2010 iPod + iPhone Buyers' Guide

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Ask iLounge 8-8-08

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By Jesse David Hollington

Contributing Editor
Published: Friday, August 8, 2008
Category: Ask iLounge

Ask iLounge offers readers the opportunity to get answers to their iPod-related questions from a member of the iLounge editorial team. We'll answer several questions here each week, and of course, you can always get help with more immediate concerns from the iLounge Discussion Forums. Submit your questions for consideration using our Ask iLounge Submit Form. We reserve the right to edit questions for grammar, spelling, and length.

The most asked question at iLounge.com:

How do I copy music from my iPod onto my computer?

Click here for the answer.

The second most asked question at iLounge.com:

How do I put DVDs on my iPod?


For converting DVDs, web video, TV shows and home movies to your iPod, iPhone or Apple TV, we have a three-part series outlining the best formats, settings, and various tools to use for converting all types of video content for use on these devices.

The Complete Guide to iPod, Apple TV and iPhone Video Formats

The Complete Guide to iPod, iPhone and Apple TV Video Conversion (Mac)

The Complete Guide to iPod, iPhone and Apple TV Video Conversion (Windows)

Top five questions most recently asked by iLounge readers:

Q: What are the best speakers to use with my iPod? (15, 76-79, and 90-92)

Q: What are the best headphones to use with my iPod? (10, 72-75, and 90-92)

Q: I really want to get a nice case for my iPod. Do you have any suggestions? (36-37, 54-67, and 90-92)

Q: How can I connect my iPod to my car stereo? (14, 32-35, 68-71, and 90-92)

Q: Are there any batteries that I can use to extend my iPod's battery life? (82-83 and 90-92)

A: Answers to these and many other questions can be found in two places. Our Free iPod Book 3.3 provides a complete report card to all of the iPod accessories we've reviewed as of summer 2007, as well as over 125 iTunes and iPod tips & tricks. Further, our new 2008 iPod & iPhone Buyers' Guide has accessory tutorials at the page numbers listed in parentheses above. These and other publications in our Library are free downloads, developed by the editors of iLounge!

And now, for this week's Ask iLounge column:

Q:

After importing my contacts from my SIM card on my new iPhone, and cleaning up the contact information, do these changes get saved back on my SIM card?  Meaning if I import my contacts again, am I going to need to clean them up again?  Further, when adding a new contact, will it auto-save onto my SIM card?  My old SE 790a has the ability to automatically copy new contacts to my SIM card, but I can’t find this function on the iPhone.

- Alex

A:

Unfortunately, the iPhone provides only for the ability to import from your SIM card—it does not actually write anything back to the SIM card. This means that any changes you make to the contacts on your iPhone itself will not be saved to your SIM card, nor will any new contacts you add.

There are some unofficial apps available that do provide SIM card contact management capabilities, but these will only work if you have jailbroken your iPhone—they are not available through the iPhone App Store. Further, be aware that SIM card contact storage is quite limited in most cases in terms of the types of data that can be stored. While names and phone numbers can certainly be saved to the SIM card, you would likely not have information like e-mail addresses and street addresses stored on the SIM card, and in fact most SIM cards only allow a single phone number per contact.

Your best bet, once you have your contacts sorted out, is to sync them with a desktop application such as Windows Address Book or Microsoft Outlook (if you’re on Windows) or the Mac OS X Address Book if you’re a Mac user. This will ensure that you have a backup of this information somewhere other than your SIM card.

Q:

As a follow-up to the previous question, I have loaded up my contacts into my iPhone by importing them from my SIM card. I now want to sync these with my Google contacts via iTunes, but I’m getting a message telling me that my contacts on my iPhone will be deleted if I do this. I have read some forums online stating that I would need to sync it with Microsoft Outlook first and then upload my contacts into Google contacts from there, but I am not permitted to use Outlook on the PC that I am using. Any advice on how to proceed would be appreciated.

- Alex

A:

Normally, syncing your contacts via iTunes should offer to merge the contacts on your iPhone with the contacts already in your desktop address book application or Google Contacts, although this can depend on a number of factors, so the statements that you should sync with a desktop address book application first is likely a safer option.

Note that iTunes and the iPhone will sync with Windows Address Book as well, so you don’t necessarily require the full Microsoft Outlook client for desktop synchronization of your contacts (Calendar sync, on the other hand, is only available with Outlook). Windows Address Book is integrated into Outlook Express, but can also be launched as a separate application which should normally be found under your Windows XP Accessories menu.

Syncing with the Windows Address Book should definitely give you the opportunity to merge your contacts in the Windows Address Book with the contacts on your iPhone. If the Windows Address Book is empty to begin with, you will likely receive no prompt, but the contacts will flow from the iPhone into the Windows Address Book.

For an added bit of security, note also that iTunes does make backups of the content on your iPhone, including the contacts, at the beginning of each sync. This backup can be used to restore your iPhone in the event that the contact sync does not flow in the direction you would expect it to. In this case, simply right-click on the iPhone in your iTunes source list, and choose the “Restore” option and iTunes will restore the most recent backup back onto your iPhone. Note that this will erase and restore everything that has changed since the last backup was made, so make sure you have a recent backup before starting this procedure.

You can check your iPhone backups by going into your iTunes preferences and choosing the Syncing tab:

Q:

Is there a way to stop incoming text messages from appearing right on the iPhone’s screen as soon as they come in? I get personal messages that I would rather stay unseen until I’m ready to review them.

- George

A:

The iPhone doesn’t provide a specific option to control the normal display of pop-up messages, but you can prevent the SMS preview from appearing when your iPhone is locked with your passcode options turned on.

To do this, go into the your iPhone Settings application, and choose General, Passcode Lock. If you haven’t already specified a passcode, you will be prompted to enter a new one, and then to re-enter it for confirmation.

On this screen, you can simply set “Show SMS Preview” to OFF.

The “Require Passcode” field will determine how long the iPhone must remain idle before it will require you to enter a passcode. You can set this to Immediately if you want the iPhone to lock as soon as you press the Sleep button, or set a longer interval, up to a maximum of 4 hours.

Once the Show SMS Preview option is turned OFF, the iPhone will suppress SMS previews whenever it’s on the main standby screen regardless of whether it’s actually reached the passcode lock interval, so there’s no need to set this interval lower than you might otherwise find necessary. You will still receive pop-up notifications of new text messages, but these will simply indicate the name of the sender followed by the words “Text Message” rather than showing a preview of the message content.

Note that turning OFF the passcode lock feature entirely will also disable the suppression of SMS preview messages. If you want to suppress SMS previews on the main standby screen, you must also use a passcode on your iPhone, although you can set it to only require the passcode after it has been unattended for four hours (the maximum setting).

Q:

I’m looking for a way to play music from my iPod touch on a computer that I’m not syncing with. My goal is to hook up my iPod to my work computer using a standard USB cable, use the iPod itself OR iTunes or other software to select music/playlists, and have it play through my laptop’s speakers. I know that there is no disk or manual mode on the iPod touch or iPhone, but does this mean that what I’ve described is impossible? I’d rather not have to buy a speaker/dock solution for this new job just yet!

- Beth

A:

There are a couple of different ways you can do this, with the most straightforward being to simply set the iPod touch to manual mode and handling it through iTunes in the same way as you would for a traditional iPod.

Although the iPod touch does not have a “Disk Mode” it does in fact support manual management of the content in the same way as any other iPod. The iPhone originally lacked any kind of manual mode, but this was partially added in iTunes 7.6 to allow you to manually manage your iPhone’s content from a single computer.

The iPod touch, on the other hand, supports the same manual management capabilities as any of the earlier iPod models, so in this case you can simply set the iPod touch to manual mode and then access it through iTunes as you normally would.

If you do not want to install iTunes on the secondary computer, you can also look at another tool called TouchCopy ($25, http://www.wideanglesoftware.com, limited trial available). This is a third-party tool that allows you to access the content on your iPod touch to play it back on your computer and even copy it from your iPod touch back to your computer.

Q:

I am trying to add four different sets of photos to my iPod. However, in going through the steps in the manual, I only get the LAST SET synced to my iPod. How can I get all four sets onto my iPod? What am I doing wrong?

- James

A:

The likely cause of this problem is that you are trying to load your photo sets onto your iPod individually as separate sync operations, and not including the previous photo sets.

iTunes does not merely transfer your photos onto your iPod, it actually synchronizes your photos with an existing photo application or folder of photos on your computer. Each time you sync your iPod, iTunes checks these folders and matches the iPod content to the content in your photo library on your computer. This means that if you have removed your photos from your computer, or pointed iTunes to a completely different photo folder, any photos you’ve loaded onto your iPod previously are removed unless they’re still in the folders selected by iTunes.

In basic terms, the solution to this is that you must treat your photo folders on your computer as a source library in much the same way that your iTunes library works. To synchronize multiple “sets” of photos onto the iPod, simply include them in a single photos folder, organized into sub-folders, and then specify that single parent folder for transfer to your iPod. iTunes will transfer all of the pictures contained in that main folder and any sub-folders, organizing the first level of sub-folders into separate “albums” on the iPod itself.

More information on how this all works can be found in our Complete Guide to Displaying Photos on the iPod + iPhone.

Q:

I bought songs on my iPod, and they were downloading fine, but then they stopped downloading and haven’t been able to get them to restart. Now I can’t find my purchased songs and I’m still getting charged. Where can I find my purchases?

- Claire

A:

When you purchase songs from the iTunes Store, whether directly on your computer or on your iPhone or iPod touch, these are queued up on the iTunes Store until you have actually finished downloading them, and iTunes will normally re-download these items again the next time you purchase something or check for downloads on your computer.

The iPhone and iPod touch are a bit of a special case here, however, in that they do not offer the ability to retry or restart interrupted downloads. If a set of downloads fails to complete on your iPhone or iPod touch, you instead have to go back to your main computer and download these tracks from there.

In this case, retrieving these tracks is generally as simple as going into your iTunes application and choosing Store, Check for Purchases from the iTunes menu. iTunes will prompt you to log in to your iTunes Store account, check for any purchased content that has not finished downloading and download it directly to your computer.

This same feature also applies when purchasing albums through the iTunes WiFi Store which contain bonus videos and digital booklets. These will not be downloaded to your iPhone or iPod touch directly, but will be available in the iTunes Store for download to your computer the next time you check for purchases.

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Ask iLounge Archives:

11-20-09: Sharing iTunes libraries between two user accounts, Enlarging text on iPhone 3GS, Transferring an iPod to a new user, iPhone shuffles when walking, New 8GB iPod touch models, Transferring purchases from a remote iTunes library

11-13-09: Syncing different contact info with two iPhones on the same computer, iPod shows no content, Syncing music and videos in playlists, Exclamation marks next to tracks in iTunes, Playing podcasts on 3G iPod shuffle.

11-6-09: Storing iPod software updates, Playing an iPod continuously, Transferring play counts to a new iTunes library, iPhone backups, Klipsch S4i earphones

10-30-09: Authorization problems with iPod touch, Changing Grid View background in iTunes, iTunes library and Music Folder are different sizes, Older iPods and firmware updates, Reconciling two different iTunes libraries, Syncing multiple devices to one iTunes library

10-23-09: Using a laptop with an iTunes library on an external hard drive, Transferring YouTube videos to iPod, iPod touch accessibility settings, Disabling Shake to Shuffle on iPod nano, Purchased songs fail to download from iTunes Store, Charging and powering off iPhone

See the rest of the Archives...

Next: iPhone Gems: Every Flickr Application, Reviewed

Previous: Ask the Editor 8-8-2008

Comments

1

please help i upgraded my software to the latest ver an syncd ipod 80 gig now cant switch it off and have to keep forcing it into disk mode to recover

Posted by John M Kelly on August 18, 2008 at 5:21 PM (PDT)

2

my ipod touch has all the updates and it still doesn’t have multiple calandars. I reloaded the 2.0 update and it didn’t help. Is there something else I need to do?

Posted by jeff yeck on September 1, 2008 at 8:35 AM (PDT)

3

Last Friday my iPod Touch stopped receiving email. No problem sending. It has worked fine since the beginning of the year. No settings were changed. My service provider says they’ve changed nothing and have no problems with iPod/email usage. Apple say the machine seems to be working fine. Any info on this kind of thing?
TIA
dick

Posted by dick carter on April 2, 2009 at 5:10 PM (PDT)

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