JackClark

Last one in gets the blame as usual.

john banks

It is clearly itunes, the products themselves work OK. Trying another PC. This install of iTunes I've been using has been plagued with errors ever since I downloaded it, it often freezes and lags.

Did notice one bug on the weather app on the iPhone though, you change the city from London to St Andrews and it still says a rather optimistic 23C and sunny on the home screen and a more realistic 17C and rain in the app.

This just isn't polished guys. I thought Apple were supposed to be good at the little things?

jameswrx

iTrader: (4)

Regarding deleting the address in the address bar in safari.. Click on the bar and look to the rhs of it, there's a small x there, touch that and it clears the whole address.

john banks

Thanks found that.

Right, iTunes is now on the desktop PC, but it is churning through 4GB of music and has locked the iTunes thread so I have to wait until it has finished since the whole of iTunes is locked to further input.

Do these guys know how to program multithreaded applications on the PC? I have oodles and RAM and CPU sitting spare meanwhile...

OK now it has given me control back, it wants to restore the (working) iPhone 4 again since it can't talk to it

john banks

Now, the iPhone has set on fire and the iPad has imprisoned my wife and cat in the room with it.


























Wouldn't surprise me, but the Iphone can repeatedly sync and the Ipad is now doing so too. Welcome to heaven where I only eat apples?

What a mess. I'm sure some would have thrown the devices at the wall by now.

Apple fanbois will just blame me for holding it wrong or my dodgy PC.

Markus

As I've said before, iTunes on the PC is a dog, pure and simple. Apple have Mac OS X, they care somewhat about Windows, but I personally don't think they care enough to made the product absolutely outstanding. I've had maybe three or four problems over iTunes' history on my various Macs, as for PC's, I'm running out of fingers and toes to count the times I've had problems and needed to reinstall it.

I think part of the problem is that Mac hardware is a known quantity, always going to be a specific set of processors, drivers, etc... With a windows machine the hardware isn't set in stone, could be different motherboard drivers, sound card drives, who knows what else, and this can make a big difference as to why some people have no problems, and others, like yourself, have a complete nightmare.

Stupid suggestion time... Try another USB port (you've probably done that though), and try the USB cable from the iPad with the iPhone (am guessing you have two USB to Dock cables as you have an iPad and iPhone 4). Pretty unlikely to help and of course will sound like a fanboy trying anything, but hey, what do you expect?

One last resort, due to antennagate, you can return the iPhone 4 and get a full refund, or you could tell them it's crap, gimme a new one, and see if the new one works ok, it's possible you have a dodgy one. If the same results then I'd return it.

Markus

I was going to say you're holding it incorrectly, you need to stroke it and talk lovingly to it

I have very little patience for hardware and the gaggle of test phones at work have come very close to being hurled at the wall when they mess me around, though to be fair, it's the dev software running on them that is causing the problem more than the device itself.

JackClark

Dodgy PC.

STi wanna Subaru

iTrader: (1)

He's a Dr. not a PC, I think.

john banks

Thanks all.

The PC is not dodgy, it has never ever misbehaved once before, and it gets used for about 40 hours a week.

It is quite clearly iTunes. Everyone else manages to write PC software that works fine.

The desktop on which iTunes is working is running 32 bit Vista and all seems well.

I tried different USB ports and both cables.

The iPhone is working great all along, just wouldn't sync until now.

john banks

Now both are syncing gigabytes of stuff simultaneously on the same PC and working well

Ant

I've used I tunes since the original iPod and not ever had the issues you are having.

Spoon

The '23C and sunny' is simply a picture denoting a weather app that never changes.

john banks

That is just silly design then as there is ample space to overlay useful info over the app icons. I do miss the notification bar from android and the degree of customisation and freedom over icon placement etc.

Folders on the iPhone are a big improvement over the clutter of the iPad.

Holding the phone naturally in the left hand kills my updated signal bar from 4 bars to no signal at all though so I do have to hold the phone differently to how I want to to keep a good or any data connection. Have ordered a case.

Need to sort out a Bluetooth audio connection to an amp for tunes in the lounge and a dock for kitchen listening etc.

Anyone know how to send the address book to a car? The car is happily waiting for it to arrive but I see no option on the phone and could not find an app to do it yet.

Apps are more varied than the ipad presumably due to time of development.

Overall very impressed with the iPhone.

iTunes fix was to put it on another computer. There is nothing weird about my laptop with win 7 64 bit though, it runs all sorts of stuff no trouble with anything except iunes.

Two things on the keyboard, is there anything like swype? Secondly if you want to correct a mistake it seems not to allow you to click in the middle of a word?

Will

should do, my 3g lets me

Will

oh and i'm running win 7 64 bit and having no problems with itunes

stevebt

iTrader: (8)

Are the ipads worth the cash??? I have recently renewed my phone contract and to get the samsung galaxy s worked out £400 cheaper over the same period so I have no problem spending that cash on an ipad as it seems a waste to spend it on an iphone? Also is the 3g version really worth the extra £100 when my phone can supposedly wifi hotspot ?/

john banks

I agree with others that the iPhone is a much more useful device than the iPad.

The 3G iPad also has GPS.

JackClark

And a compass, Motion X HD is cracking on the iPad if you're a navigator like me.

I have an Alpine Bluetooth car thingie, it does the address book thing on it's own, just paired it once and at works. My Alpine iPod only car stereo on the other hand has stopped working as well with iOS4, fix on it's way... I hope.

Swype are trying to release an iOS version, personally I think it's a bit poop, but each to there own.

john banks

Why in 2010 do you have to play about with Microsoft Exchange config to get push gmail (it doesn't helpfully tell you it isn't working even though the option is enabled) when on Android it just works from the time you first turn the phone on?

JackClark

I used the Exchange option for a while, but found it a pain in the **** and went back to standard IMAP, I don't notice any delay in receiving mail and run 2 standard and one business address.

The reason Gmail setup is easier on Android is probably the same reason that iTunes is better on the Mac.

Trout

iTrader: (1)

It's funny that I sync my iPhone with four different machines - two PCs and and two Macs. Never had trouble with iTunes or the iPhone on any of them.

john banks

I found I had synced all my photos so deselected a few folders (albeit a few GB but why should that be a problem?) and during deleting the photos from the iPhone, iTunes on the other PC fell over too and then the phone wouldn't sync again until restarted. I looked up the meaningless error (-39) and found a load of solutions from 2007 showing a similar error on the Mac. Which basically involves deleting iTunes photo cache and making it rebuild, which it is now doing.

As a user I should not be able to get a well written software package to do these things in routine use. This is the kind of thing that should be found on beta testing.

I usually do find things to break in other people's software, but this is at the internal development stage, not a supposedly mature product like iTunes.

Other people not finding fault with this software suggests to me they just haven't found the bugs yet. I shouldn't be able to crash consumer software like this whatever I try and do! It is just shoddy. The iPhone and iPad themselves do not appear to be, they behave mostly as they should with admirable stability. Maybe it is an Apple ploy to get people to think that Microsoft products are unreliable so they buy Macs to play with all their Apple toys.

I get frustrated with these things and generally know what I'm doing but even error messages in software I write myself when I'm only testing it myself are more informative than the rubbish you get from iTunes which is like Windows 3.1 error messages, users that buy these that don't could get really caught out and have to go and visit a genius, buy more Apple stuff etc just to get it to work how it should out the box.

Strange thing is I never even connected my Android phone to the PC, I started it up out the box and it worked, synced with Google and that was it apart from when I wanted to update the firmware. I just copied the media I wanted to an SD card. Once. It worked.

Android is really biting at the heels of heels of iOS whilst you have to deal with the horror of iTunes.

The iPhone and iPad themselves are beautifully designed and made, SD, USB, HDMI would be nice though.

I wonder how I'll get on if I end up buying a Mac to run the iOS SDK? WTF has my right mouse button gone??? Is there such a thing on a Mac LOL?

Right my sync has finished and all works again. Better not do anything too complex in iTunes in future I think!

JackClark

I'd bet a tenner that if you used a fresh install of Windows 7 you'd have no issues. Windows gets tired quickly.

Trout

iTrader: (1)

Your comments remind me of my constant moans at Apple about my network problem as it only failed with my Macs and not my PCs. Consistent with your advice it turned out it wasn't the Mac is was the router slowly failing!

I am in the annoying, it just works Apple camp that I know really irritates Windows users. My MTBF on Apple product is in a different league to Windows and other products.

john banks

I know what you're saying guys, but my network, router and PCs are working great for everything else.

The Windows 7 laptop in particular is extremely slick and reliable, amazingly fast and is only a few months old.

A tenner is not worth my while to reinstall Windows 7 on something that works for everything else brilliantly!

This really does point the finger at iTunes. It is obviously badly written, the way it is handling threads and locking the user interface and crashing when it is unhappy prove it, and I don't believe a well written piece of software would give such meaningless error messages. When Microsoft products break down they are usually much more helpful in fixing themselves or offering useful suggestions I find. With iTunes it usually needs a google of a completely meaningless error message.

I've not used any software so bad in the last 10 years apart from the Scottish Government funded clinical system that we're ditching in 2 weeks.

Snazy

John, question for you, seeing as you dont mind speaking your mind lol .
Have you found anything yet that you like to do that you can't on the iPad?

For me it's little niggles, like the safari browser not having an obvious way to get to the end of a web page in a press. Not being able to view video on the BBC website. Live timing on the F1.com website. And my big one ( which is still pretty minor ) being able to move up and down lines of text in reply windows like this one.

Other than that I'm pretty happy with it. In fairness I have not have had any problems like sync'ing, but do find iTunes painfully slow on the PC. I have come across a few useless apps too, like Ping, what a waste of money lol.

However as much as I like it, I still don't like the iPhone, still way to small to be any use to me.

john banks

Agree with your thoughts on the iPad. Much nicer to browse with than the iphone when the website works on it. So far lovefilm does not play trailers and there is no app for it. Not many apps yet optimised for iPad so using the 2x button on a few iPhone apps which looks a bit blocky.

JackClark

Snazy, get the F1 app, it's free. Moving to the bottom of web pages, I sent you a link to an app if you really want to do that - not that any browser does. Moving up and down lines of text you just move your finger down when the spy glass is showing. Video on the BBC site will be fixed pretty soon I'm sure, the BBC have to cater for lesser browsers for now but people are upgrading all the time. Apple can't do anything about your sausage fingers.