November 11, 2007

One week with the iPod Touch

Filed under: TMUP-Blog — George Starcher @ 9:09 am

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.

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  • Simon

    Living in the UK I made do with the Touch and like you Im hooked, unlike you I have Jail Broken my touch and have installed the iPhone Apps, Mail is fantastic and I could not function without it now I have it.

    The wireless is typical Apple and poor in my opinion, problems connecting, poor signal strengths and very unreliable, just like every Mac I have ever owned (Intel chip anyone?) ;-)

    The biggest reason for buying the Touch was movies, I love films and in this respect its fantastic, 2 full movies and a hour of web and still the thing refuses to eat!!

    January and February will be interesting in terms of 3rd party Apps and how much Apple will charge, negative?, seems Apple is all about the money recently :-( Still we keep coming back for more……..

    Great article, when will you Jailbreak? ;-)

  • Christian

    I have a Touch, too. And I don’t plan to jailbreak it. On the other hand, I would love to have the Mail app on my Touch.

    It is an amazing device. It is the reason, why I personally do not need an iPhone.

    I am still running the 1.1.1 firmware. I read about 1.1.2 being released on Friday (?), but for some reason, iTunes does not find the update…

    Thank you for the fantastic article!

  • http://ww.georgestarcher.com George Starcher

    Not sure about your wireless problems Simon. Mine has had very good performance connecting to an AP all the way across my house when my laptop would not. I even had some fun wardriving just leaving it on the wireless settings screen while I drove home from work the other day. I would glance down at stop lights to see what it had detected in the previous minute or so. It could see a lot of stuff and not all of it was near the road.

    Right now I do not plan on jailbreaking it. I have enough other stuff on my plate right now and it does a lot of what I want it to do for day to day use.

    You can find links to the 1.1.2 firmware at http://www.macrumors.com/2007/11/09/ipod-touch-firmware-1-1-2-released-add-calendar-events/

    Your choice if you update without waiting on it to come through iTunes. All I can offer is that I had no problems downloading the file, option+click the check for update button and browse to where you manually downloaded the update file.

  • Simon

    Christian, Im intrigued as to why you would not want to Jailbreak the Touch, just out of interest?

    George, I think I am surrounded by a magical field that breaks WIFI, that said I have only connected it to my home network and perhaps my problem is not indicative of AP in general but man Im on my 3rd router and lots of grey hair.

  • http://ww.georgestarcher.com George Starcher

    Have you checked that someone is not on the same channel as you? try changing the access point to channel 1 or 11 if it is currently on 6.

  • Simon

    George, I have tried some but not all and yes its a good point and will cycle through all channels but the problem seems to be a problem with the router issuing IP addresses, actually this has been more prevalent whilst running 10.5 as I get the conflict dialogue when I try to connect multiple Macs over WIFI to the same router.

    Sorry for hijacking the thread guys :-)

    Thanks for the advice :-)

  • http://ww.georgestarcher.com George Starcher

    Update the firmware of your router. That would not be a wireless issue but the way the router DHCP is interacting with the Mac OS. My dad had same issue once on Leopard. His linksys router was several updates behind. Bringing it up to date fixed it. Channels need a 5 channel spread. in the US its 1,6 and 11.

  • http://www.typicalmacuser.com Administrator

    Great post and very good comments. Congrats on your anniversary and you have to have a cool wife when she buys you mac gadgets.

  • Christian

    Simon, I am not completely sure, why I do not plan to jailbreak it. On the hand, I would love to have mail.app to mention an app, I would like to have. On the other hand, I need WiFi in order to send mail and when I have WiFi, I have access to GMail webmail – and I like the interface a lot.

    I have to admit that I did not dive into very much into the jailbreaking thing. Is there a threat breaking your iPod touch? This is one thing that makes me hesitating a bit.

  • Simon

    Hi Christian, I am a big user of Gmail and like the web based option on the Touch but having a dedicated client IMAP enabled makes reading and composing when “off the grid” very easy and will sync when Im back online ;-)

    The issues around possible “bricking” when Jailbreaking seem remote, I have not heard any case of un-restorable units, if you change your mind its just a case of restoring via iTunes :-)

    If however you do decide to jailbreak be aware that the iPhone apps are not part of the installer software and getting these installed will require SFTPing into the Touches file system, adding software and changing permissions. The iCal option is on the installer and getting the “edit” button is very easy but this comes with Vs 1.1.2.

    So to wrap up I guess the reason for me Jailbreaking the Touch was so I could install the iPhone Apps and have Terminal Access to the device and without these I would not have bothered ;-)

 

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