iProliferation
I'm now the owner of three iPods. My first iPod is a 2nd generation 4GB mini in green which I originally purchased as a music player suitable for taking along running. It's my knockabout iPod since it's of very enduring construction. It's battery is not terribly enduring compared to current iPods, but given my usage pattern the runtime is not much of a problem.
My second iPod is a standard iPod, 20GB of an unknown generation, purchased refurbished from buy.com. Both it and the mini are pre-video, which suits me just fine.
I hardly expected to want a third iPod of any sort, but when my Palm Tungsten T PDA breathed its last yesterday afternoon I found myself on the hunt for a replacement and was surprised at the state of gadgetry these days. (Before I go on I'll note that I was/am specifically not looking for a smartphone. I don't want to replace my Motorola RAZR as I quite like it.)
My immediate thoughts for a Palm replacement were another Palm or a netbook of some sort. The current Palm that's nearly equivalent to my old Palm is the Tungsten E2. I costs $199 and that $199 doesn't buy you very much, unless you really like Palm stuff. 32MB of memory, Bluetooth, a color display and an SD card slot, along with Palm OS and all the goodies you can download for it.
My most likely netbook choice was the Asus EeePC 901, followed by the Nokia N810. Both would be more expensive than the Tungsten E2, but the leap from PDA to Netbook is a very large one featurewise. The only drawback here aside from cost is size. I want something PDA-sized but with features closer to a Netbook. The problem there is the next step up in a Palm is the T|X, which adds more memory and wireless networking to the features the Tungsten E2 already has. But at $299, it still doesn't balance well when its cost/feature ratio is held up against a netbook.
Enter the wildcard. I was chatting with bruceb and Co. about the death of my PDA and he brought up the iPod touch. It had not occurred to me to consider the iPod touch because iPods have traditionally been expensive devices and I thought an iPod touch would be at the upper end of the price range. I also knew very little of its capabilities other than to be able to describe it as an iPhone minus the phone.
Turns out when you take the phone out of the iPhone you're still left with a rather smart device. It has lots of memory, (measured in GB rather than MB) badass graphics compared to the Palm, wireless networking with apps well suited to exploiting it, in a package far more attractive than anything Palm (or the companies making Windows-based PDAs) is making. (And it's still a great music player!) Most surprising was the cost. The iPod touch, though not strictly a PDA, strikes me as significantly superior to the Palm T|X in just about every way, and the base model iPod touch at 8GB of memory costs $229, $70 less than the Palm.
So yeah, I bought an iPod touch.
The PDA seems to be a dying breed in the age of smartphones, but I can't help thinking the companies still making them are accelerating their death with the archaic pricing. Flash memory is cheap these days, and if Apple can put out a product like the iPod touch at the price they currently offer, there's not much excuse for the PDA makers not to recognize and follow with price adjustments for products with much less memory and merely similar capabilities. Though it may be the companies in question simply don't care to adjust PDA pricing for the times knowing the death rattle is on the air.
If I like the iPod touch as much as I think I'm going to, there may be an iPhone in my future... :)
My second iPod is a standard iPod, 20GB of an unknown generation, purchased refurbished from buy.com. Both it and the mini are pre-video, which suits me just fine.
I hardly expected to want a third iPod of any sort, but when my Palm Tungsten T PDA breathed its last yesterday afternoon I found myself on the hunt for a replacement and was surprised at the state of gadgetry these days. (Before I go on I'll note that I was/am specifically not looking for a smartphone. I don't want to replace my Motorola RAZR as I quite like it.)
My immediate thoughts for a Palm replacement were another Palm or a netbook of some sort. The current Palm that's nearly equivalent to my old Palm is the Tungsten E2. I costs $199 and that $199 doesn't buy you very much, unless you really like Palm stuff. 32MB of memory, Bluetooth, a color display and an SD card slot, along with Palm OS and all the goodies you can download for it.
My most likely netbook choice was the Asus EeePC 901, followed by the Nokia N810. Both would be more expensive than the Tungsten E2, but the leap from PDA to Netbook is a very large one featurewise. The only drawback here aside from cost is size. I want something PDA-sized but with features closer to a Netbook. The problem there is the next step up in a Palm is the T|X, which adds more memory and wireless networking to the features the Tungsten E2 already has. But at $299, it still doesn't balance well when its cost/feature ratio is held up against a netbook.
Enter the wildcard. I was chatting with bruceb and Co. about the death of my PDA and he brought up the iPod touch. It had not occurred to me to consider the iPod touch because iPods have traditionally been expensive devices and I thought an iPod touch would be at the upper end of the price range. I also knew very little of its capabilities other than to be able to describe it as an iPhone minus the phone.
Turns out when you take the phone out of the iPhone you're still left with a rather smart device. It has lots of memory, (measured in GB rather than MB) badass graphics compared to the Palm, wireless networking with apps well suited to exploiting it, in a package far more attractive than anything Palm (or the companies making Windows-based PDAs) is making. (And it's still a great music player!) Most surprising was the cost. The iPod touch, though not strictly a PDA, strikes me as significantly superior to the Palm T|X in just about every way, and the base model iPod touch at 8GB of memory costs $229, $70 less than the Palm.
So yeah, I bought an iPod touch.
The PDA seems to be a dying breed in the age of smartphones, but I can't help thinking the companies still making them are accelerating their death with the archaic pricing. Flash memory is cheap these days, and if Apple can put out a product like the iPod touch at the price they currently offer, there's not much excuse for the PDA makers not to recognize and follow with price adjustments for products with much less memory and merely similar capabilities. Though it may be the companies in question simply don't care to adjust PDA pricing for the times knowing the death rattle is on the air.
If I like the iPod touch as much as I think I'm going to, there may be an iPhone in my future... :)