iPlayer, iPhone, iGiveIn

Short and a bit unfocussed this time, still.

For some time I've resisted buying / upgrading to an iPhone.

Previous resistance to an iPhone is a product of: the unbearable smugness of existing owners; my capacity for ruining anything vaguely stylish with oafish behaviour; a general feeling that I want to support something more open.

Anyway. Capitulation. I've got one.

It's still in perfect working order and, yes, I'm getting smugger ("Haven't you got an electronic compass in the old 3G then? No? Oh, ever so handy.")

Lot to report at some point, but mostly I'm very impressed with the mobile iPlayer / iPhone combination, particularly when it comes to the God of all media, Radio.

Access to listen-again material is superb but live streams aren't yet supported (come on, come on, I'll pay).

However, until that glorious day, everyone should purchase a copy of WunderRadio from the App Store. This allows you to listen to a couple of flavours of live BBC streams as well as thousands of others. Well worth it's paltry £4ish purchase price.


Two other small criticisms as far as the iPlayer is concerned:

1) I've signed up for Labs features, but there didn't seem to be a way to easily detect if what I was looking at was Beta-ish or not. This makes it a bit of a chore to decide whether or not to feedback.

2) Please, please, support playlists of some kind. I can already see what I've recently watched / listened to, but to be honest that isn't much use.

What I really want is a way to quickly add any program that takes my fancy to a queue, and then to be able to work my way through that queue in the iPlaeyer itself. So a button somewhere on a program says "Queue This" and it's added to the end. And playing something from the queue removes it.


That way I don't miss anything I could fancy a look at in passing on my way to something else, and I can probably stop watching late night episodes of "Make Me a Supermodel" and "America's Hardest Pets Do the Funniest Things". Thanks.