Goodbye Revo! Hello iPod!

Why Did I Get One?

I suppose it had to happen one day. "What's that?" you ask, well... the demise of my beloved Psion Revo. I can't believe it has been eight years since I bought my Revo and wrote a review. Since that review was written I had in fact bought a second Revo, a Revo+ and was using both. The Revo+ for my personal life, and the older Revo for work. The Revo was retired a few years ago, when personal devices were not permitted for business use, the Revo+ was retired from email, calendar and appointment duties when the Nokia N95 came along. So for the last couple of years the Revo+ was being used as an eBook reader. The N95 can do that too, infact it also uses Mobipocket the same as the Revo, but I couldn't use that on a plane.

Now however I have a second generation 8GB iPod Touch from Apple, and I don't feel it necessary to keep the Revos anymore, at least I don't carry them with me anywhere any more. Admittedly there is no equivalent of Mobipocket for the iPod Touch yet, but there are rumours that it will happen one day, and besides I can put my choice from a bewildering collection of games onto it instead.

So the iPod Touch 2G, what to say about it?

It is considerably smaller than a Revo, which was just a little bit too big to comfortably put into a trouser pocket, especially in the leather pouch I kept it in. I keep the iPod in a leather pouch too (A Belkin Leather Folio for iPod Touch 1G), but it is small enough and slim enough to slip into even the pocket of a pair of jeans.

The back of the 2G Touch looks like polished chrome, and marks easily. My gold wedding band had already made some marks on it before I got the pouch for it. The front is obviously glass, and this means the entire surface of the Touch seems vulnerable to marking and scratching. I wouldn't recommend tossing one into a ladies handbag unprotected! Likewise if you do keep it in a pocket, make sure it is not sharing the pocket with coins and keys.

The screen is very clear and bright, but one thing I have a problem with is my greasy fingers leave a lot of marks on the screen. I obviously can't avoid this because I naturally have to touch it. The most accurate way to use the touch screen, is with the finger perpendicular to the glass. It will work when the pad of the finger touches, but the increased area makes position less accurate, which makes using the touch keyboard more difficult. This would suggest that people with longer finger nails may find using the Touch for certain things, like writing emails, more frustrating as their error rates will be higher.

Out of the box the iPod Touch has:

  Online Applications
     Web browser (Safari)
     Email
     YouTube
     Stocks
     Maps
     Weather
  Offline Applications
     Calendar
     Contacts
     Clock
     Calculator
     Notes

Web Browser

The web browser (Safari) is really very good. I had become quite used to browsing using the Nokia N95, but the iPod Safari browser is in a different league. It is probably about as close as you can get to a desktop browsing experience using something that fits in your pocket.

I like how pages are rendered as they would appear on a desktop computer. Some pages are readable this way, but once the page is rendered, zooming in and moving around is very easy using the two finger pinch technique for zooming, and single finger swiping to move around the page.

Another useful technique is to double tap a section of a web page, i.e. a block of text or image, and Safari will auto zoom so that part of the page fits the width of the screen. Don't forget too, that by rotating the iPod through 90 degrees, the screen can be wider (or smaller depending from where you start from!).

The downside of the Safari is there is no support for flash content, although Adobe are apparently preparing a Flash Player for the iPod Touch (and iPhone). It also only supports Javascript, not Java as there is no Java Virtual Machine. What this means is that websites with complex active content will not be fully functional. In general usage these downsides have been a very minor irritant.

Email

The email application is fairly simple to set up. It has some wizards built in for popular email services like Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL and of course mobileme. Setting up POP3 email accounts is simple too, certainly no more difficult than setting up email clients on a desktop computer.

Email only fetches messages when run, i.e. it doesn't run continuously in the back ground checking for emails at regular intervals. Not a great problem, and it is possible this could change, as the iPod Touch firmware is regularly updated, and there are plans to introduce a service to allow events to trigger applications to run automatically.

The emails are rendered properly when they contain HTML, unlike the email client on the Nokia N95, which presents the HTML as an attachment, which must then be opened in the web browser manually.

The inbox will keep the 50 latest emails in the iPod by default, but this can be change to 25, 50, 75, 100 or 200. This seems fair enough, as some emails can be quite large, and the memory on the iPod is best kept for music right?

I have been amazed at how well the mail application handles attachments. It will open and present Word documents (.doc, .docx), PDFs (.pdf), text files (.txt), Excel documents (.xls, .xlsx), Powerpoint (.ppt) and of course HTML (.htm, .html).

YouTube

The YouTube application allows you to browse by category, look at the most popular and most viewed and perform searches of the videos on the YouTube website. The picture quality is very good, I would even say that I prefer watching videos on the iPod to watching them on a desktop computer at the YouTube website. I think the difference is because when viewed using a web browser, the videos are shown using a Flash based player to play .FLV files. The YouTube application plays in a native application which uses .MP4 files recoded by YouTube. They seem to play much more smoothly.

Stocks

I don't use this much. It can be setup to show the current value of shares and stock market indicators, and graphs for 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 moths, 1 year or 2 years. I have mine set to show the London FTSE100 stock market indicator and the share value of the company I work for. Well I do hold some shares!

Maps

This works without GPS, and seems to get pretty close to showing where I am when I try it. Having a very similar application on the N95 which does contain GPS, there is little reason for me to use this. It does however present maps in a very similar way to Google maps. I believe Google developed the application for Apple, which may explain why. It can show map and satellite views, and is able to plan routes and show them on a map, or as a list of directions, junction by junction.

Weather

Allows you to show a six day weather forecast and the current weather for pretty much any city world wide. It is fairly basic, just giving an icon to indicate weather conditions, i.e. day, night, cloudy, overcast, sunny, rain, snow. It also gives the maximum and minimum temperatures, and the current temperature.

Offline Applications

The offline applications are pretty much self explanatory. I won't go into much detail on those, other than to point out that the calendar and contacts applications will synchronise with their counter parts on an Apple Macintosh computer, via iTunes. I believe this also works on a PC running Windows, but I don't know with which applications it synchronises with in that case.

Music, Video, Photos and Applications I don't think I need to tell anyone that the iPod Touch can play music. Music can be transferred to the iPod from a computer running iTunes, but the Touch can also access the iTunes Music Store directly when connected to a Wi-Fi network. These purchase will be synchronised with the iTunes library on your computer when the iPod is next connected to it. The same method is used for video and games too.

Music playing is a given, and has been described in many places. The touch interface is very intuitive, and its nice to have the album art there, and cover-flow. If you don't know what cover flow is, it is a graphical method for skimming through album covers. Very pretty, but I have to say, not my preferred method for browsing the music.

Video looks very good on the iPod Touch, however not something I use the iPod much for. I would point out that iTunes does not appear to automatically optimise video for iPod. iTunes can have all sorts of video put into its library, but if they are added to the synchronisation list for the iPod, more often than not a message will appear telling you that the video cannot be played on the iPod and the process stops there. This is contrary to the way photos are handled. Photos in the iPhoto library are automatically optimised for the iPod when added to the synchronisation list. I suppose the difference could be attributed to the amount of time it takes to re-process video, but to not be given the choice is a little annoying. Software like iSquint and Roxio Toast 9 are good for processing video for the iPod.

If you haven't looked, you wouldn't believe the amount of software available for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Again they can be purchased through iTunes from a desktop or the iPod itself. When I say purchase, it might be useful to know that there is a lot of free applications, and even the paid for stuff can be as cheap as 59p (99c).

If you're interest what I have loaded onto the iPod so far:
    Google Earth
    Facebook
    Sudoku
    Tap Tap (game)
    Super Monkey Ball (game)
    Solitaire card games.
    Hangman
    Flick Bowling (10-pin bowling game).
    Remote (an application to remotely operate iTunes running on my desktop computer).
    Air Mouse (Makes the iPod Touch behave as a wireless touch pad for a computer)

I also have a few programs on there aimed at pilots and aircraft flying.

Some Useful Stuff

I would love to have had an iPhone, but my mobile phone provider doesn't have the iPhone, and the Nokia N95 is very good, it certainly has a good camera, it can take video, it has an FM radio.
I did find a way to coming close to having the iPhone experience...

JoikuSpot

Joikuspot (http://www.joiku.com/) is an application for mobile phones which allows a 3G phone that has built in Wi-Fi to act as a Wi-Fi hotspot. By running JoikuSpot, my iPod Touch can connect to the N95, which forwards the iPods web access onto the 3G network. It works brilliantly, but like the iPhone the iTunes Music Store and App Store do not work when the connection goes via a 3G network. It does however, drain the battery rather quickly, and the phone can get quite warm.