I just got back to Seattle after a long weekend in the Boston area. I flew Alaska each way, which was tolerable but not great. (A 100% full 737-800 is a bit marginal for a transcontinental route. The lines for the toilets were ridiculous, not helped by the frequent periods of moderate to severe “chop”.) The flights were also more stressful than usual, because I didn’t have my noise cancelling headphones with me… which brings me to the second topic.
I used my new iPhone as a replacement for my iPod on this trip. In general, it worked really well: the iPhone is a terrific Internet tablet. Unfortunately I was bitten by the two most annoying features of the iPhone: the non-standard headphone jack, and the standard headset supplied by Apple. The recessed socket on the iPhone meant that I could not use my noise-cancelling headphones; I guess I’ll have to buy an adapter or take an X-acto knife to my headphone cable. And the standard headset provided by Apple is simply awful: it slips around in the ear, has tinny high-end notes, and no bass. Ideally the iPhone would work with a Bluetooth solution like the Plantronics Pulsar or the Motorola HT820, but it looks as if this will depend on an upgrade to the iPhone Bluetooth stack. It would also have been nice if Apple had worked with Shure or Sennheiser to come up with a high-end earbud+microphone for the iPhone; so far, the only product on the market is the V-Moda Vibe Duo, and even that is missing important functionality.
UPDATE: After doing some more reading, I think I’m going to have to avoid active noise-cancelling headphones and go with noise-blocking ear buds. The consensus seems to be that the GSM wireless signals from the iPhone will induce noise in most active noise-cancelling headphones. I’ve certainly noticed this before: I’ve been flying on United, listening to channel 9 on my noise-cancelling headphones, and when we land and the people around me turn on their cellphones I can hear staccato bursts of noise from the GSM handsets. Perhaps the Vibe Duo is going to be the best I can do. I’ll wait until they upgrade the microphone to include the “clicker”, though.