First Contact

It's been a while since I took the time to write anything meaningful. But here I am, about six months later and full of new experiences have come my way. And that makes me hyped! So I will write some personal insight on a few technology topics in the next little while. To start, I would like to write about my newest acquisition: an 8GB version of the iPod Touch!

As I discovered that I have some organizational issues and shortcomings, I took the sound decision of acquiring and actually using a PDA. I have owned several models of PDA's or Smart Phones in the past but I always got bored of them after a few weeks and ended up selling them on EBay. My first one was a Sony Clie back in 2002 and the latest victim prior to the iPod experience was an HTC Touch. So what makes me say that Apple has found a solution to my issues? Read on to find out!

Well there are a few reasons, but I guess the main one must be the very interactive and user friendly interface. Since I am looking at the iPod Touch as a PDA rather than a music player, I must first tell you about the great calendar feature. As most calendars it offers several views (day, month and list) and the possibility to pre program repeating tasks. But what I truly enjoy and find particularly useful is that when in Day mode, you can display two events that start or finish at the same time and that the interface divides the screen into 2 cartoon like bubbles that are parallel rather than overlapping. This makes for a neater visualization as well as planning since you have a clear view of what is going on. Also, unlike some PDA's the sound alert is very discreet and not annoying.

The second nicest feature I must say is the Mail application. How does this affect my organization? Since I primarily rely on Yahoo and Gmail services for my email, I can be anywhere where there is Wi-Fi access and have my email pushed to me and be notified of new messages every 15 minutes. This technology resembles what BlackBerry offers but without the need for a data plan and expensive device. Also the way that the accounts are presented and separated, it allows me to keep a neat structure to each individual email account while having a global overview in the Accounts screen. Therefore I can oversee my four primary accounts with a glance at the screen.

Of course, one cannot write about an iPod product without talking about the music aspect. And as an audiophile, I must say that I am very happy with my purchase. Aside from getting used to iTunes, which will be the object of its own article, the experience has been awesome. I was able to fit about 800 of my favorites and still have over one GB of free space.

To conclude, I would like to mention a few lines about the App Store, which is a nice source of free and low cost applications. So far my favorites are Skype and Weather Eye. When I finally manage to make it to Wal-Mart, my iPod Touch will also serve as a wireless phone through the Skype feature! All being said, I think that this will be my favorite purchase in 09'.