The Magic Touch
October 23rd, 2007A very generous friend today gave me an iPod Touch. It is, perhaps, the most beautiful bit of technology I’ve ever owned.
It’s not the most powerful, or full-featured, or exciting, necessarily. But as an example of design it is amazing. In particular, it doesn’t have many of the features of an iPhone, with which I’ve also played. But it’s also significantly thinner, which is hard to convey in photographs: lying on my kitchen table it was about the same thickness as the coaster on which my wine glass sat. You can just about see how they fit a screen, backlight and touch sensor in that space. So where’s the battery?
Almost every aspect of this seems to be very nicely thought out, and I’m very impressed. Who would have thought, a decade ago, that Unix machines could look like this?
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October 24th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
Here’s a comment made from my iPod touch
October 24th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
[...] Quentin says, who would have thought ten years ago that Unix machines would look like this. The most interesting [...]
November 4th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
What’s the battery life like?
November 4th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Jimmy –
Well, fine for me, so far, but I have unusual ways of using phones and things. I have always, for example, plugged my phone in every night, so as long as a phone has a day’s battery life, it’s OK with me.
I certainly have to plug the Touch in much more frequently than my old iPod Photo, but then the Photo wasn’t always scanning for wifi networks. In addition, I’ve hacked my Touch and put iPhone apps on it, so it’s downloading Mail etc.
Most days I only use it for a few minutes of audio a day, and then some days I’ll be watching long video clips.
All of which is to say that I don’t really have a good answer, but that if you really want battery life, you probably want something with a small, simple screen and no wifi