iPod Touch 2G

At long last, and after years of procrastination and avid Apple-hating, I finally broke down and purchased a refurbished iPod Touch. iTunes aside, I am completely hooked on the thing. It’s so convenient! I think I could probably stop there, but I think that I should add a little more detail since this is my first entry in ages and I plan to mark it with a review tag for all of my non-existent readers out there.

When I got it, I was skeptical, but I got it for about $100, so I was ready to put it through its paces. I loaded a bunch of old music on it using Copy Trans Manager (not iTunes, because CTM lets me add and remove music from any PC without syncing and authorizing anything). I never understood the whole syncing thing for devices like this. Maybe for the iPod brick, er~ Classic, which has no purpose other than storing more music than anyone should have time to listen to, but the Touch is like a tiny Netbook (that can’t really do office apps, but oh-well – it’s a toy, so I’ll cut it some slack). There is hardly any need to connect it to a computer at all.

At the office, I generally just log it onto www.di.fm via Safari and let it play web radio all day while I’m at work. For the gym, I have a few playlists, and driving has a playlist as well. I have not gotten into movie storage, because I am relatively active and find myself idle very seldom – however, I would highly recommend the Air Video app. I use it to stream my movie collection to my device when the fam is watching TV on the tube to which my media center PC is attached. That is extremely useful for the old Twilight Zone Episodes or Star Trek re-runs. Orb is also useful for that purpose, but I use it more for streaming TV directly when I’m not in the house. Unfortunately, I find little time to make use of movies, because I’m usually busy. The iPod’s ability to play music is still its most frequently used feature.

Aside from that, I generally use iBooks and Kindle to read while I’m waiting for things. I realized in retrospect that I seem to wait for a lot of things, since I seems to have read more than 10 classic novels since the day I received the device only a few months ago.

Not much else. The iPod is a very common device, actually a little on the old side these days. The Email feature is the last extremely convenient service I will note before closing, since it makes my laptop almost unnecessary for travel. I can save all that space in my briefcase for snacks or weapons or something – just imagine the convenience of that!

All-in-all, I’m very pleased with it and it does pretty-much everything I want it to do. I have seen a lot of jailbreakers and app junkies load-up on all manner of useful things, but I’m not so much into that. It’s good to have an app for something I need to do when I need to do it, but if there is no need, I could care less. As long as the thing will do what I want it to do as far as E-Books, E-Mail, Web-Radio, Video streaming, and MP3’s, the unit converter, weather, calculator, diet diary, GPS, and all the other crap is just a boatload of gravy.