A Rant # "The iPod Touch"

The impetus for beginning this Feature was sparked by the frustration I had with the iPod touch. But now that I've had some time to cool off, well... I've sorta lost the fire. :P But since it was the thing that gave birth to the Feature, I'd feel weird about glossing over it. It should be the first. And it will be, but I won't be as vicious in my criticism as I might have been before. I kinda feel like I'm being forced to trash a lover behind his back. :P

Well the huge gripe that got the ball rolling was this weird bug that made it impossible to sync certain Smart Play Lists correctly. I'm convinced the problem must be specific to me and so, not a fair criticism. I have some ideas about what might be the core issue (dependent rules), so I'm hoping I'll fix the problem soon enough. In the meantime, I've done what I said I wouldn't do: I've had to manually drag and drop selections from my Smart Play Lists into static Play Lists. I'm actually okay with the solution for a variety of reasons, the main one, having absolute control over what comes in and goes out of my iPod.

These next few problems are universal to the iPod touch. The first isn't quite valid but speaks to the overall failing of the hardware: there's no click-wheel. Now, if you weren't happy not having a click-wheel you'd be a moron for buying the thing in the first place. So my problem isn't so much with the lack of the click-wheel, but with the lack of its functionality. The wheel made it very easy to control your music with a blind eye and the flick of a finger, not so with the iPod touch. Play lists are the watchword with the iPod touch since you can't easily skip ahead of your songs while it's in your pocket. You have to know ahead of time that what you're going to listen to is something you won't have the urge of skipping through. It's not the worst thing in the world, but I'd love for there to be an easier way to skip through songs that didn't require me pulling out the touch from my pocket.

Another invalid gripe, which speaks more to the LCD industry, is the greater depth achieved with these awesome screens means a greater incidence of dead pixels. I have four on my iPod touch, five if you've a particularly sharp eye. It's annoying, but not a deal-breaker. What sucks is that it's not something you're assured to get a replacement on, so I've never even bothered. Plus I've never been truly bothered by it to make it an issue. It's fine. But it's there. And the catch-22 of it all is that the more high-res these screens become, the greater incidence of dead pixels... but because the screens are so high-res, the pixels and so the dead pixels are so small that they become negligible.

Okay, now the real problems. I don't know why they decided to do this, but for some reason Apple decided to opt out of using scrolling title banners for songs with long titles. It's such a huge issue if, like me, you have files with titles of the same name save for the ending which denotes what part within a series they belong. That crucial bit of info is truncated into a ellipsis. It drives me insane! A "workaround" is selecting the file, letting it play and putting the screen to sleep, then waking it up. When the screen is locked, but awake, you have the entire length of the screen to display the title. Though, you're already playing the file so it's pretty much useless having to go through this, unless it's not immediately obvious what's being played. It's such a glaring flaw. I'm hoping it gets fixed in a future software update.

Next problem. One of the solutions that Apple came up with to alleviate the trouble of fiddling around with the interface to skip songs quickly was the ability to call up playback controls by double clicking the Home button. This works great. It works great for songs that are currently playing. Say I call up the controls to pause a song and put the iPod to sleep for a moment. If I then decide to play the song again, I can't just double click the Home button to bring up the controls again. That action is only registered as a single press. The iPod awakes, and you're prompted to either unlock it or you can then double click again. It's just one more button press, but I hate having to press a sleeping iPod once, and then twice more to get my playback controls! Grrr! :P

You can't copy & paste in Safari, plain and simple.

No Flash support.

I wish I could easily switch between portrait and landscape mode whenever I'm prompted with the touch keyboard. Before you touch a text field you must decide which layout you're going to use, once that keyboard is there you can't change it. You have to quit your action, align your iPod as you wish, and begin again. A mild gripe, but very annoying. I also hate how the iPod decides how I want my text field displayed in landscape mode. Because there's so little space provided in that mood to see where I'm typing, it means everything to keep the screen where I want it. But once I begin typing, the iPod will sometimes realign the iPod to include more of the cursor. It's understandable, but again, very annoying.

I really wish I could sync my YouTube account to my iPod touch. As is, if you bookmark anything on the touch, it's not being bookmarked on your YouTube account. So if you stumble upon a great video while on the touch, you have to dive to the site on your computer and bookmark it there. Likewise, if you have some great videos you want to show your friends and family that you know you bookmarked on YouTube you can't call them up on the touch. :( It's not something I would expect Apple should fix, and maybe they shouldn't... but it would be nice.

I don't like the way iCal displays appointments. I'm speaking specifically of the author citation. I happen to sync my brother's calendars on my Mac, and I have my own calendars... and while we don't have the same things going on, it still looks like a mess when you're diving around iCal on the touch. I just wish the calendar name under which an appointment was listed was displayed. Simple fix, I don't know why it's not there. :|

Gee, I think I could go on a bit more, but like I said... I lost the fire. I'm not as pissy as I was a few days ago, so I feel I'm bitching unnecessarily. I love this guy more than I find him annoying so I'm not cool with the bashing. ;) I expect the experience will get better down the line as software updates are pushed out. That's my hope anyway. :P


DS333, hopeful.