iPhone 3GS=the best thing ever, ever

[17daysolderthannes]

My problem with the iPod Touch is that it doesn't come in large enough capacities to take the place of my mp3 player. My current mp3 player is 160GB and it's almost full, just with music (it can play videos and do some other things too, but these features have gone to waste). My #1 reason for getting an mp3 player at all was to have all of my music on it at once; if I couldn't do that, I'd stick to CDs. Plus, I really don't like iTunes. My stepdad got an iPod and he had me help him with it, and I've found that iTunes is just really cumbersome and unintuitive. With my mp3 player you don't have to use a particular program, you just open it in a window like a USB drive and copy files to it.

I'm also really not a fan of digital distribution, so downloading games is not a selling point for me.

Do you REALLY listen to ALL 160GB? REALLY? I hear this argument alot, but I find its people that just download album after album of random shit they never listen to. I have about 6 GB of music because its all hand selected track by track of stuff I want to listen to, not everything on the face of the earth.

I don't see how iTunes is cumbersome, you put your music in it, sync to the iPod/iPhone, done. I used to be a little offput by the mandatory nature of iTunes for an MP3 player because I thought "what if iTunes disappears?", but it won't, not until long after you've thrown that MP3 player in the closet for a higher capacity one or one that's smaller/has more features/etc. iTunes lets you easily rename songs properly and have them display correctly on the MP3 player screen.

With my Coby MP3 player (works like a flash drive) everything was listed as what it was tagged with originally, sometimes having wrong artists or incorrect titles (mispellings, etc., I download all of my music through Limewire), so not being able to use the corrected iTunes tags made it almost unusable for anything but shuffle play (which would be pointless with 160 GB of music).

Sooner or later you'll want to sync your iPhone to backup apps, contacts, etc., so when you do that, put what music you think you'll want to listen to on there. You can make a list of "must haves" and then make a few other playlists of stuff you are feeling at the moment. My 6 GB of music comes out to several DAYS of playback, so you can't tell me you can't just choose a couple albums when you sync every day. I know there would be a bum out element if you suddenly remembered a song you wanted to listen to and it wasn't on there, but youtube has almost every song ever made so you could just stream it from there to get your fix.

Overall, point taken, but unless you keep your 160 GB MP3 player with you at all times, its still an improvement. I imagine your 160 GB is for mostly at home use anyway, so you would still use it for that and have a small sample of songs your really like for use on the iPhone. Also, I should mention the reason the iPhone memory is so small is because its flash based rather than a mini hard drive like large capacity MP3 players, which is a good thing because it can't be easily damaged by shock. I've had many friends ruin their MP3 players by dropping them and having the hard drive get damaged.

As for digital distribution, I'm sure you remember my tirades about the Wii VC and WiiWare. The difference here is price. iPhone games are so cheap, you basically choose between a single serving size bag of chips or another awesome game. I have 2 full pages of PSP/DS quality games (16 paid full versions) and I've spent like $50, and they're all awesome. They are all easily re-downloadable from the Apple server should you delete them from your computer and phone and AFAIK no game/app has been removed unless they violated Apple's terms (one app was removed because it featured pictures of naked women and Apple has a no nude policy, and its possible the purchasers were refunded). If you lose/break your iPhone, simply sync your replacement and download them all back free. You buy them, they're yours, they don't give you the run around like Nintendo does with the Wii. They even prominently display your purchasing history on your iTunes so you could print out every invoice for archival should any discrepancy arise (again, unlike Nintendo). The only downside is that 10 years from now when they aren't compatible anymore you will probably lose them, but by then you've more than worn out the $3 purchase price. Then again, they may keep modifying them to be compatible, who knows. As it is, they constantly update them to fix small bugs or to accomodate user suggestions. If these games were $30 like a PSP game, I wouldn't buy them either, but at $10 for the top tier games that are BETTER than PSP games and with most at $5 or less with tons at $0.99, you just can't lose. I paid $1.99 for F.A.S.T. which is an amazing 3D flight combat simulator that even has online play through 3G or Wi-Fi. Tell me ANY game for ANY system that offers that for $1.99 new. Hell, a bar tab for most people is more than I've spent on iPhone games and I have just about every genre covered with incredible software.

[Knuckle Duster]

I should also mention that while you are limited to 450 hardline minutes, you have unlimited mobile to mobile and like 5000 night and weekend minutes, so as long as you don't call grandma on a hardline at 2 in the afternoon every day, you will never run out of minutes.

It's a double sided coin compared to Canada's plans. It feels like they give with one hand, yet take with the other either way.

Only offered by 1 provider & it's former competition (now subsidiary) Rogers & Fido

$75. You can get 400 minutes, unlimited evenings and weekends, 100 text (15cents each afterward), visual voicemail included, 2GB data limit (50cents per mb up to 60mb, then drops to 3cents per mb) with a 2 month grace period on the data cap, so you can find out how much you use.

They offer a $20 value plan to bump it up to unlimited texting,call display, call forwarding, earlier 'evenings' calls.

So thats 95 bucks for what you'd want, without unlimited data (with the flashy advertising on 'tethering' features, gross) And I'm not even getting into "network charges" and "taxes" which even rape the average Canadian on a land-line connection.

All I want is unlimited data, I don't care if it bumps it over $100.

As far as gaming is concerned, a start up group from PEI called bight games just made an interesting 99cent title. Aside from the carnival music which would drive me insane. I see the game as something well polished, that I'd get addicted to.

"Big Top 10"
http://toucharcade.com/2009/06/29/bi...ck-number-fun/

Check it out.

[Knuckle Duster]

Zenonia



Got a 9.0 from IGN. Interesting indeed.

[j_factor]

Do you REALLY listen to ALL 160GB? REALLY? I hear this argument alot, but I find its people that just download album after album of random shit they never listen to. I have about 6 GB of music because its all hand selected track by track of stuff I want to listen to, not everything on the face of the earth.

They're not downloaded albums, they're ripped from CDs I legitimately purchased. I do have a small amount of downloaded music but it's less than 5%. I wouldn't say I listen to every single track, but I'd prefer to just leave the full albums on there, rather than go through every album and pick them apart track by track. But I do listen to the vast majority of it.

I don't see how iTunes is cumbersome, you put your music in it, sync to the iPod/iPhone, done. I used to be a little offput by the mandatory nature of iTunes for an MP3 player because I thought "what if iTunes disappears?", but it won't, not until long after you've thrown that MP3 player in the closet for a higher capacity one or one that's smaller/has more features/etc. iTunes lets you easily rename songs properly and have them display correctly on the MP3 player screen.

iTunes confuses me. There, I said it. Seriously, it took me quite a while to figure out how to do anything with iTunes. I still can't figure out why (on my stepdad's iTunes/iPod) there's a playlist with no songs in it that I can't seem to delete.

And anyway, I see no reason to have to use a particular program at all. Your operating system should be sufficient for file transfers.

With my Coby MP3 player (works like a flash drive) everything was listed as what it was tagged with originally, sometimes having wrong artists or incorrect titles (mispellings, etc., I download all of my music through Limewire), so not being able to use the corrected iTunes tags made it almost unusable for anything but shuffle play (which would be pointless with 160 GB of music).

So when you change the information in iTunes, it doesn't change the ID3 tag in a way that everything can read the change? That doesn't sound like a positive thing for iTunes. When I change a tag, it should work with everything that reads an mp3. When I change a tag in Winamp, it displays properly on everything else.

And anyway, that's not an issue for me, since I have the correct information pulled from freedb when I put the CD in. If anything's incorrect (which is rare), I change it before ripping. And if anything somehow turns out to have a bad tag after I've ripped it, I can just change it with Winamp.

Interestingly enough, I do play it on random a lot.

Sooner or later you'll want to sync your iPhone to backup apps, contacts, etc., so when you do that, put what music you think you'll want to listen to on there. You can make a list of "must haves" and then make a few other playlists of stuff you are feeling at the moment. My 6 GB of music comes out to several DAYS of playback, so you can't tell me you can't just choose a couple albums when you sync every day. I know there would be a bum out element if you suddenly remembered a song you wanted to listen to and it wasn't on there, but youtube has almost every song ever made so you could just stream it from there to get your fix.

I don't want to sync every day. I don't want to "sync" at all. I don't even want to connect my mp3 player to the computer unless I'm adding a new album to it. I don't want to have to be constantly messing with it.

I'd bet at least half of my music is not on Youtube. Youtube mostly has music videos / hit singles and live performances (usually the live recordings are shit); only occasionally does someone upload album tracks, and usually only for very popular artists/albums. This is not to mention the fact that Youtube has fairly poor audio quality.

[17daysolderthannes]

They're not downloaded albums, they're ripped from CDs I legitimately purchased. I do have a small amount of downloaded music but it's less than 5%. I wouldn't say I listen to every single track, but I'd prefer to just leave the full albums on there, rather than go through every album and pick them apart track by track. But I do listen to the vast majority of it.



iTunes confuses me. There, I said it. Seriously, it took me quite a while to figure out how to do anything with iTunes. I still can't figure out why (on my stepdad's iTunes/iPod) there's a playlist with no songs in it that I can't seem to delete.

And anyway, I see no reason to have to use a particular program at all. Your operating system should be sufficient for file transfers.



So when you change the information in iTunes, it doesn't change the ID3 tag in a way that everything can read the change? That doesn't sound like a positive thing for iTunes. When I change a tag, it should work with everything that reads an mp3. When I change a tag in Winamp, it displays properly on everything else.

And anyway, that's not an issue for me, since I have the correct information pulled from freedb when I put the CD in. If anything's incorrect (which is rare), I change it before ripping. And if anything somehow turns out to have a bad tag after I've ripped it, I can just change it with Winamp.

Interestingly enough, I do play it on random a lot.



I don't want to sync every day. I don't want to "sync" at all. I don't even want to connect my mp3 player to the computer unless I'm adding a new album to it. I don't want to have to be constantly messing with it.

I'd bet at least half of my music is not on Youtube. Youtube mostly has music videos / hit singles and live performances (usually the live recordings are shit); only occasionally does someone upload album tracks, and usually only for very popular artists/albums. This is not to mention the fact that Youtube has fairly poor audio quality.

I think you're expecting a little too much from just 1 feature of the iPhone. The iPhone is not the best at anything it does, its meant to do things good enough for 99% of the time. 99% of the time when I take a picture, it doesn't need to be a 10 megapixel masterpiece. 99% of the time when I want to listen to music, I don't need every song I've ever heard. 99% of the time, I don't need a movie to be 1080p (especially since I have a CRT TV), 99% of the time I can access whatever website I need to access with the iPhone. You will never see an all-in-one device that does it better than a dedicated device, ever, because the nature of each device prevents it from being small enough and cheap enough to be feasible. Its pretty much a given that better picture quality demands larger lenses, so that alone keeps a phone from ever achieving top tier image quality.

As for iTunes, I used to be in the same boat as you. At first I didn't understand it at all and hated using it, then I finally spent some time and figured it out and it did what I wanted it to do. Compared to almost any other mandatory MP3 player software, iTunes is by far the best. I also felt the same way about the MP3 player being tied to a program rather than just being recognized like any other drive, but being tied to iTunes makes it easier to organize and adding music just takes plugging it in and hitting "sync." I'm not sure why it doesn't change ID3 tags, it may be that there is a setting I overlooked that is keeping it from changing them, I'll have to look into that. I imagine you're also using the PC version of iTunes, and though I haven't used it, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't as clean all around as the native mac version since obviously Apple developing for their own computer is going to turn out best. Kinda goes the same for Microsoft Office which is unnecessarily slow, buggy, and awkward on the Mac.

I say for the iPhone what I used to say about the N-Gage: its a phone. You can only compare it to other phones. You can't compare an N-Gage to a PSP because a PSP can't make phone calls (unless you count that Skype nonsense). The iPod Touch isn't nearly as appealing to me as I think a small computer would be a better decision (one of those mini laptops or even an eeePC). However, as a phone, the iPhone has to be able to fit in your pocket, so its size and subsequent limitations are necessary.

I don't know what kind of music you listen to, but I can often find stuff on youtube that I can't find on Limewire. You're actually more likely to find obscure bands on youtube because the record companies are less likely to berate youtube and make them take it down. You can also put that fmt18 or whatever extension for high quality sound (dont remember the exact letters), though typing that manually every time could get old.

I guess the gist of what I'm saying here is the iPhone is the best practical device out there. It fits in your pocket and does almost everything very well. If you NEED 160GB to store your music, you'll never be satisfied with a phone-based MP3 player, that's why they still make the iPod Classic with the hard drive. Personally, music is a distant priority compared to games, if I couldn't get music free, I would do without, same with most movies, its only games I am willing to pay money for. This might change once I have a real full time job and make serious cash, but for now, its bootleg or do without. One thing I challenge someone to do is point out a better phone-based gaming device because I would love to see it.

[genocide-superstar]

I don't see what everyone's problem with iTunes is... it's called the right-click lol

[j_factor]

I think you're expecting a little too much from just 1 feature of the iPhone. The iPhone is not the best at anything it does, its meant to do things good enough for 99% of the time. 99% of the time when I take a picture, it doesn't need to be a 10 megapixel masterpiece. 99% of the time when I want to listen to music, I don't need every song I've ever heard. 99% of the time, I don't need a movie to be 1080p (especially since I have a CRT TV), 99% of the time I can access whatever website I need to access with the iPhone. You will never see an all-in-one device that does it better than a dedicated device, ever, because the nature of each device prevents it from being small enough and cheap enough to be feasible. Its pretty much a given that better picture quality demands larger lenses, so that alone keeps a phone from ever achieving top tier image quality.

But I don't see any reason they can't offer larger capacities than they currently have, or have some way of upgrading the memory. They don't even support microSD, what's up with that? I'm sure it works okay as a music player, my point is it wouldn't exactly replace the one I have, so it's not that much of a feature for me. I'm sure it's a perfectly fine phone, camera, and internet device, but so is the phone I already have. Actually my phone can play mp3's perfectly well too, but I never use that feature.

I guess it's just that you and I are coming from different places. You just upgraded to an iPhone from your old N-Gage. I had an N-Gage too, and upgraded over a year ago. My phone may not do everything that an iPhone does, but it does many of them. Getting an iPhone literally costs hundreds of dollars ($200-300 plus an extra $15/month for two years which is $360), and I don't know that a touch screen, flash drive, and better mobile game selection is worth that much money. I'm not rich. $560 to $660 is a huge chunk of change to me. I don't think I've ever bought any device that cost that much, other than my computer.

[Knuckle Duster]

How does "Vay" for iPhone compare to the SegaCD version?

It's not full of the 'working designs' scripting & balancing bullshit anymore I imagine.

Mediocre or not, I love that it's there at all.

[Knuckle Duster]

For those 'Without' an iPod Touch/iPhone (Like myself)
You may be wondering what the games have to offer, Zenonia got a 9.0 from IGN a while back, and is considered the best Action RPG on the platform. The developers offer a PC Emulator program for their software, which is slightly buggy, but you can check out what it's like:

http://global.gamevil.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21266

It's a limited version of the game, but so far it looks like it's worth 5.99 for sure. It's on sale for 2.99 on itunes (50% off right now.)