I was intrigued when I got home from Day #1 of Wordcamp Toronto 2008 to read my new friend Daniele Rossi’s blog, and to find that he wrote a post that was not very much different from one that I intended to write when I got home.  Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, allow me to proceed with my evaluation of the iPod Touch (in his case, iPhone) as an alternative to a laptop.

In fact, Daniele (god I want to put two L’s in that) found himself in almost the exact same predicament a while ago at Podcamp Montreal that I found myself in today.  Today, I was going to Wordcamp and didn’t own a laptop.  He was going to Podcamp and wanted to see if he could live without his Powerbook.  Our experiences and reactions are pretty much similar.

When we arrived at Centennial College this morning, my friend Matt was happy (and quick) to point out that there was wifi.  I breathed a sigh of relief because unlike my friend Daniele, I don’t have 3G capability.  The iPod Touch hooked into the free wifi without issue, but it was kind of annoying because the wifi provider for the weekend had blocked all the ports that e-mail clients use for IMAP and SMTP.  Oh well.  It just meant I had to check my mail with Safari (the web browser) instead of the Mail application.

I spent almost the whole day (minus the lunch time) reading e-mail, using search.twitter.com to follow the convention’s tag (#wcto08), and tweeting myself.  So essentially I was flipping back and forth between Twitterfon (my Twitter app I use) and Safari.  I have to say something.  I was absolutely FLOORED by how well the battery lasted.  I shut the Touch off during Charles Hodgson’s presentation on podcasting (in my opinion, the best presentation of the day) but I feel it could have lasted the whole day.  I should note though, that I never listened to music once today.  It was solid wifi usage all day and the iPod Touch battery held up like a trooper.  Laptop users (Windows and Mac) were flocking to the charging station at lunch.  My battery still had half left.  I really didn’t think it would do that well in a full-day test like that, and it blew me away.

Data entry?  The iPod Touch/iPhone keyboard is… an acquired taste.  I saw quite a few Touch/iPhone users today and some of them could type on it a LOT faster than I could.  I have to admit that the worst part of tweeting today was entering that #@&*(! hash-code (#wcto08).  The “#” is on one keyboard, the letters are on another keyboard, and the numbers are on a third keyboard.  I admit by the tenth or fifteenth time that I did it, I could do it pretty quick, but… I really wish there was a way to make macros, or that the Touch would support some method of predictive text entry.  Surely it doesn’t take a lot of artificial intelligence for it to realize the fifteenth time it sees me type “#w” in a day that the rest of the “word” is going to be “cto08″.

Aside from that, those who are subcribed to my Twitter feed (or are friends with me on Facebook) will tell you that I had no inhibitions tweeting today.  I also e-mailed a few times through the Gmail iPhone web interface, and checked out the odd website that was mentioned by a presenter.  Admittedly, I did grab Matt’s Macbook Pro a couple of times when “serious” surfing was required.

So what are my thoughts?  If I was stuck on a desert island (that had wifi and a place to recharge the battery) I could probably live with having an iPod Touch as my sole tool to access the internet.  It may not do everything my desktop computer does, but it doesn’t need to, and it wasn’t intended to.  In my humble view, there are very few things that any of those $300 “netbooks” (Acer AspireOne, Asus EEEpc, etc) can do that my iPod Touch can’t.  Sure the interface isn’t the same and the screen is smaller, but the netbooks don’t fit in your pocket either!

I was very impressed with my Touch today.  (But I really hope I find a way to do keyboard macros.)

Tags: apple, ipod touch, wcto08, wordcamp toronto

Comments RSS