Feel me...touch me...

I wouldn't be me if I didn't rush to get the iTouch as one of the early geeks standing in line... in my age though I prefer the online Apple Store than queueing in the rain like a moron. The marvel arrived earlier than I thought, something around Sep 28th, at my doorstep, TNT delivery as always.

I'm not gonna go thru another Holy Bible preaching about the virtues of this manufacturing miracle as there have been millions before me praising the goods of the iPhone; and the iTouch iPod is just the same as the iPhone without the phone part. Nonetheless, it's a hugely wonderful piece that does all the rest!

Only drawback I had was on day 1, when it just arrived... I got it working in a heartbeat and as I moved down from the attic (my office space) to boast to the wife, the darn think gave up its spirit. Nothing moved... pressing down buttons didn't help a bit. Anyways, cursing my bad luck (these things allways happen to me... there must be bad spirits haunting me, I guess) I go online and order a service package from Apple to ship back the damaged goods. Darn Chinese! I keep thinking - yep, all these goodies are manufactured in bleedin' China, damn you Jobso... Having nothing else better to do, I link it back to my Macbook. ... and, praise the Lord, out of no-where the little bitch came back. All started working per specs and even better... and never failed ever since. In the meantime, UPS delivered a packing box sent by Apple's return service; I keep the box somewhere in a corner... I might need it someday, who knows.

With this unpleasant surprise behind me, I went on to enjoy it for good. Wunderbar! I can't believe those folks complaining about the keyboard... these dudes must have real fat fingers or somethin'. The design is impeccable, the touch and feel is beyond belief. I actually bought the thing as a present to one of my kids but, the hell with it! I kept it to myself.

The interface of these pieces, iPhone and iPod-iTouch must be the best Apple ever did. They are really phenomenal. They say there is a sensor that senses the acceleration when you turn it from portrait to landscape and repositions the contents. I tried to fool the sensor by turning it real slow. I mean, real real slow to the point I felt my fingers sleepin'. No way to fool it though. There is a point where it senses the re-orientation and jumps to its new position. Real great engineering. Well done John Ive!

One of the fun parts is the online purchase of iTunes songs. We were just watching a film on TV the other night with Rita (I think it was Allen's Mighty Aphrodite) and they played the song 'Call me a river'. 'Who's singing this?' Rita goes... 'Hold on a sec', I says... Within seconds the iTouch was showing about 100 different versions of the song with 30 secs sampling each... I pass the earphones to her and she starts flipping from one version to another. 'That's the one I like', she goes...'Press the buy button', I says... she does and the song starts downloading over the air through my 11n router. A few secs later, it was playing through my Bose speakers... who can beat that!

Of course there are some weaknesses in these things and I am not gonna start whining like Alan Clayton (a CFO of mine long ago whose whining was a mission in life). I praise the Lord instead who had me brought to life in the age of His Jobness.

And for anyone who has one of the latest iMacs, something to know... the iTouch will not connect to the Mac under OSX (!!??). It will connect to it though under a Bootcamp Vista or XP partition... curious, eh? Is that not a noble sample of true courtesy by Apple to the Redmond Cyborgs?