iPhone

Ugh. On my existing 3G: went to go for a ride, saw that 1) it would not sync new tracks I put into a playlist (as had worked for years) and 2) suddenly, apps that had been in folders or deleted were on my home screens. When I went into the Music tab of the phone screen in iTunes, it wouldn't "see" any new playlists I created. I tried adding new tracks to the playlists it did see, any sync, but nothing changed on the phone. Went through the whole restore process, but that didn't change anything.

Now I can delete playlists (in the "Playlists" in the left column) and they disappear from the "Playlists" in the Music tab of the phone screen in iTunes, but any new playlists I create in the "Playlists" in the left column do not appear in the Music tab of the phone screen in iTunes. And not on the phone after I sync it.

Thoughts?

ddt

I'd reset the phone (Settings->General->Reset->Erase All Content and Settings), re-install everything. (Stand off and nuke them from orbit... it's the only way to be sure.)

I've had this happen before. For the apps, you are kind of fucked. For the songs, I switched to manual syncing and selected no playlists and synced the items. I then selected the playlists I wanted and synced back.

James, in my personal experience a bumper is a good tradeoff. It makes sure that the glass doesn't touch the surface of whatever you put your phone on yet the back and the front are exposed making it easy to slide the phone in and out of pockets.

Unfortunately they seem to be hard to come by these days, the one that I've got is similar to this one: http://www.pdashop.nl/product-gallery/107112/category-4214-smartphones/0

I have one of these cases for my iPhone 4... it looks like they work with the 4S as well. I like it a lot. Mild protection that doesn't get in the way. It projects about a millimeter in front of the face, so that if you drop the phone face down the glass ought not strike the ground.

I'd like to brag that my phone has no scratches, but that may not be just the ifrogz case: because I like to keep my iPhone ear buds with the phone, I tuck the whole thing into a Marware case for the original iPhone; essentially a foam pouch with an outer pocket for the ear buds.

Did you see this on deal mac yesterday?

http://dealmac.com/Griffin-Survivor-Military-Duty-Case-Belt-Clip-for-iPhone-4-for-10-free-shipping/510168.html

Secret iOS business: what you don’t know about your apps (via Metafilter)

Siri dictation cheat sheet.

The dictation is actually useful, but the Siri "assistant" stuff feels very, very half-baked to me in my first few days of use so far. And it's extremely frustrating when it fails, because it isn't easy to diagnose why it's not working -- Siri's responses are often amazingly unhelpful. Today I tried to dictate a phone number to it and kept meeting with a million strange, inexplicable failures, often resulting in a Wolfram Alpha search for mathematical properties of the number rather than a phone call. The problem turned out to be that I was saying the last few digits "four seven hundred" instead of "four seven zero zero" -- this somehow meant that Siri recognized it as a _number_, but not as a _phone_ number. And then saying "no, please place a call to the number I just said," which seems like it should work easily, results only in more fuckups and confusion. In general the "conversational" stuff seems seriously oversold at this point; Siri's ability to make corrections when it does the wrong thing the first time is very minimal. Usually, telling it that it's gotten something wrong just results in a nonresponsive "humorous" message, and then you have to cancel and start all over again. And asking for help ("you have X wrong. how can I correct that?"), which should work, produces only more snippy wisecracks, rather than help. It's a pretty annoying beta product so far, and I can't imagine I'll be using it for much until it improves.

Hmmm... That's disappointing.

Fingers crossed it gets better over time...

Since they're collecting all your input in North Carolina, we can hope they'll adjust for such situations as the attempts pile up.
That same optimistic part of me thinks that Apple restricted Siri to the 4S to ease in the NC data center, and that when Siri is out of beta, it will be made available for at least the iPad 2 (what better way to sell you a 4S?) and perhaps the iPhone 4.

I'll second Roger's observations, though I haven't used Siri very much myself yet. Dictation is waaay better than I thought it would be, but the assistance is about as useful as Newton's handwriting recognition.

Quote
Tony Leggett
Hmmm... That's disappointing.

Fingers crossed it gets better over time...

Siri is one type of tech that I can't see getting worse. It should always get better unless they program too far ahead for future hardware, and leave your hardware behind.

The Blue and Me car stereo and phone thingy in my Alfa was acting really strange after the iOS 5 upgrade. None of the names were recognised when I tried the speech recognision and at some point I found myself yelling into the steering wheel. Turned out Apple changed the bluetooth addressbook so that the names no longer were [last name, first name] but [first name, last name].

Took me a few days and some frustration to discover that...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/20/2011 12:29PM by tliet.

Search Bing and Yahoo with Siri. I didn't know that Siri would respect your selected search engine preference. Nice. Now if I could just select Altavista, or ask Siri to ask Jeeves...

I used AltaVista last week. If you search (wiki?) you'll supposedly find that they said it would be shut down. But it's just fine. What gives?

I used to love Altavista because I could make complicated boolean searches

A AND (B AND (C OR D) BUT NOT E)

But they switched over to an interface that seems identical to Google's. No point in using them anymore.

Agreed. Google at some point in attempted search 'logic' (boolean), will begin to re-assert who is in charge, and start throwing in what it wants you to see anyways, or give up far too short.
It actually sucks for any real, thought-out search.

Okay, so got an iPhone 4S (go, me). Now, I can't remember how to upgrade w/o losing stuff.

Do I plug it in to iTunes, register, activate, then swap over SIM card? Or swap over SIM card, plug it in to iTunes, activate, etc.?

ddt

nm

ddt



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/21/2011 01:52PM by ddt.