It'll be a hard-boiled talk.

So my girlfriend got her iPod touch on Tuesday. It was her birthday present (delivered significantly early, but we both were excited to see it), so I had it engraved and all that. I'm kinda proud, I have to admit.  Butalready, not even 48 hours in, I've got gadget jealousy. 

See, I've got a Palm T|X.  I like it a lot.  I've pampered it with the best utilities: TCPMP for XviD video, Lightspeed to handle those higher bitrates, the new pocketTunes to play AACs, Missing Sync to sync it with iTunes, Mundu for IMing, even Bejeweled 2 for… bejeweling.  I obviously have enjoyed the thing for the year that I've owned it.  But coaxing these arcane and wonderful features from the device is a little too much like drawing spech from a decaying skull.

Palm's OS is a sad, cobbled mess of wires hidden behind a mediocre facade of usability.  Why doesn't the thing save my left-handedness preference?  Why are all the scrollbars on the right anyway?  Why does it randomly crash for no good reason?  Why is selecting music in pTunes like typing "dir /w" in DOS?  These things were minor annoyances, niggling itches of discontent, nothing more.  I enjoyed, on the whole, my experience.

Then I touched the iPod, experienced it in action.

Make no mistake, I am a member of the Apple Defense Force.  I've owned Macs, iMacs, PowerBooks, MackBooks, iPods both nano and mini.  I know the allure.  I am familiar with its geek pheromones.  But I had spent the last month girding myself, preparing myself to purchase one-and-only-one iPod touch.  For my girlfriend.  My T|X was "Just Fine For Me."

Using the T|X after spending five minutes with the iPod made me want to cry.  I wanted to yell at the PDA, call it garbage, slap it around and demand it clean up its act.  It does everything the iPod does, and more.  I can edit documents with it.  I can play more games, listen to music with an internal speaker, play WMAs.  But those minor issues with usability were amplified tenfold.  The iPod Is Beautiful, Inside And Out.  I can't stress enough the fit and finish of the product.  It has a focused purpose, and excels at performing those tasks.  The inertia in scrolling, the keyboard that's way more intuitive than it has any right to be.  The pinch and expand.

My god, the pinch and expand.  I could play Minority Report with it all day like a delusional sixth grader. 

My only hope for a cure to this fever is to happen upon one of those fat stacks of cash the songs keep mentioning, or to go without food for a month.  The former is unlikely, but I feel like, if I watch my new iPod fervently enough (perhaps YouTube videos of other people enjoying their food) I can make it.

Maybe I'll write a book: the iPod Diet.

~Matt 

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Prose. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.