Safari 3.1 on Windows: a true competitor arrives (seriously)

So far, four days in, the experience has been awesome. I always was curious about getting a Nokia 770 internet tablet for surfing around the house. While the screen is smaller, the iPhone is perfect as a internet tablet. It connected to my wifi network without a hitch and I’ve yet to find sites I can’t view with the built in Safari browser (I’m sure they exist). Sites that are built for the iphone, like Facebook’s new iPhone site, are even better.

The iPod experience is better than my 5G video iPod. While a certain part of me misses the click wheel, having the ability to switch between playlists, artists, songs and videos at a touch of a finger is awesome. I do think it’s a little odd that there is no status bar when a song or video is playing that allows you to see how far into the content you are and how much is left (there’s probably a name for this all too familiar bar that is alluding me right now).

For the rest of the experience:

• The phone is good – what you’d expect from a cell phone with a few more bells and whistles
• Texting is good – how do you really improve on that experience
• Maps rocks – it just does
• Weather app is fun
• Stocks app is worthless – I only own mutual funds
• YouTube is ok – I haven’t really had the desire to surf a ton of videos on YouTube
• Camera is ok – bad in low light, blah, blah, blah
• Photos is awesome – my kids love flicking through the photos
• Notes is ok – been using it for the grocery list and house todos
• Keyboard typing is good – I type faster on it then I ever did on my Blackjack’s tiny little keyboard

Right now I am POP3ing mail from Gmail. This is quite lame as it doesn’t mark mail read on the Gmail server, so I am basically managing two accounts. Sending mail works like a charm though. Work email isn’t there yet. It does support IMAP for Exchange and has a VPN client so I am sure this is just a matter of time.

I have very few complaints:

• No 3G. Edge is slow
• No way to find contacts by typing. You have to scroll which sucks when you have a cubic ton of contacts sync from Entourage
• Syncing Exchange to Entourage to Address Book & iCal to iPhone is slow
• Did I mention how slow Edge is

I’m definitely in love with it. It’s super fun to surf on, play my content, talk on and play with. Now if I could find a good app to blog with, I’d be set.

So, when I heard about this joint interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (iTunes Link), I wanted to watch it. Both these guys are visionaries and have contributed a ton to the computer industry. I highly recommend investing the hour and twenty minutes to watch this.

Most – I won’t say all – video podcasts are in one of the following formats: Quicktime, mpeg-4, or h.264. This means up till this point, I couldn’t stream them from the XP MCE to the 360. That is, until Microsoft released support for mpeg-4 and h.264 with their 360 Dashboard update that just hit.

Last night, I upgraded the Dashboard – thanks Microsoft for asking rather then just forcing it. I opened up iTunes on the MCE and subscribed to four video podcasts. I set iTunes to download them to one of the shared directories so the 360 would see them. At this point, I’m almost giddy with excitement. I just saved $300 on an AppleTV.

And boy was I disappointed…not a single one of them would play. They all said invalid file format or unsupported codec when I tried to play through the MCE Extender software or didn’t even show up when I tried to play them through the Dashboard software.

I didn’t expect any quicktime encoded videos to work, so I looked for podcasts that were in mpeg-4 format. The only way I could tell was by file extension, which probably isn’t the best way. The point isn’t whether or not I can find podcasts that will work. The point is that I want to be able to watch the podcasts I want to watch. Maybe I will have to get an AppleTV after all.

UPDATE: Microsoft posted a handy FAQ on the new video features available from the update. First, the new video formats are not supported through Windows Media Center Extender which explains why that didn’t work. Second, the new video formats are not supported via Windows Media Connect, which would explain why trying to play the software through the Dashboard didn’t work. You have to either use a removable media or optical media (i.e. CD or DVD) since Windows Media Player 11 won’t stream either mpeg-4 or h.264 to the 360 from another computer. So while I can now watch the content on my 360, I have to use a thumb drive or disk to transfer it. Arg!

Tags: AppleTV, Xbox 360, MCE, Podcasts

• Speed: QS is very fast – maybe at the expense of RAM. Spotlight is very slow.
• Functionality: QS can open apps, find files and perform Apple scripts. Spotlight only searches for files.