The iPod is not an iPhone

I normally reserve this blog for things relating to politics but I’m a tech geek at heart and I have to rant on the subject from time to time.

This has been bugging me since the day I bought my iPod Touch. To all those out there reviewing the iPod Touch… IT IS NOT AN IPHONE!

I got my monthly issue of MacWorld in the mail a while back and they had a pretty heated article about how lackluster the iPod Touch was. It wasn’t a bad review and they had some quality points, just one glaring thing shared with so many other reviews… it didn’t measure up to their iPhone baby.

The iPhone has a Maps application, Notes, Email, Stocks, Weather and some physical features that the iPod touch lacks out of the box. My response… 99% of those, would be annoying on an iPod Touch MOST of the time.

On an iPhone, you will have signal access enough to check the weather, your email or your stocks pretty much any time you feel the urge, as you have dual access to AT&T’s EDGE network or WiFi. On an iPod Touch, you cannot access anything but WiFi and in the US, widespread free WiFi access is still somewhat of a non-entity. Unless I’m at work, or at my house, the chances I will have internet access to check my email are slim so why include it?

It doesn’t make much sense to me to replicate a device and include features that demand constant access to an internet signal unless (like the UK) you have a pretty good assurance that your audience will have access to use those features any time they like.

On another note, it bugs me that people are looking at the iPod as an iPhone Cripple. Apple was notorious back in the iMac days for using their “Product Matrix” presentations, where they had products grouped by their target audience/features.

If you look at the target audience and features of an out of the box iPod Touch, it fits better in the portable music player product matrix, than it does in the smart phone matrix. The lack of the ability to take notes on the iPod or enter events into your calendar from the iPod itself is a feature noticeably lacking in every single iPod model from the Classic 160GB down to the 1GB iPod Shuffle, I fail to see why it would be a shock that it wouldn’t be present in THIS iPod. The same goes for the lack of the ability to edit/add calendar events from the iPod itself (an issue fixed as of the 1.1.2 upgrade).

The only complaint most have that I see merit in, is the lack of physical buttons on the side of the iPod to deal with next/Previous track and volume. It WOULD be nice if you didn’t have to drag out the whole iPod to turn it down if you needed to hear something. That, I would say would be the biggest misstep of the iPod Touch.

Simply because the iPod Touch borrows its form and basic function from the iPhone, does not make it an iPhone mini… it’s not marketed as a neutered smart phone, so please… stop acting like it is.