As alluded to in my previous post, I recently bought an iPod Touch. It’s a 16Gb model, that I bought 2 weeks before the 32Gb models were announced (damn!). I didn’t buy it as a replacement media player, as my Archos 504 is still in service (though its utility is shrinking every day). No, given that I travel a fair amount, I decided to get a portable device that would let me browse the web. It came down to either the touch or the Asus EEE PC.
While I have no doubt that the EEE is an excellent and hackable little toy, the size, interface and battery life of the touch are much better proposition for such a limited set of requirements.
The Touch version of Safari is excellent. Being able to double tap to zoom into a particular containing block and use the two-finger crunch and expand for more fine-grained is ridiculously intuitive, and feels absolutely right. Being able to flick photos up and down, with a sea of thumbnails when viewing en masse, is perfect. Being able to browse through albums in cover flow with your hands is just how it should be (the mouse version on PC/MAC is pretty flimsy feeling). That’s the genius of the Touch design: the tactile interface makes much more sense than any other computing device. We will be seeing this much more in the future, directly interacting with the virtual objects we see.
I would also recommend to anyone who buys a touch that they Jailbreak it (i.e. do a series of very easy steps so that you can install your own software on the device). I’ve added an eBook reader, a mobile scrobbler for my last fm account, a few games, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s easy and pretty safe, and really enhances the device.
Bad points on the touch? It’ll smudge itself up a treat if you so much as look at it, so you will require a case (I went for a thin rubber backing and the original plastic screen membrane). The USB charger is a bit slow, so a powerline charger is probably a good idea.
More annoying than that though is that it stores files in a bizarre structure, rather than just acting like a disk with a software layer on top (like every other player on the market I know about). This is presumably to control uploading onto other computers, and possibly to make indexing easier, but it’s a royal pain in the arse I could do without.
All in all, well worth a purchase, particularly for the web browsing on the move.