by: George Starcher, Associate Editor
My first wedding anniversary was last weekend. My wonderful wife whom tolerates my geekness got me the 16GB touch. I am now running the latest v1.1.2 firmware. Here are some thoughts on the device.
I am totally hooked. No more breaking out the laptop just to check news headlines or update my facebook status. The touch does a great job of dealing with web pages with Safari. As a result I actually found myself cleaning up my bookmarks from firefox and setting them up in Safari. In the process I even found our local traffic webcameras display properly on it.
Thank goodness for the v1.1.2 firmware update. Now I can better control my iCal and contacts. Sure you cannot access your todo lists directly but you easily make short appointments in the calender now to sync back to your mac.
The battery life has been impressive. I have not timed things but I watched two episodes of Kim Possible back to back plus some web browsing at bed time and it barely went down. This is the advantage of flash memory over a hard drive. It consumes way less power.
One thing that was a little daunting was typing in my super long complex WPA wireless key. Thank goodness they do not make you type it twice for confirmation. I think Apple should make a way to setup connections and sync them in via iTunes. That way all the typing etc can be done on a full sized mac. Another thing about wireless. When you press the top button to shut off the display it disconnects from the wireless network. As it should. However this was a little annoying when I was at Books-a-Million. The BAM wireless lets you sign in with your discount club card for free wifi. It does a horrible job of remembering your device for the day. So each time I shut off my screen I had to log back into the BAM wireless system. This is not Apple’s fault. Just annoying.
I have not found a way to view a podcast show notes. These display fine on my 5th gen iPod. But there does not seem to be a way to get to that information on the touch.
No plans here to take the time to jailbreak my touch. I do however look forward to the release of official third party apps. I would love to get iChat and mail on the touch. An rss reader would be great too. I think it syncing with the rss feeds setup in Leopard mail.app would be great. I have seen Safari crash while I was dragging bookmark order around and audio playback crash and restart while I was web browsing at the same time. It just goes back to the main screen so not a major issue but annoying. Hopefully another round of firmware updates will make it a ‘touch’ more stable.
