Thứ Ba, 27 tháng 9, 2016

Solo 3 review: Beats solves the 3 things that make most wireless headphones suck

Thứ Ba, 27 tháng 9, 2016 - 1 Comment

The Beats Solo 3 wireless on-ear headphones have up to 40 hours of battery life.

There are three reasons why wireless headphones mostly suck and I've steered clear of dropping serious dough on a pair: poor sound quality, frustrating pairing and weak battery life.

Beats' new Solo 3 wireless on-ear headphones solve all three. And they do so while looking stylish and recognizable on top of your head for hours.

Announced with the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, the Solo 3 headphones improve on the Solo 2 in every possible way.

They're still a little pricey at $300, but for the wireless pairing convenience and battery life alone, I think it's money well spent. Sure, you could get a pair of sleeker B&O BeoPlay H8 or noise-cancelling Bose QC35 for $100 and $50 more, respectively, but the Solo 3 hit the sweet spot.

From the outside, the Solo 3 look virtually indistinguishable from the wireless Solo 2. Beats could have went with some more upscale materials like metal, but that would have also made them heavier. Plastic will have to do.

As they are, the Solo 3 are super light, the ear pads soft and the adjustable headband comfortable to wear all day long. They also fold up and fit snuggly into an included case.

They're available in six colors to match the newest iPhone palette: white, silver, gold, rose gold, matte black and gloss black.

A battery LED indicator on the bottom of the right ear cup shows you how much battery power is left and there are play/pause and volume buttons embedded into the left ear cup (these are real buttons, not touch-sensitive gesture controls).

Beats provided a gloss black pair that matches my jet black iPhone 7. I'm just a breathing mask, cape and boots short of being Darth Vader every single time I step out of my home. Do not buy this color if you hate seeing smudges and fingerprints.

Pairing magic

Ask any person with a pair of Bluetooth headphones and they'll tell you pairing can be a real bitch. You never know how well the pairing process will go. There's always something that creates interference. Or your computer can't detect the headphones. Or the battery died and the next time you go to pair them, they don't.

The Solo 3 are one of four pairs of new headphones (the others are the BeatsX, Powerbeats 3 and AirPods) from Apple and Beats that contain a tiny chip called the W1. The headphones are still connecting to devices via Bluetooth, but the W1 chip essentially acts like an assistant, talking to Apple devices (iOS devices, Macs and Apple Watch) to make pairing dead simple.

Pairing with Apple devices via the W1 chip.

And I really mean dead simple ... if you're pairing them to an iPhone running iOS 10, which I am. To connect, just press the power button for a second and place them near your iPhone. A screen slides up asking to connect, and that's it. No listening for beeps. No jumping into Bluetooth settings. No waiting for your headphones to appear on a list of nearby Bluetooth headphones. It even shows you the battery percentage.

Better, the headphones can pair with your Apple Watch, iPad or Mac easily using your iCloud login.

It feels good to finally be able to say, "It just works" — which is Apple's unofficial tagline of making complicated processes idiot-proof.

Unfortunately, if you're pairing the Solo 3 to iOS devices running iOS 9 or earlier, you won't get the pairing magic. Nor will you get it if you pair the headphones to an Android phone or other standard Bluetooth-supported devices; it's back to "pairing mode" and all that junk for you.

Battery champ

Aside from the W1's awesome pairing sauce, the chip also provides another major advantage: long battery life.

With the W1 chip, Beats was able to improve the Solo 2's 12 hours of battery life up to 40 hours, an increase of over 3x.

The best wireless headphones, some of which cost more than the Solo 3, only get up to half the battery life of Beats' new headphones. The only one that I could find that matches the Solo 3 on battery life is Sony's DRBTN20, which seems to have middling sound.

Beats was able to improve the Solo 2's 12 hours of battery life up to 40 hours.

On a weekday, I average about two hours of music listening during my commute to and from work, about four hours during the work day and another two hours when I'm at home. That's up to eight hours per day. I went five days before I ran the battery down from 100 percent.

The BeoPlay H8s I tested last year needed to be charged every two days. The QC35s needed to be charged every three days for my listening habits.

If you don't listen to music as much as I do, you could easily go a few weeks without needing to charge the Solo 3 headphones again. Say you only listen to music on a two-hour roundtrip commute; that's up to 20 days of usage.

On top of that, the headphones have a "Fast Fuel" charging feature, which is basically like the quick charging features on many smartphones. With five minutes of charging, the headphones can give you up to three hours of listening time. That's more than enough to juice up in the morning and get you through your commute to work, where you'll be able to plug the Solo 3 in and charge them proper.

Also comes with a cable for listening without eating battery life.

If you prefer, there's also a cable that plugs into the left ear cup for wired listening. The only downside is you'll need to supply your own 3.5mm headphone jack-to-Lightning or USB-C dongle if your phone doesn't have a headphone port.

Any way you slice it, the Solo 3 come out on top in terms of battery life.

Solid sound

By now, you're probably thinking, "Ray, it's great they pair easily and battery life is awesome, but how do they sound? Do you they still sound like Beats?"

The answer is yes. But not like the old Monster-era Beats when they were tuned mainly for heavy bass and sounded terrible for everything else.

The Solo 2 reworked the sound for a wider range of music and the Solo 3 offer more or less the same audio experience. Mainly, they sound great on the low-end with dubstep and EDM and today's heavily audio-tuned vocals.

That's intentional. Beats headphones are tuned for today's music, not Bob Marley or The Beatles. If you want a pure listening experience for the classics instead of Eric Prydz or Frank Ocean or Kanye, you'd be better served looking elsewhere. Beats headphones are made for modern digital music and your average millennial could care less.

So yeah, the Solo 3 sound like Beats and you know what? I have no issues with that. They're better than EarPods, but not as clean as more expensive wired headphones. For wireless headphones, they sound great to my "regular" ears in bed, on the subway and at work.

They don't have noise-cancellation like the Bose QC35s, but the noise-isolation from the ear cups are quite good in blocking out ambient sound.

It's a mistake to dismiss the Solo 3 for a modest update because it doesn't look any different from the Solo 2. What Beats has achieved with the W1 chip in terms of convenience and power efficiency is game-changing.

Years from now, when wireless headphones won't need to be charged for months, we'll be laughing at charging headphones every week (like I am now at existing wireless headphones that need to be charged every two to three days).

Audiophiles will never like Beats, but the company couldn't care less. Who needs to please audiophiles when the majority of people are streaming their music on Apple Music or Spotify, anyway?

Beats Solo 3 wireless on-ear headphones

The Good

Super comfy • Sound great • Insane battery life • W1 chip makes pairing painless • Comes in six colors

The Bad

Still kinda pricey • Doesn't include any adapters for Lightning or USB-C

The Bottom Line

These are the wireless headphones you are looking for if you've got $300 to spend.

Thứ Hai, 12 tháng 9, 2016

I'm learning code with Apple Swift Playgrounds

Thứ Hai, 12 tháng 9, 2016 - 0 Comments

Byte can be your Swift programming guide.

I’ve been in the tech publishing industry for 25 years, but that no more makes me a programmer than someone watching football on TV for a quarter of a century makes them a quarterback.

Code is my Achilles’ heel. Its proximity to formulas makes me queasy. It’s not that I can’t understand any code. Back in high school, I was a whiz at geometry, but then stumbled badly in chemistry and trigonometry. Similarly, I spent a summer learning BASIC and coding an incredibly simple program. I’ve also tackled HTML, but when it came to JavaScript, I could do some, but almost entirely based on code I’d copied and modified from other sites.

Real programming and code baffles and terrifies me.

A few years ago, Apple introduced the Swift programming language as a sort of simple gateway drug for deeper, Xcode programming. It could be the foundation of real apps in the formal language.

The first time I saw some of the code up on screen at WWDC 2014, I felt like I sort of got it. I recognized some of the words and structure.

That’s why, ostensibly, Apple's new, free code-training app Swift Playgrounds should be for me and much more agile-minded students. During the recent iPhone 7 launch, Apple also introduced Everyone Can Code, an educational initiative designed to help get code training — specifically Swift code training — into schools and curriculums. Playgrounds is a key part of that program.

On Tuesday, Apple drops Swift Playgrounds in the app store. I've been been immersing myself in this iPad-based code school for a week.

Now, as I stare at a Swift Playground lesson plan, I realize I was half right. Yes, there is something intrinsically knowable about Swift, but there’s still the code-theory leap that my mind struggles to make.

This, of course, is probably just me.

Inside the code

Swift Playgrounds is partially just that, a coding playground where you can repeatedly try out different commands, calls and code variations to propel entertaining animations over and over again. You are, in essence, the code-breaker and maker here.

And you’re doing it on the iPad, a platform that’s generally thought of as the place where you consume the result of code, not create it.

You can jump ahead in the lesson plan, but then be prepared to get lost.

As a programming language, Swift starts off pretty simply.

The basic lesson plan, called Fundamentals of Swift (there's also second one called, naturally, Beyond the Basics), is set up so there’s code on the left-hand side of the screen and an animated environment on the right that’s driven, almost in real time, by your code. Each lesson offers a challenge designed to teach you one rudimentary piece of Swift code. You can also try some of the challenges, which let you alter code and change the functionality of pre-built games and apps like Blink. Blink is a simple grid — almost a Minesweeper-style game — where surrounding cubes influenced the kind color cube I could have in cube clusters. Apple plans on adding more of those challenges over time.

Fundamentals, though, eases you into code. It starts with command and the style in which Swift commands are written. At this level, the commands use English language words and follow a clear and consistent pattern. What’s more, the iPad’s virtual keyboard and QuickType suggestions immediately offer the nearest, best code option as soon as you start typing a letter. Typing in “t” will, for example, show “turnLeft ()” which is, naturally a turn left command. Typing “m” brings up “moveForward.” I can then click on any of the commands to add them.

To my surprise and pleasure, I breezed through a series of command lessons. Each time driving the animated character, Byte (you can choose from among three animated oddballs), to move forward, toggle switches and collect gems in the right order or, at least, to the satisfaction of the app, which would cheer my progress.

Going deeper

Things got a bit trickier at Functions, which let me group some of these commands or tasks. It took me a while to figure out that I define the Function, with all its embedded commands, at the top of the programs. After that, I just call the Function below to execute the series, as many times as I wanted. In between the Functions, I used smaller commands, like “moveForward ()” to tie together these groupings, sort of like the cartilage that joins more complex bone.

To be honest, I was stumped by this simple fact for a good 30 minutes and Swift Playgrounds didn't quite help. One reason is that, while you can write code, compile (done by simply hitting “Run My Program”) and run it over and over again, watching as Byte runs and, sometimes, stumbles through, your poorly written commands, the app doesn't highlight the exact command that’s executing at the exact moment that Byte is performing an action. That’s something that would have been invaluable to me as I tried to debug my code.

Things progress quickly to more complex programming constructs like functions and loops.

I can proudly say I created and named my own function to solve this code challenge.

To get around this, I added spaces between chunks of code so I could keep track of what Byte was doing in relation to the code. This helped me make it through Functions to Loops. I then somehow solved the first lesson in Loops in one try. Seriously, it took me about a minute.

Swift Playgrounds would let me go as far as I wanted with the code. The first Lesson goes all the way into Algorithms, which scare me.

However, if I can get through to Beyond the Basics, Playgrounds will even let me write code that accesses the iPad's sensors and camera. I'll also be able to import my own visual assets and program them, all of which is almost enough to make me want to push through my coding fears.

Whatever I choose to do, the whole system is self-guided and designed to let me jump around as much as I like. I can even accelerate the program playback, if I want (worth doing since Byte moves through tasks pretty slowly – a playback speed slider would be helpful here). The problem with doing that, though, is if you jump ahead, you get lost, as I did. Some things still made sense, while others did not. Learning to code requires patience, which is why the animated program playground is so smart. It turns learning to program into a series of puzzles and games. The desire to learn is driven by the desire to solve the puzzle.

A dawning realization

The more time I spent within Swift Playgrounds, the more I realized that it’s really written exactly for people like me, as well as children and people of all ages, who want to code.

I can’t say that I ever felt comfortable coding or that what I’ve learned rooted itself into some hidden cranny in my brain – a half-day away from it and I feel lost. However, that isn’t entirely true; I am starting to see the patterns. And now I remember something about my old HTML and JavaScript coding days.

At the start, they too left me confused and bereft, but through sheer repetition and a ton of trial and error, I eventually became an expert at HTML and comfortable with at least 60 percent of JavaScript.

Soon, you're nesting Patterns. Solve one of these challenges and you will fee like a coding champ.

That’s what Swift Playgrounds asks of you. Do the code and do it again, with the carrot of an entertaining avatar plating out your code creations over and over again, looking sad when you fail and elated when you succeed.

I don’t know if this is the beginning of me, perhaps, coding a basic app and graduating to Xcode or not (probably not), but for anyone who wants to get started learning (or teaching) solid, baseline coding skills in a touch-based envrioment, Swift Playground is an excellent place to start.