Some mistake surely...

Yeah! 

The Tom Tom car Kit for iPhone 3GS appeared on the UK Apple store today. £99 

Seems a bit pricey but does include GPS enhancements, a better speaker, a better microphone for hand free and an audio out. Plus a charger.

However, the product page states:

Eh! It includes the application as well (£60 on it's own) - A bargain!!!

Hang on!

I bought the app when it first came out? I've already spent £60. You mean I should have waited? Where's the option to buy the car mount on its own?

This can't be right?

My thoughts are that the product page is incorrect. 

Why have the header "Did you notice"?

I think the section should read:

Did you notice?

You need to get both the Tom Tom navigation app for your iPhone 3GS or 3G and the docking kit to hold your iPhone securely.....

We shall see!

If the app is included with the Car Kit, then either Apple or Tom Tom need to make a reduced price version available without the app for us early adopters. If they don't, there will be hell to pay!

I've placed a call with Apple customer support who are checking it out for me. Will keep you updated.

Update on Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 11:19AM by Don McAllister

Just had a response back from Apple customer services who have quoted the Tom Tom FAQ:

This would indicate I was right and the App store entry is in error?

I've written back to the Apple rep that they need to clarify this and get the Apple store page changed if this is the case.

Update on Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 11:33AM by Don McAllister

Direct quote from Apple:

The Apple Store Publishing Team is currently working on it to correct the error.

Can I say told you so yet!

Update on Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 1:55PM by Don McAllister

Looks like the Car Kit page has been taken down from the UK store page, along with the Staff pick entry from the front page.

I thought they'd just update it in flight?

Update on Friday, September 25, 2009 at 7:22AM by Don McAllister

Tom Tom themselves have now announced that the Apple store entry was wrong and the cart kit does not, in fact. include the app itself.

Sorry Spotify, back to the free model....

Following the launch of the iPhone client for Spotify, I thought I'd try out a months Premium subscription for £9.99

Whilst I love the idea, I've been shocked to discover I just haven't used the premium service at all, except for a couple of tracks when I first signed up.

In fairness, it may well be that I'm not the ideal punter or typical of the demographic that Spotify is aiming at. I'm fairly old (!), have an established taste in music, and by now, have most of my favourite stuff already on my iPod. 

The main issues I found were:

• I never really got around to caching any songs on my iPhone client. Most of the stuff was already there on my iPhone and I really didn't want to spend the time trying to do a diff to see what was missing.
• I didn't realise just how much I used the Remote application on the iPhone to manage my iTunes collection on my main machine and have music playing via an Airport Express or Apple TV. As far as I can see, there's no way to replicate this using Spotify. It's such a boon when friends are around to play music and skip or search for tracks via the iPhone remote on iTunes. Sorely missed using Spotify.
• The main killer for me though was the lack of background playing on the iPhone client. I just don't use my iPhone with a single application loaded. I'm jumping from email to Twitter to Instapaper to Bylines. Without the background playing, it's really no use to me.

So whilst I think it's a fantastic concept, and ideal for anyone who really wants to seek out and listen to new music, I've just cancelled my Premium subscription and reverted to the free model.

Which I think is a shame, I really do :-(

What if...

As you're probably aware, Apple are holding a special "music" themed event tomorrow.

It's no big deal as this is traditionally when they roll out a revamped range of iPods for the Christmas market. They hold one of these events every September.

What is different this year however, is that the event is being held on the same day as a major Beatles relaunch including the entire Beatles catalogue remastered and rereleased, along with the launch of the Beatles RockBand - a very big deal!

The rumour mill has been awash with speculation that these events may be linked in someway, with the Beatles being involved in the Apple event. Perfectly reasonable, you might think!

At least it was, until Apple sent out the original invites to their event with the tag line:

"It's only rock and roll, but we like it."

Eh?

Isn't that a blatant reference to the Beatles arch rivals The Rolling Stones?

What gives?

So here's the completely off the wall, completely unfounded and extremely irresponsible what if bit...

What if Apple have completely fallen out with the Beatles (record company?) due to years of failed negotiations to try and get the Beatles into the iTunes store?

What if the Apple event hasn't been scheduled for the same day as the Beatles re-launch to compliment the launch but to completely over shadow it?

What if Apple were to announce some ground breaking product at the event tomorrow that would whip up a media frenzy unlike anything seen since the iPhone, you know, something that pundits have said would definitely not appear this side of 2010, even if it could be marketed as an amazing Christmas gift to people who already have iPhones and iPods.

What if the event was a blatant attempt to steal the Beatles thunder, would Steve Jobs even think of such a move?

What if?

Just sayin'

:-)

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GPS & Geotagging update

Well as mentioned, I did give the Wintec GPS dongle and the Canon G10 a spin when over in the US recently. See previous blog posts here and here.

On the whole, the Wintec did a good job when it could acquire a GPS signal. It didn't pick up a tour I did around Hollywood, but then I did leave it in my friends car boot as we drove around, so no surprises there then!

My main issue was workflow - how to use the GPS tracking data from the Wintec successfully with getting the photos off the camera and into iPhoto. As it transpires, I missed a trick by not installing the supplied Canon software to retrieve the photos off the camera, before importing them into iPhoto. Once the photos are in iPhoto, it's a major pain to update them with GPS data as iPhoto won't let you update the photos in situ.

Unusually, I can't "see" the Canon G10 from the Finder, so I couldn't access the memory card directly and extract them natively, or point HoudahGeo at the files on the camera. I had to use iPhoto to get the photos off the camera.

Then I ended up having to export them from iPhoto, updating them with HoudahGeo and then re-importing them into iPhoto.

Not the most sensible way!

Had I installed the Canon software, I could have just imported the photos to a "staging" area, updated them with the tracking data from HoudahGeo and then imported into iPhoto.

HoudahGeo and the Wintec WBT-201 worked seamlessly together by the way. I just turned on bluetooth on the Wintec and HoudahGeo just sucked all of the track data across just fine. I didn't bother changing the timezone on either the camera or the wintec, I just left them as GMT.

I have to say though that I've started to wonder if Aperture isn't the way to go?

As far as I'm aware, you can update photos with GPS info directly in the Aperture library with HoudahGeo and there are a number of GPS plugins now available to display and manage your map data directly in Aperture itself. I've installed Aperture onto my MacBook pro to give it a spin and I'll let you know how I get on.

I'd be interested if anyone could share their proven workflow with updating photos with GPS tracking information using either iPhoto or Aperture. Please feel free to share via the comments!

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GPS update....

Thanks for all the comments on the previous post, extremely useful!

I think Chris and Jonathan have hit the nail on the head with respect to the particular device I have (Wintec WBT-201) in that the main barrier to its use is the terrible instructions provided with it. It transpires you don't really need to run the supplied Windows software as it just works out of the box.

First, make sure the battery is fully charged and the press the Power key and it will come on. Top red light means GPS is activated and once signal is acquired, it will blink. You need to be outside or in clear sight of the sky for this to happen. If the blue light is on, bluetooth is enabled. Press the power button again to switch BT off. Go about your business and when you've finished tracking, switch the device off by pressing Power again.

Switch on the device so BT is enabled (blue light lit up) and pair the device with your Mac using the BT preference pane (it uses the passcode 0000).

Once paired, HoudaGeo will see the device and pull off the data. I also used GPSBabel+ using BT to extract the tracking data in various formats.

So really, not as painful as I first thought, just difficult to understand what to do with such poor documentation.

All I need to know now is how long the battery will last, will the devices ever get "full" and do I need to delete anything off the device (I think it uses circular logs).

We'll see how it behave in real life later this week.

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