My girlfriend has been a long time customer of T-Mobile Netherlands. We pay our bills on time and we purchased insurance for the iPhone 3Gs to make sure that when and if the phone breaks down, we will always be able to replace it and get back onto the T-Mobile network. Now, a bit lost for words, well… polite words, I would like to make T-Mobile’s hard working employees aware of the fact that their 3G coverage is horrible (polite phrase). In some cases, while at home or in stores, phone calls are dropped and my girlfriend is left performing, what looks like, ballet in our livingroom or in the store trying to get some kind of signal on her phone. On the 3G level, I will admit, Vodafone needs to sort out its business, too. In the center of Delft even I can’t get a 3G signal on my phone.
Yes, of course it has been down plenty of times and there are even better quality video’s online showing the performance differences of the different iPhones… but we couldn’t help ourselves and we did a similar test.
My colleague had an iPhone 4 and 3G and so I added my 3Gs to the equation and conducted a test with flight control. I was pretty relieved that the performance of my 3Gs was still quite good.
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Watch on posterous
Last night my girlfriend and I went to my appartment in Rijswijk to clean up after some hefty paint work we did during the weekend. I thought I would take a quick snapshot of our ‘work-in-progress’. There is still some work left to do, but we are very happy with what we have done so far.
The photo was taken using an iPhone application called ‘Autostitch‘. The guys at Cloudburst Research recently released version 3 of Autostitch which brought some major improvements. This image consisted of 41 individual photo’s merged together in the app. There is no way you can find a tool this good for a desktop/laptop computer for only €1,59 ($2.99).
The post processing was done with the application ‘Camera+‘. The application is still on sale for only €0,79 ($0.99), I highly recommend it! As some people say, this is what Apple’s iPhone camera app should have been.
[written from an iPhone 3GS owner's perspective]
Yesterday Apple’s Steve Jobs announced the long anticipated iPhone 4, also being referred to as the iPhone HD. I won’t bore you with all the details since I expect you to have heard the news somewhere on the digital and offline grapevine. To be quite honest, I am not really sure why I am writing this article. I have taken a little time to think about the new iPhone HD and what I really think of it and all that I could tell is, that as iPhone 3GS owner, I am not too impressed.
Is Spotify perfect? No, not 100% at least, but the benefits definitely outweigh the cons. The selection of music on Spotify is vast, this is an understatement by the way. Plenty of mainstream artists can be found, even national artists such as Marco Borsato, Blof and even Jan Smit. What were some of the pots of gold at the end of the rainbow for me? That would have to be the Smashing Pumpkins album “Rarities & B-Sides” (114 tracks) sold on Amazon for $74.18 (last year the price was more than $100).
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I really enjoy the Last.FM integration. It updates my profile automatically in the background.
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Playback auto (re)starts when re-opening the Spotfiy app when previously closed during playback, something that can happen when receiving a phone call.
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Unfortunately the Apple headphone remote control does not work with Spotify (only the volume function). It will close the Spotify app, but start up iTunes at the same time.
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Just like the headphones, the audio control buttons on my MacBook Pro don’t work properly with Spotify. It will stop Spotify playback, but start up iTunes at the same time.
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I can’t edit columns in the Spotify desktop application. I would like to remove the ‘buy’ column and show a ‘genre’ column.
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The in-app search is very flexible, it includes auto suggestion when a possible typo is found.
- The desktop app shows related artists when viewing an artist information page, something that is desperately missing in the iPhone app.
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There is no landscape mode in Playlists in the iPhone app. This is a bit annoying, especially when some tracks have long names and there is now way to view them, not even during playback.
Can Spotify play tracks in the background?
