nastybun

Bonjour, reader. I hope you’re well. Has that rash gone away yet? I hope so, it looked a little dodgy there for a while.

I got a new ipod touch a couple of weeks ago, the drambuie¹ model. It’s an upgrade from my trusty 5G 60GB model. There are many things about it that I like, it’s a good music player, it can has many useful apps and all that whatnot you’ve already heard about. Given I’m a miserable bugger I’ll point out the things I don’t like about it. The most irksome thing is the way it deals with compilation damons². On my old 5G, when a damon was set to be a compilation the artists on it would not appear in the main artists list. This was great, as it kept things tidy. On the new one however they do appear. When a damon artist is set in the info the various contributers are grouped where than damon would appear in the list so it’s not too catestrophic, but for a pedantic git like myself it’s very irritating. Especially when a damn near 5 year old model does it right. Googling shows much rage aimed at Apple about it, but they seem to be steadfastly ignoring it. In my spite I removed most of the compilations from itunes, but the nerdrage smoulders. If I’m utterly wrong about this, please feel free to correct me. I’d welcome being proven stupid in this case.

The other two things are a bit less irksome. Firstly the RAM is left at 256MB, rather than the 512 that the new iphone has. That’s not too much of an issue, as apps and whatnot are still being made with the old 3GS in mind, but it’s a limitation that could prove to annoy in the nebulous futuretimes. Lastly the camera is far worse than the iphone – a 0.7 megrepixel senser vs a 5 megapixel. I took a few photos today on my ride, this one for example, which you can see is rather less nice than this one that was taken on my Nokia E72 workphone which has a 5mp camera. Not a deal breaker, but something to consider against the ‘ipod touch is an iphone without the phone’ position. Also the body has a rounded back rather than the iphone’s nice square one, but is a little thinner – hence they couldn’t fit the nicer camera in. It does all the rest though, including facetime – I’ve not tried it, but I believe the front-facing camera is about the same as iphone. The retina display has a silly name, but is a very nice little screen. All in all, I probably should have stuck with my perfectly functional 5G ipod.. but it’s fun to mess around with some of the apps.

I might briefly (can you breef?) mention the Nokia E72 here actually. It’s a smaertphone without a touch screen, but it has a full qwerty physical keyboard to partially make up for it. The web browsing is not as nice as anything with a touchscreen, but it has ample social media apps for all that sort of need (it’s called Snaptu and it works great), the call quality is great and the battery life is phenomenal. I charge it once once a week, and usually only because I plug it into my PC to get some photos off. It shows that Nokia can make some fantastic hardware, but they really need to get back into their design-fu. I maintain they make the best mobile telephone hardware you can buy – it’s just that their UI needs some serious work. Every mobile phone I’ve had – including workphones – have been Nokias, so I really hope that the new CEO (Stephen Eloop, ex Microsoft and the first non Finnish CEO ever!) can fix whatever is holding them back there. I don’t want them to out-Apple the iphone, I want them to out-Nokia the iphone. I’ll buy it, if they can pull it off. Wow me, Nokia! Make me a phone I don’t have to be defensive about liking!

That’ll do for now. There’s a few things in the pipeline for future posts that I might even get off my arse and make happen in the next few weeks, but you know.. we’ll see.

1. Brand new-ey
2. Damon Albarn – album