So I got a iPod Touch (32GB) for Christmas, it’s a 3rd gen touch and really quite nice. I’ve written of my love of Apple devices before (something about fighting with a Mac and windows 7 comes to mind) and once again this device has captured my attention. I fully understand why people who use iPhones love their devices. As a phone it’s OK at best, but as a personal pocket computer it’s a rock star.
I refrain from using Personal Digital Assistant since that implies a dumb device that only knows what it knows (generally from syncing or some other method of input). The PDA sector has not been that for several years now (really ever since the first windows mobile phones/blackberries/treo’s of the world). But even having used Windows mobile on my last PDA and Treo/Blackberry for the last 3 years I’ve never thought of them as more then phones with calendar and some extra functionality. Never once did I think of my blackberry as a “Pocket computer” I always thought of it more as a tool than anything else a powerful network enabled tool, but a tool none the less.
Now comes the iPod Touch and it’s this platform that is open enough to allow applications to be developed that there is literally a application for everything you can possibly think of (the one that tells you where the closest bar is located is my personal favorite) about the only thing I can’t do on my touch that I can do on my computer is play PC based games (I’m thinking MMO type games here) and honestly I think that is only because no developer has sat down and created a client for the iPod touch/iPhone for any of these games. It’s truly what I’ve been looking for (today) in a personal device.
I think the thing that finally pushed me over the edge from being “happy” with the Touch to being “wow’d” my it was I setup full syncing between my Gmail account and the touch… and when I say fully syncing I mean full exchange type Email, Contacts, Calendar between my touch and my Gmail account. Now I’ve been doing a bastardized version of this with my blackberry using a couple of Google apps for the blackberry, but it’s been a less than ideal situation (mainly issues with double contacts, keeping email sync’d, and keeping calendar appointments from disappearing from one or both calendars (actually putting events into the phone calendar and having them reliably show up in my Gmail calendar would be a nice start)) Now I realize that the blackberry is a “secure” environment and you need to have additional items setup to get things to work that seamlessly, but when my MP3 player can do better calendar/contact/mail sync then my phone which is supposed to do this stuff that well out of the gate I think we may have a issue.
Then again it may just be that paradigm shift that happens from time to time, no I don’t need all of this additional security I just want something that keeps my personal stuff organized as well as all of these tools do for my professional life I just don’t want the two parts of my life to cross any more than they already do. And I think that last sentence is the true crux of the problem.