Apr

2

2008

In the last installment of my series on using an iPod Touch as a PDA I’m going to talk about most of the rest of its major applications:  Contacts, Photos, Music, Video, Safari, and Mail.  There were a few surprises, both positive and negative, that I discovered through use and experimentation.

Contacts

The Contacts application is fairly simplistic but works pretty well.  It shows all of the contacts with separators for the first letter of the last name or company name.  You can rapidly scroll backward and forward with the flick motion, and you can jump to a location using the alphabet list along the right side.  It’s a simple but effective translation of a paper address book.

Each address book entry allows you to enter multiple addresses and phone numbers, classified by “home,” “work,” or “other.” There are some additional fields (such as “Nickname” and “Job Title") and the ability to add a free-form note.  I find the information fields to be a bit more flushed-out, and more flexible, than on the Palm.

One feature I never used on the Palm, but find myself using more regularly on the Touch, is the ability to attach a picture to a contact.  It’s just soooo much easier to pick pictures from a large set on the Touch.  Unfortunately without an integrated camera (available on the iPhone) I have to import the photo from somewhere else.  I never thought I’d care that it didn’t have a camera (I had one on a Cleo previously but almost never used it) but for this feature it would be pretty useful.  I was surprised that no effort was made to include an icon made from the photo in the contact list, which seems like an obvious feature.

Search

Perhaps the most surprising feature missing from the Touch is the ability to search for ... anything.  There’s no way to search for a contact except via the first letter of the last name and no way to search for a calendar or notepad entry at all.  This is a huge failing, and a surprising one from the company that brought us Spotlight.

While I can perhaps forgive the lack of an integrated search system a la the Palm, the lack of even intra-application search is more than an oversight, it severely limits the usefulness of several of the applications.  On my Palm I would regularly search for a company name, or an occupation, or a phone number.  On the Touch that’s just not possible.  This is the most serious omission in its software suite.

Things That (I Thought) I Didn’t Really Care About

Photos: I uploaded a few photos, mostly of my daughter, into my Palm but never really used it as a portable photo album.  It just didn’t work that well: It was hard to find the photo I wanted, and it took too long to display one even once I found it.  Coming from that experience I didn’t expect much from the Photos applciation on the Touch ... imagine my surprise at finding that the Touch’s Photos application is really very nice.  The album view is fast and easy to use; you can scroll through hundreds of images and quickly pick the one you’re looking for.  Have a landscape-oriented picture?  Rotate the unit to horizontal and it rotates and scales it to fit.  Browsing through a set of pictures is just a series of flicking motions.  Sweet.  I ended up loading hundreds of my favorite pictures and I use this feature a lot.

Music: Okay, so this thing is called an iPod Touch.  The iPod in its name might lead you to believe that its intent was to listen to music.  It might come as a surprise, then, to find that it’s not actually a very good music player.

I didn’t buy it to use that way, but once in awhile I want to listen to a tune.  It actually took me three tries to figure out how to get it to play something other than “A-Ha”, the first album in my list.  I’ll explain what happened in a minute, but first a little exploration of the user interface.

There are actually three different iPod interfaces.  If the unit is held horizontally it shows Apples iconic “Cover Flow” interface where you flick through the album covers of the songs on the unit.  It’s beautiful, it’s slick.  There’s a tiny play/pause button in the lower left that you can use to play the album you’re looking at, and you can touch the album to see its songs and select one to play.  Simple, or so it seemed.

The first time I tried to use the Touch as an iPod I went to this interface and pushed “play” to kick off the first song in A-Ha’s Hunting High and Low.  Satisfied that it worked, I paused it (there’s no “stop” button) and forgot all about it.  Some days later I went back to listen to some music, scrolled to a different album, and pushed “play”.  A-Ha started up again.  Not what I expected!

Sometimes when I scroll to a new album and push “play” it resumes where I was previously, sometimes it starts on the new album as I expect.  I am not sure what triggers each behavior, or if the behavior simply changed with my last upgrade (there have been two already in the time I’ve owned my Touch), but the reliable way to get it to play the album you want it to play is to tap the album and then tap the first song on its list.

The other hugely irritating issue with the Cover Flow mode is that there is no volume control at all.  I think it was a big mistake not to include physical volume buttons (the iPhone has them!) in something that purports to be a music player but, lacking them, the volume slider really should be readily available in every part of the interface.  It isn’t.

Turn the unit vertical and it toggles between two different interfaces.  One is the search interface where you can select Album, Artist, Playlist or Song list modes.  Pick something from one of those and drill down to the song.  It drops you into the last of its interfaces, the vertical “Play” interface.  Amazingly this is the only place in the whole interface that has volume controls.  Switch back to the list mode and all of the controls disappear.  What were they thinking?

This needs a lot more work.  As an iPod I would say that the Touch is something of a dud.  It works, it’s pretty, but it’s annoying.  The iPhone, with its external volume controls, is a way better iPod.

Video: One thing I absolutely did not expect to ever use was the video feature of the Touch, but I tried one of the free samples ("Jack Jack Attack” from The Incredibles) and found that it worked really well.  I used the fine Handbrake tool (http://handbrake.fr/) to rip some TV shows off DVD and now I watch them whenever I need a few minutes of entertainment and I don’t have a good book.  The touch gets an A+ for its video capabilities; I could even see myself ripping a whole movie to watch on an airplane instead of pulling out my laptop.  Not a feature I cared for in a PDA but a welcome surprise nonetheless.

Web Browser: I admit it: I thought web browsing on a small device was a waste of time.  It was an awful experience on the Palm, not much better on Windows PDAs and Smartphones, and utterly useless on just about all cellphones.  Then I tried it on the iPhone.  OK, you’re going to scroll around a heck of a lot, and it helps to have really good eyesight, and Java and Flash applications don’t work, but despite these limitations Apple made it really work where everyone else has failed.  Their Safari browser knocks the ball out of the park when it comes to browsing on small devices and I find myself using the browser regularly even when my laptop is just a room away.

E-Mail: While this may be the killer app for phones in a corporate setting, I have always found it too hard to both read and write messages on tiny devices.  Still, I hooked it up to my GMail account to see how it works.  Sending messages is still a hunt-and-peck torture system, although it does work with patience, but reading messages is straightforward and web links jump to Safari cleanly.  Bravo!

Stuff I Would Like

I think a little bluetooth integration would be very useful; it could at least dial a bluetooth phone.  On the other hand my Palm T|X had bluetooth support and I never got it to do anything useful beyond sync, and that was too slow to use, so perhaps the utility is too light for the cost.

Speaking of synchronization, it sure would be nice to synchronize with my Mac over WiFi.  I’d like to be able to recharge it on the stand near the door, sync wirelessly, and never have to take it up to the office at all.

If the Touch had a vibrate alert feature I might miss fewer appointments.  Similarly, the lack of a real external speaker (the iPhone has one) means that I have to lug headphones around if I want to use the music or video features—even briefly.

The unit has a serious need for an external volume control and, failing that, needs the volume to be accessible in as many places in the UI as possible.

Conclusion (For Now)

Despite the limitations I found in the Touch I’ve given up my Palm completely; it works well enough, and Apple is clearly working on their platform while Palm continues to stagnate.  Apple’s recent decision to open up the platform to third-party developers should ensure a vibrant market for add-ons in just a few months, and I’ll be talking about various applications as I discover them.

If you use your iPhone or Touch as a PDA, what do you like or hate about it?  Leave me feedback, I’d love the hear from you.


Categories: Mobile

2 Comments

I love the iphone. it’s really great i just wish they would figure out a better typing system.


I guess it’s good to have small fingers :D


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