PHILIPS DS8550/10 Fidelio Docking Speaker for iPad/iPhone/iPod

Do yourself a favour and avoid this.  It was meant to be a Christmas present to me so i’m glad i tried it out first! Before i get to the annoying habits/faults the first thing i noticed when i switched the dock on was the sound quality and i really don’t think it’s that great. I can hear a great deal of hissing and popping noises on a lot of songs (something that’s mentioned a lot on the Amazon US reviews i’ve since discovered) – i’ve tried several files from normal quality mp3 to very high quality, all of which play crystal clear on all my other devices but it’s there on most songs on this dock.

When you power on the dock it rams the volume up really loud even though your ipad/iphone was on its lowest setting so you’re left scrambling for the volume.  Also it just randomly switches itself off half way through songs for no apparent reason. I read that it also randomly switches itself on too at high volume. Not at all what you expect for a £200 dock.  So i’m sending it back and i won’t bother with a replacement – at least not a Phillips one.

Frame created with Polymagic app for iPhone

I shot this test video using an App called Luma. It’s great for stabilisation and has a few nice effects too. I edited the video together in iMovie – previously i was using Sony Vegas pro which was a mutha fu*king nightmare and take forever. Well no more!

The camera is one if my most used things on a smart phone so I couldn’t wait to try it out. The standard iPhone camera is really good for outdoor shots and general snaps but for pictures with tricky lighting I find that it’s a bit lacking. Taking photos of Pip indoors it tends to blow out the white highlights in her fur. So I’m trying some third party apps and the first one is camera+

Standard iPhone camera:

Camera+ using separate focus and exposure lock:

I think camera+ does a much better job in this situation. It’s easy to do, just tap your finger on the screen to bring up a + sign on the focus ring. Click the + to bring up the exposure ring and then move this to wherever you want to expose from. I took an exposure reading from pips white fur around her nose and focused on her eye. More tests coming soon.

I never thought that i would leave Android and i thought that if i ever did i’d miss it … well i did leave and i don’t miss it!  Ok maybe some things i miss.

Getting my iPhone was a complete fucking farce though.  I bought it on PAYG via Vodafone (BIG mistake) with the intention of putting my contract Sim in it.  I ordered through their website on the 20th October and i didn’t hear a thing from them – 2 weeks of calls, online chats, forums posts, constant lies, mis-information and a tweet or two they eventually say “oh … we lost a load of orders and yours was one of them – would you like to re-order?”.  Hell. No.

So i bought it direct from Apple, communication was great and it arrived when they said it would.  Some advice, don’t deal with Vodafone, their customer service is shocking – just check out the forums.  By the way, i then spent 2 days trying to get Vodafone to transfer my number to a micro sim – again, they were useless.  Couldn’t do it.  So i walked into a shop and they did it in 2 minutes flat.

Anyway, the phone.  WOW!  I can’t get over how heavy and solid it feels – last time i felt like that was my first Blackberry Bold.  The screen is amazing.  Incidentally i was using a Samsung Galaxy S2 (which my hubby now has) and i know that the S2 is considered iPhones biggest Rival … personally, as a device i prefer the iphone even with its smaller screen.

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