I preordered my Nest thermostat on Day 0. It arrived on my doorstep today. I don’t think anyone has been excited about a thermostat in the last 10 years (except for the guy who finally figured out how to program his after a couple years of not bothering) and I feel a little silly about the fact that I care about a thermostat at all. The timing was right: I wanted a programmable thermostat so I could feel less guilty about keeping it so warm in the Summer and cool in the Winter. We had an ancient a retro model that we rarely adjusted when leaving; basically throwing money away.

The Nest costs a bit more than the programmable models I was researching but it does something none of them will do: it learns so I don’t have to. I’ve lived in 2 homes with programmable thermostats and never learned to program them so they were wasted. With Nest, I don’t have to learn how to program it. I set the temperatures as I go for the first week and it learns how to program for me. If I change my mind or need to adjust things, I can do it at the thermostat, on the web site, or via the iPhone app.

After the installation, the thermostat booted up, asked which wifi network to use, downloaded an update, rebooted, then walked me through setup. It was made to impress and it succeeded. Each step was informative, easy, and made me continuously wonder why all consumer electronics don’t work like this. Connecting the thermostat to my Nest account was a 2 step process: I logged into my account. The site told me it found a Nest and I should go to it if I wanted to add it to this account. A message was waiting for me on the thermostat that asked if I wanted it added to my account. I clicked OK. Done.

I have to assume there are dozens of consumer electronic companies working this sort of setup functionality into their next products. If not, they’re doing it wrong.

I tested iTunes Match on my PC at work and, though I will never really use it, it is pretty cool. Most of my playlists are available and I can listen to pretty much all of my music at work now, if I wanted. I prefer listening to music on my phone at work so I won’t use this much. If I did listen to iTunes at work on my PC, this would be the greatest use of $25 ever.

I planned on using iTunes Match for my iPhone, not my work PC so I went into settings to turn it on. When I did, I saw this message:

iTunes Match Warning

That was the end of that experiment.

I read later that the message is a lie (which means it should not be there) and that your existing music won’t be erased from the phone. However, it apparently prevents you from syncing with iTunes on your PC afterwards, so no thanks.

Besides the obvious limitations above that will keep me from using this, there are a few other things that bother me:

• “Matching a user’s iTunes library in the cloud take minutes, not days or weeks,” Apple says. While this is technically true, over 1/3 of my music was not matched and had to be uploaded. This took days, not minutes.
• Smart playlists based on other smart playlists will not work in iTunes Match. This kills my main playlists on my phone and is almost a dealbreaker. It isn’t a dealbreak by itself but turning on iTunes Match for my phone means I can’t sync my main playlists anymore at all. That is a dealbreaker.
• Adding music (when ripping CDs) doesn’t automatically add them to iTunes Match. Not sure if it runs on a schedule or not but I ripped a CD then added those tracks to my stepson’s playlist and was told that the tracks weren’t in iTunes Match so adding them to the playlist would remove the playlist. Weird and lame.

Also, what is going on with these icons? Steve Jobs must be rolling over in his grave right now. (Note: these are on my work machine, the ‘close left panel’ icon doesn’t exist on my home machine.)

One thing I that might actually be better about the Fire than the iPad is the home page UI. I really like the use of cover flow for all your recently used apps, books, web pages. In my opinion it’s better than Apple’s double tap home screen button solution. In fact I’m starting to think Apple should actually rip off this UI instead of just using the free for all icon layout they’ve used since the iPhone 1. On the iPhone that layout is probably still the best route to go; but the iPad has enough real estate to get more creative with the UI. The Fire is a perfect example of what can be done.

As far as the size goes. It is simply too small to be a full featured tablet. However I actually like the size for book reading books and gaming. I find the iPad is a bit too large for games that use the accelerometer/gyroscope, so I never play those on the iPad. On the flipside I think the iPhone is a bit too small for my old ass eyes when it comes to those kind of games. The Fire splits the difference nicely. The same can be said for reading books on the iPad and the iPhone, one is too large, and the other is too small.

The Fire obviously has tons of flaws, read Engadget or pretty much any review to see a list of them, but there are some things Apple could and should learn from this device. Would I pay $300 for it? No, I wouldn’t. However, if I didn’t already own an iPad $200 is a tempting price point.

GarageBand on iPhone is impressive. They managed to make it support everything the iPad version does, but intelligently hid a lot of things in menus so there is enough room on the screen.

The piano keyboard is small (tiny!) but the drums may actually be a little easier to play for me than they are on iPad.

The fact that the phone supports a full 8-track digital recorder with smart instruments, effects, drum machine, etc, etc, etc, is (very!) impressive but I may actually be more impressed with how we they minified the UI.

Plus, with DiskAid (or a similar app), I was able to move a garageband project from ipad onto the iphone and it all worked perfectly.

Worst new feature: Playlist order is broken again.

Other things I’ve noticed:

• Location-based reminders are apparently only on iPhone 4S. I can set a reminder for a time but not a location.
• I hide all of my unused Apple apps in 1 folder on the last page of my homescreens to keep them out of my way. You can’t put the Newsstand app in a folder so that empty ass bookcase is going to be staring at me every time I visit the barren wasteland of my last homescreen.
• Smart Playlists now update correctly again. Since iOS 4, they wouldn’t live update on my phone (i.e. playing a song on the “unplayed” playlist should make the song disappear from the playlist without having to sync but that didn’t work since iOS 4).
• Playlists aren’t ordered correctly now. Playlists that start with numbers come after playlists that start with letters. Underscores are ignored.
• The new Notifications alone make the upgrade worth it. Yeah, the upgrade is free but still, those old notifications were the shittiest thing I’ve ever seen on a phone.
• The notifications area has weather and stocks, too. Neato.
• If your Apple ID is just a username and not an email address, you’ll have to change that when you first start your phone after upgrading. If you also have a MobileMe address and want to use that as your  Apple ID, you’re going to have some weirdness because you have to use your MobileMe address to sign in to your phone but then your old non-email Apple ID to sign in to the iTunes Store and GameCenter.
• I can’t use iCloud yet because I have a MobileMe account that needs to be moved to iCloud first and I can’t do that yet.
• Syncing no longer disables your phone. Instead of the screen being on with a “Sync in Progress” message at the top, there is just a small sync icon spinning in the status bar up top. Your phone screen will go black if you sync it and let it sit. This caused me to unplug it once in the middle of a sync because I assumed it was finished.
• The messaging/SMS app has greens where the blues should be. Lame.

For the next week, I’ll still be using my iPhone 4 so I can’t play with Siri or the location-based notifications yet. That should be some fun (and/or annoying) features to test. Maybe I’ll even use them later, who knows.  I’m still not in the habit of using Search homescreen to find things on the phone.

[UPDATE: Sean Herrala pointed out that you can add location-based reminders in the Reminder app on iPhone 4 but you have to add it as a Reminder, not a Task. I didn't have a Reminders section in the app, only Tasks, so I added a new section called "Reminders" and then items I added had location-based reminders available. Weird. Sounds like a bug to me.  Also, when adding a location-based reminder, you are limited to locations that are in your contact list. In all of the Siri demos, they say things like "remind me to get milk at the grocery store", I wonder if that guy has a contact called "Grocery Store" or something...]

After joining, the first 4 movies they suggested:
Howard the Duck.
Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
Short Circuit.
Big Fan.

WTF.

or maybe they forgot that whole “beta” thing and hit the “go live” button a couple months too soon.

The Gutter : Keep
The Gutter : Ditch

Now go vote.

So I downloaded and installed Camera Control version 2.5 (again via “run as administrator”) and it works just fine. Not sure if it works enough to be worth the price but I have a month to see if it is actually usable and worth buying. If I had a real computer with dual monitors in a room where I could set up and take photos, I would definitely use it but I’m not so sure about the benefits vs pita ratio when using this software and a laptop.

I was able to solve that by going into the properties of the 3G connection in the at&t software and finding the phone number it dials to connect (that “phone number” consists of a mix of symbols and numbers). Then I opened the properties of the 3G connection in the Windows wireless manager and pasted that “phone number” in. After that, I can connect without using the at&t software at all. I haven’t tried uninstalling the at&t software completely but I will after I return from next week’s roadtrip.