I’ve gone full circle with my Touch now.
During the first few days of ownership I was flush with pride while looking and playing with my slim little friend. Oh, how lovely it was to look at. How delicate it was to hold. How sweet it was to see Coverflow glide between albums…
But then precisely a week into my love affair, something dark inside woke up and realised how annoying it was to use. Would it have killed Apple to give me some freaking real buttons? Every time I want to change advance a track or even just adjust the volume, I have to mess with the ‘radical new multi-touch interface’. It is pretty sexy to deftly glide your fingers over the surface and have it react, but when it means I have to glide my finger to do anything, then it’s starting to be multi-pain-in-the-ass.
I started moaning to everyone! “God, it’s so slow to browse the internet, even on WiFi!”. “Why do I have to do five things before I can just go to the next song?” “Why did I pay $400 for something that’s more annoying to use than my old $200 Nano?”
But as try as I might, I just couldn’t let go of Touchy. I just relaxed, saw differently the annoyances and turned them into ‘charming quirks’ and let the Apple fanboy in me reason myself into a stupor. For about two dark days back there, I even thought about getting a Zune! I know, I know… Everyone else laughed too. Poor Zune. On paper the new Zune looks like a really good deal: 3.2″ screen, 80gb, $250. What’s not to like?! Well, the public derision for a start, “Oh you got a Zune! Wow. You’re brave.”
So, the main reasons to love my little Touch are still present: awesome video playback, svelte body, good battery life, great music playback. The other annoyances like, slow web browsing (Safari apparently has little to no cache to load pages), annoying multi-touch interface to get to the most basic functions, are still there too. I just learnt to live with them. The other said reality is that for much of my music I don’t have the album art which makes the 3.5″ screen a little redundant.
In conclusion, my Touch and I have go through some tough times, but we’re still together.
PS. I’m off to NY this Thursday to see my sister run the New York Marathon this weekend. Amazing huh? I’m also excited to see if I can kill the Touch’s battery on the trip watching Soprano’s episodes on the way over. I’ll give you a battery update soon!
