Apple TV 2nd Generation

So today my Apple TV (2nd Generation) turned up, and I have to say I’m pretty impressed.

Anybody who knows me or has been reading these my post, will know that over the last couple of years, I’ve become an Apple fan boy I’ve gradually replaced my MP3 player, my phone, my PCs and even my entire network with Apple products, and as time has gone by, I’ve organised my entire music collection to be “iTunes friendly”.

I’ve been toying with the idea of an Apple TV for a while now, and very nearly bought one of the 1 generation ones about 2 months ago.

I’ve been using a piece of software on my MacMini called MediaLink, to stream my iTunes content to my PS3, which to be honest has been working pretty well, apart from the fact that it won’t play DRM media.

So the announcement was made early in September that a new Apple TV would be out shortly, so me being me ordered one.

So what’s it like ?

Now this is the first time I’ve used an Apple TV, so some of the features I’m raving about, might have been in the first generation.

First of all, it’s size, this thing is tiny, it literally fits in the palm of my hand.

The device has a very small white light on the front, the flashes with the remote press. The rear has a USB port, a HDMI port, power port and an optical output.

Setup, as with any Apple product was painless, plugged it in, selected my language, added my apple ID and that was it, good to go.

So what is an Apple TV ?

Basically, it’s a device which allows you to stream content from the web, and a PC or Mac which is running iTunes home sharing (please note, you have to have iTunes 10 installed for it to be picked up)

The main menu gives you a few options.

Movies, and then the sub menu of Top Movies, Genres, Search and in Theaters.

The movie collection is huge, and everything I searched for came back with a result (kinda like the movie selection in iTunes)

The “in Theaters” option was essentially what you get on Apples trailer site, all the trailers for whats in the cinema right now.

The next tab is Internet, with the option of YouTube, Podcasts, MobileMe, Flickr and Radio.

The Youtube option will allow you to sign in and see your subscriptions.

The podcast option does what it says on the tin, it opens up the content as found in the iTunes store and splits them into Audio, Video or all. You can then “add to favourites”, which will let you know how many unwatched episodes you have, it also remembers your position which I thought was a good feature.

I don’t have a MobileMe account, but assume if I had, I would be able to stream from this.

The Flickr allows you to subscribe to public users and view their content. I can’t see a way of signing in, as this would be perfect as I’m a Flickr pro subscriber and have my entire photo collection hidden online, it would be nice to be able to access these.

Finally there’s the radio, which is the same content as the Radio tab in iTunes.

The next tab is Computers. Basically any machine that you have iTunes on (version 10 or above) with Home Sharing enabled, you can stream all you content from them.

Finally you have the settings tab, which you can…..well change the settings

2 interesting features in the settings are the AirPlay, and Remotes.

The Airplay allows you to use the Apple TV as an Airport Express, and the Remote option allows you to use you iPhone as a remote control. As your probably aware, the iPhone remote app has recently been upgraded to support the Apple TV. The app works with gesture controls, swipe left and right for fast forward and backward, tap to pause and play, and the godsend was being able to type in when searching. There is also flick up to get to chapter, and 2 finger left swipe to roll back 10 seconds, you can even move the onscreen content using this !

The AirPlay is pretty cool too, now granted, to play media from my Mac by selecting Computers > Mac Mini > Music > Album > Play or I also have the option to connect to my MacMini via the Apple Remote app, select the Album > Play > select the Apple TV as the speakers. This will not only output the audio to the Apple TV, but it will also display the album art and ID tag of the track being played.

Now I subscribe to a lot of podcasts, and it’s nice to see that if I’m looking at my Computers library, I then watch or listen to a podcast, this syncs back to the library. There was nothing more annoying than watching something using MediaLink, then having to Screenshare onto my MacMini to mark them as watched. This seems to be the same for Movies and TV too.

So far I’ve very happy with this device, and I guess I’ll be spending the next couple of months converting all my DVD’s to mp4 format and adding these to my iTunes library.

For anyone who uses iTunes for their media content, and if you have a spare £99, I suggest getting one of these.

As always, unboxing photos are below.

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Google Latitude on iOS 4 update

Now don’t get me wrong Latitudie does what it says on the tin, but boy…does it drain the battery. I also found that the only way to turn it off was to stop the background app from running, and then disable the location service for it.

The setting I used for background were, Best location, periodic updates when not moving…off. With these settings, a full battery would last around 8 hours on my iPhone 4, and around 6 hours on C’s 3GS.

Now suprisingly I would have expected to App store to be over saturated with Google latatide apps, however I could only find one other, called Device Locator.

Device Locator like Latitudie will track your position, and update the latitude servers, however does so much more.

You initially need to create an account on the Device Locators site, download the app, sign into the app, then your good to setup.

Via the website you can configure how you want your phone to update. The range is as follows

Cell Tower Switch
2 Hours
1 Hour
30 mins
10 mins
1 min (emergency)

Now I’ve been running at the 10 minute interval update, and it’s hardly touching my battery, my battery was fully charged at 8am this morning, and when I write this 3 hours later, my battery is on 99%, which is a vast improvement over Latitudie, this would normally be in the low 80%.

The website also give you a small google maps preview showing you currently location of device, and a history down the left hand side. There is even a graph to tell you how much battery you had at the last poll.

There is also the option to send a text message to your phone (if somebody has swiped it), or set the alarm going (assuming you can’t find your phone).

Now granted, this app is £2.99 however it’s a small price to pay in comparison to the mobileme account which does a very similar job. Judging by the website, this is still in the very early stages (no css on the site as yet), however it works very well.

Tags: 10 mins, 3gs, apps, cell tower, comparison, configure, Download, drain, emergency, google, google maps, graph, iphone, iphone 4, job, last poll, latitude, left hand side, location, location service, Locator, Locators, minute interval, mobileme, option, periodic updates, phone, poll, servers, sign, store, switch, text, text message, tin, Via

Apple iOS 4

When I moved from my Nokia E90 to iPhone, there were a few features missing that I used a lot. Being a “tidy freak”, I kept my application organised in folder. I’m also a big fan of Google Latitude and had this running in the background all the time, but these were scarifies I was willing to make to move across to the iPhone. As you can imagine I was overjoyed to find that not only were Folders coming to the next OS for the iPhone, but also “multitasking”. Now granted this isn’t the same multitasking that you get on the likes of Symbian S60, however for what I want it for (Background location), this made my day.

I guess I’m one of the lucky ones, I have an iPhone 3GS and on Thursday will be accepting the delivery of my new, shiny iPhone 4. This means I get to use the full functionality of the new OS, other people (iPhone 3G and before, iPod Touch 2G and before), will only have limited functionality (No multitasking).

So today’s the day, and iOS 4 is available for download, and obviously I’ve now downloaded it and have it installed.

The first think that stands out is the customised Home Screen Wallpaper. Now I know it’s a simple thing, but does really help to personalise your phone. This is something that I took for granted on the Symbian OS, and until it was gone, I started to miss it.

The next thing I did was created folders and started to drop apps into them, this was a god send, Apple have made it as easy as possible for you to do this, simple drag one app on top of another and voila a folder is created. The folder names are automatically named, eg Games, Reference, Social Network, and can only assume it does this based on the iTunes category, this can however be changed . Before I used to organise my application using the screens, Social Media, Weather (yeah, I have multiple weather apps), Shopping, Fitness, Media, Game Tracking, and Games. On OS3 you can have 16 apps per page, however the folders are only 12 apps. This does really clean up the iPhones real estate.

The Spell checker works a treat, I prefer it to it just randomly correcting as I type.

When I saw the email was “Even Better Mail”, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I only have one mail box with all mail in (I use email forwarding for all my accounts, and have my google apps account as the central repository, and splitting my mail accounts using labels), so didn’t think I’d see a benefit, however, being a gmail user is was good to see “organize messages by threads”. It felt a lot more familiar. You get a number at the side of the email to tell you how many are in the chain, clicking on email brings up the “conversation”

Functions like iBooks, the ability to create playlists on the move weren’t something I was really interested in, as I’m more of an Audio book reader, and I prefer to organise my playlists on my Mac.

As for the other functions like Facetime, I guess I’m going to have to wait until Thursday.

I think I can now finally say, there are no features that I’m missing, and glad to be an iPhone owner, I’m sure that over the next few days, I’m going to find features I’ve not initially noticed, but will tweet about them as and when I find them.

edit: After playing with iOS 4 now for a good few hours, I’ve found a few more features. The 3GS does support the digital zoom function on the camera app, you just need to tap the screen once, and you’ll get a slider bar allowing your to zoom in.

The camera app has also been upgraded to include similar features to the Mac software iPhoto, in the way that it now sorts your photos by places and faces, and seems to be loads more accurate with the GPS location.

You also have the option of having 2 different wallpapers, one for the lock screen and one for the home screen. This option can be found on the 3GS under Setting >> Wallpaper.

You can also now change your Safari search engine by going into Setting >> Safari >> and changing the search engine from Google, to Yahoo! and Bing

Currently I only have 1 app on my iPhone that supports “background processing” and that’s Dropbox. If I set something uploaded, then close, this will continue to upload in the background.

Tags: 2g, 3g, 3gs, Download, drag one, Fitness, folder names, folders, freak, functionality, god send, google, ios, iphone, ipod, location, media game, media weather, nokia e90, one of the lucky ones, option, os3, page, phone, Safari, screen, screen wallpaper, screens, search, something, symbian os, Thursday, time, touch, type, voila, Weather, yeah