Purchases

Yes, it’s happened … goodbye Blackberry, hello Apple!

Blackberry and Apple phones

An early – and expensive – birthday present 😉

In some ways, I feel that the iPhone is a little like our MINIs … when I first heard about the iPhone I felt “interesting … but I don’t want one”
But then came the day when I actually saw one close up, and tried it – actually it was an iPod Touch, but similar – and using the web browser to visit GBMINI was a revelation! Look at how it renders the webpage exactly how it looks at home … look at how the text is readable even though it’s teeny tiny … and wow, it redraws wider if I turn the thing round, even easier to read 🙂
At that time, I had no idea about zooming, scrolling, etc – but it was so cool and it just seemed to work “right”. Once you’ve tried one, you don’t want to use a regular one any more – similar to how I feel with MINIs.

Margaret, also, is close to falling for an iPhone – although she’d never own a MINI. So I guess they’re not quite the same 😉

Anyway, to put this slightly “on topic” (do I have to do that for my own website):
I tried the iPhone in GBMINI#6 tonight – with the R50/R52/R53 factory iPod interface. The iPhone put up a message about not being compatible:

And yet, it actually played fine, working just like my regular iPod with the factory interface – which is, pressing CD6 to get any music (I haven’t bothered creating MINI1-5 playlists), and basically having no ability to navigate or see what’s playing.

You can press <> to navigate track by track (or 10 tracks at a time if you hold the buttons down), but with no way to know where you are, it’s best just to use random play mode.

Random play actually works better on the original factory iPod than on the R56 – in that pressing <> skips to the previous/next RANDOM track, but against that, the HU forgets that it’s in random play every time the car is turned off (or even if you just switch to radio).
Another plus of this factory solution over the R56 is that it continues where it left off after you turn the car off – but the negative here is that if you disconnect, then on re-connection it goes back to track 1. That’s a big pain in the iPhone, since you’re very likely to remove it from the car whenever you park.
Finally, you can’t look at the iPhone to see what’s playing, since it displays an unhelpful blank message, curiously though, you can still browse the web, check email – and presumably use the phone (but the wire’s not long enough – I’d have to put my head in the glovebox!)

Meanwhile, back in the land of iPhones – and following DB’s lead – I put the Content Robot iPhone WordPress plugin on to GBMINI … so now, my website displays quite differently on an iPhone to how it displays normally.
I can’t decide if I prefer the original “webby” layout, showing complete entries and pictures but very small text, or the iPhone custom layout which is much easier to read, but doesn’t show the whole page:

iPhone web page formats

Feedback, please 🙂