Pleasant Surprises

Most of these weren't really surprises, but to be fair, the positives need to be stated along side the negatives. And, the positive list is stronger than the negative one, at least for me.

1. The form factor. I bought a very slim rubberized case, and wow: it's so thin and light.
   
2. The screen size. Especially in landscape, it's a great viewing experience.
   
3. Syncing to Outlook. I was never able to get Contact syncing to work on my older iPods - don't know why, but it just didn't work. iPod Touch syncing worked like a charm.
   
4. Keeping several things going at once. My other pocket device is a Treo - and while I like it, it is single threaded. The Touch works like the Treo should.

To be continued...

Unpleasant Surprises

So, what don't I like so far:

1. When wifi is on, the battery life is really bad. The solution is easy: turn wifi off when I'm not using it.
   
2. You can't change the volume or pause while the iPod Touch is in your pocket. You have to take it out, wake it up, bring up the music controls, and press the appropriate button. I've come up with a partial workaround: buy a headset with a volume control built in to it, keep the volume fairly high on the Touch, and control the volume via the headset. There are a lot of headsets like this that I found by googling "headphones with volume control".
   
3. iPod Touch cannot be used as a USB hard drive. This one really surprised me because every other iPod (at least every one I've ever owned) had this feature. I used my old iPods as backup devices when I travelled. The workaround is simple, but I don't like it: use a USB thumb drive.
   
4. Google maps says it can know where you are from nearby wifi access points, but somehow I'm never near one it can use for this purpose. I live in NYC, so if they're not in abundance here, where are they?
   
5. Start up time is slow. When turning on the iPod Touch, it takes a noticably long time to boot up. With older iPods this happened only occasionally when the iPod had been turned off for a long time. This takes a long time all the time. Workaround: start the boot-up process before you start untangling the headphone cord and it will be nearly ready by the time you've got the earbuds or headphone positioned right.
   
6. There are no games built in, not even solitaire.

To be continued...