Review: A week with the Etymotic hf2, by yours truly, on Boing Boing Gadgets.
Last week I was on line at Duane Reade and watched the man in front of me ask for a pair of headphones. He selected a Maxell model from behind the register; it was $14.99, I think, maybe a bit more. He contemplated them for a moment.
“Those are very good,” said the cashier, blithely.
“Okay,” said the customer, who paid and walked out.
Suffice to say I am not that guy.
I have always had, and appreciated, top-flight portable audio, from my fancy Sony Walkmans in the 1980s to several pairs of expensive noise-canceling headphones in recent years. And with my tinnitus forcing me to listen to in-ear music at low volumes, having good noise isolation has been a must.
At the tail end of bicycle commuting last summer, I ran over my headphones–my $150, pristine-sounding, noise-isolating, wondrous Shure E3c headphones–with my front tire. Oops. I used them anyway, broken and sad, for several months.
It took me that long to figure out which headphones to buy, and the ones I finally got were good but not great. Useful reviews of noise-canceling and noise-isolating headphones are hard to come by. I don’t need wonky audio spectrum surveys, or dissections of the nuances of Django Renhardt’s solos: what I need is, do they sound good? and how well do they shut out the outside world?
So I decided to do what any good blogger should: do it myself. I pitched Joel Johnson, formerly of Boing Boing Gadgets, and he gave me the go-ahead. Two months of emails later, I have $2880 worth of headphones in my dining room, a ridiculous categorical spreadsheet, and a fun, interesting commute to work. Goofy expressions like “in hog heaven” come to mind.
The first review went live today, with 10 more to run through the summer. My thanks go out to Joel and to Rob Beschizza, my new editor, who inherited this project and has been most gracious and helpful. Look for more posts on BBG and some additional commentary in this space as the project continues.
Category: gadgets (Page 4 of 4)
Some more items on the election’s impact:
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George Will on the Republican election loss, mirroring my blog post from yesterday: “more dispiriting than numerically stunning.”
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Experts call it, among other things, “a normal win.” Which sounds about right.
To answer the question I hear most about it: yes, I love my iPhone. It is every bit the gee-whiz, fun-to-use, eye-candy-rich, conversation-starting geek toy I expected when I bought it. It does so many things so well and has fast become an indispensible tool. It also simplified my life: I have shed my pocket day planner, streamlined my contacts list, and I no longer lug my laptop away from my desk, since I can just whip out the iPhone for the majority of what I want to do online.
What’s great about it is that so many of the “wow” features in the iPhone are actually practical. Pinching and spreading to zoom in and out: wonderful. Scrolling around a screen by dragging displays with one finger: so great I keep wishing my computer supported the same function. The touch screen is an easy, intuitive way to do, well, everything, and the relatively transparent access to the Internet (even on AT&T’s network) turns the iPhone into an iAnything. Web browsing is great. The iPod is great. Google Maps is phenomenal. The weather pane seemed like a throw-in when I got the phone, until I found myself checking it a few times a day, and now I can’t live without it.
That pretty much sums up the whole user experience: once you have an iPhone, you immediately find it useful and pleasant, and everything else pales in comparison. In a word, terrific.
Alongside my praise, I am not afraid to admit it’s not a “perfect” device, in the sense that all of its capabilities are not pinnacles of joy and ease-of-use. I will defer to the many, many reviews of the iPhone elsewhere online for a reasoned critique, but here’s what I personally am crinkling my nose at:
~ The vertical keyboard layout is mediocre. I might enjoy it more in horizontal web layout, but since it’s not available anywhere else, I just do all my typing upright, and three weeks in, I’m still tapping words with my index finger. Yeah, it works, but BlackBerry and Treo users (including myself) will feel slowed down by its interface. It does trump T9 on a phone, but that’s not enough.
~ Neat, look at the wheelie calendar scheduling interface! I use this all the time to show off how nifty the iPhone is. But as an actual scheduler, it’s pretty damn annoying. If I used my Mac to book appointments I’d be in good shape, but I generally plug them straight into my iPhone, and man, wouldn’t it be nice to have a 10-key number pad for dates and times.
~ Holding the device steady enough to tap the touch-screen camera shutter is a challenge. I could probably learn to juggle on a unicycle in the time it will take me to learn how to never blur my photos.
~ I worry endlessly that the spam-filter-less mail function and the fun but error-prone slide-to-delete finger stroke in it are exposing my email address to happy spammers around the world.
~ I’ve noticed that the side of my thumb is not a sufficient surface for the screen to pick up on tapping. This might just be my freak thumbs, but whatever the reason, it’s annoying.
So, no, it’s not perfect. I’m looking forward to firmware updates that continue to improve the UI, although I’m expecting them not to address all my concerns. The iPhone simultaneously reminds me of why I continually buy Apple products… and why I don’t use the applications in OS X outside of iLife.
All this said, the iPhone is still a fascinating device and a complete game-changer in the world of consumer electronics. I am gleefully obsessed with it and proud to own it.
If you wanted an iPhone this weekend, you could have waited on line for three days, like some of the folks who made it into national newspapers, or you could have done what I did: roll into the Apple Soho store just after it opened at 9:30 Saturday morning, gotten on a very short line at the register, and walked out with one in roughly four minutes.
So far, it’s pretty terrific. The learning curve is short and the pleasures of the UI are long. Free wifi is easy to find in the city, so the major shortcoming cited in early reviews (AT&T’s slow EDGE data network) has not been a factor. And I can sheepishly report that the iPhone withstands a three-foot drop onto concrete without any damage to the system or the beautiful display, although my day-old gadget is nicely scruffed.
Also: the iPhone comes in a dedicated iPhone bag. Carrying this bag around Manhattan turns a person into a temporary rock star. The buzz around this device is truly astounding.