Choices, choices...

So I hit the Apple Store in the Eaton Center again today, to play with the iPod Touch a little more, and now I’m kind of sad that I did. There seem to be a few things about it that I don’t know if I can deal with. First, the screen apparently uses a capacitive screen, which basically means that you need to use your fingers to touch it. No slightly-longer-than-normal thumbnails, no left-over spare stylii, nothing that could make the large surface area of my stubby fingers slightly smaller. This turned out to be a little annoying when I was trying to type. I would probably get used to it if it weren’t for the second problem. Very few of the apps seem to support landscape-mode text input. Where by "very few", I mean "only Safari". The keyboard in portrait-mode is just a little too small for my fingers. Bah, who am I kidding? The keyboard in landscape-mode is just a little too small for my fingers. The keyboard in portrait-mode is way too small for my fingers.

So, I can’t really type on it. That’s a fairly big problem. But at least I can download videos and music from my website, so that when I’m at the office, and I see that my long DVD-to-iPod conversion has finished, I can grab a copy of it over HTTP to watch on the commute home… But when I tried it, it was a total no-go. None of the avis worked, which isn’t totally surprising, but the mp3s in the same directory also gave me the “Safari is unable to download this file”. WTF?!? An MP3 player that can’t play MP3s? The biggest downside of this whole trip is that I can’t really think of a good way around either of those problems. I mean, I guess text editors will come out which allow landscape-mode keyboards, but it’s going to be annoying every time I go to enter a new appointment, or contact. And I don’t have any idea what I could do to get around the no-downloading stuff. So I guess I’m back to looking at other options (and maybe ending up asking Jeremy for my SD Card back). And no, I don’t think the Nintendo DS is a reasonable replacement. It’s too… game-y. Not enough like an actual PDA.