David Emery OnlineMusic in the air
14 February 2008
Unsurprisingly, I own an iPhone and even more unsurprisingly I think it’s possibly the best gadget I’ve ever owned. As many, many people have elucidated at length (including me) the iPhone truly is a revolutionary device; the interface is the best interface I have ever used on any device – it’s that simple.
The purported lack of features for me is a complete non-issue. Have I ever sent an MMS? No. Is GPRS quick enough? Yes (it seems just as fast as my previous Nokia 3G phone). Have I ever removed the battery (other then to reboot/change the SIM) from any other phone I’ve ever owned? No. The features that it does have are the right ones, and implemented in a way that really changes the way you use the device – Safari and Mail for me shaking things up the most.
There has – up until now – been one slightly irritating thing that’s been bugging me about my iPhone usage: lack of Last.fm support. I’ll be honest, I’ve always utterly loved the idea of Last.fm but never been able to get it scrobbling my tracks reliably. This is probably because I do the vast majority of my music listening on an iPod, so the scrobbler client has to monitor for an iPod being connected and take its plays from a ‘Recently Played’ playlist which seems like a fairly fragile setup – it works most of the time. However, with the iPhone it doesn’t seem to work at all – no tracks get scrobbled; my hunch is that it doesn’t detect when the iPhone gets plugged in so the whole ropey setup falls down.
Enter stage left: MobileScrobbler.
MobileScrobbler is a third party application for the iPhone that scrobbles your plays over both wireless and EDGE, which instantly turns Last.fm into something I can finally use. It’s now my third favourite iPhone app, after Safari and iPod.app – it really is stunningly good. Of course, there is a big caveat in that it’s not an official app, and the forthcoming SDK is still forthcoming, so to use it you have to ‘jailbreak’ your phone.
Jailbreaking pretty much is hacking your iPhone, for want of a better term, and allows you to install a whole load of applications that do all sorts of things. However, other then MobileScrobbler they’re all utterly useless which is why up until now I hadn’t bothered, combined with the fragility and mild danger of the jailbreaking process. That all changed this week with the release of iJailbreak which makes the whole thing absurdly easy and pretty much risk free.
Download iJailbreak, launch it, click ‘jailbreak’, wait a minute while your iPhone does an impression of every computer ever featured in a movie with lots of fast moving scrolling text, click the new ‘Installer’ icon on your iPhone, find MobileScrobbler, click install and make your iPhone so much more interesting.