I Touched The iTouch More & More – And I liked it.

Time is definitely one of those things in life that are relative. During certain activities time moves exceptionally slowly. During other activities, such as vacations, time flies by.

So it is that a week of vacation comes to an end before it even feels like it began. After a week out of the northeast’s cold who am I to complain though.

Although I brought both my iPhone and one of the new HP MiniNote 1000 netbooks with me, my primary device ended up being my Touch.

I didn’t plan it that way. In fact, I picked up the netbook the day before the trip because I planned to use it as my primary device. I ended up using the Touch most of the time though and it gave me a bit more insight into the device than I had before. In the process it convinced me even more that the device is excellent and has the potential to be even better.

So why, if I had a netbook with me did the Touch get so much more use than I expected?

It certainly wasn’t because of any shortcomings on the part of the MiniNote 1000. HP did a superb job with it and it has actually got me using XP again. (That is something I NEVER thought I would see happen.) The size is great, the keyboard is superb and it has enough power to get by. But I ended up using the Touch most of the time anyway. Why? A few reasons.

First, the wireless connection as the resort was, at best, slow. Pulling up full webpages on the netbook to check email and RSS feeds was painful and brought me back to the not-so-good-old-days of dial-up. It wasn’t the netbooks fault as this would have been an issue on any computer. The Touch, on the other hand, with its highly efficient and optimnized pages pulled up email and rss feeds with ease. In a quarter the time it took to get me email up on the netbook I was already on to something else with the Touch.

Second, battery life. The MiniNote gets decent battery life considering it has just a 3 cell battery, but it couldn’t come close to the Touch. And the fact that I had both the Mophie JuicePack and the RichardSolo 1800 Battery and I had a full day of heavy use if need be.

Which leads to the third reason- portability. The netbook is a nice size- small and easy to toss into a bag, yet large enough to use for an extended period. (Despite Intel’s claim that netbooks are only good for an hour of use maximum, I could, if need be, use the MiniNote 1000 for a prolonged period.) The Touch, however, even with TWO external battery packs, is so much smaller and lighter. I could throw it into my beach bag without thinking about it and have it whenever I wanted to listen to something, check the news, or do any of the other myriad things the Touch can do.

And that, friends, is the last point- the Touch is super capable. With it I checked email and rss feeds, wrote posts, listened to internet radio (once I accidentally trashed all my music), downloaded podcasts via iTunes (it took FOREVER but worked), updated todo lists as "must-do-upon-return-homes" came into my mind. There was, in fact, very little I wanted and needed to do on the netbook that I could not do on the Touch so long as the right apps were installed. No, the Touch doesn’t do voice recognition or allow me to pull images off my camera’s SD card, but for the most part, the majority of daily things I wanted to do were possible on the Touch.

And what were my most used apps?

Email, Bylines, BeejiveIM, Facebook, eReader, Evernote, RadioBOX, Last.FM and the iTunes app for downloading podcasts.,

So what could make it better?

Battery Life- The battery life is good but had Apple made it the slightest bit thicker the battery life would be awesome.

Bluetooth- Bluetooth would allow the use of both stereo headphone and a portable bluetooth keyboard. That would be something.

Background apps- Just one or two background apps would have made it possible to listen to internet radio and do other things on the Touch. As it stands I had to choose one or the other but not both.

Cut and Paste and TextMacros- Period.

Camera and GPS- I know Apple is trying to maintain a distinction between the iPhone and the Touch but adding the camera and GPS would add so much functionality to the Touch and it still would not have the "always connected/its also your cellphone" cache of the iPhone.

A few weeks back I wrote a series of posts arguing for and against categorizing the iPhone/iPod Touch as a netbook. After this week the answer has become clear to me. The iPod Touch is not a netbook but it does fulfill many of the same wants and needs of one and in a pinch, it makes one heck of a stand-in. And between firmware updates, new apps, and some excellent accessories it will only get better.