blog-j: Symbolizing, Coding, Objectifying, Processing

has been released. Check it out.

It’s still in beta, and, regardless, it is, IMNSHO, the best Actionscript IDE on the market, bar none.

How’s that for lots of commas?

Get it @ flashdevelop.org

Way back in March, my car was broken into and my laptop (along with a variety of accessories) was stolen. My insurance replaced the laptop (with some fairly sweet upgrades along the way), but I’d been holding out on replacing some of the other accessories, mainly in order to get the best possible product for the replacement (yes, I know - a complete waste of time with computer parts).

In any case, I finally replaced my headphones yesterday - picked up the Plantronics Pulsar 590E (E for “Everything including the headset”, if by everything you mean the headset, heh). They absolutely rock - I’ve had them plugged in (and by plugged in I mean hooked via Bluetooth) to my laptop all day: the audio is excellent, latency is low (watching movies with them is definitely doable), connecting was simple (aside from that turning the headset off and hitting play in Winamp caused some minor issues attempting to access a no-longer-existent device) - all in all, you could say I’m in love.

Do yourself a favour and pick up a pair. (And thanks to Martin for turning me on to them in the first place.)

What is pissing me off, however, is the fact that my Sony Ericsson w810i does not support A2DP, and therefore will not play audio via Bluetooth. Making/receiving calls over Bluetooth? No problem. Play audio? Nope. Out of luck.

I suppose this is my fault. I didn’t check the spec when I picked up the phone - I would have noted fairly quickly that A2DP is not supported. However, I’m not the only SE user to be frustrated by this, and SE is apparently not upgrading the firmware to support A2DP.

I’m not blaming myself entirely, though. Browsing through the SE site, I can see where I was mislead. The product page for the w810i has a Bluetooth section, and on it it states:

Listening is a pleasure
Pump up the volume with confidence when listening to your favorite song – your Bluetooth&trademark; device will automatically mute the music for incoming calls. There’s no need to lunge for the volume control.

You can check that out yourself at sonyericsson.com.

I guess, though, that they’re on the money. The audio is in fact automatically muted for incoming calls. Namely because it was never playing in the first place.

Luckily, the 590 supports multiple connections, so I can have the laptop pushing audio and still take calls via the headset, and it does mute the audio for me…

Sony Ericsson, if you’re reading - please upgrade the firmware. And, to be fair, other than this issue, I do love the phone.