How have I discovered this? Well, I put it on a counter top, table or other large flat surface, turn it on and do whatever else I’m doing. A couple of hours later it has vibrated itself off the desk and hit the floor.

So far, no dents and no apparent damage, but it makes me wonder about the long-term viability as speakers don’t usually handle repeated impacts particularly well. Blah.

On the plus side, since giving up even trying to pair to multiple devices, it’s been an absolutely fantastic speaker. Can’t wait to take it travelling again!

I went looking for a Bluetooth solution, preferably with it’s own batteries and USB/5v rechargeable batteries as I have little desire to start carrying spare batteries on me and I ended up with a Jawbone JAMBOX. At $199 MSRP, they’re on the expensive end of “Hey, it’s just a speaker” but given the value of having a decent solution, I felt it was worth trying. At this point odds are better than 50/50 that it’s getting boxed up and returned.

Lets be clear: the sound is great! It could be a bit louder, but it’s probably loud enough to annoy a neighbour in a hotel with thin walls, and is just right for most hotels or single room use, which is pretty much the point. Better, it doubles as a speakerphone and the quality is far better than the iPhone’s built-in speaker, so that’s fantastic. The out-of-the-box-experience is fantastic too, it has a very satisfying rumble in your hand the first time you power it on.

The box is high quality, opens up easily, the speaker is well placed at the top with an accessory USB cable, charger and 3.5mm cable. Great, almost. The website says this is what’s in the box:

1. JAMBOX
2. 60″ micro USB charging cable
3. 12.5″ micro USB charging cable
4. 36″ 3.5mm stereo cable
5. Carrying case
6. A/C wall charger
7. User guide

Mine had only one micro USB charging cable, not the two described. No big deal. The “Carrying case” is just a thick cardboard envelope folded up, it’s better than nothing, but it’s nothing to get excited about.

What is more of a pain, however, is the Bluetooth support, specifically the quasi-multipoint hack. It remembers up to 8 pairings at any one time and out of the box only connects to the most recently used device. I paired to my iPhone and iPad initially, planning on possibly pairing to another device later. Being late at night and having upcoming travel, I headed off to bed. I turned the speaker on and it helpfully paired with my iPad charging in another room and I couldn’t find any way to force it over to the iPhone pairing. A quick trip to Google didn’t help, but indicated that I could enable multi-point (to allow it to connect to multiple devices at once) via the web interface. Great, I connect up the USB cable, install drivers/software on my laptop, upgrade the firmware and turn on multi-point support, restart everything. It connects up to my phone, and boom, sound comes out the iPhone speaker. Fail.

A couple more tries and it turns out that although the JAMBOX technically can connect to two devices at once, only which one it decides is first gets speaker support, the other only gets the headset profile. Unfortunately there’s no way to predict which device will actually connect first; it tries to connect to the most recently connected result but in practice, it seems to hit either device randomly and the other, well, it’s audio doesn’t go to the speaker.

Oh and worse, so once I figure out that it’s talking to the wrong device, is it enough to disconnect from the device in question? Of course not, you have to disconnect from both devices, kill Bluetooth on one, then re-connect from the other.

A hobbled implementation is one thing, but an unpredictable/unreliable UI might just be too much of a pain; for $200, could we at least get the power/pairing switch to flip to the next paired device?

All in all, so far, I love this device. I’ve been reading books on my iPhone and iPad so far, but at this point, I’d highly recommend it!

I got the $139 version which has wifi only, but for $189 you can snag a 3G version that will let you download eBooks from anywhere without setting up your own wireless network.

So to start with it, the packaging is very Apple-like. So is the charger. That’s nice. It doesn’t come in a shipping box, the box it comes in IS the shipping box, that’s a damn nice design to avoid wasted packing materials.

Out of the box is a nice experience; the Kindle itself is wrapped in plastic and the screen has instructions on how to get started printed on it. If you want to look like less of a fool than me, you won’t try and pry them off since unlike most devices that have a beautifully printed plastic cover over the screen, the startup instructions are the screen itself! Talk about a great first impression.

Oh, and yes, there is a charger plus a USB cable included in the box. Another nice touch in a day where $300 devices *cough*iPod Touch*cough* don’t include power adapters.

I already have a Kindle account and read eBooks on my iPad and iPhone, when I fired up the Kindle it was pre-configured to my Amazon account and once I got wifi connected, I was immediately able to download books that I’d already purchased.

The screen is absolutely beautiful, the Kindle is so much lighter than I’d expected, and it’s a very comfortable fit in the hand. There are page-turn buttons on the left and right, so it’s great regardless of which hand you’re using at that particular moment.

Unfortunately I did have one fairly major problem with the wifi setup. On the plus side it should work fine for most normal home networks, the problem only occurs when using a configuration that is more common in business networks.

If you really care about the details, read on:

It’s looking like a bug in Kindle’s network stack.  Specifically, the device breaks when a DHCP server returns this configuration:

IP: 172.16.0.1
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway: 172.16.0.1
DNS Server: 172.16.0.40

After the Kindle obtains an IP address, it attempts to send a DNS lookups to 172.16.0.40, but routes the packets to the default gateway instead of correctly delivering them to the local network.

Interestingly this works on “normal” home LANs where 172.16.0.1 is both a router and DNS server, but breaks on a more “corporate” style LAN where the router/firewall/default-gateway is not the DNS server.

I’ve reported the problem to Amazon’s support, we’ll see how much hassle it is to get through the first level support droid.

First off, for anyone who has never been to an Apple Store to get service on a broken Apple product, let me give you a bit of warning: Apple sells so much defective gear that you apparently need an appointment just to return your expensive doorstop to get a replacement pre-doorstop. Who knew?

Anyway, a message to Apple: FedEx and UPS are different companies. No really, they are.

After having flown to another city to go to the Apple Store and having been turned away by said Apple Store, I complained to Apple’s phone based support until they offered to send a replacement phone and was told I just had to put the broken phone in box with the prepaid shipping label for return.

The instructions contained within the box included a toll free number to call to arrange pickup, the number was answered by a friendly UPS rep.

Unfortunately the return shipping label said “FedEx” so UPS wasn’t able to help.

I found a FedEx’s phone number on the tubes, and was told that despite the fact that I already had a FedEx delivery truck coming later this week, I didn’t have the right colour label for pickup service. FedEx then instructed me to take the package to some location near the airport, approximately a $35 cab ride away.

I called Apple, and was again advised to call UPS, after I explained that the return shipping label wasn’t a UPS label, the Apple rep seemed confused and didn’t know how to proceed. I suspect he was really a software program, and had I been able to see the screen, I’d have seen the “sad mac” logo at this point.

I ended up shipping the phone at my cost via Canada Post, $15 for a tracked and insured shipment; this seemed smarter then $70-round-trip cab fare or wasting any more time or effort.

Assuming I’m not on crack, how cool is that?

Weirdly enough, I see names on older calls, so maybe it’s been there for a while and I just never noticed?

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to love about the iPhone, especially with some of the applications that are making appearances now, but Apple really needs to get some of the basics implemented.

Whenever I complain I always have someone popup to say that it isn’t needed because information just flows between apps. To some extent this is true, it’s one click to call a phone number from an email (assuming it’s formatted correctly, no way to add that missing zero or area code though), Google Maps adds contacts to the address book automatically, etc.

What I can’t figure out is how exactly to flow three 16 digit numbers from an email to a courier’s tracking page to find out when my Christmas gift will be here.

Apple fanbois, enlighten me!

I am currently running an entire virtual instance of Windows Vista (you know, that OS you keep poking holes at in your commercials) and in that instance I am running three different webbrowsers and a mail *server*.

Guess what is using more memory, iTunes or Vista? Now keep in mind one is an operating system and the other is an overgrown music player which Apple has bundled (hmm, wasn’t Apple among those crying about Microsoft’s bundling a couple years ago) with some of their hardware.

Please learn to write more compact code, and for the sake of all that is holy, learn how to use multiple threads so the entire iTunes GUI can be snappy and responsive while it takes iTunes 99% of a 2.4GHz core for over 30 seconds just to connect to an iPhone, will ya?

It’s a simple concept, every day you fire it up and enter your weight, it keeps track. Yay. However, what it also does is allow you to chart your weight over time, and builds an exponentially smoothed average to help you watch your over-all weight trends, without letting an ice cream day hurt you.

It also allows you to set and measure goals, and based on your current and target weight will give you an estimate as to how you need to adjust your intake.

At $9.95 it’s not the cheapest app on the AppStore, but skip a couple fast food lunches and you’ll have covered the $9.95.

Under 100MB. That’s embarrassing.

Why? Well, I spend most of my time with access to wifi, and use it religiously. Still, I’d have expected 500MB or so, I’m constantly reading email and Google Reader while I’m out.

Still, I suppose this isn’t a bad thing.