I have a tendency to buy redundant gadgets. If a music player is what I was looking for, the latest iPod touch is my fourth portable ‘music player capable’ device, however, playing music is not what I bought the iPod touch for.
I always used to secretly envy others who possessed an iPod/iPhone solely for one reason – Apps. It was disheartening to see that most of stuff you do online has an app associated with it and guess what it is available only for iPhone or the iPod touch. In my honest opinion, iPhone is too expensive a device compared to to the touch. The price difference does is not justified given the differences are few [there is no phone in the touch, of course]
It’s been a week since I got my iPod touch from US. I still haven’t started using it frequently as the military quality ZAGG invisible shield is yet to arrive. Jailbreaking it was a piece of cake although I didn’t find a compelling enough reason to do it! I don’t understand why people pay hundreds at National Market/Sukh Sagar mall to get it done.
Initial impressions:
- The screen is gorgeous. 960×640 resolution is splendid, you have to see it to believe it.
- The sound output is loud and balanced. External speaker is decent and is fun to use while gaming
- The stock earphones suck big time. It hurts my ear and shows distortion when I pump up the volume
- The 2 cameras are decent in daylight and next to unusable during the night. Decent for 720p video recording on the go.
- The body is slightly slimmer than the previous iPod and nice to hold. It is also much lighter compared to my Samsung Omnia Pro
- I am still getting used to home button and feel a back button like in the newer windows phone series would have been great
- Connecting to Exchange on this is great. Emails look beautiful unlike on WM devices where scrolling is a pain HTML content content doesn’t get displayed properly
Apps I have found so far that are useful
- Dropbox – I have been using dropbox since it was in beta and the availability of dropbox for the touch is welcoming
- Facebook/twitter – Only I know how much I have missed a good social networking app in the earlier generations of windows phones. Echofon for twitter and the official facebook app works like a charm
- VLC media player – The lack of such an app was a deal breaker for me when I had considered buying an iPod touch in the past. It was great to have drag and drop without need to transcode videos on my omnia. With VLC I can effortlessly play most video formats without having to re-encode them.
- Lots and lots of fun games – I can’t name them all here.
- iTunes university – Lots of amazing video lectures available for download
- Google Maps – works like a charm. But is of not much use given that it needs WiFi to work.
- Stanza – Another excellent application to read ebooks. Reading ebooks on a portable device was never so much fun. Die mobipocketreader!
- Shazam – Identifies music on the go, however, only 5 tries per month before you have to upgrade.
I will keep updating this list as and when I find a cool app. Tell me which app do you like and how you are using your iPod