Brian Jarvis, UMPC Geek

I mentioned earlier that I recently picked up a iPod Touch. It truly is a great device and I’m using it a ton. It’s an average music player, a very good video player, and a great mobile internet device. I think Josh Bancroft hit the nail on the head that Apple was “pwned” the MID market by beating everyone else to the punch.

I love the Safari browser on the Touch. Using my finger to navigate web pages and flick the screen to scroll couldn’t be more natural. With the one exception of the inability to view Flash-based pages, it’s perfect. Even with that one (pretty significant) shortcoming, it’s still the best mobile browser I’ve ever used. I look forward to other platforms learning from the usability of the iPhone/Touch experience.

I’m also looking forward to the release of the SDK and hope that it will open a firestorm of sanctioned applications for the device. I think it would be great to get better PIM functionality and some productivity apps written for off-line use. Originally I thought that the soft keyboard would limit effectivness of this device as a mobile computing platform, but the keyboard works better than I thought. It is the perfect size and weight to replace any non-phone PDA on the market and I believe that it will.

So far, it’s great. I only really struggle with two things:

1. Should I have bought the iPhone instead?
2. I need a better answer for my son who keeps asking why we need 4 iPods in the house.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.