iTouch Myself

The iPod Touch has finally arrived at the local Apple Store, and I got to play with one a couple days ago.

Oh man, I am so tempted to impulse buy.

The interface is amazingly cool–it’s like something from a cyberpunk movie set twenty years in the future. It weighs a tiny fraction of my PSP, my current portable-video choice, and has a footprint that makes the PSP look elephantine. The screen is smaller, but it seems bigger, because the picture quality blows the PSP out of the water–especially because video played from the Memory Stick in the PSP is purposefully crippled to lower resolution, to encourage people to buy videos on the hilariously mis-named Universal Media Disk. I never minded a maximum of 15fps until I watched OK Go’s amazing "Here It Goes Again" and Muse’s fun "Knights of Cydonia" on the Touch.

Using the Safari browser was quite easy. The first demo model I tried wouldn’t let me click links by tapping them, but I switched to another one and it was fine. (An employee rebooted the malfunctioning one and it was fine after that.) Zooming in on web pages is fun, and switching to keyboard mode to type in text is ridiculously easy compared to the PSP and any cell phone. Sure, I wish I could install Firefox, but what the hell, eh? People complain that it doesn’t have built-in email, but that’s what Gmail is for. I’m so mobile, I pretty much have to use web-based mail anyway.

With all the other features, I’m sure to get one eventually. Have to wait a few months, though–there’s got to be something wrong with it. I stopped being an early adopter long, long ago. In six months, any serious bugs should be fixed, and it’ll probably have twice as much storage for the same price. 32 gigs is more than my notebook’s hard drive.

superdave