Dan Murphy's Blog

I hate to say it…yes HATE…but I must admit that this little thing is pretty awesome.  With the new iTouch I can access my email, check stocks, check the weather, browse the Internet (sorta) with a little hand held device.  This is great for things like when I just want to check my email and not deal with turning on a computer.  The integration with Yahoo! mail is great it is a realtime look into your folder any emails you delete, respond, forward, read are marked accordingly in Yahoo.

I did come upon this by winning it at a convention for work that I went to so the price couldn’t be much better ($0).  I won the 8GB model which holds enough music to keep me happy as that is about 2,000 songs but not my full library (running about 33GB).  I also, for my birthday, received my car connection bridge from my girlfriend so now I have it directly connected to my car and that is really nice.  No more dealing with changing CD’s and I got the connection cable that plugs into the headphone jack so I can plug into any MP3 player not just iPod.

I have it synced up with my outlook calendar which is linked through Plaxo to my Gmail account so now it is easy to see what meeting I need to be at next for work.  It is also synced with my Yahoo! contacts.  The web browser is alright and gets the job done but I wouldn’t surf the net for long with it.  Also Safari doesn’t support flash so anything with flash doesn’t work on the device but I just read something that said this will be changing soon.

For a first generation product I am very impressed.  But as usual Apple always kills the early adopters and added a 32GB model and rumors are they are going to drop the 8GB version and drop all prices by $100.  Right now the 32GB version runs $499 which is a lot of money but I would expect the price to drop to $399 in the near future.  As long as you find a way to work around iTunes, get the album art, update iTunes, get your MP3 tags inline and download your MP3′s the iTouch gets a very positive review

This little thing just plugs right into your headphones and gives you some MP3 goodness.  Personally I love the form factor as it is pretty much totally hidden after being plugged into your headphones.  It comes with a base station for docking for uploading files, which makes me laugh as the base station is about 100 times larger.  It reminds me of that Futurama episode where the cell phone is about the size of a dime, and the charging station is about the size of a desktop computer.