AA* Meeting

OK, um, my name, is, um, Stuart and I…

Sigh.

My name is Stuart and I’ve just bought an Apple product.

And I really really like it. Despite my previous rants posts about not liking Apple and everything they stand for I have just bought an iPod Touch.

Let me explain.

Oh, actually. Let’s not.  All you need to know is that my beautiful looking new phone, the Smasung F480 ‘Tocco’, turned out to be rather a disappointment.

Among other things:

• The 5Mp camera: brilliant – if used in broad daylight on a tripod by David Bailey.  Any other combination=crappy.
• The MP3 player: nice sound, but the shoddy storage interface took two whole minutes to scroll through 100-odd albums, so I basically only ever listened to albums beginning with ABC or XYZ.
• The 3G internet connection: pretty speedy and reliable, but no keyboard for the browser (only text message-style input) meant it was completely crippled.

And lots of things were just really really badly done.  Gmail, for instance: it took me over two hours to set up my email account, despite having a “Setup Your Gmail account” button.  And a month later Google changed their system somehow and Gmail no longer worked on my phone.

So, I’ve sold my F480 on eBay and with the money bought an iPod Touch 8Gb.  This isn’t a phone, obviously, so I’ve gone back to my old trusty Sony-Ericsson M600i – an ugly workhorse of a phone, but with a half-decent mini keyboard and decent reception, unlike my F480, which would regularly drop out when used at home.

But what about the iPod Touch?

Well, I wish I didn’t have to use iTunes with it, because iTunes sucks badly at almost anything.

Otherwise, I love it.  This is the device and the functionality I’ve always dreamed about.  If it says it does something then it damned well does it.  No messing about.

You want Gmail?  What’s your account name and password?  OK, you’ve got 13 emails.

Want to see what music you’ve got?  Press that and…there you go.

Want to download an application or eBook?  User name and password, please.  Uh-huh, there’s your application/book.

The weather?  OK, let me just auto-goddamn-matically connect to your wi-fi network…uh-huh…here’s the next five days’ weather.

Whatever you try and do with the Touch it just does it.

Samsung phones seem to have been built by their accounting department.  They’ve asked their engineers what the perfect phone would do and then given them £20 and a week to develop it before spending a £20 million on publicity and rushing the phone out before even actually switching it on.

With the Touch they’ve asked what people want, given their engineers some time and some money and let them knock up some solutions.  Then they’ve gotten smart people to look at all the problems with those solutions, before tested the results on idiots.  Once the idiots have finished with it they’ve tested the solutions again, this time on smart people, so that not only is the final product idiot-proof but it looks pretty, too.

I’m not about to go and buy a rip-off Mac, but I am a late convert to the glories of the iPod – or the iPod Touch, at least.

* AA= Apple Anonymous