iPod Touch Review
iPod Touch
The iPod Touch (and, by extension, the iPhone) is a frustrating beast: on the one hand, Apple has gotten a lot of things right, yet their corporate strategy is spoiling the whole experience.
So, what does the iPod Touch get right?
- great screen
- fast response
- easy software installation
- great industrial design
- decent desktop integration, if you use Apple’s approved applications
- development tools that help average developers develop decent applications
What does the iPod Touch/iPhone get wrong? Plenty.
- text input Text input on the iPod is a pain; it requires constant attention to the screen, lacks any kind of tactile feedback, and is generally slow and unreliable.
- synchronization Out of the box, the iPod Touch/iPhone only synchronizes to your desktop; that’s so 1990’s. Synchronization is slow and buggy. Apple’s productivity applications manage to be even more limited than the Palm desktop of yore, but, of course, they look a whole lot nicer.
- software The default set of applications that ships with the iPod Touch/iPhone is oddly limited: no iChat, very limited functionality in applications like the photo browser, no terminal, limited Bluetooth support (e.g., no external keyboards).
- third party applications It’s astounding how many third party applications have been created for the iPod Touch and the iPhone in such short time, but Apple’s restrictions hamstring many of them: WiFi browsers can’t connect, ebook readers can’t communicate and share data, SyncML software can’t synchronize the calendar, etc. Basically, Apple tries to restrict anything that could compete with iTunes or MobileMe.
- no Java Mobile Java applications are often ugly, but there are some gems out there, as well as plenty of good games. Apple’s restrictions on Java are pure corporate greed.
Between the numerous bugs and numerous restrictions, I think it’s a bad idea to buy an iPhone right now: you’ll be locked into a long term contract with a device that may turn out to be too buggy to be useful. The iPod Touch may be a good choice, though: you can run most of the applications and you aren’t tied into a contract. I
