Introducing the iPod Smudge ™
Ahhh gadgetry. Picked up the iPod Touch and one of those nifty new Apple bluetooth keyboards. Ch-ching.
The keyboard defies all modern technological conventions. It’s just mind-bogglingly (bottlingly) thin. In the next James Bond film I fully expect to see a henchman whose M.O. is to tap nonchalantly away at this keyboard whilst his big villain boss waxes lyrical about some diabolical plan, but then suddenly he signals to the henchman whereupon this dude picks the keyboard up, gracefully flings it at a hapless prisoner henchman who had failed in his duties or was caught betraying the big boss etc slicing his head clean from his body, the sheer thinness and aerodynamic perfection of the board making it fly for some several hundred meters beyond the now headless cadavar, before floating softly to the ground and an hilarious pun being made revolving around the word “key”.
Now the iPod Touch. This thing is beautiful but its touch-screen interface is of course a fingermark magnet. Behold:
Fingermarks are to be expected on a device that you interact with via finger power, but seriously it looks like I’ve been using a fricking doughnut as a stylus or something. I don’t think I have particularly greasy hands. At least I didn’t until I bought the iPod Smudge - Now With More Self Consciousness.
Smudges aside, I’m loving this device. The interface is a triumph - there is zero learning curve, something I love to see in devices that have relatively complicated functionality such as this. Browsing the web is excellent. So excellent, that I think this shakes up the current state of mobile browsing quite significantly. If all mobile devices served web pages as well as the iPod Touch, the mobile web would be a MUCH more interesting place. Interacting with sites on a mobile device is now no longer a cumbersome ordeal of cycling through links on a page (or, god forbid, controlling a mouse pointer with some half-arsed 4-button keypad implementation), it’s a much more fluid experience of simply touching whatever you want, and flicking the page up and down to scroll. A huge leap forward.
Kudos in particular to Facebook, who have quickly produced an iPod Touch / iPhone-specific version of their site, which is a total and utter joy to use. I find myself checking Facebook on this device almost as much as I do on a regular computer.
Oh it also plays music and stuff.
