Full FeedThree ways iPod Touch gets it wrong
I recently got an iPod touch (8 GB), and agree: it’s the most amazing gadget I’ve ever owned. In terms of a review, let me just say it’s the gizmo we’ve been waiting for. It’s the freaking Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a Tri-corder. Arthur C. Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and that’s the only way I can explain how this device, thin as a pencil, works. Magic.
But (and there’s always a “but”)...
There are a few areas where it could be improved, as well as a few that are just plain dumb.
The Interface
The original iPod interface was a perfect example of why they call Apple product “elegant.” Four buttons and a scroll wheel. You could have the thing in your pocket and use it flawlessly. No more. With the touch interface, it has to be out and in front of you. Add to the fact that if you live in a cold weather area (like me), you’re going to have to take your glove off when you want to skip a song.
Another problem of the touch interface is the lack of harmony between it and the Apple laptop. On my Macbook, dragging my fingers down causes the screen to move down (the scroll bar matches the movement), on the touch, moving your finger from top to bottom causes the screen to move up (the interface acts as if you’re “grabbing” the screen). This screws me up all the time when moving from iPod to laptop.
Thirdly, I need a way to add words to the iPod’s vocabulary. While the autocorrect function is very useful (esp. considering the cramped keyboard and my chunky fingers), there are certain words—and I’m talking about profanity here—I use a lot which it doesn’t recognize. Supposedly the touch will eventually “learn” the words I want to use, but I rolled out of bed the other day and turned on my laptop to find out I’d told my friends that “It’s snowing outside. Duck.”
Internet
The iPod touch moves beyond music and video (both of which it does well) to become an internet device, a handheld personal computer, a convenient replacement for laptop functions—as long as you’re connected to the internet. Of course, in America, finding an open wireless connection is about as hard as finding an independent coffee shop, except when you’re in an airport. What can Apple do to fix this? Nothing. It’s a whiny, minor rant, but it still drives me nuts: without an internet connection, the touch loses a lot of its functionality.
One problem I do feel justified in complaining about is this: at home, my Airport Base Station (an original Graphite: old school!) is set up to be “hidden,” that is, to not broadcast its name in a list of available networks. While getting my iPod to access the station was no problem, getting it to remember the station is. I must have reentered the name and password a half-dozen times, yet every time I come home, I’d call it a 50-50 gamble as to whether it will find the Airport.
Lack of Firewire Support
I’ve harped on this before but it still boggles the mind; my new iPod no longer charges on Firewire-based iPod devices. And since my first iPod was the original 10GB, that means there’s a lot of them. Both my car and home charger, along with several travel cords, are now useless and must be replaced. One of the complaints against the greenness of iPods (and computers in general) is that people don’t keep using old products that still work: they upgrade. Good news for the computer industry, bad news for the landfill. Now, I’m not going to just throw these accessories away; I’ll pass them on to friends with older iPods. But I’ll still have to replace several perfectly good products, all because Apple is discontinuing support for a product that Apple itself owns.
And Furthermore
My other complaints are ones you’ve no doubt heard: lack of Flash support in Safari is criminally stupid, tethering Apple to its partner YouTube for whatever commercial reasons. I’ve always rolled my eyes about complaints of the “Apple monopoly” on the iPod when it was an issue of getting an Apple product (songs from iTunes) onto another player. But now it’s an issue of getting product onto an Apple device, and Apple is preventing that. Indeed, Apple is knowingly throttling the development and distribution of software, which is so freaking Bizarro I expect to walk into Macworld and see a strange Steve Jobs with a pale, angular face and an amulet that says “sTeVE #1.”
And you know, except for the amulet, that’s pretty much how Steve’s been looking lately…
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If Apple put Flash on the iPod, you would be complaining way more about that than you do about it’s absence. It already runs like crap on the full-fledged computers and OSes from Apple, it would be criminal to put it on the iPod.
on November 8, 2008 at 11:55 AM - LINKFlash? Adobe Flash? You crazy?
on November 8, 2008 at 12:04 PM - LINKNope. You can ask pretty much anyone who has knowledge of the Flash platform and its OS X relationship and they will agree you do NOT want it on the iPod or iPhone. Test it out. An 800 MHz G4 with 512 MB of RAM can’t play a YouTube video smoothly, while an old Pentium Windows machine can. Flash was never built right for OS X.
on November 8, 2008 at 12:09 PM - LINKI should add that while current Macs can run Flash seemingly smoothly, it takes a whole lot more overhead than on Windows, and you’ll often her the fans rev up.
on November 8, 2008 at 12:10 PM - LINKI, too, hope Flash doesn’t come to the iPhone / iPod Touch.
Flash websites are crazy annoying!
on November 8, 2008 at 01:23 PM - LINKI love the iPod touch, but there are definitely a few things that I would change. This article lists
on November 8, 2008 at 05:56 PM - LINKa few shortcomings of the iPod Touch. Yours plus a few more.
I love my i pod and i like buying song from i tunes but i dont undertand why simple cd art can not be found like ( three sides live ) by genises and and more
on November 9, 2008 at 12:36 AM - LINKA couple of your complaints seem unwarranted.
Apple decided that on such a small device, it would be wasteful to dedicate a vertical strip of screen for use solely as a scroll bar. Scrolling by dragging directly on content is a great solution.
If you wanted “always on” internet, you should have bought the product Apple designed for this purpose: an iPhone.
As other have already mentioned, Flash is simply evil. The biggest use of Flash is to bog sites down with annoying kinetic advertisements.
Nobody forces them to embed video in a Flash-based player with a crappy UI. The sooner sites stop using Adobe’s proprietary Flash, and convert to actual web standards, the better we’ll all be.
Ever try to bookmark a view deep within a completely Flash based website?—it can’t be done. How about simply selecting some text within a Flash presentation in order to copy it to another application?—doesn’t always work. Ever have Flash just quit working during a long session? It has crappy memory management. The Flash horrors go on and on.
I am however more sympathetic your complaints about lack of FireWire support, and the impracticality of a touch interface for pocketed or gloved use.
on November 9, 2008 at 04:03 PM - LINKSo, Apple shouldn’t include Flash because web designers don’t use it well? That seems counter productive. It’s not like web designers are suddenly going to say, “Hey, Flash doesn’t work on the iPhone, so let’s not use it.”
And the reason so many sites use Flash video is because it just works more reliably across platforms and browsers. Of course the video looks worse than QuickTime or AVI, but people are going to complain less about quality than about not even being able to see something without downloading and installing software.
Yes, Flash-based sites are annoying, but the Flash technology is very useful in some cases. Personally, I agree with Bill. I’d much rather have the option available to me, perhaps with the ability to turn it off, than to be flat-out denied it.
on November 9, 2008 at 04:48 PM - LINK@Kirk Hiner:
“So, Apple shouldn’t include Flash because web designers don’t use it well?”
Yes. That, and the fact that Apple would become reliant on Adobe producing and maintaining a Flash player that doesn’t embarrass the iPhone with poor performance. And because allowing Flash (Java, Silverlight, and other virtual machines), it only encourages lazy developers to attempt compromised cross-platform solutions which don’t look and feel like they belong on an iPhone.
“...It’s not like web designers are suddenly going to say, “Hey, Flash doesn’t work on the iPhone, so let’s not use it.”.
Actually, if the iPhone (and other webkit based browsers) gain significant market-share, it is very likely that web designers will do whatever is necessary to properly support them. God knows that for the longest time they certainly bent over backwards to write ‘works best with IE’ sites.
“...I’d much rather have the option available to me, perhaps with the ability to turn it off, than to be flat-out denied it.”
Of course you would. But one of the reasons Apple’s products have that “It’s so simple, it just works” characteristic is that Apple doesn’t overwhelm users with a jillion configuration options—particularly when enabling them could compromise the the user experience and create potential support problems.
Yeah it hurts when Apple doesn’t design things just the way you’d like them to. If this turns some people away, so be it. Apple doesn’t want or need to be all things to all people.
on November 9, 2008 at 06:04 PM - LINK@Brett
Wow, by your reasoning we should shutdown the internet, since its biggest use is to deliver hard core porn to any kid able to click a mouse button.
Sure, Flash is use FOR evil purposes, just like the internet, money, speech.. pretty anything on the planet, but that doesn’t make it evil unto itself.
I can imagine the rooms of the people who flat out hate flash, they must have no concept of style or aesthetics, blank white walls, oak or black laminate desks with 15 billion action figures covering every available square inch…
I use flash. I’m SICK of microsoft’s buggy Internet Explorer and having to add extra code to all of my sites just to get it to work correctly as it already does in Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino, etc… It’s a waste of my time and money.
Plus I can actually make a site LOOK the way I DESIGNED IT TO LOOK! I’m not at the mercy of an ancient web language “designed” by engineers, not artists. I don’t fill my site with a bunch of crappy animations or intros, no blinking junk or sounds for every mouse-over, I just use it to make my sites look nice, and I can rest assured everyone is seeing it the way I intended (un-color-corrected monitors notwithstanding).
Almost every singe thing you view on your ipod or off was done by artists, imagine if they had to do things through some limited engineer’s version of an artist’s studio.
Best example, the difference between a concept car and the final product (after engineers completely destroy its soul).
@ Bill Stiteler
Maybe rather than trying to get your iPod to learn profanity, you should take its lead and remove that from your vocabulary instead.
as far as my own complaints with the touch… the best selling ipod is the Classic, for one simple reason, CAPACITY. How can we have 160GB ipod in one hand, and then a supposed flagship model touch that can’t even hold a person’s entire MUSIC collection, let alone, pics, movies, games, apps.. 32GB is a complete joke. worse, the previous touch already has 32GB, the upgrade didn’t go up at all.
on November 9, 2008 at 11:02 PM - LINKYour iPod Touch won’t charge on any FireWire-based charger?
Better not let my 32GB Touch hear that…since it’s charging up right now on an old Apple iPod AC adapter that feeds to a FireWire cable with an iPod connector at the other end.
My wife is waiting to connect hers when mine is done.
on November 10, 2008 at 01:07 AM - LINKI had a similar problem with the work WiFi which is also hidden (WPA security though). If it didn’t find it, I just had to open the WiFi Sheet in Settings and wait. It would eventually show up and I could just tap it if it didn’t automatically select it.
Doesn’t your iPod have a button on the wire for changing tracks like my iPhone? I agree that it does take more if you don’t have one. If not, I believe the latest version of the Touch has that.
Get over missing Flash. It ain’t gonna happen. You can scream “Duck” all your want, but the code sucks on OS X (Adobe blames gcc) and it is a highly unwanted means to bring applications to the platform that Apple doesn’t want.
on November 10, 2008 at 02:59 AM - LINKSteveH: Bizarre! Just to check, do you have a 2nd Gen Touch? Because as I mentioned in my previous article, when I connect mine to either a Firewire cable (which I used in my car charger) or my radio/speaker dock, I get a message that “charging is not supported with this accessory.”
on November 10, 2008 at 07:59 AM - LINKImagine if scrolling on the iPod Touch worked like on a MacBook. You drag your finger down, the content immediately under your finger scrolls up. How much sense does that make?
on November 11, 2008 at 11:00 AM - LINK