stevegerrard.org

I did a lot of searching for reviews on this product, but since it’s pretty new it’s no surprise that not a lot came up. The reviews I found were largely positive save for a few comments on sound quality (very subjective) and a couple on the in-ear fit. So, I went ahead a bought a pair and I though I’d share my initital views and experience.

First impressions were pretty good. Packaging is nice (although not up to the bar set by Apple these days) and the Rockaway’s themselves feel good quality. The red cord itself is really quite nice in my opinion. Its a flat ribbon profile, and rubberised so feels good in the hand and comfortable and warm to the touch when draped around your neck. If fact, because of its feel you think you can stretch it like a rubber band (although of course you can’t) you hopefully you get the idea.

I charged them up as per instructions and managed to pair to my iphone 4s without any trouble, and so onto the first thing, music sound quality. OK, the thing to bear in mind about the sound quality is for what purpose you are using them for. If you are comparing them to mid/high end wired headphones, then your going to be disappointed, but then if you are doing that, you are missing the point in my view. Bluetooth headphones (especially these) are primarily for a convenience use case, in my example I use them when at work for a bit of music but mainly for work calls and in the car because I don’t like getting tangled up in wires and a like to hear phone call in both ears. So for this case my view is that the sound is perfectly good. I also have a pair of B&W P5’s and in comparison you can certainly tell a difference, but I would say they are no worse that the default supplied Apple headphones. I actually thought the voice calls were clearer. One other thing to note is that the volume is significantly less than the P5 for the same iphone volume setting; even when on max volume you definitely feel there’s room for more..

As I mentioned, I had seen a couple of reviews complaining about in-ear fit, specifically that they kept on falling out of ears. I would say the fit in the ear is not great probably mainly due to the weight of each earbud; because there is no other hardware than the earbuds themeselves including the Bluetooth HW, USB connector and internal battery etc. it all has to go in the earbud. Its impressive how they’ve packed it all in, but there no way of hiding the weight. It gives them a reassuring weighty quality feel, but your earholes have to hold them! How problematic this in is again down to your use case. For me its OK as I’m pretty stationary all the time I’m using them, but if you want to go jogging with, good luck! Also its fair to note I’ve never got on that well with in-ear fit from any headphone of this type so you might get on better than me. Either way, it wasn’t a show stopper for me.

When it comes to pairing it worth noting that the specification say you can pair up to 8 devices. This is true (well probably, I only tried it with a second device, my ipad) but it does not support 2 simultaneous devices. I personally don’t think this is an issue at all, but depending on your use case, it’s worth being aware of.

So, everthing was going well until….. they stopped working!! In its first day of full use there appears to be a problem. It appears dead, and when connected via USB charge the LED indicates fully charged (which it definitely is not), so something is up. I will try to see if Novero downloadable SW updater provides any update to this product, but otherwise its back to amazon. I’m really disappointed as I really like these so far. I will certainly get another pair and hope its a one off problem, so fingers crossed and I’ll update this post with what happens with my second pair! More to follow ..

——-> next day

It turns out that the Novero SW updater covers a host of their products but not these, so that avenue is closed. The next morning and I plugged in the usb charge, and we had a red light, not blue (indicating it’s charging) so it was a step in the right direction at least. 1 hour later I get the blue fully charged indicator, so I then turn them on and…. we have lift off! Plan is now to hammer them today to see if I get any further problems, otherwise it’s indeed back to the rain forest..

Some good friends of mine are trying to sell their villa in Bodrum, Turkey, so if you are interested and are in the market, have a look at it on their website: gumuslukvilla.co.uk

No Flash support. Come on!! the best browsing experience?????
No multi-tasking..
No camera, so what about video skype??
No OLED screen..
Screen resolution at 1024×768 so does not support HD video..
No video out interface..
No SD card slot..
No USB port..

All in all, still very much a slave device to a Mac (or PC)

It does look very nice through and I’ll problable end up buying one!!

My good friend Peter Costello commented on the fact that there have been precious few contributions made to all that is stevegerrard.org, so just for you Peter here’s the first entry for 2010 (but also I would suggest you search elsewhere for online reading material!)

It’s rare that I get too excited about an application, given the sheer amount of new desktop and mobile apps coming on to the market everyday. Having had an iphone for over half a year I’ve seen quite a few interesting new apps that make you think “ahh, that’s quite cool, but how much will I actually use it?” One common issue that bugs me is how to share files and photos with my family, especially since Ayfer and I have become de-facto official photographers of my niece Tzipi, I somehow need to get hundreds (actually, nearly thousands) of high quality photos to my family, which can be a real pain as its far to large to email, hence the only options are a USB stick or to burn DVD, both of which require physically meeting up. Other options would be to use space on my web-hosting account which requires using an FTP program, fairly un-user friendly for most people, or I could sign up for MobileMe which although is quite a neat and complete offering, I do feel is a little limited and rather over priced for what you get. So this marvellous application I speak of is Dropbox.

In simple and consise terms the Dropbox concept is a centralised folder that you have on all your computers or devices that allows you to automatically see what is in that folder be it on your work or home computer, and is available on Mac, PC, and Linux, and there’s even an iPhone app as well.

All you do is sign up for an account, install the software and you can then instantly share documents, photos -pretty much all files – as long as they are in the that Dropbox folder. Within the folder itself you are free to create further folders and better still you can give public or, more importantly, provide selected access to those folders to you family and friends.

What it means for example is that if you save all your documents to that folder whenever you make a change and then save it, it is automatically updated on all your computers rather than just the one you are working on. In turn this means the the previous hassle I had of putting on a USB stick or burning a DVD with hundred to photos of Tzipi and then physically having to take to my sisters house no longer exists. Instead she can also sign up with Dropbox and I share that folder with her. “Simples” as a Russian meerkat would say.

For the princely sum of diddly-squat you get 2 Gbytes of storage, and if you want more (50 or 100 Gb) you can pay a relatively small monthly fee.

What else, well, all yoru files are fully backed up online, you also get full web access to the files if you aren’t with one of you own computers, and you can see the complete revision history and previous versions of updated files, a bit like Time Machine. For files that you want you give open access to anyone there’s a “Public” folder that allows you to dump files in and then dish out a URL to anyone.

Clever huh?

For the few days that I’ve been using it I am really impressed. Its so simple, so logical, and so useful. Brilliant!

Yup, it snowed last night. It was quite surreal actually; after a lovely meal at the Lokanta Turkish restaurant in George Street, we head off to the Bee’s Mouth for a quick drink, only to emerge just 1 hour later, and a good 10cm of snow!

Of course, the obligatory, inevitable, and fairly lenghtly snowball fight followed. Here’s a couple of pics taken on my iphone when we were on Palmiera Square:

Ayfer, John M, Philippa, and Antonio

with the local snowman

In the morning,instead of going to work, Ayfer went for a wander and took some great pics that you can see on Flickr.

Here’s a few of the best ones:

In the a space of 48 hours it’s all gone Pete Tong. In pretty atrocious conditions successive semi-finals in the mens singls and mens doubles have not gone my way. In the singles I simply didn’t play well enough, and in the doubles last night, and excrusiatingly tight second set was lost 11-9 in the tie break… Merde!!! (as they say in France).

The slight consolation is that wer’e in the Mixed final on Saturday so at least there is some chance to salvage something from what has been a pretty dire week on the tennis front!! :((

The Grasshoppers quadruple is still on; having secured the Winter Mixed with Jenny, I’m still in the hunt for the singles, mens doubles, and mixed! Will my flat look like a large gleaming trophy cabinet, or will I grab defeat from the jaws of victory in spectacular fashion… only time will tell!

First up is the mens doubles semi against Giles and Matt; should be a close one.. will keep you posted…!

I recently started getting the message “could not activate cellular data network: You are not subscribed to a cellular service”. The way to solve this is to go to the “Cellular Data Network” stting under the General/Network option, and change the data APN from idata.o2.co.uk to mobile.o2.co.uk.

Also, for MMS you should change the APN from idata.o2.co.uk to wap.o2.co.uk.

I just need to vent my frustration that the supposed new iMac are still not out yet. I’m ready to go an replace my 4 year old iMac G4 with the latest and greatest from Apple, and there have been reports that it is iminent since the begining of january, but ziltch so far.

Current rumour suggest it will be based on the quad-core “Nehalem” Intel Core i7 processors which should make it a significant upgrade to the current dual core versions, but with Apple you never know so well have to wait and see. Also its not clear whether the appearance or form factor will change.

All I know is that i want it to happen soon!