With the price drop, I finally decided to get a 32GB iPod Touch, and I have to admit, Apple has done a really nice job. Its decisions about which applications it decides to arbitrarily blacklist from its AppStore (either now or without warning in the future) is evil, of course, but I don’t plan to develop on a locked-in platform such iPod/iPhone, so that’s not a problem. And of course, given AT&T’s evil customer service, I won’t be getting an iPhone any time soon (life’s too short to play cat and mouse with Apple’s cell phone locking games), this was probably my only opportunity in the short time to play with the iPhone/iPod touch’s e-mail application.
My reaction? Apple’s programmers and UI designers are very, very, good. As Jim Zemlin has pointed out, if Apple’s locked-down platform is a prison, it’s a velvet lined one. And I’m not one to like living in prisons, even if they are gorgeously appointed with 50 inch flat panel TV screens and an ocean view. But still, I’m happy with the iPod Touch; it’s relatively cheap for its functionality as an mp3 player, with web and e-mail access via wifi as a bonus. The only thing that is important is that I not harbor any illusions that this is not an open device, but a locked down platform. So that means I won’t invest any time in developing for it; nor will I invest any money in any for-pay applications (after all, Apple has the right to disable them at any time, for any reason they deem good and proper). And if any one really thinks Apple wouldn’t do anything like this, remember, they’re the company that just filed a patent on implementing DRM on clothing and sneakers!
Still, it would be nice if an open platform, such as the Nokia N800 had the functionality and usability of the iPod touch. One day, perhaps…
September 14th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I also just picked up an iPod Touch as a PDA (it’ll be replacing my Palm TX). I’m marginally hopeful that it’ll open up in time, though I’m not counting on that; I never buy gear based on anything more than “what it does now”, and if things get better it’s a pleasant surprise.
I am willing to put some amount of money into software for it, on the risk/reward tradeoff that it’s unlikely that a given app will get disabled before I can get my money’s worth out of it. Not being much of a developer, the issues on that side are pretty much irrelevant to me.
I considered the N800 or N810, especially since the Garnet VM would let me use my Palm software, but they’re big, clunky, and not getting the kind of third-party software love that the iPhone OS is getting.
The main thing the Touch doesn’t have that I want is the ability to tether through my Bluetooth phone, so that I can take advantage of my T-Mobile data plan. Maybe someday.
September 14th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
You might be interested in this project: http://matt.colyer.name/projects/iphone-linux/index.php?title=Main_Page
It is an effort to make the iPhone/iPod touch usable with Linux without needing to do a “Jailbreak” or any such things.
September 14th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
> The main thing the Touch doesn’t have that I want is the ability to tether
> through my Bluetooth phone, so that I can take advantage of my T-Mobile
> data plan.
If you have a symbian phone with wifi, you can tether trough wifi using joikuspot:
http://www.joikuspot.com/
September 14th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
I tried to use my N800 as a music player and was very much highly disappointed. Beside the deliberate lack of support of Ogg-Vorbis, the music player software is catastrophic and closed as well. Too bad, Maemo have a tremendous potential, that Nokia as missed so far with lot of annoyances and closeness when there shouldn’t be. At least unlike the iPhone, alternative software can be written….
September 14th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
A future OpenMoko device running some future Linux-based software on a Debian distribution will rock.
September 21st, 2008 at 7:13 am
Liked your commentary, though it was repetitive (”won’t develop, not a developer, don’t like locked platform, locked platform”). Still, the metaphor was fun– velvet lined prison cell with ocean view!
My prob is that the PIM (personal info management) functions seem underwhelming… unlike the Palm which hit a home run from its release date. Why, oh why, Apple couldn’t have gotten this right is beyond me? Jobs and anti-Newton bias? His still smarting from the Doonesbury spoof of its poor handwriting recognition? Don’t know, but a synchable to-do list that doesn’t require a web server is truly needed!
September 22nd, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Apple is evil. But they’re so good at it.
Of course, the alternative might be worse …
October 16th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
There’s an interesting discovery that I made when playing with the iTouch. As soon as I got it I installed the hack that allowed me to add GNU apps.
It worked really well, except for one huge point. Which I did not really want to believe because it seemed too impossible.
The battery life drastically dropped to just a few hours (2-4). It did not matter what I installed, as soon as I had done it there was only one way to restore battery life, as I accidentally discovered, which was to send it back to Apple for battery replacement.
Except they did not replace it. Simply restored it to the original condition. Now I had done that too, I thought. Using iTunes I could wipe out my previous efforts and be back to the original condition. Well, that was obviously not correct as I had installed the hack and restored it a dozen times without recovering the battery life. The only thing that brought it back to some 20+ hours was a factory “rebuild”.
What looked to me to be a faulty battery turned out to be something entirely caused by the hack. Mind you I used iTunes to restore it and then used it for weeks with 2-4 hour battery life. I could just leave it sitting over two days and the battery was gone.
I don’t know what is different between what iTuned restore could do and Apple’s, but it certainly made all the difference.
Now I have settled in using it the same way the above author does, as it shipped. Certainly I loved the features I got when hacked but with that poor battery life it became close to useless.
Incidentally, I read a post from someone else who said that his battery life died too, but I figured it HAD to do with something else.
October 16th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Eh, yes I did a jailbreak using iLiberty+. Which otherwise worked really well.
October 16th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Steve,
Funny thing, I haven’t seen anyone else complain about decreased battery life when using iLiberty+. That being said, I haven’t been interested and I haven’t tried jailbreaking my iPod Touch, so I don’t have any personal experience about this.
October 16th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
That is odd. I knew there were risks involved so I took my time before settling on iLiberty+, not wanting to brick it. All I know of is the other poster and me having had that result.
It would be intersting to hear what others might have done. Use of jailbreak s/w and so on. To try to develop a pattern to narrow down what’s behind it.
(OT, I’m really looking forward to ext4 going gold, as I’m sure the rest of the ext3 world is, no doubt. Thanks for your good work there!)
October 29th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
It appears to be due to sshd running all the time, keeping the wireless connected, thus eating up the battery.
It should however have disappeared when I ran Restore in iTunes. This is another oddity. Maybe it is due to some things being moved to a different location during the jailbreak, which prevents it from being deleted, that could keep the wireless going…
A good test would be to repeat the jailbreak, then restore back to default while using a tool on a wireless router to see if the connection is being kept alive after the restore.