iPod’ed

I gave in, and bought myself an 8Gb iPod touch. It’s actually a fairly pathetic amount of storage, given that even my old 1st 2nd generation iPod has more storage, but let’s not go there. They’re pretty popular, it seems – most of the shops I tried were sold out, and won’t be getting any more for a month or so. Some had a couple of 16Gb versions left in stock, which suggests that people here are, like me, going for the slightly more affordable version. Eventually, I found a shop in the Funan IT mall that had stock left. I didn’t let myself think about it, and just bought it.

Setting it up wasn’t quite as smooth as I’d hoped. It actually doesn’t work with my old iBook, which is still running OS X 10.3 something, which was a bit of a surprise – in all of the reading I’d done in research, I hadn’t seen it mentioned that older Macs won’t run the iPod Touch. Boo for Apple. So, I had to run it with my Windows XP laptop. It makes little difference, in that most of my multimedia files are on an external hard drive, but it was a bit annoying.

I set it up for local time etc, and a number of other things, before I ran the update to 1.1.1 – which then wiped out all of my settings so I had to do it again. That was also annoying. Setting it up to use the wifi in my apartment was actually pretty straightforward, though, and the web browser works pretty well.

I took the iPod with me when I went to the cinema last night, and I liked it: watching videos while on the MRT was enjoyable, and the screen is plenty big enough. Sound quality was excellent for listening to music whilst walking around town on a Saturday night. I haven’t bothered to use the Apple earphones, though: the lack of a volume control immediately makes them useless to me, since I know I move through widely varying areas of environmental noise, and I don’t want to be constantly getting the iPod itself out of its carrying pouch to change the volume. Speaking of the carrying pouch: although I’ve been pretty careful with it, and kept it in a soft pouch while I was out and about, the iPod’s chrome back picked up a couple of scratches within the first few hours of use. Hmmm.

Overall, though, I think that with its small size, great screen and wifi access, the iPod Touch fits my personal requirements; I won’t regret buying it.