Legal Commentary

Popular iPhone and iPod Touch Add-Ons

By Jeralyn

I still haven't gotten my iPhone. Apple stores have been sold out since Friday and I got mad at AT&T when it didn't come through with my phone 7 days after I paid for it so I canceled the order. The current shortage may last a month:

Apple stores are reporting serious shortages of the device, an inventory slip-up that might last for a month, Computerworld reported. Barely a quarter of Apple's retail stores have iPhones to sell, but only nine stores have all three versions available. Only 18 stores currently have the 16 gigabit black model in stock and 26 stores have the white model with the same storage capacity. AT&T is also reporting a severe shortage with all 1,200 retail stores nearly out of the iPhone altogether.

But, I did get a gift of a brand new iPod touch. It's the latest iPod and has a much bigger video screen, wifi, internet and e-mail and all the calendar, contacts, etc features. The only thing it doesn't have is the phone. (And, you need to be able to connect to a wi-fi network.) [More...]

I spent all day Sunday setting it up. I love it. It doesn't hold as much as the iPod video unless you get the 32 Gig model which is $500, but it holds 587 of my favorite songs plus my videos with several gigabytes left over.

All the cool apps that are available to download for the iPhone also work on the iPod touch. There are hundreds of apps -- related to music, news, business and everything else. I spent several hours perusing them but haven't downloaded any yet.

Now, Reuters has a roundup of some of the better music ones -- with descriptions of each: Pandora, AOL radio, Shazam, MIDOMI MOBILE, MOOCOWMUSIC: BAND, INTUNA, GUITARTOOLKIT and JAMD.

More on Apple and the Apps is here.

The iPod touch will make it less painful for me to wait for the iPhone. When I get it, there's a feature called MobileMe that costs $99 a year and syncs your iPod touch with your Mac, your PC's and iPhone -- from emails to the calendar to music. That will probably take me another week to configure, but since I don't have anything but music to sync yet, I'm in no hurry.

I am probably one of the only people in the universe that finds the Mac much harder and more cumbersome to use than a PC. But now that I have the iPod touch and while I'm waiting for my iPhone, I'm going to try using the Mac more and see if I can't, after three years of trying, finally get the hang of it.

If you have any cool apps to recommend, or other iPhone, iPod touch related thoughts, please put them in comments. I'm off to do some downloading.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 21, 2008 (boomark / email).