second to none & the quality in general of their products is superb. I prefer to buy once & buy well & this fits the bill. It’s made from sturdy, rugged plastic and is quite heavy. It has a charge indicator button and four small blue LED’s to show you the current charge level of the power bank, much like that found on Macbook’s.

This particular model has a single micro usb input for charging (with the supplied cable) and two standard USB outputs for charging any USB device. The Power Bank also comes in a great padded sleeve with a draw cord, which is perfect for travelling & throwing into your backpack.

The Anker PowerCore 20100 can charge two devices at the same time & I find it charges my iPhone 6 as quickly as a mains adapter. On a recent trip, it managed to keep my iPhone 6 charged for an entire week, which is crazy.

The Anker PowerCore 20100 can output 4.8 amps and features something they call Power IQ technology, which optimizes charging based on the device it is charging & can rapid charge supported devices. I feel more confident using a device like this over a generic one as I trust the quality of the cells used & trust it won’t burst into flames or fry my devices.

I also found this is the maximum capacity I would go for as anything larger can been troublesome when it comes to airport security & carry on luggage. There is a limit on the size of lithium-ion batteries that can be taken on a plane without scrutiny, so to save the hassle I went with an acceptable battery capacity.

Finally the packaging. I’m a bit of a packaging geek & Anker satisfied my geekiness. The packaging is wonderful & even feels nice. You can see just how good the packaging is in the pictures below.

If you use your smart phone or tablet on the go I would recommend you go & grab one of these before the price increases. It has become a staple in my everyday carry & always sites fully charged in my backpack. No more hunting for sockets. I’ve also been able to bail out friends when their devices have died.

Do you use a power bank? Let me know which ones you use & your experience with them. In the days pokémon Go it would appear more & more people rely on them to keep their devices charged.

I first tried deleting old apps and app data. This helped a little. I then deleted all of the music off my device which freed up some space but not a great deal. Next I opened the Battery Doctor app and ran the clean up scripts included, which clean out old cache and orphaned files. Again, this gave me a few extra MB but nothing noticeable.

The final thing I tried was to disable iCloud music under settings > music. As soon as I returned to check the storage space available I could see I had quite a bit more free. I checked back 5 minutes later and I had gone from almost full to 2GB free. It would seem that the caching of music on the iPhone with iTunes match is very inefficient on smaller devices. I see the benefit of caching music files for quicker retrieval & a reduction in cellular usage, but on smaller devices this really doesn’t help and I do wish they would include a way to disable caching, or a cache time-out.

If you use an Apple iPhone or iPad along with iTunes match/iCloud music I would advise giving this trick a go. Turn off iCloud music and watch your free space return. I now do this on a regular basis to free up space & delete the cache. It has really helped me free up space & made my 16GB iPhone much more useable.

If you are having the same issue please do let me know. I would love to hear your own fixes for storage issues on smaller iOS devices. iTunes match & iCloud music library seem very under-optimised in iOS 9 & I do hope they invest some more time & effort into improving this, especially on 16GB devices which I assume they will phase out in future iPhone & iPad models.

I looked online & the tear down guides & forum posts looked complex. By all accounts, the liquid had fried the logic board and it was toast. I enquired about repair which was starting at many hundreds of £££. I then considered a refurbished machine which would have been £500+ for the exact same laptop (age & spec). I then snapped back into my old ways & started troubleshooting.

Out came the screwdrivers & apart came the unibody. After carefully removing the keyboard ribbon cable & starting the laptop using the diagnostic power pads on the logic board, I was surprised to see it boot up. I plugged in an external keyboard and the Macbook was fine. This instantly pointed to a faulty keyboard. As the power button and keyboard are on the same circuit it would appear that the liquid had bridged the power circuits permanently and that’s why it wouldn’t power up. It was like permanently holding the power button down.

I headed over to eBay & a new keyboard & backlight was only £24.99 delivered. This was for a brand new, official apple replacement. I bought the keyboard & the next day installed it in the Macbook. The dismantling was tedious, over 100 screws most of which are tiny. But I installed the keyboard, reassembled the machine & it’s now better than it was before. Brand new, grippy matte keyboard and backlight.

This is why the ability to repair an item is so important. The laptop would have been scrap, like I’m sure many are, for the sake of a simple replacement keyboard & a bit of labour. Without this I would have been unable to replace the laptop due to cost & would have likely gone into debt to acquire a new one.

I’m not one to throw things away, technology lasts a lot longer in my household than it does in most. I had an original Xbox 360 for 10+ years which became a Frankenstein of a machine, most components repaired or replaced. The same with my old iMac which is my main machine. In fact I’ve always been like this.

The fact that technology is now being crippled by software updates is worrying. Apple have essentially ruined my old iPad 2 with iOS 9. It’s slow & laggy and the ability to downgrade to a useful iOS has been removed. This is forced obsoletion. This week in the news we are learning that Error 53, caused by the replacement or damage of the home button/finger print scanner in modern iPhones, essentially causes the handsets to brick on update. This is wrong. Apple say this is a security measure, but surely the software should disable the fingerprint scanning capability and not the whole handset. I’m sure people would still be angry about this but at least they could use a pass code and still use their phone.

This sounds less like security & more like apple clamping down on unauthorised repair of their products. Everyone will know that apple repairs are far more expensive than a local repair shop, or even self repair. I’m glad to see this is being investigated legally, as it sets a dangerous precedent for us as consumers of technology. If an item we own can be made redundant by a software update, surely that can be classed as criminal damage. At the very least it can be classed as a perfectly usable product not being fit for purpose.

Can you imagine if your car needed repair & you took it to a normal mechanic (not affiliated with the manufacturer) only to find your car had become a useless hunk of junk. I for one pay more for Apple Products than I did for my car so this analogy is not that far out.

This corporate control of devices after purchase needs to stop. I’ve always been a hardware hacker, I like to see what technology can be pushed to do. The way I see it, when I buy hardware, I want to be in charge of what I can do with it.

For this very reason, I’m now actively seeking out repairable tech. Companies like Fairphone are challenging the corporate attitude to closed systems. They offer an easily repairable smart phone & will supply all the parts & help required. They are also ethical & transparent. This pleases me greatly. Smart phones are expensive. If anyone told you 15 years ago that you would spend £600+ on a mobile phone you would have laughed, but here we are. Convergence of technology means we rely on them more than ever & so pay the high price tags. Surely that means that if we are so invested, we should be able to at least attempt repair.

If you have any views on this I would love to hear from you. I’ll do a full write up of the Macbook repair & diagnostics as soon as possible.

So far Apple Music is an hour old in my hands & I’m already loving it. The initial setup was pretty easy with the exception of some awkward genre bubbles to select when setting up your profile. There seems to be a ton of artists available to stream and iTunes match has been integrated into a My Music tab.

I’ve followed a few of my favourite artists already & played with the streaming quality which seems responsive & crisp. No load times to speak of & nice bitrate streaming. I would like to see a way to limit the bitrate for use on mobile like in the Google Play app, hopefully apple will adopt that for users with smaller data plans.

The UI also seems pretty good. I keep losing the now playing as it minimises to a bar which needs to be clicked to bring it back. Will get used to it in no time but weird as users are used to looking at the bottom or top of a screen for minimised windows.

As it’s a brand new platform, a lot of the connect features are yet to be populated. Artists will need to start using the service & scrapers will need to start collecting content for the artists. I also found that bands such as Tool are not available to stream, but this is pretty standard as they aren’t on Spotify. Also Steve Wilson’s new material isn’t available. I’ve already found a bunch of music which isn’t available to stream so this will compliment my library & iTunes match as opposed to replacing it.

Anyway this is all new & I’m still playing with it, but I’ll write another post when I’ve got to know Apple Music better. Until then, a bunch of screenshots for you.

The three big announcements this year where iOS 9, OSX El Capitan and Watch OS – With a little extra bit at the end for Apple Music & Beats 1 radio. All exciting things & a lot to get your head around.

The thing I’m most excited about is OSX El Capitan. Whilst the name won’t be to everyone’s liking the underlying improvements should be. Improving the architecture of the OS and utilising Metal to boost core graphics and core animation by almost 50%, not to mention improving efficiency by providing low overhead access to the GPU should be of great benefit to OSX users. This is achieved by shifting more processing over to the GPU without the overhead for faster processing and a snappier feel. The demo that Epic gave of the upcoming title Fortnite ran crisp & smooth on the test hardware. Also with Swift now going open source I expect to see a lot more development using swift & with more integration of swift into El Capitan we should see some great stuff from developers.

I will be really interested to see if Metal and other improvements will run on older hardware. I’m still using an early 2009 iMac as my main development machine which is still more than capable and as yet not worth the upgrade. We do have a newer Macbook pro but I will be over the moon if this runs well on our older hardware too. I had to revert back to Mountain Lion on the main machine as Yosemite was very buggy & full of memory leaks. It ran at an acceptable speed but nowhere near as fast as ML. From the App Store reviews it seems a lot of people have had issues with Yosemite so I reverted back to ML until such a time that stability is improved.

iOS 9 was also announced at WWDC and some of the new features do look great. Most notably the new News app looks like a game changer. It’s essentially a proprietary RSS aggregator using apples own mark-up but the articles and formatting did look great on the demo. I wonder how it will work now more & more news content is going behind a pay wall? I tend to use the BBC app on iOS for my news and Feedly for all of my other RSS feeds but in the days of twitter I tend to follow the major sources of news such as Cnet, The Verge, The Register etc and read their articles as & when they tweet a link. With tweetbot this works great as I can view them in reader view. If news works as suggested & the news outlets do adopt the platform it will be amazing, if they decide not to support News it may just add to the already fragmented news/article reading experience.

Also in iOS 9 apple announced new multi tasking & keyboard functions along with split screen multi tasking. Granted the Split Screen will only work on Apple’s flagship iPad Air 2 but for future generations it’s the right direction to go for tablets. The new keyboard functions including using two fingers to create a trackpad with cursor have been a long time coming. How often are you trying to edit text in iOS, it magnifies where it thinks you want the cursor to be then starts jumping all over the place. Not Cool.

The new multi tasking does look great & should help people be even more productive with a tablet. As an old school techie I would never be without a desktop computer *shivers*, however many people now only have a smart phone or tablet for all of their computing tasks so the more capable these machines are the better for everyone who designs or develops apps & websites. The more people we have actively online the greater potential we have to achieve great things with our work.

Also announced for iOS 9 are new Maps which include better walking & transit maps. Granted these will only support major cities so the majority of people will never benefit from this, however it should be a good improvement when visiting unfamiliar cities, especially by integrating mass transit into maps itself. It will give you detailed instructions including transit times and numbers along with detailed internal maps of stations. I’m a bit of a mass transit geek so don’t often struggle with figuring out subways and trains, however for many people this is a hugely daunting task so can only be a good thing.

Finally apple announced a more energy-efficient iOS 9, with an estimated 1 hour extra of battery life under general usage & a new low energy mode to conserve upto an additional 3 hours of battery time. That’s got to be a good thing as smart phones become more and more etched into our lives. A few other things were announced for iOS 9 but I’m just covering the things that got me excited.

With regards Watch OS I’m not really that excited. The Apple Watch is a great device, I’ve played with them & love them, however I just don’t have a need for one yet. I may in the future pick one up but right now it’s just not something I want or need. The fact that apps will run natively in Watch OS 2 is great for developers. I’m sure developers will come up with uses for the apple watch that apple never even dreamed of. I’m just not prepared to be an early adopter on this so not much to say on Watch OS.

Just as we all thought the WWDC keynote was over we heard Tim Cook mention we have something else to talk about. I for one was preying it was an Apple TV update but alas it was something completely different. Apple Music & Beats 1 was announced. As always when apple bring in musicians to talk to a room of developers it all gets a little awkward and weird. Almost like they have had the worst actor in the building quickly learn a script that goes totally wrong. I was happy to see Trent Reznor talking about Apple Music & his involvement and the service does look good. I’ll be happy to get my 3 month trial on the 30th June when iOS 8.4 comes out.

Apple Music is essentially all the best bits of Spotify, myspace of old, twitter, instagram, facebook and music news websites all rolled into one. With connect you can follow your favourite artists, see latest releases & checkout stuff they are working on & generally connect more with your favourite artists. This has been a long time coming. Since the shift from physical media to MP3/AAC/Streaming storage & acquisition of music has become far easier, but the social aspects of music & music discovery have faltered. I used to love going to a record shop(s) and browsing the racks, seeing new releases, chatting with like-minded people & hearing new music in store. I loved swapping CD’s with friends & discovering new bands. In the age of iTunes & streaming this has all but disappeared. I’m hoping that the new connect service goes some way to bridging that gap & hopefully artists will promote music they love & not just self promote. The new discovery tools are apparently user curated & not algorithm led so hopefully the suggestions will be just as good as those made by your mates/peers back in the CD/Tape/Vinyl days.

Alongside the Apple Music subscription service they announced beats 1 radio. Broadcasting out of London, NYC & LA it’s meant to be a 24 hour global radio station. I hope that they bring some more countries into the mix as broadcasting from two US locations & London hardly seems representative of the world. I’m glad to see they brought in Zane Lowe. I didn’t like a lot of his Radio 1 stuff but that’s simply because I don’t rate mainstream chart music, however in his early MTV days & in his own music taste this guy does know what he is talking about. It may finally shake up the old chart system & broadcast radio nonsense & finally expose some new genuine talent.

So that’s my quick recap of WWDC 2015. I hope I managed to express what parts of WWDC I most enjoyed. Did you guys watch? What in particular are you looking forward to?

The Apple Watch essentially comes in three distinct editions. We have Watch Sport, Watch & Watch Edition. I must admit I fell in love with the 38mm Watch Edition with 18-Carat Yellow Gold Case & Black Sport Band – Typical the one I loved was £8000. That’s a massive investment in a first generation so I think I will hold off until they mature a little.

So now a little about the watch itself. It seems to run a  custom build of ios which works very well on this tiny screen. It has a dial button on the side which can be turned like a standard watch time dial & pressed as a button & it also features a rectangular push button which brings you back to main menus. The custom ios works really well, you can slide the icons around enlarging the in focus icons allowing for a seamless user experience & also allowing for an almost infinite amount of icons.

I concentrated on the aspects of the watch I feel I would use most, notably the itunes control, email, iMessage, maps, weather & passbook. I absolutely loved them all. Emails display clearly (although only a few words per line) and can even inline photo attachments. It’s a similar story with iMessage which could offer a very usable way of reading messages on the go (although you would still need to use your phone to reply and interact).

The maps are great. It uses Apple mapping and shows a small full featured map on the watch face which can easily guide you to a destination. This would be perfect for finding places in any city and means you could glance at your wrist for directions as opposed to looking down at your iPhone. I can see this being a great new way to use online mapping & gps.

iTunes control was brilliant. It had play/pause and previous/next buttons. It also shows you the artist information & volume controls. It also allows you to browse & select music. This would be great for me as I listen to a lot of music on the go. Being able to visually skip tracks without taking the phone out would be perfect in wet British weather & much safer than carrying your phone in hand. It is also much more user-friendly than the inline controls on Apple Earbuds.

I can see Passbook being a game changer. Boarding passes, mass transit passes, Starbucks & store cards. The possibilities are endless for cashless & paperless transactions. I personally like paying cash for things for both privacy & budgeting reasons, but I am tempted to try out more passbook compatible apps for travel such as boarding passes. It means carrying less paper & no chance of losing boarding passes. I’d be really interested in seeing how this new way of interacting with businesses grows.

The weather app does exactly what you would expect but the UI is beautiful and works so well on such a small display. Something I’m also getting into since upgrading to iPhone 6 are the health sides of iOS devices. I really enjoying the pedometer & tracking my daily steps & distances walked. The health integration into the watch include pulse/heart rate monitoring & I think we are going to see much more integration of health apps into our daily lives.

Anyway, as the iPhone & iPad where laughed at when introduced, I think that the naysayers will peel away & many people will soon treat an Apple Watch as a daily companion. It makes a lot of sense with the exception of the price tags. I’m converted after an afternoon of playing with

Have you tried the apple watch yet? What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments. The Apple Watch is now available for Pre order via the apple store online & in physical stores. Delivery estimates are already slipping and as of today a June delivery estimate is being shown. Order quickly to avoid months of waiting.

I love how the apple earphones integrate with iPod and the Ipod music app for iPhone. The play/pause & volume controls are great when I put my music on Shuffle. I use iTunes match so I stream my entire library to my iOS devices. My library has over 15,000 songs in it so I use the skip button quite often & it’s great to be able to do it via the cable remote. I also like to answer my calls while I’m on the go, walking around cities. It seamlessly mutes my music so i can take the call using the built in cable mic and then resumes playback at the end.

The new EarPods are a revelation. The positioning of the bass and treble speakers are perfect. The bass essentially plays into the cartilage/bone around your ear so it’s full bodied & not deafening. It’s so much richer. The small treble speaker gives great definition to higher notes & the whole experience is a major improvement on the older earphone design. They come in Apple’s infamous rubbery finish and the parts of the cable that meet the ear buds & the 3.5mm audio jack are perfectly reinforced to stop bending and splitting. They come beautifully packaged in a plastic wrap box. These are well worth the money & I would recommend them to anyone. I also find that they sit in my ears much better & feel far more comfortable.

As someone who listens to really heavy music (I tested these with Down, Lamb Of God & Kyuss) I really recommend them. The bass is incredible for in earphones and doesn’t leave that horrible muffled hearing when you stop listening.

You can buy them directly from Apple or Amazon. Amazon have them for £10.95 delivered. Absolute bargain!  ]]> 1094 https://www.johnlarge.co.uk/ios-8-1-1-update-for-ipad-2/ Thu, 20 Nov 2014 20:27:23 +0000 http://www.johnlarge.co.uk/?p=1056 Just a quick post regarding memory issues and poor performance on iOS 8 when used on an older A5 chipset iPad 2. I upgraded to iOS 8.1.1 tonight and everything seems much improved. It’s nowhere near as quick as iOS 7.1.2 was, but it is snappier and less buggy. Also seems to have fixed the copy and paste issue I hacked a workaround for last week.

This standpoint is reflected in my current lineup of tech. My one & only phone is an iPhone 4. Not a 4S, a humble 4. It’s jailbroken & locked down to ios 7 as apple no longer allow it to be upgraded. With the jailbreak tweaks its perfectly fine speed wise, I actually prefer the smaller form factor and the battery life hasn’t really degraded from the day I bought it.

The same goes for my iPad which is a 64GB iPad 2 with GSM. This cost the best part of £700 on release (when i bought it from the apple store in Exeter) and has seen daily use ever since. I depend a lot on my ios devices. I run an online business & manage a few social media accounts, both personal and business and I do this perfectly well with my current lineup.

This isn’t the end of our legacy hardware setup though. My wife has a 32GB iPhone 3GS which again is jailbroken and tweaked to hell. She only takes this on the odd day out or meeting, the rest of the time she simply uses her iPad mini (which is the newest device we have) and finds a wifi hotspot. People are shocked when they find out she only carries an old iPhone a few days a year but our setup works perfectly well.

My main computer is an early 2009 24 inch imac. I got a pretty good spec at the time with the uprated pci-e nvidia GT 120 and to be honest, with 8GB of ram this machine kicks the arse out of most other macs I’ve come across, including my brother in laws 2012 iMac. This is largely down to the fact that I care for my hardware & software and have everything setup & tweaked perfectly. I’ve not even been tempted to upgrade to a newer imac, with the exception of airplay & hardware decoding/encoding of video this thing does the lot.

I have a real problem with this forced obsolescence of hardware. I know that companies like apple need to keep the market moving forward, they are in the business of selling hardware and software, but it just seems so wasteful. I’ve had these devices so long & the only time I wavered was when I bought a Google LG Nexus 5 on release date. I only kept it for 3 weeks and returned it to google. It was shocking. So many issues, fragile build quality, terrible audio, pretty poor ecosystem, jittery sound recording on videos due to faulty noise cancelling mics. It was a bad experience.

I do quite fancy a fairphone, but again I have the problem of upgrading an item which is perfectly fine & does everything I need. I know that marketing teams are very good at making older devices feel inferior, but for a smartphone I really don’t see the point of having all of that power in your pocket. After all most of us only email, lookup random things on the web and use a handful of apps, all of which work perfectly fine on older handsets.

By keeping my iPhone for so long I really feel like I’ve got my moneys worth. I’ve had this handset since mid 2010 (over 4 years) of daily hard use and it’s still fine. It’s not on a contract so with giffgaff for £12 a month I get all the minutes and texts I need and unlimited 3G data. To upgrade to an iPhone 6 for cash is a small fortune, the contracts have eye watering monthly costs.

The financial costs aside, there are huge environmental costs to all of this. Many precious metals and other materials go into making these devices. The sad truth is so many of these handsets sit in drawers for years after they are taken out of use (most people have a drawer full of old handsets & chargers) and are eventually disposed of when they have no perceived value. This is sad & wasteful.

The problem as I see it are two fold. People have the new handsets marketed at them with subtle differences. Enough to differentiate between the new and the old model and enough to make the old models look inferior. This is a good motivator for people to upgrade. Then comes the contract trap. Apple and other vendors know the prices are high and most people will opt for a monthly contract to obtain the new handsets. So people sign for a 24 month contract at £42 per month and over the two years their phone is superseded by two or three new models. During the course of the contract this shiny new phone becomes the old phone that users can’t wait to get rid of when their contract is up, so the cycle starts again & the marketing teams have a very simple job of selling the new hardware to you.

Lets take the £42 a month contract I found as an example. With a small payment upfront of around £60 you pay £1068 over the 2 years minimum. That is without any extra costs such as outside of tariff calls/texts/data or roaming charges. If the carriers advertised that costs I doubt most people would upgrade. Compare that to my £12 a month over 4 years which is £576 and not a penny more. Add to that the price of the handset which was £499 and i’ve paid the same over 4 years as most people will pay in two. So for each month I get out of this handset I make a killer saving, I’m not tied into any contract and I’m free to put any sim I like into the phone when I go abroad.

Maybe this is an old fashioned way to look at the world, but I don’t like items such as phones and cars and other consumer products to be paid for monthly. I’ve always owned my cars outright. The same with my tech. Difference being, they don’t change the way roads work or make fuel different each year so I can continue to use my car as long as it is useful. Not so with tech.

I’m not ignorant to the fact that new operating systems are too demanding for older hardware, but support for hardware shouldn’t cease after 4 years. I’m now being told I can’t upgrade apps on the phone as they are iOS only. Eventually this will force my hand but I aim to get another 6-12 months out of this phone. I will keep the iMac for years to come and our other devices will be in use as long as possible. At the end of their life they will be repurposed. The iPhone will make a great mp3 & internet audio player in a dock or in the car. I still have my 4th Generation iPod classic (the U2 limited edition i bought at the Apples tore in SF) and it still sees a lot of use.

Comment back if you have similar views on this. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I can’t be on my own with this view. Tech should be used until it no longer functions, not because a manufacturer decided it’s time to spend more cash.