My iPod Touch wis hlist
iPod Touch is an extremely useful and sexy little gadget. It can do a lot of cool things however there quite a few it can’t. It’s these things I’d like to talk about.
Software.
A Lot of improvements (easy to implement) can be just programmed in. I have few items on my wish list which concerns iTouch’s core application. Things like music and video player, alternatives to which are banned from App Store by Apple’s bonehead policy.
1. Number one on my list is audio “memory” feature. I carry ton of albums on my iPod at any time, but I don’t listen to the music all the time. And I certainly cannot remember last album/track I was listening a day or a week ago. When you switch to Video or reboot your iPod, it will not let you go back where you were. I even had to write down track/album in the Notes application each time I switch it off. I find it extremely frustrating why such simple feature could not be implemented.
2. Various Fast Forward and Rewind speeds. I own a wonderful box called Tivo HD. I also spend about 4 hours a day commuting to/from work. So because I don’t have time to watch all the shows I record on Tivo, I can easily rip it to MP4 and watch on iTouch in the train. So you can see how I can find useful a feature to fast forward commercials faster than snail speed. Give me 2x,6x and maybe even 10x FF/REW speeds. Let me jump to a specific time in the show! Currently using that play bar to go to certain spot is a Russian roulette game… This can be very useful with Audio books as well. My iTouch glitches sometimes and doesn’t remember spot where I left off in the book…
3. Audio Gain (preAmp) option. It’s not that rare. When I had my Treo650 I had a nice media player application that run on Palm OS. It had that. Very useful for movies where volume is very low. It basically drastically increases volume. Don’t know how they did it but it worked great. Would be very nice to have in iPod.
3.5 Funky graphical VU meter/visualizer. Ok I’ll admit it serves no real purpose but i just love graphical level meters and sound visualizers. PSP has it, why not iPod? 🙂
Hardware
I know you can’t have everything and keep price of the device low. But some things had no excuse to be left out.
1. Bluetooth/GPS. Take that Nike+ chip and shove it up your… apple. We could had bluetooth or GPS chip in it’s place! And you CAN track workouts using GPS. What a waste of transistors on that proprietary POS. Even if iTouch only had Bluetooth, I would still be able to use my match-size bluetooth GPS receiver. Dumb really dumb move, Apple… Another great application for bluetooth is that you’d be able to (in theory) to hook up iTouch to the Internet enabled bluetooth phone (like Blackberry) and use it’s data for internet connectivity. WiFi is far from being available everywhere….
2. User replaceable battery. Any heavy iTouch/iPhone user will need this. Internal batter lasts for a while, but after a year it stops holding charge very well, and it goes down from there very quickly. Besides battery life, it would be very nice to have ability so swap a fresh one when on the long flight or waiting in the airport for a delayed plane.
Built-in microphone. You built in speaker, but why the heck not mic? Oh what a nice wireless Skype headset it could’ve been.
3. Camera. It would’ve probably added to the price tag, but would be really nice to have! There are so many nice Apps out there that will only work with iPhone because of the camera. For example app that takes image of the bar code in the store and recognizes the product (can also search online for best price).
Well that’s pretty much all of it.
