the one thing that really annoys me about my iPhone
The single thing that annoys me the most about my iPhone isn't how often Safari crashes or the slowness of EDGE. No, the thing that really drives me batty is the earbuds. I'm really hating the earbuds.
I'm not a big fan of Bluetooth headsets. It's has nothing to do with the technology, it has everything to do with me. I'm bad about remembering to keep my headset charged. I'm bad about remembering where my headset is located. I'm bad about keeping my headset paired with my phone. All of these together mean that headsets are virtually unusable, and unused, by me. I've tried it before, many times, and it just never works out.
I'm not willing to walk around all day with a headset attached to my ear. I get enough Borg jokes because I work for Microsoft, I can't imagine adding to that with a piece of glowing electronics sticking out of my ear constantly. I don't make calls on my phone often enough to justify keeping the thing in my ear all the time. While I do end up making a number of calls on my phone, it's sporadic. It's pretty common for my phone to only be used for calling every other day or so, but then that call is an hour or two. So no constantly-in-ear headset for me.
Instead, I rely on the iPhone's earbuds. I generally know where my earbuds are (why I've never been able to extend this kind of knowledge to a headset is beyond me). I find the earbuds pretty uncomfortable for extended use (90 minutes is pretty much the max that I can take it).
The thing that really gets me about the earbuds is that they're constantly tangled. I've tried all sorts of cute little tricks to somehow make them be not tangled. Nothing has worked. Every time I pull out my earbuds to connect them to my iPhone, I've got to spend a couple of minutes untangling them. I'm pretty convinced that there's some kind of technology there that makes them knot onto themselves. I hope that Apple is licensing that technology to the military, it seems like something that they'd find useful.
Please, Apple, please find a way to make the earbuds work better. I'll accept their current level of discomfort, but I'd really love it if you guys could make them not tangle all the time. I really don't care what you do, I just want to not have to spend four minutes untangling my earbuds every single freakin' time I want to use them.
Comments
Anonymous
May 19, 2008
Be nice if Apple (or somebody) could outwit the laws of physics. Not going to happen, at least not soon (check back next year), thanks to something called "Tangle Theory". Here's a pretty good article on the subject: http://www.maa.org/mathtourist/mathtourist_10_01_07.htmlAnonymous
May 19, 2008
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May 19, 2008
@Bladderpod - There are some easy methods to outwit the laws of physics. The Zune does this by putting magnets in the earbuds, so at least you've only got one long string instead of a Y-shaped piece of string to tangle. I've seen retractable earbuds as well, so maybe it's time for me to see if there are iPhone ones out there. @Rick - The devil horns method only works if there's nothing for the cable to catch on and untangle, which isn't the case when it's in the bag of cables and dongles that lives in my laptop bag. :)Anonymous
May 20, 2008
I have a friend that keeps them in a toothpick case. You could also keep them in an empty dental floss case too. Or you could get one of those dorky looking cases that has a thing to wrap the headphones around.Anonymous
May 22, 2008
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May 22, 2008
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May 27, 2008
Whinging about the iPhone earbuds got me thinking about some other iPhone improvements I'd love to seeAnonymous
May 30, 2008
Here is what you should look into. BTW, we hooked Scoble up with the folks from Ultimate Ears and they comped him a sweet pair of custom molded UE10s for the nice writeup he did. http://www.ultimateears.com/_ultimateears/products/superfi/superfi4vi_description.php