Yes I know today isn't Friday, but other things always come up on Fridays that delay these postings. But at the very least I'm trying to keep the number of these Tech Fridays postings. This episode concentrates on my test of the new wifi iTunes store. I'm starting to think that my testing of everything is some sort of mental disorder. I got the software update for the iPhone which was somewhere in the order 130 MB. After I downloaded it via iTunes, it installed on my iPhone and the phone rebooted. After that I saw the new wifi iTunes icon on my iPhone main page. When I clicked on it I was brought to the wifi iTunes store. The first thing I noticed was that it was a clean, minimalist interface. I scrolled up and down checking out different genres and top 10s. I also did a few searches which worked well. The previews were downloaded pretty quickly (due to my fast network speed) and were intuitive to use. I had a tough time finding something that I wanted to buy and test out the download functionality, but I eventually bought an Amy Winehouse album and saw the files moved over to my downloads section and then I watched the progress as each song was downloaded. In less than 5 minutes I was able to play all the songs in the album. Later on I synced the iPhone up with my computer and I saw the songs move over to the computer. All in all it was pretty easy to use and it is pretty scary how easy it is now to spend money on the iTunes store. One recommendation I would like to make is that when I don't have a wifi connection the icon for the wifi iTunes store should disappear. If I don't have access to a wifi network and I click on the wifi iTunes store it tells me that I cannot connect to the iTunes store and that I should try with a wifi connection. I also think Apple did a pretty good job of architecting iTunes since you can easily access pretty much the same stuff (no video of any kind or podcasts) as you can with the regular iTunes store. I would like to see access to podcasts via wifi iTunes eventually. I wonder if the connection to the iTunes store is encrypted? When you buy something it only asks for your password, but how is that transmitted? The wifi iTunes store shows nothing to say that it is secure. I would recommend only using this on an encrypted network for now...
Posted by troutm8 at October 1, 2007 04:43 PM