My initial thought about it is that it’s fun just navigating through the menu. I thought that when you play video, you can play it portrait or landscape mode. It seems to only play in landscape mode. Also, I’ve read before that the iPod Touch has inferior screens compared to the iPhone.
I noticed that right away when watching a dark video (not the kind of dark that includes capes, Big Ben and howling…I’m not sure what I’m referencing). I figured it was just a result of a poor LCD screen. My phone is like that when you’re not looking at it straight-on, the blacks look inverted and seems like it’s brighter than other colors. It seems like early iPod Touches have defective screens. Now Apple has officially announced that there is definitely a problem. Since the iPhone has been out for more than three months, I didn’t consider the Touch as a first-gen device. Well personally, the screen isn’t a big issue. I’ve had no problems with it when doing other things with it, especially web browsing.
Web Browsing With Safari
When I first saw the announcement of the iPod Touch, the first thing I thought of was browsing the web on Safari while laying down on the couch while watching a Mets game or IMing friends while on the water closet that Thomas Crapper made famous as Patrick Norton puts it.
Playing with Safari was pretty fun but when you get into it and try to browse like you would on a desktop or laptop, you realize it’s really slow. When you zoom in to read text, it looks like Google maps when you zoom in. It looks like it’s loading a jpeg everytime you zoom or scroll. It’s a good thing it doesn’t have flash or pages with flash would come to a halt. This is why I think that Apple didn’t include Flash support in the iPhone and iPod Touch. It would probably crash it. It already freezes when you goto a content-heavy site. It froze on my when I visited my iGoogle page. I have about a dozen widgets and it kept getting hung up. Same problem with Yahoo.
It’s not like that’s why I got this for. I got this for when I think of something, I can Google it without having to get my laptop, startup it, wait for windows to load, log in to my user account, wait for windows to load and then start firefox. So far, it’s been great for that. Although, I missed the Mets game.
Music
Music playback it pretty straightforward. Press the Music button on the home dock, select the way you want to browse your music, find your music, and play. Not much has changed. Coverflow is something that I never really liked. When I listen to music, I don’t listen to one album at a time anymore. I had to when I had CD’s. I don’t need to load each album, one at a time. It feels like going backwards. I just like to play my playlist and shuffle the albums.
I never get an urge to play a specific song. Sometimes when I’m at a party, I want to play a song for everyone, but usually they don’t have a stereo with an iPod dock or a RCA stereo to 1/8″ headphone cable laying around. They’ll have a computer but of course I can’t copy the songs from my iPod to their computer. I could try downloading and installing a program like Senuti but at this point, I’m sober which means I’m knocking over the ice luge and nobody wants that.
YouTube, Other Features
This is the first thing that came up when I clicked on the YouTube icon, “YouTube Not Available.” Why? I don’t know. I was able to click on the other buttons and they played fine. This is one of my favorite features, actually. The videos look way better than on youtube.com. the H.264 conversion look great. I thought that they converted the compressed videos on youtube but I guess that they converted the original, uploaded videos.
Another feature, I like is Contacts. I don’t use the iContact or whatever it’s called on OSX, but entering contacts was easy and fun on the Touch. I really could’ve used this feature last week. A potential client called me but I had nothing but my cell phone on me. I couldn’t take down the number. I told him my email address but I don’t think he got the right spelling.
