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captainsblogI spent a good deal of time yesterday watching Clash of the Titans. Not the movie (we watched the amazing Being Elmo, though:) but rather the computer version. And it's no game.
In this corner, running Safari, iTunes and 8 gig of storage.... the iPhone, presented by Apple!
[cheers and applause]
In this corner, running Vista Service Pack 2, with 3 gig of available memory.... the Laptop, powered by Microsoft!
[boos and hisses for the bad guy]
And in the new corner, sporting a 10.1" VGA display, the Android 3.2 Operating System, a gig of RAM, 16GB Internal Flash Memory; Wireless 802.11 and Bluetooth 2.1.... Godot the Tablet, heavily influenced by Google!
[dead silence while Larry and Serg try to steal all your personal information and browsing history]
Until yesterday, Godot was great. I read Matchbox Girls on it, pulled up my Gmail and blog on it with decent wifi connections, but I thought, hey! There's a headphone jack! iTunes takes forever to come up on the phone, so why not use all those extra gigs to sync my Itunes library to it, as well?
You know where this is going. Google and Apple do not have formal diplomatic relations. You have to go through Swiss embassy backchannels to get anything done, in this case one recommended by CNET called Doubletwist. It promised to provide a beautiful connection between tablet and existing iTunesy stuff, even carrying over ratings and playcounts (which I don't even pay attention to). Get it from the Market!, it begged.
So this little piggy did go to Market. And Doubletwist immediately asked for permission to take over every control of my tablet known to man, including sleep features, posting access, and all rights in and to my still-unborn first child. So I told the Market to go Screw Itself and did it as a direct download instead from the PC, which, somehow through the mysteries of Google Über Alles, wound up on the tablet!
It installed, and without much if any written instructions (I found some on an external website), I got to the point of asking it to sync my iTunes playlists to it. Sorry, no can do with the basic Doubletwist app. You need the through-the-air one. Would piggy like to go back to Market and BUY that?
By now I'm pissed, so I told it "no" and closed it. And that's where Clippy came along.
You remember him, right? We may have killed his physical manifestation-
-but his spirit still lives on in multiple corners of Vista. It looks like you're trying to sync music to a remote device. I can do that for you! Just say yes! Sadly, I did, and suddenly screen after screen of tunes started appearing in the Doubletwist interface. Not all of my music, and not in the playlist order I'm used to, but hey, I thought, I can tinker.
And then Clippy stuck one end of himself right in my ass. When I got to the gym yesterday afternoon, the tunes were there, but My Library wasn't working. Unfortunately, My Library cannot be opened, it told me. Thinking maybe one of these steps required a reboot, I gave Godot one. Bigger mistake- I then got a cascade of unfortunatelys, that now NOTHING worked on the damn thing. Not the music, not the browser, not the mail client or the library. Un-unfortunately, I did find my way to the File Manager. Sorry, I'm still a DOS guy at heart; I likes me my menus and shift-ctrl-alt combos and nonvisual things that Apple and Google hate so much. It was through that screen, with a lot of checking and garbage-canning, that I deleted most of the 13 gigs of unwanted "music" (most of it 4-year backlogs of podcasts) that Clippy had just loaded on there and kept loading until there was no room left for anything else to run.
After all that, I managed 45 minutes of cardio to the sight of Matchbox Girls and the sound of David Sanborn- although why the headphone jack is on the opposite end of the tablet from the edge with the power buttons, I've no idea. I also have no idea why the sound is so much lower, even at maximum setting, than it is on either phone or laptop. But most of all, I have no idea why these three behemoths have made it so feckin hard for us to try to like and use all of them at the same time.
Maybe Rodney King can come up with a Can We All Get Along? app- but the iTunes store would probably reject it, the Market would overprice it, and Clippy would fill up my drive with 13 gigs of copies of it.
In this corner, running Safari, iTunes and 8 gig of storage.... the iPhone, presented by Apple!
[cheers and applause]
In this corner, running Vista Service Pack 2, with 3 gig of available memory.... the Laptop, powered by Microsoft!
[boos and hisses for the bad guy]
And in the new corner, sporting a 10.1" VGA display, the Android 3.2 Operating System, a gig of RAM, 16GB Internal Flash Memory; Wireless 802.11 and Bluetooth 2.1.... Godot the Tablet, heavily influenced by Google!
[dead silence while Larry and Serg try to steal all your personal information and browsing history]
Until yesterday, Godot was great. I read Matchbox Girls on it, pulled up my Gmail and blog on it with decent wifi connections, but I thought, hey! There's a headphone jack! iTunes takes forever to come up on the phone, so why not use all those extra gigs to sync my Itunes library to it, as well?
You know where this is going. Google and Apple do not have formal diplomatic relations. You have to go through Swiss embassy backchannels to get anything done, in this case one recommended by CNET called Doubletwist. It promised to provide a beautiful connection between tablet and existing iTunesy stuff, even carrying over ratings and playcounts (which I don't even pay attention to). Get it from the Market!, it begged.
So this little piggy did go to Market. And Doubletwist immediately asked for permission to take over every control of my tablet known to man, including sleep features, posting access, and all rights in and to my still-unborn first child. So I told the Market to go Screw Itself and did it as a direct download instead from the PC, which, somehow through the mysteries of Google Über Alles, wound up on the tablet!
It installed, and without much if any written instructions (I found some on an external website), I got to the point of asking it to sync my iTunes playlists to it. Sorry, no can do with the basic Doubletwist app. You need the through-the-air one. Would piggy like to go back to Market and BUY that?
By now I'm pissed, so I told it "no" and closed it. And that's where Clippy came along.
You remember him, right? We may have killed his physical manifestation-
-but his spirit still lives on in multiple corners of Vista. It looks like you're trying to sync music to a remote device. I can do that for you! Just say yes! Sadly, I did, and suddenly screen after screen of tunes started appearing in the Doubletwist interface. Not all of my music, and not in the playlist order I'm used to, but hey, I thought, I can tinker.
And then Clippy stuck one end of himself right in my ass. When I got to the gym yesterday afternoon, the tunes were there, but My Library wasn't working. Unfortunately, My Library cannot be opened, it told me. Thinking maybe one of these steps required a reboot, I gave Godot one. Bigger mistake- I then got a cascade of unfortunatelys, that now NOTHING worked on the damn thing. Not the music, not the browser, not the mail client or the library. Un-unfortunately, I did find my way to the File Manager. Sorry, I'm still a DOS guy at heart; I likes me my menus and shift-ctrl-alt combos and nonvisual things that Apple and Google hate so much. It was through that screen, with a lot of checking and garbage-canning, that I deleted most of the 13 gigs of unwanted "music" (most of it 4-year backlogs of podcasts) that Clippy had just loaded on there and kept loading until there was no room left for anything else to run.
After all that, I managed 45 minutes of cardio to the sight of Matchbox Girls and the sound of David Sanborn- although why the headphone jack is on the opposite end of the tablet from the edge with the power buttons, I've no idea. I also have no idea why the sound is so much lower, even at maximum setting, than it is on either phone or laptop. But most of all, I have no idea why these three behemoths have made it so feckin hard for us to try to like and use all of them at the same time.
Maybe Rodney King can come up with a Can We All Get Along? app- but the iTunes store would probably reject it, the Market would overprice it, and Clippy would fill up my drive with 13 gigs of copies of it.
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