Christmas stockings attract a Touch or two Apple's iPod Touch was the Christmas gift of choice this year, if an apparent 1000 per cent jump in application sales in anything to judge by. On December 25 sales of applications to iPod-touting customers jumped by one thousand per cent, and the total figures for December are already 51 per cent up on November when the iPhone …
When I couldn't decide what I wanted, I asked for itunes gift cards! You can get them in 'normal' shops, so any family member knows what you're on about. Worrying how quickly you can burn through credit just on apps... and the best one I bought on xmas day was solitaire for 59p.
He isnt that technical. He plonked it in my hand and said "its broken, Fix it Fix it Fix it"
Needless to say, i couldnt fix it, it was knackered.
He mentioned something about it needing an update, so maybe that failed. My iphone never had any issue and the wifey's itouch also worked fine, but then i set both up from scratch. they aint idiot proof.
Teens without credit cards isn't much of a problem. I'll bet a lot of those kids got iTunes gift cards along with their Touches, and will probably wind up getting a monthly iTunes Allowance (I know both my kids do). Cupertino doesn't just "care about" selling hardware -- their profit margins are probably much higher on stuff sold out of the iTunes store, and the recurring revenue is the real goldmine.
And of course, the Touches are a gateway drug; before you know it, the kids will be visiting switchtomac.com on their new pocket computers, laughing at the music video, and telling mum & dad they want a Mac... "I won't right click, I multitouch, muthafucka" -- yeah, it is pretty catchy...
Rest of the article, I got no beef with.
You may not believe it but my impression with "normal" people is that almost everyone knows about the iPhone but hardly anyone knows about the iPod touch being very much the same thing just with no phone (and no monthly costs). I had to explain this uncounted times and everyone got extremely curious then. They usually think "iPod" and then "music" and then "well, got a player already". When you show them that you can browse the web and check your email and play games and read books on the thing, you practically see gears starting to move in their heads and hear things clicking into place.
when they introduced it. The new device was and is a mini Mac OS. The Touch device is a new category of Internet Catching Devices/ computer functions. But hey the iPod plus iTunes Store on every PC was just the backdoor beginning to the Steve vs Steve war. Zune vs Touch Two. Let the fighting begin!
"The figures come from Flurry Analytics, a company that provides a tiny client developer's drop into applications in exchange for access to raw data."
Let me get this right ... Not only does the hardware "call home" (by design), but so do the individual apps? Does anyone but me see serious potential privacy issues here? And you are letting KIDS use these things unsupervised?
Jobs' reality distortion field is getting stronger ...
There are indeed lots of companies that sell services to developers for exactly that. You can rely on the fact that lots (if not most) of the more professional apps are sending usage patterns and even location data to some central servers. I'd agree with you that this is somewhat unnerving.
On the other hand, every device and every software that uses "the cloud" does that to a certain degree. And this is not exactly new, every webserver and every mailserver knows when and with what software you access it. As long as this data isn't personalized this is something you'll just have to live with.
"On the other hand, every device and every software that uses "the cloud" does that to a certain degree."
Now ask me why I don't use !GooMyFaceYouTwit & the like.
"And this is not exactly new, every webserver and every mailserver knows when and with what software you access it."
I've been running my own email, ftp, Usenet and the johnnycomelately WWW servers for about as long as they have been available. Currently, they are on an aging Sun 3/470 "Pegasus" under Bryant Street in Palo Alto, with fallback machines at several geographically diverse locations. It's overkill for a small family system, but as a research platform it's mostly tax deductible.
"As long as this data isn't personalized this is something you'll just have to live with."
Nope. I haven't been brainwashed into believing this by !GooMyFaceYouTwit ...
I'm on a South African Airways A340 the week before Xmas. With 12 hours ahead of me I plug my hideously expensive Bose cans into my iPhone 3GS and fire up an old episode of Spooks.
Before the opening credits are through comes the dreaded tap on the shoulder:
"Sir, please switch off your phone now".
"It's in Airplane mode, which makes it an iPod"
"Sir, I know the difference between an iPhone and an iPod and that's an iPhone. Please switch it off".
Not wanting to spend Xmas in a police cell I meekly but grudgingly complied.
But could the flight attendant really see the telltale mic slit in the gloom of economy class, or didn't she know that Pods now look like phones?
Well, nobody gave me a Touch for Xmas, but would it have saved me? Or would that have led to another argument about whether all those WiFi enabled laptops were more likely to bring down the plane than my 3G signal?
When is a Touch a phone? Discuss.
Why would a wi-fi enabled music player be pointless? It actually makes it easier to use to transfer things like a music file. Now as far as the games and watching video, I don't do that with music players, I plug them into my car audio system and can enjoy over a weeks worth of music on a single device.
I have 6 portable music players, I had a Digital River mp3 player before there were iPods. But the competing user interfaces are crap when compared to Apple even on a Windows box. The players from ALL brands I owned have worked very well. However, I just replaced my 1st generation 10GB iPod with a 5th generation iPod Nano with 16GB. The Apple device provides the easiest way for me to do what I want, it is far more intuitive and easier to use than WMP with Sansa, Sony or Zune. I rip most of my music from the thousands of CDs I purchased in the past 20 years, so I in 8 years I spent less than $200 at the iTunes store. Some people prefer single purpose devices, other like multi-purpose, with Apple you can have either.
Happy New Year!
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