nXZEN nX6000 Bluetooth headset

(Yeah, here I go again, but I promise to keep this one short.)

A couple of weeks ago I quickly reverted to the ever-reliable Jawbone after being disappointed by the Motorola MOTOPURE H12; never giving up the fight, I decided to give yet another headset a shot at the crown (there’s two levels there, think about it ;), and so I purchased the nXZEN nX6000.

When I first heard about this product earlier this year, I kind of dismissed it without much thought, but repeated high praise (and from people presumably in the know) compelled me to give it a chance. I wish I hadn’t.

It felt OK in my ear, but it couldn’t decide if it was an on-the-ear or an in-the-ear device, which made long talks quite uncomfortable.

It will come as no surprise that I liked its super-plain looks; I thought it kind of steampunk’ish actually. A negative side-effect of the simple look is the lack of buttons — the “multi-function” button does everything, and uses a hard-to-learn hold/press/tap system that only Samuel Morse could love. Overall the buttons felt nice and had a good action to them, but I would have liked to have seen at least one more button take the load off the multi-function hero.

And now, the noise-cancellation. Every headset I’ve used since the Jawbone has disappointed me in this department, and sadly, the nX6000 is no exception. I knew it wasn’t going well, when, as I was talking to my girlfriend while walking outside, she said, “I can hear all the cars and the wind.” There were no cars and no wind to speak of (and as far as I know she’s not that kind of crazy). Further, she could hear everything I was doing while wearing the headset — opening my car door, turning the car key, typing on my keyboard — and could even tell me what the TV was saying in the background.

I’d half a mind to think the headset was broken — could this really be what FrontWave Extreme was all about? I seriously doubted it, but didn’t care enough to order a replacement to find out.

My girlfriend, and everyone else I talked to with the device, told me there was a faint echo to everything I said. It was also noted that it sounded like I was talking from inside a closet or a bathroom, and my voice was repeatedly described as “tinny” (a complaint not uncommon of Bluetooth headsets).

On the positive side, the nX6000 could get quite loud, and so being able to hear the person on the other end was a non-issue.

Should I quit, or try out the BlueAnt Z9?

200,000 words

It’s just been brought to my attention that this site’s entries now contain over 200,000 words. Damn.

Gmail’s filters now support “mark as read”

Not sure when it happened (my best bet is that it came along with Gmail “v2.0”), but Gmail’s filtering system now (finally!) allows you to automatically “mark as read,” something I’ve been clamoring for since jump.

I get various e-mails that I never really need to see, and before this recent addition, I couldn’t automatically mark them as read, which meant I needed to manually perform some action on them even though I didn’t care at all about their actual content.

For example, I get a weekly e-mail from WordPress containing a complete backup of my posts (using the WordPress Database Backup plugin); I take it on faith that the plugin is doing its job each week and so I don’t need to see these e-mails. The same goes for student loan payment confirmations, which, until now, required me to constantly go to their label/folder and manually mark them as read.

You can understand how this inefficiency could drive me up a wall (OK, maybe you can’t understand that, but no matter!). Now I can receive, skip inbox, apply label, and mark as read, all without ever having to see or even know about the e-mail.

I can’t make this stuff up

So I’m at McDonald’s late one night ordering one of their newfangled iced coffees (which are great by the way), and this is how the transaction went down:

Apathy: Hi, how may I help you?
Justin: Hello, does the regular iced coffee come with cream and sugar?¹
Apathy: OK, anything else?
Justin: No, I’m sorry, I was asking if the regular iced coffee came with cream.
Apathy: Yeah, I got it, anything else?
Justin: Huh?
Apathy: $2.19 at the second window.
(at second window)
Apathy: Large hazelnut coffee, $2.19 please.
Justin: No one ever said the word hazelnut.
Apathy: You don’t want hazelnut?

I swear, between this and that other McDonald’s experience, I just don’t get how the world turns.

Motorola MOTOPURE H12 Bluetooth headset

So the MOTOPURE H12 headset was released on Tuesday, and I, of course, picked one up on Tuesday.

The six word review: I’m not giving up my Jawbone.

I’ll be honest, I’m kind of tired of buying these things and always being disappointed (what is this, like my 20th Bluetooth headset?). Here’s to hoping Aliph can use its recent $5 million cash infusion to remedy all of the original Jawbone’s shortcomings; if they make it smaller, louder, and impervious to wind, it’s going to be untouchable.

The good

First off, I quite like the design. Though I could certainly do without the black tip (why not just use the metal grate for the length of it?), it’s not too bad, and I’ve no complaints about its size, which allows it to take a decent fit to my ear. Save the ear hook, I really like the materials used, especially the “diamond-cut” metal (whatever that means).

The microUSB-powered desktop charger looks cool, has some heft, and uses magnets to couple the headset to it; you just set the headset near it and it sucks it down and begins charging. The package also includes a useful travel charger/case and a micro-to-miniUSB converter.

The multi-color LED is unobtrusive, and as far as these things go, is done quite well; I don’t quite understand it, but manufacturers are convinced that Bluetooth headsets need blinking, public-facing lights (the Jawbone’s is horrible — very distracting). What amounts to a small dot on the H12 indicates various things, such as an incoming call, call status, battery status,¹ etc.

The one overriding problem I have with the Jawbone is its low speaker volume. I’ve never had a complaint from the other side, but more often than I’d like the volume just isn’t loud enough on my end. The H12 is definitely better about this, but noticeably clips the audio if you push it too far — one step forward, two steps back.

Overall, it’s quite easy to use (not least because it has dedicated power, volume, and talk buttons) and performs moderately well.

The not so good

There was a lot of hype surrounding this headset (mostly from Motorola), but unfortunately the device just doesn’t live up to it, especially when it comes to the most hyped bit: noise-cancellation.

This is Motorola’s first headset with CrystalTalk, its newfangled noise-cancellation technology. Like it or not, companies need to realize that the Jawbone has set the noise-cancelling standard — if your device can’t at least compete with its abilities in this regard, then you probably need to return to the drawing board.

Everyone I’ve talked to while using the H12 has either asked me what’s wrong with my phone (because they’ve been spoiled by my Jawbone (seriously)) or responded negatively when I’ve asked about background noise. I don’t mean to say that CrystalTalk doesn’t work, or even that it works poorly, but to even try to compare it to the Jawbone seems silly; this performance disparity is the main reason I decided to not hang onto it.

The final comment I have concerns the ear hook, which despite its appearance, isn’t rubbery at all; it’s hard plastic that can rotate around the earpiece, but doesn’t change shape. Save its ability to rotate, it offers zero customization, and unfortunately, the way it connects to the headset reminds me a lot of the fragile ear hook on my Jabra JX10 (which, to Jabra’s credit, they tried to make right).

Fixing Safari + Saft on Leopard

Update: Jeff Harrell and a few others have e-mailed me to let me know that Safari does now have some form of session restoration; see “Reopen All Windows From Last Session” in the “History” menu. Kind of a weird place to put it if you ask me (why not mention it in the preferences?). In any event, there seems to be some slight delay before it “saves” a newly opened window/tab to the restoration ‘list,’ but it does seem to do this even without a valid “quit” signal, which is great — I killed the process, and it restored the tabs I had opened since I last “quit.” I’m assuming it works the same way when the browser crashes (i.e., if the windows/tabs have been open longer than whatever the delay is, they’ll be put in the restoration list). The only thing this implementation doesn’t seem to account for is the case where a malignant site is causing Safari to crash; will Safari continue to load this page when you restore the session, or will it give you the option of skipping it?

Update: Hao Li has released a new version of Saft (v10.0.1) that likely fixes the problems outlined below (and conforms to the Input Manager requirements introduced in Leopard).

I finally started messing around with Safari 3 on Leopard¹ this weekend and was kind of surprised and disappointed to see that it still doesn’t have native support for window/tab restoration (for much more on this multi-year omission, please see Browser session restoration on Mac OS X, which I penned three years ago).

Warranted(!) griping aside, I looked to see if Saft (which I first mentioned in the article linked to above, and which takes care of the restoration issue) had been updated to support Safari v3.0.4 (the version that shipped with Leopard). Turns out, it has been updated to work with the new browser, and so I happily paid my six bucks to upgrade it, even though I could never really use Safari as my primary browser.²

If you didn’t already know, Leopard kind of does away with Input Managers,³ which means that for Saft to work, it now has to launch Safari. OK, fine, but when I launch Safari with Saft I get no windows. None. Asking for a new window produces nothing on the screen. However, asking for a new tab does give me a window (with two tabs!), but takes away the address bar. Huh?

I played around with various files and preferences, but no matter what I did, the result was always the same: either no window or a window without an address bar. Finally, out of pure frustration, I just decided to scrap my com.apple.Safari.plist file and start over. Funny enough, this actually did the trick, and now Saft is working as it should.

Gmail “v2.0”

Google is in the business of answering Gmail prayers, and business is good.

Nearly two years ago, in On using Gmail exclusively, I said the following:

If you are reading a “conversation” and see that a new e-mail has arrived, it would be nice if when that new e-mail is part of the conversation you are currently looking at, it would just refresh your conversation instead of requiring you to go all the way back to the list of conversations and click it again.

That request has been fulfilled (as have many others from that post), because, as I noticed earlier tonight, Gmail now displays a small rectangular box in the bottom, right hand corner of the browser window when the above-described situation occurs.

Inside the box it says “New Message from John Doe” and offers you two choices: “Update Conversation” and “Ignore.” As you might expect, when you tell it to update the conversation, it refreshes the message-body window with the new e-mail. It works great.

Speaking of working great, it would be remiss of me to not mention the speed bump this version has received. I mean, wow.

[W]e [now] prefetch messages in the current view, so when you open an email your browser doesn’t have to talk to Google’s server; it just displays the message. These techniques really shine on newer browsers and computers. […] We’re seeing sub-200ms times when opening messages — pretty quick.

Pretty quick indeed. I’d call it instantaneous. If you didn’t know you were working from within a browser, you couldn’t be certain either way.

Unfortunately, even in light of these big improvements, I’m still forced to use the “old” version (which is available by clicking “older version” in the menu at the top) because the Gmail Macros Greasemonkey script isn’t yet compatible with the new version, and I can’t live without it.

True, the keyboard shortcuts were updated in the new version, but they still won’t let me add/remove labels and quickly move back and forth between them. My workflow depends on that sort of functionality being there; without it, I feel horribly inefficient, which negatively affects my mood.

Google has “contacted a number of the developers behind some popular extensions and provided them with an opportunity to create fixes,” and so I’m sure I’ll be able to really enjoy the new version soon enough.