twenty-three

Last week, during a slighty spontaneous moment, I made a quick run to Best Buy and picked out a new iPod. I’d been eyeing the Touch a bit over the past couple months and seized the oportunity of this week’s travel to Louisville as a good excuse to make the investment. I don’t like lugging around my work laptop when I don’t have to, even around town, and I’ve been looking for a calendar device to replace my defunct Palm.

So, here I am typing away at a blog post using a miniature keyboard on board my return flight from Kentucky. And as I thumb-tap along to Death Cab for Cutie in my headphones, I remain impressed with this little device’s versatility and usability.

First, I was able to spend most of my time at the conference this week connected and in touch with emails and work from home. The Wi-fi capabilities of the iPod are excellent. Anywhere I went where I could get wireless, I was quickly able to sync up with email and calendars, along with Twitter and to-do lists. The only issue I’ve had in that department was trying to access “pay-to-use” networks at the airport, which was frustrating, blamed more on their inability to handle diverse mobile users rather than the device having issues itself.

I’ve also been impressed with how much use this thing has been able to handle with ‘ner a hiccup. I’ve been going strong for days now, simply charging up for a few minutes here and there. No overheating. No funky locking up. (I’m clearly a Windows user, as I’ve come to expect such things).

The applications included and available for free download are all pretty slick and really expand upon the versatility for me. Like I mentioned, Twitter got a lot of use this week. I’ve tested two apps, the free Twitteric and the $2.99 Tweetie. I’m going with Tweetie because of the better searching and no adds. I have my finances syncing through Mint.com, music tracking with last.fm, and much more.

Along with all the standard iPod music features, I’m also very impressed with the new Genuis features incorporated into the Touch. I’ve been really into this custom recommendation feature in iTunes and now it comes on the iPod. If you haven’t tried this yet at home, you really should. iTunes will build recommendation playlists from your music library and listening trends. I’ve found it great fir rediscovering music from my collection that hasn’t gotten much attention lately. A good reminder that I have too much music.

My iLife is now more completely integrated. I’m not sure if this is good or not, but at least my email response time has decreased significantly and I’m more organized. I’m still going to give the students who sit at the back of the INN with their iPhones going strong a hard time. But I think I get it a bit more now.