I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
Follow @roddrury
Simmsy today dropped off my latest geek accessory after running around every Apple store between Silicon Valley and LAX. The iPod Touch. Thanks Steve.
It is the sh#t.
Already I have all my photo’s on it and my music. I’ve already bored people to death with photo’s of my kids.
Slightly smaller than an iPhone, it is a wireless tablet.
The game now shifts to hotspot authentication. In the Koru Lounge it took me 3 goes to try to type in wD5FLDxxx as a password (thsi is what you see when typing … ***********) before giving up and pulling out my laptop.
Without a doubt this is the coolest bit of kit I’ve had in while. It’s small enough that I think I might even be able to use it while in an AirNZ domestic seat.
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Which begs a question - why on earth do we still need passwords for WiFi access in Koru club lounges - I mean we pay around $600/annum membership - surely that should get us easy and stress free wireless access as well??
Hey Rod - you must surely be too “mature” to be a Jobs FanBoy. The touch is beautiful but for the money get someone to send you a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet - way more functionality, hackable (by design) and a similar sort of footprint.
Heh. My 16 GB iPod Touch arrived by courier from China today, complete with free engraving on the back.
Yeah, it’s awesome.
I’ve put 9 GB of music (which is all that I’m actually likely to ever listen to) on it, and the entire season of Flight of the Conchords (bittorrented and then converted). And a bunch of photos.
I’ve just got back from having a coffee with a friend over in Courtenay Central. My friend and I were arguing about exactly which model of Sukhoi was designed to match the F15. The cafe had free wifi with any purchase. Wikipedia to the rescue. (CafeNet had a better signal but costs money)
While there I also bought a song from the iTunes store. Because I could.
It’s a pity that there is no email client built in, but full strength gmail works fine. Maybe I’ll try the basic or mobile versions later, but the real one works.
The biggest omission is Google Maps. Yeah, you can use the web version, but it sucks on such a small screen and you can’t do the effortless zooming and panning that you can with the iPhone version.
Comparing side by side, the screen is good but not quite as purely awesome as the iPhone one. In particular it has a worse viewing angle and it doesn’t look quite so … painted onto the glass .. as the iPhone does.
I’m disappointed that there isn’t a jailbreak yet, as I have a few apps I’d love to put on e.g. ssh client, vnc client, AIM/MSN/Yahoo/irc chat, all of which work great on the iPhone.
Hey Bruce, so how do you get Conchords on?
Install a divx codec for quicktime e.g. from http://www.divx.com (the free one is fine), open your avi movie file in QuickTime Player, choose File/Export…/”Movie to iPhone”. Then add the resulting movie to iTunes.
There’s probably an easier way…
Time to update your “tech in use” :P
Hi Rod,
I’ve had trouble connecting to the koru lounge wifi on my iphone as well. The new long passwords dont help, but even when I am sure I’ve entered it in correctly, you get denied. This happens about 3 times, then it will accept you. I think there is some prolonged authentication’s going on, but having gone through it a couple times now, I can connect first time. (nothing beats using the cell free section lazeboy chairs and surfing on an iphone!)
http://www.videora.com/en-us/Converter/iPhone/ works well as a one click video transcoder for iphone - it converts to mp4 and dumps straight into itunes video library, so should work with the touch as well.
Jos
well the reason for the passwords are us plebs sitting right out side at the gate looking for free wifi ….. (though my United FF just reached some magic point after that last trip that probably leaves me sitting inside for a while ….)
I’d love a ‘touch but I’ll wait for the 80G or whatever model - I carry about 50G of music every day (and have paid for every track) and couldn’t live without it
The converter program Jos points to had me all interested until I noticed that the file being downloaded was an .EXE, which is totally useless to me.
Nowhere on their web site that I could see did it mention anything about supported platforms or that their program is Windows-only.
Sorry guys - I am a wannabe Mac user trapped in an all PC work environment - the iphone is how I live out my vicarious mac dreams…
In other news - Reuben over at the Dom is getting roasted for his unfavourable iphone comments / pseudo review (would have helped if he had actually used one before writing about it)
http://www.stuff.co.nz/blogs/coolkit/2007/09/27/no-iphone-no-worries/
> would have helped if he had actually used one before writing about it
It very much would have. The things are much greater than the sum of their parts and features. I have personally seen quite anti people become converts after just a few minutes of playing. And not only geeks. A very non-technical woman who hadn’t heard of it at all before I showed it to her told me the next day that she had — literally — dreamed about the iPhone.
Rod, I was at a function last night where someone mentioned they had just bought a Touch in Auckland. He said it was slow getting his email using WiFi but I think this is no different that using a BB, a notebook on WiFi, sometimes the infrastructure is slow and sometimes (probably rarely in practice) it works as we expect. I also compared the specs to the Nokia N800 which gives interesting comparisons.
As Bruce mentioned being able to use 3rd party apps on Apple devices would extend their market but I think this is a business concept that Jobs and Apple has never understood from day one; they have also leaned towards a close system. Lots of people buy iPods and iPhones because they look cool and come from Apple. If Apple redesigned it to allow 3rd party apps and provided development tools like MS do in Visual Studio for Windows Mobile, then they would sell many more. Also providing replaceable batteries would go along way. And this is not hard or expensive to do.
How about a review of the BB Curve. The i key on my 8700 is partially stuffed, if you push it twice you get an i, sometimes a i and an o. So I would be interested in how you find the Pearl roller. My secretary has one which she has not trouble with but she is a lot younger than you and me.
Does the Touch have Bluetooth?
The Touch does not have Bluetooth.
I disagree on the user-replaceable battery issue. Yes, batteries wear out, but so far every single time I have replaced my phone it has been because the (still perfectly good) battery has ceased to maintain a reliable contact with the electrodes in the phone and on a frequent basis I wonder why I’m not getting any calls and take the phone from my pocket and find it has switched itself off due to momentary loss of contact with the battery. My current phone (a Sharp) has started doing this already and it is barely a year old. My previous one (a Seimens) became totally unreliable in two years, and the one before that (an Ericsson) in not much more. I never remove the battery in my phones between fitting the SIM card when I buy it and removing the SIM card when I get a new phone. Having it not soldered in is 100% a pain in the arse.
After a few days the Touch feels like so much more than a music player. I can carry my last 12 months photo’s with me and I find myself showing pictures.
It’s amazing seeing grandparent aged people scrolling through photo’s with their finger. The interface is so natural it just works.
I also find myself queuing up lots of video podcasts for travel.
Have you checked out the iPhone/iPod touch implementations of Facebook and Digg? (iphone.facebook.com and digg.com/iphone). The Facebook interface is something else - gave me a whole new perspective on the mini safari browser. If only we could have a more standardised browser for mobile devices, it would make it worthwhile for websites other than those huge players to create a mobile friendly front end.