Pandora

I really enjoy Pandora, the internet streaming music service that works like a radio station keyed to a single or group of seed artists to shape a program of songs in the user's preferred style.

It's pretty damn good and works rather well. It even digs into beloved album tracks you'd think would never get noticed. And the streaming is smart, pre-loading songs as much as possible to prevent mid-stream hiccups.

While Pandora is in stereo on broadband, it does run in Mono on the iPhone. However, that may be necessary to fly below the 115kpbs Edge network limits. 128kps or 160kbps mp3's in stereo won't fit, so 64kbps or 80kbps mono mp3's are used...see 160 > 115 while 80 < 115 so mono streaming works well generally, depending on Edge signal quality.



I tried going for a 4 mile walk the other night with Pandora playing on my iPhone (using the dedicated Pandora app). Walking around with Pandora on the iPhone is a surreal and wholly modern experience.

Walking around with Pandora on the iPhone is a surreal and wholly modern experience.

I realized I could not watch any marketing messages they might deliver while the iPhone was in my pocket.

I think Pandora offers a paid service, though to support the free service I could stand a 20-30 second audio ad every 3 songs or so. I think Pandora is a great evolution from traditional radio, though its very nature creates enormous licensing costs.

While Radio can pay one ASCAP fee for broadcasting a song to millions, Pandora is probably stuck with a fee per stream per user. There should be some middle ground license to allow Pandora's brilliant service to be more viable.

I get into Pandora, and who knew how much 80's hair band music made into my memory when I was a teenager. I can kind of tolerate it now, amazingly.

=sw

Things I hate about...

my iPhone:
Why can't my iPhone do picture messaging? Whatever political reason they have not to support it, it is not worth it.

What I get is a "viewmymessage.com" link with a cryptic, awful, impossible to memorize username and password. THEN, the viewmymessage site sometimes doesn't even work on the edge network!

What AT&T need to do is program the authentication info into the link they send me so I can tap and view the multimedia message immediately!

What is all this anyway? The iPhone should be the definition of multi-media mobile life. If picture messaging is not supported, the least they can do is make it easy to access in Safari!

I think AT&T and Apple need to get their show together. All the nice features of the iphone can easily get forgotten when something so obviously flawed and so regularly irritating happens. I am a hardcore Apple fan and I miss my Motorola Razor sometimes. It could shoot video, send and receive picture messages...and I could hack it to play any mp3 as a ring tone!

I want on my iPhone:
* Any ringtone from any mp3!!!
* Picture messaging!!!
* The ability to shoot video!!!

As it stands, these features are represented by a symbolically blank screen:


My iPhone is a computing device I have purchased. I want to be able to use it how ever I like.

These improvements are software, not beyond reasonable and I believe they are necessary to keep any reasonable person from wishing to dump their iPhone.

=sw