Touch Me, Touch Me

The saga of my iPod touch is finally over. I've had a rough time acquiring my precious new device, and I've been angry at just about every major entity between here and California in trying to resolve my problems.

This is the abbreviated version of my story: January 3rd, I order my iPod touch from MacMall. January 5th it ships, although the tracking number is wrong, so I can't track it. Thursday, January 9th I was supposed to receive my package, but nothing was in the mail, so I have it time. Friday came, no package. Saturday, nothing. After contacting MacMall multiple times and blaming them for my loss, I narrowed it down to the postal system misplacing my package, which saw one of my neighbors with my package for eight days. After plenty of bitching, my package was located and delivered late on a Saturday night - two full weeks after I ordered it. Whew.

But all is well now, and I'm now fully basked in the glow of Apple Magic. The iPod touch is quite the amazing device, managing to live up to all of its hype while faltering in very few places. It's hard to call the iPod touch an MP3 player. Unlike the digital audio players that made Apple into an empire, playing music is merely a fraction of what the touch is capable of doing. In my honest opinion, it is an understatement to label this device as an "iPod" - clearly it is a unique device all it's own, although the iPod name heritage is too powerful for Apple's marketing department to ignore, hence the final name.

My initial thoughts about the touch were positive: sleek, thin, and powerful. I was generally skeptical about how smooth and useful the touch interface was... after all, my fat, greasy fingers sometimes feel like they dwarf the screen. I was amazed, then, at how easy it was to do anything on the touch. Zooming, panning, tapping, dragging... any logical motion that could be used to accomplish a task is done well on the touch, and Apple has simply redefined the mobile interface forever (not to mentioned patented the hell out of it).

I will quickly run down my initial thoughts about the core functionality of the touch.

Music: Although not as revolutionary as the Track Wheel was on the original iPod, nagivating a large music library is still quick and accurate on the touch, with varying degrees of finger flicks and taps used to get where you need to go. It is very hard to operate the music controls (play/pause, next track, etc.) without looking at the touch directly, so changing songs while the touch is in your pocket is out. I haven't been able to do it yet.

Pictures / Video: The screen of the touch excels at showing off pictures and video, so no complaints here. I will say that the limitation of video format is frustrating. I'm spending a lot of time converting my perfectly good DivX files to H.264 iPod format, which is a pain.

Safari Web Browser: Browsing on the touch is wonderful, not only one of the biggest marketing points for Apple, but perfectly capable on such a tiny device, thanks - once again - to simple navigation and a fully-featured browser that doesn't compromise rendering. Every website I use throughout my day works flawlessly on the touch thus far.

Apps: The touch comes loaded some many useful apps: Google Maps (genius!), YouTube (again, love it), Contacts, Mail (GMail integration is great), among several others. I like the extensibility of the touch so far, and the App Store is overwhelming at this point... there's literally an app for every possible thing I could want to do on a device this size, including iXpenseIt, a budget manager, that I handily paid $4.99 to help me keep spending in track. Games? Labyrinth is a Wii-style casual game that my mom and I both enjoy equally.

The big downside to the touch thus far is inherit to what the device is: it's not an iPhone. The iPhone and its software were designed with continuous data access in mind - the Internet anywhere - and the iPod touch uses Wi-Fi as it's door to the world. I am typically bathed in Wi-Fi access almost everywhere I go - home, work, Colleen's, downtown BG, downtown Findlay - so being near an access point isn't a problem. The battery drain is a problem, unfortunately. I haven't conducted a full Wi-Fi battery drain, but it doesn't look like it'll see more than five or six hours of constant Wi-Fi use. This creates the dilema of how to use connected applications. Many apps sold in the App Store work with a data connection to the Internet, and without this connection, the iPod touch feels limited in its cooler features. Google Maps, Safari, Facebook, etc. are some of the best uses for my touch, but all require a connection that I won't always have access to, nor may have the battery power for. It's a little depressing, but I'm bitching about a small quibble that I shouldn't be. Everything about the iPod touch is utterly awesome thus far.

Hmm... Blogger for the iPod touch? I hope so...

B3 out.