Apple iPod Touch Wish List

Without a doubt, the latest range of Apple products on the market have given us two lightweight yet graphic-filled devices. I am talking ’bout the iPhone and Touch. The popularity of both totally amazes me, though not because I don’t like them, far from it — I know of many people who have either purchased one, been given one, or still have one on back-order. That’s commitment and fanaticism!

Having purchased the Touch earlier this year, I prefer its options. If I could afford the monthly bill of a iPhone, I’d have gotten one. But being a stingy bastard, that’s hardly likely.

Yesterday I discovered Brian Caulfield out in California gave us a list of the seven biggest iPhone disappointments. I have discovered that the Apple Touch also has a half-dozen problems that need further development.

Whilst the Touch has the best features of the iPhone – which we all know is primarily web surfing wherever you can find and connect an unsecured/free network (Wifi) — all with minimal cost because we paid up front for the device — it does lack a few similar features to the Apple iPhone that I know we’d also wished for:

No Flash

Considering how many sites out there rely on Flash for components or entire pages of their sites (including navigation-tabs, the sidebar advertisements and those heinous ‘introduction’ page we’ve all learnt to hate), you’d think this would have been first on the drawing board.

But not, we miss out on so much because the Apple tech’ crew somehow figured this was an unnecessary component. Considering the internal technology required to enable jiggling icons on its high-res’ screen with a finger-touch, wouldn’t the capability to see and interact with SWF imagery been a simple yet integral program to include? As Brian says, “While Adobe is working hard to make its technology iPhone-friendly, don’t hold your breath.”

Can’t Replace Batteries

Their are two issues to this, but the inability to remove and insert batteries is the bane of this device.

Being an avid listener of music whilst I work or read, it’s vital to have full batteries at any time of the day. We are not always able to be at a location that enables charging at a wall or via the pc (which I freely admit is a great feature), and whilst the great white plug is the best thing since dual-powerpoints it’s not ‘polite etiquette’ to simply plug in wherever you are.

So if the device had a slide-cover similar to many cameras have, the battery component could have designed to be easily remove and replace the internal battery. I’m guessing the device would need an internal definitely-unremovable battery to continue core-functions whilst the power was off. Now that I think about that, it must already do: What happens when battery runs out? It doesn’t lose date and saved data.

Apple tech, the power is in your hands.

Why no Cut’n’Paste functions?

As every coder, writer and DOM-hacker knows, having the ability to copy/cut and paste is vital when reading any text of interest. Whether it be a cool piece of CSS that would fit in well with the latest personal site incarnation or quoting from Steve Job’s latest report on the Apple, it is vital to have this feature.

But alas, Apple didn’t think that far down the track. They probably never imagined that their users would be using this device to send articles to their blogs, to recite tracts from Shakespeare to send as e-cards, nor to crack the DOM of every ‘mobile.css’ now appearing across the WWW.

So we suffer in silence, waiting for the next magor upgrade. Maybe this time they’ll include it? Even if I have to use two fingers (like enlarging an image), I’d be first to install this update!

Voice Activated Login

Oooh Aaah, who would like this feature:

(Lifts Apple to face, looks directly at it.) Me: Login

Apple: Password required (Now this would be nice either as the voice of HAL, Marvin the Paranoid Android, the alert computers from “Starship Troopers”, or something similar to those elevator voices that tell you what floor you’ve arrived. Please.)
Me: _removed despite wife working it out_
Apple: Thank you. Welcome Stephen. You have 47 emails, 125 spam. Twitter has 31 responses, Plurk has 42 responses, Upcoming has 2 events, Meetup __ has 2 attendees, Apple has 2 updates. Your blog has 22 replies on 3 articles. Enjoy.

Ok, a guy can dream.

Difficult Music and Image Syncing with iTunes.

Am I the only person to discover that iTunes deletes not only from its inbuilt library, but also from your PC-directory when removing music no longer of interest? Or is there some backwater of the instruction manual I’m missing? I initially allowed my 12GIG of music to be ‘synced’ by iTunes … which promptly resorted into an arrangement that made no visible sense to me.

Suddenly my combination of songs by the same artist were broken up according to the album they were upon. Not all bad, yeah, considering it then added the album cover to the directory icon, but my directory-structure suddenly looked like 9-11: All structure disintegrated and the contents spilled everywhere.

Worse still, iTunes creates an additional directory on PC that has same content as device, but in icon’s totally unreadable to anything but the Apple products …and constitutes the same KILOBYTE size.

My advice: Keep your music on a 500GIG external drive. Back up regularly. My previous MP3 player had a USB connection, and simply allowed me to drag and drop entire directories onto/out of the device. Why didn’t Apple go with this idea?

So there is my opinion and review of the Apple Touch.

There will be more reviews to follow: I want my wife to also get one, so I really need to sell the GOOD features. She’s already happy she can have her Shopping List on easy display. What she really wants is a way to view and interact with existing spreadsheets. So, for now, we keep testing and trialling ideas.

Update : 5/Sept/2008

Thanks to everyone who has found this article via Boxxet.com!