Mar

30

2008

In my inaugural postings for JetDrop I’m going to talk about the iPod Touch, but before I get to that I need to feed you all some historical perspective.  I’m new around here so you don’t know me yet, and I’m in an ongoing learning experience about the JetDrop community too.  To that end I first want to talk to you about the history of Personal Digital Assistants, or PDAs, and over the next couple of days I’ll talk in depth about using the Touch as a PDA.

I got my first PDA, a Palm 5000, back in 1997.  Since then I’ve had a succession of replacements: A Palm V when the plastic 5000 finally died; a couple of Handspring Edges which proved fairly fragile, a Sony Cleo, and finally a Palm T|X.  My dedication to the Palm platform has been obvious and long-term.  The platform was spare, the hardware minimal, the handwriting recognition laughably simple.  As a package, however, it worked ... and worked very well.  In particular the synchronization process with PCs was always simple and fast, with none of the balkiness of many other portable devices.


Unfortunately the Palm T|X appears to be the last in the Palm line outside of their Treo phones.  The last major update of PalmOS was released for no other purpose than to replace the Graffiti handwriting recognition system with Graffiti2, a lamentable result of losing a patent lawsuit.  Graffiti2 is lousy, a big step backward, and since then the the only patch that has been made available for the T|X is to update its daylight savings table.

Thus when my T|X started acting up recently I decided that if Palm didn’t want to continue to support me, I didn’t want to give them any more of my money.  I was in the market for a PDA, and it wasn’t going to be anything from Palm.

Over the years many competitors have appeared, notably WinCE (now Windows Mobile) from Microsoft.  Having used a number of those devices, all the way back to 1.0, I find Microsoft’s decision to try to shoehorn a desktop user interface into a tiny gadget not only regrettable, but stupid.  The Windows-style interface eats up too much real-estate on the tiny screen and trying to pick at the microscopic icons is tedious.  Add to that the high cost of the units, largely because the operating system is porky, and Windows Mobile does not make my short list.

I have even tried Linux PDAs in the past, and while they’re improving they’re really not ready for the mass-market yet.  Keep trying, guys.

Which brings me to Apple.  The iPhone, introduced last summer, is such a huge leap forward in handheld user interface design as to not only incite praise, but make me angry at just how poorly everyone else has done.  Palm has done practically nothing to their interface or applications, other than add some color, since the day the first Palm shipped.  Microsoft has given it six tries and showed no ingenuity at all.  Meanwhile, Apple nails it on the first try with an interface similar to one that Microsoft plans to sell as a table computer for ten grand a pop.

Apple deserves my money.  The problem is, the iPhone wasn’t my PDA.

Why Not The iPhone?

Sure, the iPhone has a decent collection of PDA applications and it one-ups everyone else with a terrific web-browser and Google Maps integration.  It has drop-dead simple synchronization the likes of which we’ve only ever seen from Palm previously.  And if I chose it I could even give up my iPod, one less thing to carry.

The iPhone could be my PDA.  But I don’t want an expensive phone that does everything; I kill my phones with alarming regularity because I have to take them places that aren’t all that friendly to electronic equipment, and I wear them on my belt for easy access so they get bashed around.  I’m not really ready to put a $500 device to that kind of use.  Even if I were ready, I am not an AT&T customer today because they really messed up their network after the Cingular merger.  I don’t want to be an AT&T customer again.

What I wanted is the iPhone without the phone.  A couple of months after the iPhone came out Apple released what appeared at first glance to be the product I was waiting for: the iPod Touch.

Unfortunately appearances were misleading.  Rather than shipping the iPhone without the phone, they crippled the calendar and removed half of the rest of the applications.  Since the iPhone is still a closed platform (efforts like this notwithstanding) I can’t even pay someone else to fix the problem.  So, gorgeous as it was, I passed on the Touch: Close, but no cigar.

Then came Apple’s annual conference in January.  Amidst the typical Jobs patented Reality Distortion Field came one very interesting minor announcement: Apple decided to stop crippling the iPod Touch.  Finally the Touch could be a real PDA.  What’s more, Apple announced plans to open it up to third-party software, and they’re even talking about it as their “WiFi platform.” Good, good, good.  A couple of weeks later I bought one and I’ve been using it ever since.

That’s it for today.  Tomorrow I’ll start the in-depth review of the Touch, stay tuned.


Categories: Mobile

2 Comments

As cool as the Iphone is, it’s not the greatest smartphone. I still like the blackberry better. But the widescreen is very useful.


Not a big apple fan. But i do admit that it’s the best for browsing the internet.


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