Be careful what you wish for ’cause you just might get it

Saturday 6 December 2008 - Filed under Life Outside Work

It’s been a week since I bought my first iPod. And it’s a 2nd-generation 32GB touch. I wanted something that could productively occupy my 23-minute on-foot commute but also wanted something more than just a music/podcast player. I bought the touch because I knew it was the most compact – and affordable – Mac portable computer out there. That’s right, it’s a computer running Mac OS X. And that’s what made me curious to death. That, and I had to see for myself Apple’s App Store, a marketplace for 10,000 third-party application software of all categories for download. With the rock-bottom equity, property, and commodity markets all around, the iPhone/iPod App Store must be the world’s fastest-growing economy right now.

It’s the economy, no, it’s the applications, Stupid
The iPod touch is essentially the iPhone minus the camera and monthly mobile phone bills. Compared with the iPhone 3G, the current generation iPod touch features less overall power consumption (since 3G sucks up so much juice), a faster processor, and up to double the storage space. Although it lacks always-on connectivity because it’s not a phone, the touch turns into a fully networked handheld computer wherever there is wireless Internet nearby. Other times, it’s a music/video player, a gaming device, a photo archive, a personal organiser, and whatever else your “applications” are designed to be or do. Therein lies the real differentiator for the iPhone and the iPod touch against other portable entertainment gadgets on the market, and that is the power of applications, especially when they are unbeatably cheap and plentiful.

Time and time again, your money ends up in Apple’s pocket
In fact, Apple has pulled it off so elegantly, making sure they take revenue from all levels of the food chain (or “value” chain). After selling iPods and iPhones, they sell music to go on the hardware. They get revenue from people who download not only music but movies, TV shows, and paid apps from the iTunes Store. They take money from third-party programmers who want to sell apps for the iPhone/iPod touch. They also take money from third-party manufacturers who sell all sorts of accessories. As a consumer, once you buy an iPod or iPhone, you continuously spend more money on it to enrich the experience just because you can and are convinced you should. It’s no surprise that the iPhone in particular is aggressively eating into Nokia’s share in the worldwide smartphone market.

A netbook? Why?
Enough of an Apple bite. So, how’s my touch-powered week been? Other than my ears enjoying the streaming of music while on the move, I have certainly downloaded and tried lots of apps, mostly free ones. “Bloomberg” and “Free RSS Reader” are two of my most frequently used free apps. And there are heaps of note-taking, social networking, and productivity apps ranging from $0 to around $5. With all that plus the built-in Mail, Calendar, YouTube, and Safari Web browser apps, I’m thinking, who needs to carry around a “netbook”? Do you really need a laptop to do all that?

The whole touch business – sliding, scrolling, dragging, clicking, zooming in/out – works accurately and sensibly. I was particularly amazed at how fast I could type on the virtual keyboard with my thumbs and the help of convenient shortcuts and auto correction. With this, surely everyone can touch-type.

The other wow factor is the motion sensors powered by a moving silicon mass hidden in the device. Being able to tilt and shake gives a really unique method of input. With “MotionX Dice,” I can roll up to six dice at once just by giving it a shake. Handy for playing games like backgammon or Monopoly. But “Labyrinth” is probably the most ingenious app that takes advantage of what the iPod touch is capable of. Hold it parallel to the ground and then start tilting gently to navigate the steel ball safely to the destination. The sounds, texture, and physics are so realistic that it’s hard to realise that what I’m holding is actually not a piece of woodwork. The hundreds of levels range from trivial:

to deceptive:

to deadly:

Keep wiping off the finger marks until you can’t be bothered
The iPod touch is small, thin, and light enough to easily slip into a pocket. It attracts dust and finger marks like a magnet, but that’s expected of a handheld device that is supposed to be touched all the time. I found the build quality generally good, but I did get a clear shell case the next day to protect it from scratches and also to get a better, less delicate grip. The battery life has not been an issue so far (36 hours of music playback and 6 hours of video playback according to the specs) and it’s just a matter of hooking it up to a USB port to charge and to sync music, calendar events, etc.

Surprise: iPod touch not a USB flash drive?
One surprise I had was that I could not readily use my iPod touch like an ordinary USB stick to store general documents other than music, photos, videos, and apps. After all, I don’t plan to use all 32GB of storage just for multimedia files and little games. But plugging the touch to a USB port of a computer gives access to it only through iTunes, which hides much of the inner workings of the device. I can, however, use one of three options to get it to behave like a massive USB flash drive:

• Connect to it wirelessly. The iPod touch by definition is a wireless device. I can transfer files wirelessly to and from it using free and paid App Store applications like “Files” and “Air Sharing”. Those apps turn the device into a WebDAV server on an as-needed basis and also offers password protection in case wireless security is a concern. From my experience, transferring files wirelessly works well for relatively small files of up to around 50MB in size.
• “Jailbreak” it. By installing a custom-made firmware developed by a bunch of hackers, the iPod touch or iPhone can be broken free of restrictions imposed by Apple. That includes the ability to install third-party applications without going through the App Store, and also opening up the device like a flash drive, which is precisely what I want. It’s obviously not supported by Apple, but a lot of people go ahead and jailbreak their iPhone or iPod touch. I haven’t tried this and don’t intend to take the risk until I know more about how this thing works. Update: Don’t do it.
• Use DiskAid. DiskAid is a third-party desktop application that installs on the PC or the Mac that wants to talk to the iPod touch through a USB cable. It gives access to only the “media” folder of the device, but I can create sub-folders within it and copy whatever files onto them. I must say the user interface is less than sexy or intuitive, but it works and works much faster and more reliably than the wireless alternative. It’s also considered “safe” because jailbreaking is not required. I have used this to transfer files such as compressed backups of large documents. Update: The new version (2.0) of DiskAid seems to cause stability issues. I have restored the iPod software 2.2 and stopped using DiskAid, and will keep an eye on the developments. Update #2: The only supported way of transferring files to and from the iPod touch is via Wi-Fi. There are dozens of free and paid apps that do that. I am perfectly happy with Air Sharing.

In the end, the iPod touch is a bit of everything short of a phone. It’s an MP3 player, a highly versatile toy, an organiser, a portable drive (via Wi-Fi), a study aid, a news reader, a movie player, an electronic book, a remote control, you name it. I hope to be able to get much value out of it and I have a few ideas. Filling up some of the 26.31GB of free space would be a good start.

2008-12-06  »  JK