OK, so I’ve had my new iPod Touch (iTouch) for a couple of weeks now. Long enough for a friend to see me using it extensively and promptly go buy one for himself. I am still using it all the time. I even sometimes use it to check something while I am sitting at my computer. I can’t be bothered to switch out of WoW to check the weather, check it on the iTouch!
OK, granted, that’s just weird. But I use it everywhere I go, and I am already planning my day out around where I can go for free wi-fi.
The things I don’t use it for, which I thought I would, are varied. Twitter, nearly never. Reading ebooks, on rare occasions. Listening to music (it is an iPod), almost never. Controlling my Mac, playing iTunes… sometimes, but I don’t have the computer hooked up to the stereo, so not that much. Games, Pandora, Virgin Radio, NPR… not so much.
On the other hand, there are several things I do use it for that are unexpected, or where before I got it. First, alarms. I use them all the time. WHo would have thought. I also use the timer at least daily. The Notes app I use all the time to jot something down, the name of a book, something I need from the store, our Xmas list, etc. I also use Tomatoes, Now Playing, AND Flixster. They all have differing strengths, and flixster and now playing give pricing for different movie chains. Oh, and watching videos and YOuTube. Shockingly, I am finding my self watching quite a lot of video stuff. I converted a bunch of cartoons and watch them happily, have re-watched Season 1 of The Guild, and even a few movies (Elf, Ghostbusters). It’s a surprisingly nice little video player.
Of course, my main use is email access and web-browsing, and the real need-feature is the ssh into my servers, but that is only needed when 1) I am away from my computers and 2) something is wrong. It happens, but rarely enough that this is not a critical, but not primary, use.
There are failings about the iTouch that I really dislike. It is impossible to change the date format to something sensinble like ddmmyy or yyyymmdd or dd-mmm-yy without changing your country. And changing the country has a whole cascade of changes that happen without your consent and out of your control. Google searches, YouTube searches, pretty much any searches, phone number format, and even the language of the date display, which ignores the language setting and uses the country’s language.
Also, the inability of other email accounts to be ‘push’ based, and the inability of non-Apple apps to run in the background. I can listen to itunes while I read my email, but not to the nuTsi top-100 app. Eh, annoying.
Still, it’s a wildly useful little bit of kit, and it’s always in my pocket. I may upgrade to an iPhone next year, depending on how the 3G rollout in my area goes and what sorts of problems there are. Come June, I will be looking very carefully. Sooner if T-Mobile does anything to really annoy me.
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