In the red corner, the iPod Touch…
I’m currently going through the most exciting and frustrating phase of another purchase cycle: the research period. This is the time when I obsess over candidate products, do loads research and cross-referencing, create spreadsheets, and generally work myself into a tizz about something almost no-one else would give a second thought to.
This time it’s (still) about getting an iPod Touch. Possibly. But it’s just got really interesting. The facts (and fantasies) are as follows:
- My very elderly Psion Vx is going to give out sooner or later, and I’ll need a replacement organiser. (This is actually a rubbish non-justification for splashing out on some fancy gear. But I’m ignoring that.)
- The iPod Touch is very cool, but it’s not an organiser. In fact, it’s not even got a search facility for you to search your contacts, diary and to-do items.
- The iPod Touch has wi-fi. That’s very cool. I’ve decided that my next organiser needs wi-fi.
- Apple will launch their SDK and it’s only a matter of time before someone turns it into an organiser. After all, as their COO says, “it’s a platform not a product”.
- I don’t need a phone built in. I want an organiser without a phone.
- I seriously need to find an alternative to the iPod Touch, to convince myself that I’m making a properly balanced purchasing choice. After all, I don’t want to be caught out by that sneaky Temporal Frame Information.
- The Palm TX does not cut the mustard. It ticks all the boxes, but it looks positively stone-age next to the Touch. I was beginning to give up…
- But amazingly, I have just discovered a real contender: the Nokia N810. It’s a proper, tiny wi-fi PC, which runs a Mozilla browser — so all those Web 2.0 applications work — and Flash. In fact there’s a little YouTube video of it, of which a big chunk consists of watching the device play a YouTube video.
- As Last100’s excellent review points out, it’s a proper platform. With an SDK. And loads of community-built applications.
- Plus, it’s got a camera, a microphone, and Skype included. And proper sockets (like USB), real buttons, and an actual keyboard. Very cool.
- Today the N810 “fails abysmally as a PDA”, but it’s got an SDK, so it’s only matter of time before that changes, surely.
So this is very, very good: I have two exciting products to choose from. And now I need to try to hold back from buying one, long enough to see how the fight develops.
No doubt I will write more about this in the coming weeks. Whatever you read here, be reassured that it will be a mere shadow of a very large, and growing, obsession.
