iPod touch!

Why have you got one when you’ve already got an iPod Shuffle you ask? Ah, well, that’s easy an one:

ConsumerWhoreiPodTouch.jpg

See Don Hertzfeldt’s classic, Rejected for the reference :)

There’s no other reason than that. So, here is the little monkey:

iPodtouch.JPG

I bought an 8GB model off eBay earlier in week. I didn’t go for the 16GB mainly due to cost but also one thing I realised from having a Shuffle was that you don’t need to have all your music to hand. Yeah I know, I’m a bit late to game on that one when it comes to playlists, but I’m getting the hang of them now.

Anyhoo, I got a bargain at £150 (+ 13 quid P&P) versus the RRP of £199. I was a bit annoyed with the eBay seller since they’d listed it as one of the new models which has Mail, Maps, Notes, Stocks, editable Calender, etc, aka the January Software Upgrade, but wasn’t. So I coughed up £13 quid for it and the total wasn’t much different from what Amazon are selling them for (£175) (and they’re the pre-update too). With the software upgrade it makes like a mini PDA. Using iTunes I’ve been able to sync up all my contacts and notes, which is nice.

Initial thoughts are that the battery life with wifi enabled is lousy. I haven’t tried running it until its flat but I reckon it would be less than 4 hours if you were constantly web browsing. However with wifi off, its much better. Again, I’m not sure how long it would last in total, but I used it a few days at work now (so say about 3 to 4 hours a day) and the battery indicator has hardly moved!

Web browsing with Safari is pretty good. You can have multiple windows open at once and switch between them relatively quickly, however I don’t recommend having lots open since it can make the poor thing chug! I thought perhaps the lack of flash support would be a problem, but it’s not. It’s actually been great because most sites now have no adverts appearing!

Thanks to the Accelerometer you can switch between landscape and portrait views. Some web pages work better in landscape and some the opposite. The Times for example is much better in portrait since its still perfectly readable and you get more on screen. Most apps seem to be in portrait mode whereas videos and cover flow mode for music are in landscape.

Of course the thing about the iPod touch is the touch interface to it, which I just love, its incredibly intuitive and there’s a wonderful tactile sensation to stroking it :D You’ve got two buttons. The home button, which is the white square you can see on the photos, and the power / lock button at the top left of the device. That’s it. Everything else is controlled by the screen. Thing is I now want everything to have a touch screen interface! Damn you Apple!

My favourite new blog

spEak You’re bRanes. It’s utter genius and it’s about page does a better job than I would of explaining itself:

This blog is dedicated to the dribble-spattered lunacy of BBC “Have Your Say” discussions. Part of me thinks that the right-wing “blogosphere” of America is encouraging its slow readers to get over to the BBC and add their ill-informed opinions… but another part of me fears that the sample is actually more representative… perhaps the majority of people in the world really are this awful and stupid.

This is possibly a better description though, from an avid reader: “I just love the way you’ve appointed yourselves as the moral arbiters of what is posted on HYS, as if you have something significant to contribute. That and your self-satisfied sanctimonious attitude…“. Bang on, bitch.

It’s not just the stupid, and sometimes sensible, comments that make it though, it’s the authors sarcastic remarks on them.

Whenever I’ve read Have Your Say I’ve been dismayed by the fact that people seem very serious about what they’ve written when it’s actually complete twaddle. It’s nice to know that I wasn’t the only one thinking that.

MacBook Air and Time Capsule

Mmmmmm MacBook Air. Just watched the full Macworld 2008 keynote, pretty impressive stuff.

Air2

The Air is a really cool piece of kit and pretty well specced for an ultra portable. What gets me is how dinky it is. At it thickest, at 0.76”, it’s still smaller than the thinnest part of a Sony TZ Series! There are a couple of things that aren’t so good such as only 1 USB port and the lack of a removal battery, but I could probably live with that!

I was also impressed by the Time Capsule. A wireless n network hub + 500GB hard drive isn’t bad for £200. I remember reading up on home NAS style devices in PC Pro not so long back and they were more expensive than that.

Promo_timecapsule_20080115

The user reviews on Amazon for the NAS stuff listed in PC Pro came back with some real horror stories of them just been generally useless and a pain to connect too. I’d hope with the Time Capsule it’d be a doodle to setup and use!

It’s very tempting… Damn you Apple and your shiny new products!

Ars Technica has the full beef on it.