iPod Touch Mini-Review

Had a first chance to try the new iPod Touch today and its hard not to be impressed by its PDA like features. In fact the more I look at it, the more I suspect that only Apple's decision to pull the ability to add calendar appointments on the fly saved Palm's corporate backsides.

First thing that you'll notice about the Touch is its speed. Flicking between programs is near instant with even the most demanding of applications (specifically Safari) starting with no discernible delay.

Video performance is excellent - although I never had the time to upload any of my own videos, nothing I saw made me think that this would work any less well than converting videos to existing 5G iPods.

The Coverflow feature works exactly as advertised and more than anything does a fantastic job of keeping the iPod at the top of the MP3 player pile. It always performed well, but now it looks good in use too - at least until you decide to kill the screen to save battery life.

Talking of battery life, five hours seemed about right for video playback. No worries about lasting a full day for muic listening either - although everytime you sync the battery will get juiced, so its unlikely you'll ever see the low battery warning in anything other than exceptional circumstances.

As an MP3 player then, the iPod Touch excels. How does it fare as a PDA? I'd like to say that this is the death knell for traditional devices from companies like Palm, except that Apple decided to cripple the Calendar application at the last minute.

Which seems a pretty arbitrary thing to do, especially as the contact application allows creation of new contacts - something a lot less useful than the calendar app.

Safari is amazing - unchanged from the iPhone version its crispness and clarity onscreen puts even VGA resolution Pocket PCs to shame. This feature alone makes the iPod Touch an easy sell for Apple: this is the ultimate internet tablet for home use.

There's little more to add. The Touch looks astonishing, its hard to gauge its size until you hold it in your hands. The screen is bright and very readable in all ambient lighting conditions (and didn't exhibit any of the negative black issues that apparently afflict other people's Touches). Finlly the on-screen keyboard is brilliant and as easy to use as any of the thumbpad sized qwerty keyboards that phone makers have been adding to their devices.

The only thing left to discuss are the omissions. Firstly I've already mentioned the new calendar appointment omission twice, so by bringing it up a third time I hope I can convey my total bemusement at the the decision to remove it from the shipping ROM. Secondly I'm a little surprised at the decision to skip an eBook reader from the iPhone/iPod Touch feature set. Here's a new iTunes Music Store just waiting to happen.

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Where Have All The Big Screens Gone?

The trend to reduce the size of smart phones and PDA phones has continued apace over the last few years, but the cost has been high - we're all staring at smaller screens and getting eyestrain in the process.

Apart from the Universal and Advantage VGA devices from HTC, the average screen size has shrunk to around 2.5" - even the WVGA screen on the Toshiba G900 is a trifling 3" in diagonal.

First glimpse of the HTC Panda suggested a reversal of that trend, but in fact that suffers from a small screen too.

Now before you question my eyesight, let me point out that there's a secondary reason for wanting a bigger screen on my devices - Transcriber. This is the most accurate method of adding large amounts of text on a mobile device (well it is for me anyway) and a smaller screen restricts me to a few words at a time rather than the whole paragraph that the larger 3.5" screens allow. Especially useful when doing something creative like a blog post, article or proposal, when it reduces the number of distracting pauses which occur whilst waiting for the text to be recognised.

So lets see some more bigger screens and if it means a bigger device in the pocket, well I'll find a way around that!

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Will The iPhone Payoff For O2?

The announcement of O2's exclusive deal with Apple for the iPhone in the UK didn't make a huge ripple in the blogpool - after all we were pretty sure that O2 had got the contract once they started rolling out EDGE on their 2G towers - the data connection supported by the iPhone.

What's more interesting are the dynamics behind the package and just how much O2 thinks they are going to make on the deal.

The £269 sticker price appears to be completely unsubsudised and means that the cheapest deal you'll get for an iPhone will cost you £900 over the 18 month minimum contract. That's an awful lot of readies given the iPhone's shortcomings, some of which will be more important over here than in the US, where usage patterns aren't the same at all. I'm guessing early take up will be brisk - but will tail off quickly, there aren't that many people ready to pay that sort of money out on a phone who are also out of a contract. Which means that O2 are going to have to start subsidising it - as early as January if my expectations of sales are right. And probably by March/April they'll be offering it on any price plan you like.

Why will sales be so stunted? The iPod Touch. 80% of the iPhone, 25% of the price.

Apple has re-written the rules in terms of interface, appearance and expected performance, but ultimately the lack of a keyboard, 3G and a decent camera will hurt sales in text and photo crazy Britain.

And the best suggestion I've seen to combat iPhone-itis (contracted by the companies who didn't get the iPhone deal) is not to launch your own music store (although they all pretty much have anyway) but rather to cut the price on video calling, something the 2G iPhone will never manage.

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Latest Is Not Always Greatest

I've been using a Windows Mobile 2003 SE device for the last couple of days and after nearly two years of windows Mobile 5 its something of a revelation to step back in time and find that things really were better in days of yore.

For example, who decided that we all wanted to abandon RAM for Flash in our devices, with the attendant loss of performance and additional boot up time that this brings? Every single WM5 device has flash ROM for device storage. Surely we should be allowed to choose whether we value performance over battery life?

Of course the justification has always been that having ROM storage means that we won't lose data if we ever suffer a flat battery. But as I trust myself to ensure that this never happens (and to have a valid backup on storage card if it does) I'd quite happily trade that feature for a bit of extra 'zing' - and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

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iPod To Save The PDA, Maim Windows Mobile, Kill Palm

In a world where we're constantly being told that the unconnected PDA is dead, its interesting to see that Apple joined HP in launching new phone-free PDAs this week.

Whilst HP's iPaqs were new only in name, Apple dropped a stealth bomb down the pants of Palm and HP themselves (being the only two major players inhabiting this sector) by launching the iPod Touch - aka the 'i' (as its an iPhone without the Phone).

Now the iPod is an MP3 player isn't it? Well yes, but lets just take a quick peek at the feature list and see how well it does as a PDA.

Calendars and contacts are all present and correct, shouldn't be too hard to manage your day. Web browsing is at the same high quality as the iPhone, thanks to their shared Safari browser. Music and video will naturally be iPod strongpoints.

So we've covered off around 75% of PDA users complete function lists already. The only real failings are the absence of an email client (although I'm guessing that will be rectified pretty soon (officially or otherwise) and an ebook reader. The former has some impact, although access to web-based mail will still be supported through the browser.

All in all its a pretty good impression of a PDA - all the more worrying for execs at Palm, because if Apple decides to put its mind to building a new PDA platform based around the iPhone I would expect it to hit the target very firmly indeed.

On the plus side, UK availability is expected for September 28th, so less than three weeks until we can sample the delights of the iPod Touch for ourselves.

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Maybe The PDA Isn't Quite Dead

The companies that put a spin on sales numbers have been telling us that converged devices are going to kill the traditional (ie non-connected) PDA stone-dead. Recent evidence, however, is starting to suggest that this is far from the truth, even if recent sales trends have been consistent with those predictions.

To deal with the sales progressions first. At about the same time that the analysts started telling us that converged devices were the way to go, all the key companies in the PDA market killed development on regular PDAs and threw research money at the PDA/phone as the cash cow of the future. PDA sales started dropping - but with good reason: no new devices = no compulsion to upgrade.

Palm (for many years market leader) concentrated on its Treo line, so its PDAs stagnated. Their current line up consists of lightly warmed over seconds from 2005. HP has had the same line-up of traditional iPaqs since before the arrival of WM5, as has Dell with its Axim x50 line. The fourth and fifth members of the big five (Sony and Toshiba) didn't even bother - both killed their PDA divisions.

It was left to the smaller players (principally Acer and Fujitsu-Siemens, plus ODMs like Mitac) to make what innovations where to be made.

Smartphone sales were rocketing ahead in the same period. A combination of poor statistics (counting Symbian S40 devices as smart for example), a number of lucrative network OEM deals for HTC, greater Blackberry sales (an email terminal, not a smartphone) and Nokia's decision to start shipping Symbian S60 in a greater number of devices (effectively chalking a smartphone sale from a user with no intention of buying or using a smartphone) meant that comparitively PDA figures looked bleaker and bleaker by the passing quarter. Earlier this year Dell and Fujitsu-Siemens reacted to these trends by pulling out of the market completely.

Which is a shame, because I think the PDA market is about to bounce back strongly.

Why? Because joining a PDA and a phone together is a really, really stupid idea. There roles are just too different.

A phone needs to be small. The idea is, after all, that you carry it with you everywhere. And a small phone must have a small screen and a small keypad. A PDA needs to be big. To fit the big screen on which you can scribble your notes and view your webpages/documents/calendars in relative comfort. Ideally it would have a decent sized keyboard too.

Two diagramatically opposite sets of features which make for pretty difficult compromise decisions in the design phase of a converged device. Do you go big and build a PDA with phone functionality that people won't be able to carry around easily; or go small and build a phone with PDA functions, but strip the PDA of some of the utility which made it so popular.

Ultimately all ways have been tried and none have been a great success. And the evidence is all around that users are starting to switch back to two devices to give themselves a complete solution. That two device solution does now seem to centre around a Windows Mobile Standard (AKA Smartphone) device and a separate PDA. But its a trend I'm expecting to see grow in the future, even if it will never buck the smartphone trend.

Its pleasing then, to see, in amongst HP's recent iPaq refresh, a pair of traditonal PDAs, a high end (with VGA!) and low end device, really pitching for some increased market share. Hopefully they'll grow the market as a whole just by reminding consumers and prosumers that such a device really does still exist.

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Foleo - A Sign Of Big Problems At Palm

Its rare for a non-product to consume so much of the oxygen around a company that its actual product line disappears into oblivion, but at Palm that's what's been happening for a rather long time.

Since around mid-2005 Jeff Hawkins has been pumping a mysterious third product line for Palm. We wondered what ground-breaking device this could be? After all Palm's existing products were rotting on the vine and its one major source of income, the Treo smartphone, was under increasing competition from all directions. It had to be something pretty impressive to drag much needed resources away from the core business. Especially as the company had undergone a chaotic restructuring/sell-off which appeared to leave it less able to compete than before.

Then Palm announced a Windows Mobile powered Treo. This had to be a sign. This new product line was so good that the company was even prepared to jump into bed with Microsoft, its erstwhile nemesis, throwing into stark contrast the shortcomings of its aging Palm OS based products.

Ed Colligan, the other half of Palm's Morecambe and Wise double act, even laughed off the launch of the iPhone saying "We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone" then added "PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in." This must be a company with some dynamite packed up its sleeves, we thought at the time.

Then, to a grand fanfare, Palm announced the Foleo. A product aimed at a niche of a niche. A product looking and sounding like a Psion/Teklogix NetBook half a decade late. A product, most of all, looking decidedly like a last, desperate throw of the dice.

Palm promised a September launch and trotted out a handful of developers who had been 'priviliged' to be allowed to develop the launch applications for the Foleo. Then as rumours spread that the Foleo was delayed Palm denied that this was the case.

Damn right it wasn't.

Palm wasn't delaying the Foleo at all, instead, just weeks before its expected launch, after at least 2 whole years in development, Palm has decided to cancel the Foleo completely.

Apparently overhyping and then launching the world's least saleable product wasn't making them look stupid enough, so they decided to go for the hat-trick and cancel it without selling any, at a cost of $10million. Proving that they didn't even have the courage of their convictions. Makes you wonder what they've been doing for 2 years doesn't it? And why the person who made the decision to kill the Foleo this week didn't stand up 2 years ago and say something then? Hopefully questions Palm's shareholders will be looking to get answered next time they have a little get together.

And, as an aside, that iPhone? Looks like since launch its outsold every single smartphone in the world. Put together. But I think I see Palm's problem here: Ed Colligan thinks the Treo is a decent phone. Now there's a guy who's never had to use one.

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