When you have Technologist for spouse, your birthday present would likely be an iPod Touch and a wedding Anniversary could well bring a Kindle… Am I complaining? Not really, for these gadgets keep me feeling younger than my age…probably by doing to the brain what solving crosswords helps achieve. New gadgets and their convenience also perpetually invoke feelings of gratitude in me for living my life in the present times instead of my great grandparents…
A gadget such as iPod Touch could however mean different things to different people. It could remain a portable music player or video viewer for many or become a dependable link to most of one’s resources—as it is to me. The difference is in the hands it reaches…you as the user or your tech spouse (or daughter or another relative) whose vision of any application or device is its seamless integration with its user’s life. So while Kishore was polite to let me be the first one to open its seal, it’s only after he’d spent some hours with it that it appeared a great device to have.
Two months of its ownership, and here’s what my iPod Touch facilitates for me—and hopefully, the list will get longer as I get more ideas:
Email client: I’m using the Mail app to read (or send) mail from my 3 different email accounts without anxieties about losing any of it as the incoming mail eventually pops into my Netbook‘s email client.
Twitter client: Using Echofon on it to see (or send) my Twitter feeds.
Blog/website aggregator: Newswire is letting me read my subscriptions made from Google Reader, and leaves the updates on Reader too.
Browser: Safari lets me browse sites of interest even while my Netbook is booting–or resting after long use.
LinkedIn updates: A free app brings on it my LinkedIn mail and updates.
Facebook updates: Same as above, and this mobile interface looks cleaner than the web interface.
Calendar: A precious tool to me as I depend on my Calendar‘s reminders for most regular of my tasks, it’s synchronised with the Google Calendar app of my gmail account.
Contacts: Again, synchronised with my contact database on Google, I’m seeing them getting updated without forcing a ‘hot sync’ as I had to do for Palm.
Notes: Some useful data and checklists of various kinds have been neatly brought into this free app.
Documents: Useful bird sighting trip reports, region checklists of birds, some spreadsheets and other text files are available for me to dip into by directing the free Document reader to Google docs.
To-do lists: Awesome Note allows me to track my to-do lists and any ideas worth jotting down. I’d been feeling quite out of sorts till I found this app (again free) for daily and long term tasks.
Ebooks: Stanza allows me to read ebooks saved on the device for those offline situations that I constantly find myself in as I leave the wifi zone of home or Linkaxis office.
Music: 2 GB music on the device comprises of some unheard and oft-heard audiobooks and Hindi/western music.
Internet radio: Tunemark helps access lots of varying music through internet radio channels for states of mind when my own collection feels inadequate.
Photos: Have just 30 or so treasured pics of people and places that I can use as wallpaper.
Youtube: One of my least used apps, it gives me a direct search and use of videos on youtube.com.
Videos: Interestingly, an otherwise overly used app, I’m still to use it for any movies or videos I want to travel with.
Weekly weather: Weather helps make a judicious choice of clothes by giving max/min temp for the day and the next 5 days!
Currency converter: Currency allows conversion between 2 chosen currencies and I find it useful instead of calculating in the air by using a vague conversion rate.
Time zones: Clock permits 4 different time zones in a glance—useful for planning those international phone calls, set an alarm or use it as a stopwatch.
Calculator: Works like any other calculator.
I’d been thinking that an instant messenger client would make every sense on the device but before I went around checking if the idea was possible, this read came my way declaring ebuddy as a good multiservice IM client, so I’ll be clubbing my multiple accounts with that.
Some of my favourite games on iPod Touch are Scramble2, Hangman, Checkers, Dots, TickTacTouch, eSudoku, Chess, all of which are available free and the uninitiated need to experience the ease of download to believe it.
This brings the tally to 22 apps without the games…isn’t this impressive for something just labeled as a multimedia player and for a non-techie user like me?
Now your turn to tell me if this list:
1. tempts you enough to wish for it as a gift or
2. pushes you to use your existing Touch for any of these functions or
3. gets you to share with me any crucial uses that still escape me?
Jyoti's Musings 
My touch has always been a great computing device in addition to being a great iPod. I can forget my mobile phone but not my touch. And the low prices of paid apps makes it very difficult to go by without buying them. All gaps are fille by the app store. And while it might be a pain for devs to get used to it, the end user loves the store. Some of the apps, I as a user love, are Things, Tweetie, Remote for Keynote. For the stuff they do, they could be priced at least ten times more.
I love the integrated Microsoft Exchange support that let’s you sync one of your google accounts with your device. Contacts and calendar changed reflected over the air on all devices used to access them.
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Thanks, Abhishek — will check out Things and Remote for Keynote. Other than paying for the upgraded firmware, I haven’t yet picked up any paid apps…even though some are really enticing at their $0.99 tag but when a free alternative is available, I’ve just gone for that. My son is awaiting his 32 GB iPod as his post-class VIII exam gift and he can’t wait to play FIFA 09 on it — he’d been longing to buy a PSP but after much mulling decided to go for Touch instead. I expect him to pick up a handful of paid games and it sure helps that several games are cheaper for Touch than for his PS2.
You being a techie (CS student makes you a geek 🙂 don’t you find it a nuisance to use a wifi dependent device when wifi enabled public places in our country can be counted on our fingertips?
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No, actually. It is a device that does so many things. Nothing is so important that it can’t wait to be delivered on reaching the next access point. If your phone has wifi you can connect to it to use your cellular data service through your iPod.
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Alot of bloggers aren’t very pleased with the new iPad.There was just too much hype about it and alot people got turned off.Quite frankly, I actually see some of the awesome potential of the gizmo. Third-party apps for composing tunes, games, papers and magazines and books, all kinds of cool stuff, but IMHO they just didn’t really sell it very well (excluding the books). It looks kind of not finished
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