DigitalOutbox Episode 7

Chris: screw all that well thought out nonsense you've posted.

The final "Get Out!" (after the credits) made me snort coffee all over my keyboard. Genius.

Glad you liked it. We want to do more like this, get a bit of humour in there which isn't easy. We need a comedy stooge that can act as foil for our Apple fanboy'ish statements. If only we could find someone like that....

Hi, here's my comments to add into the mix for the show. Firstly, Apple blocking the Palm Pre from the latest iTunes software. Shitters. It really bugged me. We all knew it was going to happen but WHY? Apple line being that it's unsupported hardware and they can't guarantee that future updates will support it. Fair enough. Understood - you don't want to affect your development schedule by having to worry about other hardware - But why release an update purely to break the connectivity? That's what irks me. iTunes is the biggest store on the online high-street and Apple are stopping shoppers going in who aren't wearing Apple shoes. "Are those Palm Pre shoes you're wearing Sir? GET OUT". Well screw you Apple - eventually something will come along and you'll get a right good kicking from those non-Apple shoes.

Whilst I'm on a rant! You were talking about the OS 3.0 on 3G iPhone generally responding less well - and how this wasn't a deliberate ploy by Apple to make people upgrade. I subscribe to that view - but it's certainly interesting to hear Shack say that the solution to any perceived clunkyness is to upgrade. Great solution!! Spend multi-hundreds of pounds to get a new phone to simply get back the slick operation we had before... (PS I know the comment made by Shack was semi-tongue in cheek but see above for current state of mind!)

As for media streaming - I'm probably a great candidate for wanting to have a good, slick, solution. Firstly, I don't torrent anything, I buy media. I collect box sets of all sorts and have (probably) multi-thousands of hours of content on DVD. Having these all on a virtual shelf that I can consume anywhere I want is very appealing - but as you've made relatively clear from the two lengthy discussions on streaming options, this whole market is anything but simple. I could spend months ripping to one particular digital format only to find that this becomes completely redundant. There's no clear direction things are heading as the industry is exploding itself by burying its head in the sand and not trying to find a sensible, realistic way forward that doesn't include implanting chips in peoples eyes and charging for any content that person my have watched.

Anyway. Keep 'em coming.

Easy tiger :-)

Palm used a hack for the Palm Pre to work with iTunes. Apple removed the ability to use the hack - is there really any problem with that apart from Palm look a bit silly selling Palm Pre's while taking advantage of back door hacks and then adding that as a feature on a nationwide campaign? Fools. This only has one outcome. If something comes along and stomp's on Apple then great as it means it's a great product for us consumers.

OS3.0 - Shak (note the spelling!) wasn't being serious....I still hope that a 3.1 will sort some of these issues. It reminds me of the 2.0 release.

Media streaming - totally agree. Formats is an issue that we didn't really cover and it's an excellent point. If you rip to pure DVD vob's though is format ever an issue? I wonder how many times people will pay for Star Wars?