Can touch this!

I thought the iPhone was an impressive piece of technology when it was announced. However, there are two factors that turned me off. I don't really care for phones and it was expensive. I figured that if they made a non-phone iPod version, then I'd get one. As it turned out, Apple announced one, the iPod touch, on September 5th.

Apple's online store listed the shipping date for September 28th and I ordered one after a little hesitation on September 14th. I had initially wanted to read some reviews, but that didn't happen and I ordered one anyway. A few days after the order was placed, initial reports of poor image quality started popping up. I waited and hoped that my iPod touch would not have any problems.

Friday, September 28th the touch arrived. It came in a teeny box. I went with the 8 gig version to save the $100. Mainly I was looking for a cool toy to play with as opposed to replacing my 40 gig 4th generation iPod.

It's pretty cool. The interface is so much better looking compared to the old iPod's monochrome display. It's like going from command line to a nice GUI. The UI, images, and video all look good. Sound quality seems fine to me, but I am not that discriminating.

I was excited by the Wi-Fi and safari combination. My previous mobile browsing experience is the limited Openwave browser on my LG VX8300. That's not very impressive and mainly consisted of limited browsing as capable from google searches. Safari is much nicer as it does the rendering like... Safari. That isn't always the best, but it's better than the VX8300. Not that I've done too much on it, but you can read Slashdot headlines. Safari lets you zoom in and out with your fingers. My general strategy is to resize and center on the content. For the most part that works well. but the one time I check Gmail with Safari was kind of a pain. The size of the resized newer links were a little small to click.

For some reason, the Wi-Fi connection wasn't working at Caribou Coffee the other day. Not the Wi-Fi so much as the Caribou Coffee. A workaround, which I have not tried, is to call the Caribou Coffee support line to manually connect your iPod touch or iPhone. I didn't bother with that.

The integrated Youtube application is nice. It's straight forward with some popular videos easily accessible and searching functionality present. It does the job.

The combination of Safari, Youtube and mobility have combined for a small problem that has caught me at least twice. In-bed browsing. I get in bed to sleep, but instead pull out the touch. I then proceed to read some articles and/or watch Youtube videos instead of going to sleep. It was definitely a first for me to browse in bed.

I haven't used the iTunes Wi-Fi Store except to browse and sample some tracks. That works as expected and is nothing fancy.

Typing isn't something I have done much of. Occasionally you mis-hit a letter and have to go back. The key pops up when "struck" showing what registered. That's handy for knowing what's been typed.

Generally I haven't really used it that much, but I wasn't expecting to. I got it since I thought it would be a cool toy to play with. And it is. The limited storage space doesn't fit all my music as the older iPod does. I'm planning to just keep some of my favorite music on the touch and keep the old iPod for the bulk of my music. That way I can also keep some video on the touch. Right now that is just the Ninja Warrior (Best show ever) podcast, but in the future maybe some Simpsons and movies. All in all, it is a nice little iPod.