Much more to touch

On 11.7 Apple released the hyped 2.0 software version of iPhone software. The following day the update also became available for iPod Touch users, costing 10$ (7,99e). As the update brought many new features, I decided to shell out the cash and try out the new software.

UPDATE: I also covered the iPod/iPhone software update 2.1, so remember to check that one out too.

I’ve now played with 2.0 for a few days and while it is a great improvement over the previous version, it’s also surprisingly lacking in many areas. As some of the long known issues haven’t still been fixed, it leaves me to wonder if they just ran out of time or just plainly ignored these. More on that later. Let’s see the good things first.

NOTE: Focusing on iPod Touch here. I don’t own an iPhone yet, so no comments regarding the topic can it make toast or not and would making toast be an essential part of the mobile experience or something that all other smartphones either have or should have. There. (Replace toast with MMS, bluetooth access, user replaceable battery etc.)

The big thing of 2.0 software is, of course, the AppStore. When iPod Touch first came out, all it had was pretty much the standard iPod features (music, photos, videos) besides Safari and a calendar you couldn’t modify. Can’t recall if contacts were part of the original package or not (probably were), but doesn’t matter. In the beginning of 2008 Apple released a software update that brought Mail and Notes alongside few other apps in exchange for your money. Around then iPod Touch was starting to be more than just a fancy iPod and early February I bought mine.

Despite of the update, there still wasn’t much besides mail and web you could use Touch for PDA-wise. Google Maps, Notes and Weather. Of course, Jailbreaking (modifying the iPod so that third-party software could be installed and on iPhone also allowed to unlock the phone) gave access to many other applications for those who bothered going that route. I didn’t, since I decided to see first what the announced AppStore would bring on to table.

Store of Dreams

Now the AppStore is here, bringing hundreds of free and commercial applications for iPod Touch and iPhone owners everywhere. They have still a long way to go as it takes time before the developers get to know the platform and start cooking up truly innovative and useful software. It’s a start of a long run.

Currently the App Store offers hundreds of programs, some of them free and others ranging from 1€ to around 80€. Unfortunately there is no way of testing the program before purchase, so it’s a bit of a gamble. As time goes by and the reviews start piling up it becomes a bit easier to choose.

Due to being a cheap bastard I haven’t invested a dime in applications yet (Besides the 2.0 upgrade). Luckily there’s plenty of free software and I’ve managed to get something to throw at my iPod. Here’s a few examples:

NetNewsWire: version of the popular Mac RSS-reader. Brings RSS feeds to Touch.

Evernote: Client for the Evernote online service. Allows you to save webpages, audio, pictures and text as notes you can tag and search.

Aurora Feint: A puzzle game with a few RPG-elements. Kind of like Puzzle Quest.

Remote: Apple’s software for remote controlling your iTunes-library. Now you can change tracks while lying on your sofa.

What else is there?

All right, we’ve covered the App Store. Does the 2.0 bring anything more to the table? Well, there’s Exchange and pushmail-support, for instance. Now with the introduction of Apple’s MobileMe-service your calendar, email and contacts are automatically pushed to your devices. Theoretically, that is. Currently the entries are instantly sync in MobileMe, iPod Touch and iPhone, but there’s a 15 minute delay on computers. So, not quite as pushy as it was supposed to be. But hey, it works. After they get first get some reliability to MobileMe, my life’s not dependant on instant push.

On Exchange support I can’t say much as I don’t use Exchange. Supposedly it works and works quite well, but not without some issues. Other changes include the fancy ability to finally delete multiple messages on Mail, ability to save images from web or email, support for multiple calendars (now with colors too) and a scientific mode for calculator.

As you can see from the images around this article, 2.0 software also allows you to take screenshots. Screenshots are saved under Photos and are taken by holding down the Home-button and pressing power-button.

Six Things Still Not Cool

1. No Copy & Paste

Despite all the added features, iPod Touch’s software has a long way to go. It’s filled with many little things that just cry to be fixed (even more so on the iPhone side, or so I hear) . But, 2.0 update wasn’t the cure here. First of all, no copy & paste. Still. This can hardly come as a surprise since there’s never been. I can understand why it’s sought after and find myself wishing for it every so often.

2. No native keyboard for you

The second annoyance I’m listing concerns probaby only my fellow Europeans, or at least the Scandinavian ones. European languages tend to have their own special characters which are needed every now and then. for example, in finnish (and swedish too) the ones you mostly need are a-umlaut (ä) and o-umlaut (ö). So, it would make sense – now that the software supposedly has a finnish keyboard layout – that those keys would be available easily. No dice. The way to go is holding down letter a (or o) until a pop-up menu comes up and you get to pick the letter there. Mighty handy and slows your writing to a crawl. Now that also iPhone is available in Finland you’d think they would’ve fixed it. I mean, they have support for chinese which requires a little bit extra than just adding two keys…

Typing the Finnish way: fast as lightning and twice as accurate.

3. Notes and todo crippled

Onward. No way to sync your notes. No sync whatsoever. Which is weird because the Mail-application in Leopard supports notes. currently you can’t do anything with the notes you write in Touch. You can’t email them or even copy the text elsewhere since there’s no copy & paste. Sure, they work as Notes on your iPod, but this limits the usefullness of Notes a great deal.

As for Todo-tasks, iPod Touch doesn’t even come with an Application that supports Todo. Which is kind of a basic feature on every other gadget out there, ranging from PDAs to phones. App Store partially corrected this as now there are like 10 different solutions, but the fact is that none of them support the Todo-tasks built in OS X 10.5 Leopard’s mail client. Why Apple didn’t think of these in the first place is beyond me. Sure, lots of more high-priority stuff to do, but these have been missing since day one.

4. Cry me a Wifi-switch

This is the smallest of my complaints, but here goes: there’s currently no way to turn wifi on and off fast. Want to switch off wireless? Tap settings, then Wi-Fi and then the off-switch. Not a big deal, but since Wi-Fi’s a bit of a power-hog you need to switch it off every now and then to conserve battery. It would’ve been nice to do this with a single tap instead of three.

5. Invisible wall

As for Application Store, the developers weren’t given free hands and it shows. Apps can’t run on background yet and as far as I know there’s currently no way for to access the low level functions of the operating system (They can’t add those two mighty keys to keypad, for example and my guess is that they can’t do the wifi-button either). On Apple’s side I can see why they’ve put the boundaries, but only time will tell if it was a good choice or a bad one.

Final Thoughts

On many levels the 2.0 update is great and definitely an improvement over the previous software version. Well worth the money for iPod users as well. Unfortunately while the 2.0 version brings a lot of new features, it doesn’t fix many of the shortcomings of the previous version. Now we’re in a situation where more features are added to the soup with their own bugs and gripes in addition to the old ones people have been crying about ever since day one (copy & paste etc).

If you own an iPod Touch (or iPhone) with 1.X firmware, you should definitelly upgrade. I just hope the future updates focus more on fixing instead of adding. The platform was great, now it’s even better and by improving those small things it could achieve all that it’s set out to be.