alternative hippopotamus

At Drinking Liberally last Thursday a few of us were commiserating over the new iPod Touch. One of the problems with technological progress is that it leaves a big wake. Included in this wake are our old video iPods, and even iPod Nanos. Sure, the stubby 320×240 video iPod with the classic click wheel is something we’ll hold onto for years. In case a museum wants one. Until then, it’s just a reminder that if we had waited a few months, we could have had the iPod we always wanted.

I finally got a chance to see an iPod Touch at the Apple Store in Bethesda, and it really is as cool as it looks in the ads. Your hands will tremble as you surf the web in full 480×320 Safari glory. I gather the device supports Adobe Flash, at least well enough to play selected YouTube videos (see below for more, however). I say “gather” as the demo unit wasn’t playing back on youtube.com, but I’ll chalk that up to bandwidth/connectivity issues. The display is sharp. No, I’ll take that back. The display is art. If Leonardo da Vinci had an iPod Touch, he would have put down his brushes and gone surfing.

I asked a salesman how the new iPods were selling. He told me that weren’t so much “selling” as “sold.” I asked him about the Virginia stores (there’s two accessible by Metro). He said he’d could give me their phone numbers and I could call them. Really? Apple doesn’t have a gizmo to check stock at local area stores? I mean, calling up an Apple store when I’m at another Apple store sounds so 1986 to me. So Windows 3.1.

Now, let me explain why I really wasn’t all that bummed out that I couldn’t take an iPod Touch home with me today. See this Business Week story for more details.

First, the iPod Touch doesn’t support Flash. It supports some features of Flash that enable it to play some Flash videos. Since Adobe has published the API for swf files, it can’t be a licensing issue. So, maybe this will get fixed in a firmware upgrade. There’s a lot of websites out there who use Flash extensively, so this would have been a big plus. Woulda coulda shoulda.

Second, the iPod Touch doesn’t have an audio input jack. That means you can’t use it for Skype, or other VOIP services. You can do IMing through web sites, though the Business Week article argues that it’s pretty awkward.

Third, there’s other devices that have been out there for more than a year that are better suited for web browsing, or have other applications that the iPod just doesn’t have, and probably won’t ever have: the Palm TX and Sony PSP. Here, I can give you my own hands-on experience. I can’t and won’t argue that either one is as sexy as the iPod Touch.

The Palm TX may be rightly described as the iPod Touch’s older, geekier brother. The 320×480 screen is sweet. I use it to read the Washington Post (and other favorite newspapers) through PressDisplay. I’ve bookmarked most of my favorite blogs, and will often be found in the wifi hotspots of the Hipposhire browsing over a cafe au lait, or pub cider. Using services like Mobipocket, I can cache anything that has an RSS feed for browsing offline. Favorite books (e.g., Eric Boehlert’s “Lap Dogs”) are there for my perusal. I can even read pdf documents, Microsoft Word files, and Excel spread sheets. If I want to listen to a podcast, I can and often do, download it through bloglines.

The Sony PSP is… how do I put it? While the iPod Touch is Euro-chique (and make no mistake, I like Euro-chique), the Sony PSP is East Coast street-wise. I also use it for browsing, though it is not nearly as kind as the Palm TX for dealing with pages using large gobs of memory. That means I stick with the mobile versions of pages mostly, though it has no problems with the Huffington Post, Open Left, TPM, or many other blogs that I read.

When riding on the subway, I’ll use the PSP to watch videos I’ve compressed offline, look at art (most people keep family photos on their mobiles, mostly I keep shots of pop art and graffiti), or play a variety of games. Tony Hawk’s “Project 9″ is on there right now. The 3D graphics rendering is perfectly respectable. Sure, it’s not the XBox 360. But I wasn’t expecting that. On the other hand, I don’t see too many people with XBox’s hooked up to flat panel monitors gaming on the Metro.

I’ll mention one other device briefly, but not with any kind of recommendation: the Sony Mylo. The Mylo is built to do everything the iPod Touch doesn’t want to do: particularly instant messaging and Skype phone connections. The display is tiny, and while it can function as a web browser in an emergency, it’s painful if it’s not an emergency. All that said, I often use the Mylo as an mp3 player, as the audio codec quality is better than other devices in its class. And for one other reason that will probably not interest most users. I can plug it into a Linux machine and just do file copies of mp3s, jpgs, or videos. If at some point in the future IMing becomes more of my daily habit than web browsing, then the Mylo would become my device of choice.

With this in mind I walked back to the subway. I didn’t get the other store’s phone numbers from the Apple Store salesman. For now, I don’t think I need them.