I Have A New Toy...

I’ve enjoyed playing with my new gadget lately. It’s something I swore I’d never, ever own. Ever.

It’s an iPod. More specifically, the 32 GB iPod Touch.

Some background: I have had an mp3 player for the last three and a half years. It still works quite well, all 40 GB of it. (Well, okay. Technically, it’s 38.113 GB, but what’s a few gig between friends?) It sits on my dresser, and cranks out music nightly. It goes on trips with the missus and I. It’s been all over the US, having been bought for a 5 week road trip in 2005 so we would have music while driving across the plains, southwest, midwest and so forth. It’s got over three hundred discs on its little hard drive; I could set the thing to play and come back days later and it might finally start repeating something. The battery has a good ten hour life on it, if I detach the power cord, down from fourteen hours or so when I first bought it. Not bad for three-plus years. In short, I am quite happy with it.

When the first iPods came out, they were so expensive. All that money for a fancy disc drive with earbuds. Which is ultimately why I bought the Creative Zen Jukebox. It was something like $110 less. Okay, so there wasn’t too many options for the thing...but it did what I asked it to do, which was to play a boatload of music. What more does one ask of a unit named “Jukebox”?

Fast forward to today. My old electronic planner is on the fritz; the letters “O” and “P” no longer function and I can’t call up a whole month, anyway. My solar calculator has seen better days as well. My Daytimer (yes, a paper one) is too bloody big to fit in my pouch. (I use a fanny pack from REI. Deal with it.) I could really use the ability to check e-mail without hauling my laptop (which, by the way, is dying a slow, painful, heat-related death and is another story for another time) all over. The Creative Zen Jukebox is sitting, with speaker cable and power plug attached, on the dresser making it a somewhat of a pain to take to the gym. And, my cell phone is coming due for replacement as well.

I confess: I was looking at a BlackBerry. Which is something I have looked at for the last five or six years, but could never bring myself to the point of actually buying one. I mean, I just didn’t want to pay for web connect time via cell or bluetooth, and I am not all that keen on using my phone as an mp3 player at the gym. When I am working out, I really do not want to have a call come in when I am panting and out of breath on a treadmill. (It gives people the wrong impression.) Besides, it plays music on its own at times. Seems the “start” button activates a little too easy in a crowded pouch.

The iPod Touch fills many of those functions (except for, of course, the phone). And I don’t have to pay the monthly charge for internet for it; I can use wi-fi when I need it. I have some video on it, photos, an app for a to-do list, a few games...it does everything I need it to do, and then some. I used it to take notes on a Master Director’s class this last weekend, as well as checking the weather. I have sent e-mail from it. The calculator has worked well, as has the calendar.

And, yes, I have put about three days worth of music on it, so far.

So I am quite happy with my purchase.

Enough for now.

(posted 11/27/08)