Waiting for the Next iPod touch Model
Fourteen months ago I traded in my old iPod mini for a new 8-GB iPod touch. I think the price at the time was about $230, but I got a 10% discount for exchanging the old iPod mini.
Six weeks later, I dropped the iPod touch from waist height onto brick pavement and broke it; the impact created a dent in the metal back and apparently crushed some of the electronic components inside. (These things are surprisingly delicate.) I took it to the Apple store on Boylston Street in Boston and asked if they could fix it. The answer was no, but they offered me a refurbished unit in exchange for the broken unit and a little under $130. I have been using the refurbished iPod for over a year now.
Since I live in an urban area, I usually have wifi connectivity. (For example, when I’m waiting for the bus in Kendall Square, I get a good connection to MIT Guest wifi.) This means I don’t need to buy a smart phone such as the iPhone; I get nearly iPhone-equivalent functionality from two devices, my minimal cell phone ($40 a month with Verizon) and my iPod touch, saving me roughly $40 per month that I can spend on books or music.
I was slow to take advantage of all of the iPod touch’s capabilities, using it initially for listening to music, podcasts, and audiobooks. I usually commute to work by walking, a 45-minute trip each way. I can listen to two audiobooks per month plus quite a few podcasts during my commuting time.
The first apps I added were news-, information-, and book-related: New York Times, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, WeatherBug Elite, Stanza, and Shakespeare Pro. I find that the iPod touch makes for a great electronic book reader (although I still haven’t found a good app for reading PDFs of research papers).
Lately I’ve been taking advantage of the iPod touch’s abilities to act as a small pocket computer. I purchased the American Heritage Deluxe dictionary app ($35), and I feel like I’ve already gotten my money’s worth for that app alone because now I have an unabridged dictionary in my pocket and I use it all the time. I also installed the Facebook, LinkedIn, TweetDeck, and WordPress apps for managing my Web 2.0 presence. And recently I set up two new email addresses that I use primarily from the iPod touch with the Mail app.
Lately, I’ve begun buying movies and TV shows from the iTunes store. The TV shows are, in my opinion, an incredible bargain. I bought the first season (twelve episodes, 10 hours) of HBO’s Rome for only $20. Recently, I taught myself how to use Handbreak and VLC to copy my DVDs to mpeg files formatted for the iPod touch.
The result is that my little 8-GB iPod touch is feeling cramped for space. First of all, the 8-GB iPod touch actually has 7.66 GB of storage capacity. (Is the remaining 0.34 GB used for the operating system and included apps?) Second, I have almost 2 GB of apps installed, the dictionary being the largest. Third, I like to carry one or two TV shows or a movie with me, and each of these is roughly 0.6 GB in size. Fourth and finally, I like to carry plenty of music and audiobooks.
Consequently, I’m ready to buy a new iPod touch. The bigger models have 32 GB and 64 GB of storage and list for $300 and $400, respectively. However, rumor has it that the next model of the iPod touch will include a camera for stills and video, and I would find a camera quite useful. And rumor has it that Apple is about to announce its new tablet computer, allegedly named the iSlate. So I’ve decided to bide my time to see what Apple might announce in the next few months.
January 03 2010 03:58 pm | Computing
Sphaerula » Waiting for the Next iPod touch Model « iPod News on 03 Jan 2010 at 4:55 pm #
[...] is the original post: Sphaerula » Waiting for the Next iPod touch Model January 4th, 2010 | Tags: brick-pavement, electronic, from-waist, height-onto, impact, ipod, [...]