Sometimes good things come to those who wait.  Thankfully I can now include myself in those! The Geneva is definitely a stereo for those who know what they want. Designed to please furniture and stereo aficionados alike, it’s pretty impressive in both respects.

Let’s look at the stereo aspects first. In this particular unit (Geneva L – middle of the range), you get a 100 watt stereo with two tweeters and two woofers in the one unit. Now Geneva tell you in their brochureware that you get a much better stereo sound with all the speakers in one unit. Without a graphic EQ though, I had one punk song that you couldn’t hear the vocal track at all the way Geneva have setup the mix. The guitars and percussion sounded amazing though! In short, most stuff sounds amazing. Even daggy old MP3s of very poor quality sound surprisingly good. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you’ve been missing on your old stereo. One moot point though, it’s audio quality is almost wasted on crappy MP3s. Put a CD in and the difference is night and day.

The build quality is fantastic. I could stare at the back of this unit for hours (sad as that is) because there’s no plastic and it’s so well thought out and it’s like a Sherman tank! The attention to detail extends to the polishing cloth and cool little cloth bag for all the accessories you get. Unwrapping this thing is a real Christmas day experience: each individual unit neatly boxed and labeled!

This particular unit comes with the iPod dock. It’s not fully compatible with the iPhone, but I’m yet to see one that is. One nice feature is that it asks you if you want to go into flight mode when you dock, so calls won’t interrupt your music – sometimes. I’m still working out the nuances of it. It also has a traditional line in jack so you can play non iPod MP3 players through the unit.

Furniture nerds will totally appreciate the a piano quality lacquered finish, or the option of a natural walnut finish. I went the red. The heavy unpolished aluminum stand, a $300 AUD option, looks fantastic. This stand also lets you run the cables through it to hide all those garish wires. One thing’s for certain, this is not a ‘bright, shiny object’. It won’t look obsolete like last year’s Nokia phone when the next one comes out. It’s designed to be appreciated. The remote too has been designed to look good and be minimal yet totally usable. No flashing lights or any bullshit.

Despite the strengths, the is one undeniable issue with the Geneva: for such a small unit it’s bloody expensive. Having said that, if you want a unit that looks this good that doesn’t have six or seven separate speakers and sounds fantastic all the time, it’s probably quite cheap. I suspect to get something that sounds better than this would be a lot closer to $10K than the $2K this one costs. This is definitely not a mass produced stereo with a mass produced sound.  Your friends will never understand but who cares. It’s a fantastic unit without being that’s not too nerdy and definitely not too bling. If you appreciate the finer things, just get one!

EDIT: drummers will love the sound of this unit. It’s really well suited to hi-hats and cymbal type sounds. Has to be heard to be believed.

OK so I am cheap. There is a certain competitor that starts with ‘T’ and ends in ‘elstra’ that provides a far superior coverage (although a parallel test on a similar handset would be awesome). But their plan is frankly pathetic. They offer the iPhone on a phone plan from the 1990s with no data or ‘cap’ of included calls. So yes, tar me with the cheapskate brush. Who cares.

Anyway who cares about coverage per se? Certainly not me. Especially in the middle of town it shouldn’t matter. I don’t have to part the red sea to get to work, so why do you have to to make a phone call? So why the hell can’t I make a call. This is not deepest darkest Sierra Leone or Ascension Island slap bang in the middle of the ocean. It’s the centre of a populist, burgeoning city. For the first time in 5 years, voice mail is essential because the stupid network keeps dropping out. OR you can dial a number (land line or mobile) and after two minutes, it doesn’t even get a dial tone!

Well you do get what you pay for. But you should get a lot more. At least Apple hold up their end and I can play Pac Man or listen to gigs of music until Optus get their act together.

Let’s take for example the email tab in the dock. Frankly iPhone isn’t ideally suited to email and I don’t use it for that anyway. So I wanted to swap the email icon in the doc for the SMS icon, which I do use. How do you do it? Easy!

1. Hold your finger down on the icon you want to move for about 5 seconds

2. All the icons on the screen will start to shake like you’re drunk! All wobbly like the room is spinning. Any apps you’ve installed will now have a little ‘X‘ next to theicon

3. touch and drag the ‘email‘ icon off of the dock, into the main screen area. The icons should still be woozy.

4. touch and grab the ‘SMS‘ icon and move it onto the doc

5. to stop your icons wobbling around, hit the actual button on the iPhone (you know the only physical button below the screen!). The icons will now be static again. Otherwise after a minute, they will go static anyway

At first I discovered this by mistake, thinking I was indeed drunk or the phone was playing up. But by the time you’ve added 10 or so apps and games to your iPhone, it’s a very handy function. So handy they should’ve bloody well told you about it in the first place!

• 1 USB cable
• latest copy of iTunes
• Your Outlook (I have 2003), computer and phone.

Based on this slightly out of date article, it’s advised to reset your sync settings first. It was necessary for me. You need to:

And now you’re done! Don’t get sucked into buying stuff you don’t need. And thankfully you don’t need to sync every single option (e.g. your music and mail) you can sync only what you want. No need to buy additional software or MobileMe or anything. It’s all sorted.

Airsharing is a relatively cheap application for your iPhone. Basically, it sets up a web server on your iphone which you can access by IP address. Then you can copy and paste files from your iPhone to any other computer via wireless networks (WLAN). You can either load the IP address up in your browser, or setup a ’shared drive’ on your Windows machine or Mac.

Files shared using Airshare on iphone

Sadly, you can setup new directories to share out on your iPhone but you can’t share your music. But what I’ve learnt is that if you copy music to the public directory Airshare creates, you can play it. It doesn’t play within the iPod, it plays using Quicktime. Sadly it only plays one song at at a time too, but it works! So then if you want to transport tunes, you can copy it using Airshare to your iPhone. Get to where you’re going, open a web browser and copy over.

Next question: how fast is the file transfer? Pretty good actually. At least as fast as iTunes can copy music to your iPod. Perhaps like 400K per second or something. It’s not freaky fast, but it’s not crazy slow. It’s pretty bloody good! Maybe a few seconds for a 5 meg file.

Airshare is no substitute for a device that would let you do what you want with your music. Instead Apple have setup a musical nanny that wont let you be naughty. But for an application that costs about $7 (it was free initially. Sadly no more), it’s incredibly bloody useful. You may never have to carry around a stupid little USB stick again!