This week Apple has announced another redesign of the iPod line: new colours for the Shuffles, a shorter, squatter Nano, and one new model: the iPod Touch, which is pretty much the iPhone without the phone.
Now one thing I’ve heard about the iPhone is that it’s the best iPod ever, and from that perspective the Touch makes a lot of sense. The iPhone market is limited by (among other things) the fact that most people who would want or need a cellphone already have a cellphone, and often that phone is attached to a contract with dire consequences (or at least monetary penalties) when breached. Personally, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of convergence; I don’t need a cellphone that’s also a camera, MP3 player, internet device, and corkscrew, prefering to have multiple tools each of which does one or two jobs well to one tool which does many things half-assedly.
So while the early-adopter in me was tempted by the iPhone, ultimately it doesn’t really suit my needs technically. (It also doesn’t suit my needs for other, more complicated reasons that concern my cellphone habits, but leave that be.) However, I have been thinking I might need a new MP3 player — the old one’s getting a little flaky battery-wise, and replacing the battery on an iPod seems almost more trouble than it’s worth — so the Touch is a temptation in its own right.
And yet… while there are many cool things about the Touch, I’m wondering if they’ve taken too much away from the iPhone. Specifically, I’m disappointed to see that the Touch doesn’t seem to have the “Notes” application; scribbling quick notes was one of the few things I found the old Palm devices useful for back in the day, and it would be handy to have that on the Touch. In general, it’s unclear whether the Touch would be extensible (through widgets or whatever) in the way that the Palms were, or that the iPhone is.
I’m withholding judgement until the Touch ships and I can check one out at the friendly not-exactly-neighbourhood Apple store, but right now it seems like I’m Goldilocks with only the first two choices. The iPhone is too much, while the Touch might not be enough.
(Or I might go for something that’s just an MP3 player without the pretensions of the Touch; such a device would have even less, but my expectations would be correspondingly altered. As would, I imagine, the price.)