Gadgets – Page 18 – Roo's View

iTouch

The gadget lust was finally too much and I’ve purchased an iPod Touch. Way back I was a fairly early adopter of the Palm Pilot 1000, however its been years since I’ve bothered to carry a PDA with me. Cell phones have mostly closed that gap and the internet is more ubiquitous than it was back in 1996, these two technologies which have radically changed the information landscape around us. While I do tease some of my friends with the iPhone (I charge my Nokia 5310 once a week), I’d have an iPhone if I could justify the cost of the monthly plans.

I’m a big fan of the Apple store online, specifically the refurbished section. They offer “as new” products for a significant discount. The refurbished iPod Touch has a new battery and outer shell, new earbuds, USB cable and it comes with the same 1-year warranty that a new unit would. The only real difference is price (8Gb iTouch $199 vs. $239) and a plain white box. If you can stand to wait until the latest model starts to be available refurbished, why pay full price?

I ordered monday, it arrived thursday. Shipping was free. Surprisingly it came from Shenzen, home of Foxconn (I found Bunnie’s description of Shenzen facinating, worth a read). To give you a sense of the scale of the voyage that this lowly iPod Touch made over the past week – here is a map showing the voyage:

As I already have a video iPod, getting setup was very simple. Using the latest version of iTunes, I just plugged in the new iTouch to let it charge and sync. The initial sync was very slow, apparently this is somewhat expected.

As to exactly why I went out and bought an iTouch? Well, it was a Fathers Day gift (Thanks Jenn!) – but I’ve been oogling at them for a while. This LifeHacker article could serve as a good set of reasons to pick one up instead of holding out for an iPhone. The 2nd generation iTouch is more compelling than the 1st – it has a faster processor (faster than the iPhone 3G, but not the 3G S), the headphone jack supports microphone input, there is also an external speaker. In comparison to the iPhone – the 2nd generation iTouch is missing: a camera, GPS, and of course cell phone functionality. It does have almost every other ability.

So far its been very cool. With only 8Gb of storage, I can’t get all my music on it – but iTunes seems to have done a fairly sane job of putting the right selection on without any interaction from me. The App Store is really cool (but there are far too many apps out there). If you need more convincing to jump on the Apple train, Jeff Atwood wrote an interesting commentary on the significance of the iPhone.

iPod earbuds disassembled

The other day my iPod ‘stock’ earbuds stopped working correctly. At first I thought it might be something wrong with my ear, since the volume on the right side was so much lower than the left. I swapped the buds around and the low volume followed – so it wasn’t my ears. Next worry was that my iPod had gotten sick, but a quick check with another set of headphones and I knew I was ok.

While the stock iPod headphones aren’t anything special, I’ve grown to like them. They are actually well matched to the iPod itself which I find to have background hiss when used with better headphones. Most of my listening is done at about 1/3 volume anyways – I did enough damage to my hearing as a teenager, I like to pretend I’m smarter now.

Of course I had to take them apart to fix them. Initially I had no idea how to open them up, searching around found me this posting on taking the older style apart. It wasn’t until today that I found this video – but I had already figured it out myself. In the picture above, you can see the two parts. A little pressure with your thumb nail on the joint and it will pop apart nicely.

Once I had them apart – I tested them to see if the problem was still there, so I could poke at the wires to see what was wrong. They worked fine – no fiddling required. So I simply popped the earbud back together and its been working normally since. I suspect that the two wires had gotten twisted and were rubbing causing a short, but who knows.

Sometimes things just need to be taken apart and put back together.

Exit Review: Nokia 6585

This post is inspired by Bunnie’s Exit Review of his Blackberry, he also did one for his Thinkpad T60. The concept is a good one, often our new gadget purchases are based on our personal past experiences as much as they are influenced by our friends and “the latest new thing”.

From the picture above, you can see that its had a hard life. The paint is rubbing off on the corners, the keypad is starting to show black plastic under the chipped keys and the screen is held on with some scotch tape. This phone has survived countless high impact falls to the floor, a few to pavement- and a handful that resulted in a yard sale style disassembly upon impact.

This was my 3rd Nokia phone. When I purchased the 6585 in late 2004 I was switching from a GSM based carrier onto a CDMA carrier, my reasoning here was for improved coverage. At the time, GSM coverage at my home was spotty (it has improved since). I was attracted to the form factor (4.17” x 1.77” x 0.80”), and battery life (standby time 6 days).

Via eBay I did pick up the headset (with integrated radio antenna) which served me well. Both the speaker phone and headset voice quality were such that I could be on a business conference call and people couldn’t tell that I wasn’t on my office phone. As for extras, there wasn’t much to rave about. The web browser would quickly drain your battery. The screen 128×128 resolution and 4096 colours was poor. The embedded java was only MIDP1.0. The radio was a neat addition, but I never used it.

This phone does have an IRDA port on it. This let me synchronize my contacts with a PC with the Nokia PC Suite. I could also store pictures (low quality due to the display) on the phone to customize it. This was also the first phone which I did any amount of text messaging with, and found the predictive T9 input to be fairly usable. I also found the alarm clock to be invaluable when traveling – hotel alarm clocks can be challenging when you’re jet lagged.

I probably would still be using this phone had the battery life not degraded to the point where it needed charging daily to be reliable at all. It was far too common to hear the sad ‘dee doop’ Nokia low battery sound from my pocket.

While the 6585 didn’t offer a lot of whiz bang features, it did work well as a phone. The PC connectivity is something I can’t imagine not having now. My new phone is another Nokia, more on that in a future post.