2008-10-19 12:28
iPod Touch First Impressions
I have been putting off getting into the whole portable music device market for some time, and have had a pretty poor attitude towards iPods over the years, but finally succumbed to the latest offering from Apple. The new iPod Touch has enough things going for it to turn a blind eye to the lack of playable music formats Apple allows and other nagging negatives like iTunes. I bought the 16 GB version with 2.1 firmware for around the same price a 30GB iAudio X5L costs, which makes me sad, but the ability to add useful applications and surf to webapps specifically designed for the touch made it more appealing.
The wifi capability of the iPod Touch is really what made my final decision to purchase one. With the ability to stream Pandora in the brewhouse, there is never a need to battle the evil disc skipping stereo we use. The battery life with streaming music playing is drastically shortened, although I have not had an issue with running out while brewing (so > 7.5 hours). Now if Pandora would keep adding variety to their music and if you could do other tasks while streaming with their app, I think they would have a real winner.
There are of course tons of applications that vary in usefulness available in the iTunes app store. So far I have been using Sportacular for sport scores, FStream for streaming internet radio, and Lux Touch (a Risk game) for wasting time.
I have recently discovered a bunch of nice webapps for the iPod. These are basically websites that have been optimized for the iPod/iPhone and Safari on the device. One such application that I use is thinkpod. My broker (who seems to get most of my money these days) has been developing a relatively usable interface for trading on the iPod. Once thinkpod has the charting abilities that their other mobile platforms have, like thinkAnywhere, I will be using the iPod to continue my portfolio’s downward spiral.
Over the last couple weeks, I have been pretty pleased with the iPod Touch. I will post my findings of good apps/webapps here as I find them, and feel free to leave me some suggestions on what you people use.
