TomTom. Apple. I Want My Money Back

Before we ventured out on our roadtrip, I bought TomTom’s US/Canada and Nordic apps for the iPhone for an awful lot of money. Hey, I thought, always having a navigation system in my pocket is a pretty nifty tool for traveling around a foreign country. Gee, golly.

Off we went, got the car, fired up the TomTom app aaaaand… FAIL.

What TomTom forgot to write on their incredibly self-conglatuatory app description (‘has been very well received’, my ass) is that the app is literally only half the product, as it is on its own, incapable of keeping track of your location while driving.

Oh, for that to work properly, you need the TomTom cradle.

I would have bought the cradle in the blink of an eye actually. Except, it wasn’t available. And still isn’t by the way, with ‘Coming Soon’ having been the message on the website for about two months now.

So I bought half a product. Twice. I’m stupid that way.

So the same day we drove to a Target and bought a real TomTom unit. Worked flawlessly and practically saved our trip several times.

I mailed TomTom, asking for my money back on the iPhone apps, reasoning that they had sold me a product which fails to live up to what it promised (and promises still) to do. They told me they couldn’t give me back my money, I would have to take that up with Apple.

Of course, despite in theory having the ability to remotely turn off apps, Apple of course holds the policy of flat out no refunds on iTunes Store purchases.

So… TomTom creates an app which in itself does not do what it promises (and which is expensive, the US & Canada version currently goes for $100), but they unfortunately can’t refund my money. And Apple, renowed for their approval process, which ostensibly is supposed to shield me from bad apps, chose to approve TomTom’s app and gladly took my money despite the app not working?

What is wrong with this picture? What happened to my rights as a consumer? They product may be virtual, but my money isn’t…

The Woes of the Digital Album Booklet

It is remarkably rare to see your latest iTMS purchase accompanied by a digital booklet in the shape of a PDF file. Remarkable because whereas a physical booklet requires the use of large color-corrected printers, ink, distribution outlets, delivery vehicles (and men), loss in profits and much more, digital booklets require only ‘print to PDF’, and you’re done. Considering that, I do wonder why all my albums don’t come with booklets.

When they do however, it makes for a nice addition to the otherwise pretty non-tangible purchase that is digitally distributed music. In fact, in the degradation from LP to CD to digital audio, the only thing truly missed by the too-busy-with-life-or-too-sane-to-be-anal-audiophiles portion of the population is the art of proper packaging.

Yes, you can still go out and buy your Amon Tobin on LP with beautiful luxurious cover art the size of your head or order up the latest ultra-deluxe limited edition from Nine Inch Nails and get fantastically well-crafted paraphernalia you’ll look at maybe once a decade. In fact, when you take into account the work some b®ands put into creating their packaging, buying digitally is really a damn shame (never mind piracy).

Well played Lars. Well played.

Now for the bait ‘n’ switch in which we turn our the attention to how iTunes deals with those accompanying PDF files in a most annoying manner.

It lists them in the same file-listing as all the music tracks, which makes sense, after all where else would it list it? But what happens when you’re in coverflow view and you double-click an album-cover to play said album and PDF is listed at the top of the album’s files?

The album doesn’t actually play, as you might expect. It simply opens the PDF file! And adding insult to injury, the PDF file opens in your PDF-reader-of-choice—which in my unfortunate case, is Adobe Acrobat—taking you away from iTunes and probably launching you into the teeth-grindingly long process of telling Adobe Updater ‘please, with all due respect; fuck off’. This will probably take up to several minutes, depending on your system and the PDF being opened with what app, before you can return to iTunes and actually play the album you wanted to listen to in the first place.

Listen. No. Alright? Just no. Bad designer.

This is a perfect example of the system performing an ‘expected action’, which in the user’s mind is most likely absolutely unexpected. After all, when would you expect double-clicking an album cover to open a PDF file? And even worse, this is the only action you can perform in iTunes which will actually transport you away from iTunes!

The iPhone (Sucks) as Portable Music Library

I love my iPhone, but there’s one thing I don’t understand. With my iPod, formatted with FAT32, I could connect it both at home and at work, and effortlessly stream music off of it or even copy music onto it in both places. Not so with the iPhone. It is bound to my workstation. Sure, I can connect it to my workstation (or my MacBook Pro or Rikke’s Powerbook or someone else’s computer), and they will detect it just fine. But the music on it is inaccessible…

If I try to turn on ‘manage manually’, which is what worked with my iPod, it tells me I have to erase the music library to bind it to the current computer!

Combined with the minijack port being compatible only with Apple headphones (what’s that about?!), this effectively makes it a pain in the ass to use at work. After all, I spent good money getting myself a pair of awesome headphones (Beyerdynamic DT 770); yet if I want to listen to something off of the iPhone, I have to use Apple’s headphones?

In turn, this has me switching back and forth between headphones, as I have to listen to something from my workstation and then back on the iPhone for a podcast, or whatever.

I love that it can be disconnected at any time, so I can take a call if necessary, and as such I accept that it doesn’t work as a HDD. But how can this be intentional? At least let me stream my own music off of the damn thing; that’s the least you can do.

No iTMS for Denmark

Looks like I won’t be putting down money on iTMS from today anyway. Plenty of new European outlet’s, just not in Scandinavia. Fuck. And color me amazed, they did put out a color iPod Photo. I wouldn’t have put my money on that happening, that’s for sure. Especially since they only just updated to 4G. The photo function is pretty cool I suppose, but the coolest thing about the iPod Photo, is definitely that it shows you the album cover of the currently playing track! With me being the anal sucker I am, all the albums in our 80 something GB music collection have had their covers painstackingly added, and I would just love to have this feature.

But with my 3G iPod being merely 9 months old, I doubt I’ll be fronting the money for a new model any time soon…

Update: A stream of the event has been posted.