Jul

15

2008

It’s been a crazy spring so I haven’t been writing much, but I finally got a breather from work and in a timely manner: The iPod touch Update 2.0 came out concurrent with the iPhone 3G release.  Like everyone else it was impossible for me to download it on Friday, but the next morning was another story.  A long back-up, update, and restore process followed, and some revelations: mostly good, mostly what everyone anticipated, but there are still areas were Apple clearly isn’t even trying.

The big surprise came when I touched the “find me” button in the Map application.  Previously this did a whole lot of nothing; lacking GPS capability there wasn’t much for it to do.  I tried it mostly on a lark ... and it located me, within my home neighborhood, right down to the street corner I was standing on.  The accuracy circle showed that it had located me to within a couple of hundred feet, but the center was right at my feet.  I was shocked, very much in a “Big Brother is watching me” kind of way.  How did it do that?

There were really only two possibilities: It may have used IP address localization based on the IP address of my home router, which didn’t make any sense since that is usually accurate to no more than a large city area, or it used WiFi somehow.  I knew there were maps of WiFi hotspots, so it was possible it was sniffing out nearby WiFi hotspots and using them to determine my location.  I spent awhile thinking about it before I realized they must be using the wireless addresses (like ethernet addresses), which are very nearly globally unique, to pinpoint the precise hotspots I was near.  I presumed that Google’s Street View cars built a WiFi map while they were wandering around taking pictures of everything in sight; it’s the kind of thing they would do.

I got it mostly right.  A little research let me to Skyhook, who market a positioning system based on WiFi, and it works just the way I thought it did.  They claim accuracy as precise as 10m (30ft).  Apple is indeed using their technology.  GPS and cell towers work almost anywhere, but where WiFi is prevalent the positioning can be both more accurate and much more reliable.  And faster; it takes only a couple of seconds to get a position.  And it can work on any device that has WiFi capability.  Wow.

This is a nifty and unexpected new benefit for existing touch owners.  Major kudos to Apple for that one.  Suddenly the $10 upgrade price started to seem like it might be a bargain.

The other major new feature is, of course, iPhone Apps ... most of which also work on the touch.  I won’t belabor you with details on that, since every iPhone reviewer went into it in depth.  The salient point for a touch owner are: 1) Games!  and 2) Useful applications, like to-do lists, that Apple couldn’t be bothered to write.  This feature of course multiplied the value of the touch, especially to businessmen, just like the wide array of applications for the Palm made it much more valuable than just an organizer.  There’s even a free eReader app, nicely multitouch-enabled, so I can read the hundred-odd e-books I purchased in that format over the last decade.  (But no Mobipocket yet.)

The big negative surprise was how little Apple has improved the standard applications in the last year.

Calendar is still un-searchable and has a traditional rather than multitouch interface.  You still can’t set event types on the touch (but you can on a Mac—sorry PC owners) even though it now provides calendar slices by event type.  Event alerts are still too short and quiet to be useful.

Contacts now has search, as pointed out in Apple’s iPhone G3 introduction last month, but it turns out to be the lamest search feature ever.  It performs a starts-with match on the name and business name fields and nothing else.  There’s still no way for me to search on the contact data.  Gah!  Ok, Apple, I don’t need Spotlight but I sure would like to have a search with more or less the capability I had on my Palm 5000 back in 1997.

Even so the touch, riding on the iPhone’s coat-tails, is turning into a rather nice tool.


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