Topic: iPod Touch

[charlie]

I am always failing my wife when it comes to her birthday. She wants attention and gifts. I am lazy and just want to tell her I love her and maybe go on a little mini-vacation.

But this year I am getting her an iPod Touch. This will make her happy. I'm excited about that. This will also mean that I will not get in the doghouse (assuming it arrives in time and I let her open it as early in the morning as possible). I'm excited (and a bit nervous) about that.

The reason this thread is in Hardware is for anybody to give me tips or advice on using the iPod Touch based on experience, research, or tarot cards. Or if you want to laugh at me for spending an absurd amount of money on iPod Touch when Woot had a Zune for a third of the price feel free to do that as well.

This is how I feel right now:

[KnuckleBuckett]

I think it is a great idea Bud!  GJ!

I just scored big with a digital picture frame.

[Perspective]

Show her the photo browser with multi-touch controls for zooming.. it's fun.

Digital picture frame is a great idea too, I'd like to get one for my folks but they're a little pricey.

[KnuckleBuckett]

Not too surprisingly, I got the frame from WOOT.

[charlie]

So I got the iPod a couple days ago and gave it to her for her birthday. She liked it. Here's my "review".

The Look: Damn! Very nice. Sleek, elegant, cool, whatever you want to call it. Even the packaging was done well. 10/10

Software: Damn! That sucked. First, the iPod only supports Mac OS 10.4. My wife's mac is a few years old and has 10.3. I never really considered upgrading, I think it's a bit expensive. So after downloading the latest iTunes and spending a few minutes on her machine trying to sync her music and photos, I realized it wasn't going to work at all. Totally stupid. Luckily, it supports XP so I moved over to my PC and installed iTunes there. The problem of course is that all her music is on her mac (although all our photos are on my PC, so that's ok).

Once it was up and running the interface was fine. I wish they gave you more control though. You can only upload a directory of photos, there's no file-level control. I like to control all that stuff, so I'm sad to see that. Plus, we have our own directory structure for our folders and I don't necessarily want all those pictures on her iPod. The pictures were "optimized for the iPod" which was nice since they're huge on our PC and they don't take up as much space on the iPod. Transferring music was fine but that's because I just copied it from the directories on her mac where it was already stored in iTunes. 6/10

Photos: Uploading photos was relatively easy. When my camera takes portrait style pictures (rather than landscape), they are saved on their side. When viewing them on the iPod, they stay on their side and cannot be rotated. When you rotate the iPod, the picture rotates, too, so you can't look at the picture without turning your head. This happens on the computer as well, but it would be nice to be able to have a solution for it in the iPod itself. Flipping through pictures worked pretty well, and of course the finger scaling and moving is nifty. The large and clear screen gives it a ratings bump as well. 8/10

Music: Flipping through album art is cool. I guess the sound is good, I didn't listen. Wife says the earphones are better than her earphones from the old iPod. 8/10

Internet: It comes with Safari and you can browse the internet (after I connected it to our wireless network). She was playing with it at a gas station and there was a Travelodge next door with free WiFi, so while I pumped gas she surfed the net. That was pretty neat, but that's the wireless network's fault for being neat.

Browsing is ok. Checking email worked well, but google maps did not because the click interface of google maps was overridden by the touch interface of the iPod (click and drag in google maps drags the map but on iPod it drags the whole webpage). There is no flash player, and I couldn't figure out how to download and install it. I'm not sure if that's possible. I tried downloading and installing Opera Mini, but that doesn't work either. Until I do some research on how to install stuff, web browsing will be pretty limited. 4/10

Contacts/Calendar: Using the iPod as an address book was an idea my wife was very happy with. Seems easy enough to use. We couldn't figure out how to add to the calendar, though. I'm thinking we might have to sync up with a calendar application on the PC. 6/10


Overall: There are quite a few things that I think the iPod touch would be capable of if they just provided an interface for them. Without those things it still does a good job on the music (it's primary purpose) and holding photos. So overall I'll give it a "good" grade and hope that future software updates allow more flexibility and advanced usage. Either that or I just need to learn how to do things correctly. 7/10

[KnuckleBuckett]

Interesting.  Thanks for the review.

[Perspective]

Good review.

Calendar should sync with any iCal calandar.

[ober]

Nice review... thanks for writing that up!

[charlie]

Calendar should sync with any iCal calandar.

We don't do any calendar stuff on our computers, so we won't be using this feature on the iPod at all. The wife was hoping to be able to add stuff manually. Maybe I missed the setting, but I'm surprised they don't allow that.

[Steve]

very good review

[charlie]

Update:

Upgraded the wife to the latest Mac OS, so now she does everything from that. It's annoying that we had to upgrade, but it was about time anyway I guess.

Found the setting on the calendar in the iPod to add items. The wife has input a crapload of stuff. She's been using her machine a lot more lately and now syncs with the calendar on the mac, so that all works nicely. Upgrade that to 8/10.

She recently paid $20 for the software upgrade which provides a notes widget, which is nice, and also a google maps and email widget. Those are great.

I complained in the original review about google maps not working. With the new widget it's great. You can input addresses with a quick click from your address book. Yesterday we looked up directions to a printer in Berkeley, so we typed in that address and selected our home location. But then we realized we wouldn't be leaving from home but instead from our cousin's house, so we just touched the button and selected our cousin from the address book. Trey awesome. The map is easy to follow from step to step and the directions stay up even after you leave the wireless network. So an hour into our drive we look at the iPod to see what the next step in the directions are, view the map, etc.

I also mentioned email. With the new email widget, my wife has her three most used emails that get downloaded to the iPod. When we're in the range of a known network, it checks email periodically (based on a setting). So we might be driving and she whips out the iPod and sees that she's gotten a couple emails since she last checked, even though we're not on network at the time. Reading the emails is really easy, and attached photos look great and are easier to view than on a regular machine because they are scaled perfectly.

I also found out about why flash doesn't work. Apparently there is some fight between Apple and Adobe about getting the flash to work. That is the last big step in my opinion, the flash needs to work to surf the internet nicely. Luckily many sites have small versions for iPhones and iPod touches, but those don't have the same quality.

We just haven't been using the photos part as much and uploading photos is easy if they're on your machine, but we haven't been doing a good job of that, so that gets a score downgrade.

Updated scores:

The Look: 10/10
Software: 8/10
Photos: 7/10
Music: 8/10
Internet: 5/10
Email: 9/10
Maps: 9/10
Contacts/Calendar/Notes: 8/10

Overall: 9/10

They need to fix the flash and it would be nice if we had more space on it, but overall I am very pleased, as is my wife.