Rackspace held a sysadmin contest at LinuxWorld. I won first place, and got the top prize, an iPod Touch. I’ve never belonged to the Cult of Apple, and have never been particularly fond of iPods. They are expensive relative to their competitors, and I hate the iPod scrollwheel UI. Also, I think iTunes, especially the syncing UI, is awful. Still, my previous MP3 player (from Toshiba) died not too long ago, and I wasn’t going to turn down a free $299 MP3 player.

The first thing I tried to do was upgrade its OS, since it came with 1.x built-in. I paid my $10, downloaded the upgrade, and tried to install it. The install failed, leaving my iPod in recovery mode. Over the next week and a half, I spent hours reading forums, waiting at the Genius Bar, and trying various things, I was finally able to upgrade a replacment unit to 2.0.1. At last, I could play with my new iPod Touch.

I quickly came to the conclusion that the iPod Touch is not really an MP3 player. It’s a full-blown PDA whose marketing emphasizes music and video. It can do everything Palm’s last real PDA, the Tungsten TX, can do:

• sync calendar/contacts/email
• surf the web using WiFi
• play music & videos
• view photos
• play games
• install third-party applications

The iPod Touch has all the improvements Palm should have included in the TX successor:

• More colorful, friendly, and polished UI
• Enough internal flash memory to store a decent amount of music and videos
• A better web browser
• Easy music, photo, & video syncing
• A higher-resolution screen
• Easy over-the-air application, music, and video downloads

There are a few things I miss from the TX, but not much:

• Ability to install applications from anyone I want. (For the iTouch, Apple has to approve each application, and only allows installation from the iTunes store.)
• Page up/Page down hard buttons. A must when reading lots of text
• Copy/Paste
• Stylus support for precision tapping without fingerprints on the screen. Stylus support would also make working with the onscreen keyboard much less frustrating.

When I was at Palm there were a number of people, including me, who advocated taking an existing Treo design (the 650 or 700), replacing the cellular radio with a WiFi radio, and releasing it as a PDA. Palm Product Marketing at the time emphatically stated that there was no market for such a device, PDAs were dead, and building a WiFi Treo would be a waste of time. The iPod Touch proves that they were wrong; one small item in a long list of missteps by Palm in the last few years.