iPod Touch
Despite long-standing evidence for what I would term “good taste” in technology, influence from the evil machine that is Apple‘s marketing division has rendered me helpless and forced my hand: last year, I purchased an iPod Touch. However, due to Apple’s malfeasance and nefarious schemes, I also purchased one for my wife‘s birthday, which was early in September. Right here, I’d insert a snarky chart comparing our uses of the iPod. Mine would have “sitting on my desk,” “being carried around in our car,” and perhaps “being carried around in my backpack.” Hers would have “sitting in the box.” The joke is probably lost on 99% of the readership here, but suffice it to say that neither of our uses have included playing much music.
Apple iPod Touch - Click to View Larger
In seriousness, however, we did use it one night to play music for an hour or two while we watched the sun rise over the lake, but other than that, my uses have been limited to the Apple App Store and related apps. Using apps on the iPod Touch requires a $10 update (or at least, it did when I updated mine — friends have told me they weren’t charged). The store, however, is chock-full of interesting applications to can both waste time and sort-of kind-of help accomplish meaningless tasks in a roundabout way. Really, if you’re depending on an iPod Touch to help you manage your life, there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way you’re approaching things.
I downloaded about 50 different apps and installed most of them. The best one I’ve found so far is Blackjack Run, which challenges the user to play five hands of Blackjack against the clock. The rules aren’t complex, but they’re listed on the site so I won’t regurgitate them here.
One of the coolest features of the iPod Touch (and the iPhone, of course) is its accelerometer. It’s a pretty smart piece of technology that detects the motion and orientation of the device and rotates the screen and/or manipulates applications accordingly. This lets you do fun things like use the iPod like a steering wheel to drive an onscreen car, rotate pictures from landscape to portrait with a flick of the wrist, and other neat tricks.
Apple also included dual-zone touch sensitivity, which allows functionality like “pinching” the screen to zoom out whle browsing the web, and single-screen-multiplayer touch-sensitive games (and quite possibly other multi-hyphenated words).
At its initial price, I wouldn’t have suggested it to anyone aside from early adopters, as Apple products tend to drop in price significantly. Apple always seems to provide a disincentive to early-adoption brand loyalty by releasing new (and much better) versions quickly and without warning as well as dropping prices dramatically.
