Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
I've been up and down in touch (and, even more so, iPhone) craving ever since it was released.
On and on, up and down, it went. What tipped me over right here and now was, surprisingly, watching video content. I have a bunch of long-ish train journeys planned the coming month, and the thought of spending them watching TV series or the odd film without carrying along a laptop just for watching felt pretty tempting. That combined with the fact that the 32 GB touch comfortably eats all my music with plenty of room to spare suddenly landed me at the local Apple reseller, branded little bag in one hand and slightly emptier credit card in the other.
The iPod packaging have lost some of its natural room-furnishing value as its shrunk. Nevertheless, the touch box was on close inspection pretty well made and a very solid and pleasant unpacking experience.
Note: the "Don't steal music" text which was printed on the screen-protecting plastic in days of old is now gone. When did it go? And where to?
Also: yes, there is that wonderful smell of new about the iPod and the packaging!
To get video onto your iPod of any flavour, you have to get it into the right format and drop it in iTunes for syncing. Of course, the number of iPods doing video and the number of people owning such iPods has made this a rather thoroughly solved problem. I got myself a program called iSquint, free and soley created for converting video files into iPod-liked formats. Imports the files into iTunes too, just for good measure. I threw a handful of files at it using completely default settings. What came out on the other side was obviously compressed visually, but it definitely looked good enough for one-man viewing. All the formats were converted successfully too, including those always-uncertain WMV files. I've raised the quality setting a notch for the next batch of files, and it will be interesting to see if it makes any relevant difference.
Steve Jobs is, in case you weren't aware, a liar. He called the iPhone iPod application the best iPod ever. It isn't. The touch or iPhone is probably the coolest iPod ever, but if music listening is all you're after I say you're better off with an iPod classic. I pick some specific nits later on, but the other iPods have the advantages of specific hardware and software, both of which have gone through a lot more revisions than the touch software. On the touch, things are nice and shiny, but there's always the feeling that any given task is slightly more cumbersome and slightly less intuitive to perform.
As with the iPhone, the touch can attempt to locate you in the maps application. As the iPod lacks GPS or cell tower information, it relies soley on the available wifi networks to find out where you are. I always wondered just how the list of "known" networks was compiled. It sure seemed like a lot of work to plot, and I'd heard from friends in Gothenburg that it wouldn't work in Sweden. So I was pretty darn surprised when I tried it right here and the map went from the highest zoom level right down to my block and put up a big circle centered on pretty much the exact right spot. My first thought was that they might make use of registered FON spots, but then I remembered how I disconnected and packed my FON router down a couple of days ago. A few days ago, I found out on Skyhook's (the company providing the service to Apple) website that they'd actually driven wifi locating and plotting cars around the world to find networks, and that the service auto-adds and uptates network locations as it's used. So far, "the world" as it applies to Skyhook surprisingly includes Malmö and Lund but not much else in Sweden. So that's how it works.
Here's an interesting fact: the iPod part of the touch and iTunes group things differently. Apparantly iTunes can and does group things with different capitalization together while the iPod doesn't. For example, I'm extremely tough on the number of genres I use, and I use them a lot for browsing. When I synced with the touch it turned out that I had both Rock and rock as genres, but iTunes' genre pane grouped them together and the difference was only visible when you inspected individual tracks. The same goes for the other information you can browse by, The Soundtrack of Our Lives and The Soundtrack Of Our Lives are put together in iTunes as well.
I have no idea why iTunes does this and the iPod doesn't, but I do prefer the iPod way. I want my spellings and capitalizations to be consequent, and when they're not I prefer for it to be noticeable.
With a few more months under my belt and the long-fabled 2.0 software update installed I figured this could do with an update.
If you hit the wrong letter when typing, you can slide your finger over to the correct one before you release, and all will be well. However, if you need to get an alternative character on the key, you have to hit it right away, if you slide your finger over to it the alternative characters won't appear. This and the fact that we Swedes frequently use a bunch of such characters makes typing in English significantly faster than languages like ours. All this remains the same as pre-2.0. However, as a part of the increased localization work of 2.0 Apple adjusted the location of the alternative characters for each language. That means our oft-used umlauts are at least the most reachable of the alternative characters, so typing them is at least a bit faster now.
Also as part of the internationalization, the Swedish dictionary has been expanded a lot and now frequently suggests words I might want. Just tap space, and it is filled in for me. The annoyance comes when, and this is still pretty frequently, you have typed the word you want but there is a suggestion for a different one. If you thoughtlessly type space and go on typing you've now got the suggested word instead of the one you wanted. The thing is, to dismiss the suggestion right away you need to leave the keyboard part of the screen and tap the little close circle on the suggestion. It feels about as interruptive to typing as having to reach for the mouse while on a keyboard does. I have yet to figure out a convenient way out of this, meaning I now go back and re-type words pretty often. Right now it feels like the solution for me would be that some keypress dismissed suggestions. Apart from this, though, the completion works pretty well now, and I think I could get really used to it.
Wouldn't it work to be able to assign double-tap shortcuts to your favourite alternative characters, just like the trick of double-tapping space to get a dot and a space?
If this screen is so multi-touch, why can't I hold one finger to make alternative characters pop up and then use another to tap the characer I want?
The quickest way to pause playback is to pull the headphones out of the headphone jack. With a touch screen, it's of course pretty much out of the question to try and do anything without looking at said screen. A corded remote like the one you could get for older pods certainly wouldn't go amiss.
Creation of on-the-go playlists is quite a bit more roundabout than it used to be. You have to find the on-the-go menu option, and choosing to add songs takes you into a special browsing mode where everything you tap is added to the list. It's powerful, sure, but it takes enough work to go from random browsing to creating a playlist that I've only got around to it once or twice. It's a solution I could have come up with, and I expect a lot more than my ideas from Apple's interface designers.
Items (songs, videos and so on) with long titles get cut off by available space, and I have yet to find a place where titles scroll or expand to show in their entirety. It sure doesn't happen in the list views where it would be nice.
Even after about a month of regular use, it still feels a little too easy to accidentally select and activate an item when scrolling, especially when touching to slow down a quick scroll.
What if I'm looking at, say, all the albums of an artist and would like to listen to them all in order? Wouldn't a "play all"-button go along well with the shuffle-button already in place at the top of lists?
The photos application just can't handle images if they get too big. By that I mean it either freaks out visually when I display one, or it locks up completely and restarts the whole touch after a little while. This I can't consider a feature.
Oh, and I still can't sync notes with my computer. And there is still no handling or support whatsoever for to-do-lists. Waaah!
(At least there are now some decent third-party to-do-list apps appearing. I'm currently using Zenbe lists myself. The major downside is of course that they can't sync with iCal.)