iPod Touch

I've been living with the iPod touch for three months now and overall I think it is great. Here's why (and a few why nots as well)...

Using it

Like the MacBook Air, the iPod Touch comes packaged in a work of art- the box is robust and is still sat beside my iMac looking for something to store in it - I refuse the throw it out.  Once unboxed, the Touch simply connects to the compute with the enclosed USB cable and iTunes bursts into life inviting you to register the iPod against an iTunes account.  Making this link then enables the iTunes mobile store application on the Touch to purchase and download songs via your existing iTunes account and then automatically sync them back to your computer and authorise them to play the next time you sync your iPod- very neat, very easy- very Apple.

In use the iPod Touch is quite reliable but I have seen a couple of music player crashes and many Safari crashes.  I overheard an iPod genius talking to another customer about this and he said you should reset (full power off and on) your Touch once a week to keep it reliable. I've been doing that for 3 weeks and have not had a crash since and I was seeing several a week so it sounds like good advice!

Mobile Safari is easy to use and a very good browser - I just wish it would synch my Safari bookmarks from my Mac to my iPod Touch.

The photo application is very good, with some pretty iPhoto like transitions which hint at some of the horsepower hiding under the hood of this tiny little device. That said, I find the photo application gets most use as a means to show off the device to friends and let them play with the multi-touch gestures rather than anything else.

The contacts application is simple but effective and allows you to email contacts easily when you have a Wi-Fi signal to hand.

The Mail application is really good and integrates with my gMail account reliably.  The Mail application provides the most use for the onscreen keyboard which I have found more reliable the more I use it, but no where near as fast or reliable as my old BlackBerry.  Not a major issue for an iPod Touch if you only use it for adhoc emailing but if we were talking about an iPhone then I would have reservations about it being able to replace my blackberry for heavy email and texters - much as I would love to have one.

I like the Google Maps application and having submitted my home wi-fi router to SKYHOOK's database, I expect to be able to use the auto-position feature any day now- from home anyway.

What really makes the iPod touch exciting are the new raft of web based and soon to be native applications being developed for the iPhone - dont forget they work on the touch as well.  The BBC iPlayer is a dream over a wi-fi connection and the native FaceBook and Encyclopedia Britanica applications are great to use.  I can't wait to see what the iPhone SDK produces in the summer.  Then we will see the game change as we realise the iPod touch is not an iPod with a browser built in, it is a pocket computer with an iPod built in.

I've got the 16GB version and find it full most of the time - just add a single move and lose 10% of your capacity in one go.

In the UK iTunes movie purchases are not yet available by my iMac has Elgato EyeTV software with a digital TV (DVB) tuner so I regularly record TV programmes and movies and then EyeTV can export them direct to iTunes in a touch compatible resolution for easy synching and watching on the train.

Problems

The Screen and casing of the Touch feel strong in the hand, but the silver rear casing was looking scratched after just a few days so I quickly invested in a case to keep it safe.

The iPod Touch has no external volume control, you can only change the volume through the touch screen- which will pop up the screen saver and lock after only a few second in your pocket so given my Touch is in a case I have to take the touch out of my pocket, open the case, slide the unlock control on the screen and the adjust the volume slider... by that time the mobile phone has stopped ringing or you have missed a quiet bit of the podcast/ deafened yourself with that unexpected loud blast of rock.

Overall the iPod touch is a 4/5 bit of kit and an external volume control would up that to 5/5. The additional software scores a 3/5  - expect to see that rise to a 5/5 this summer when the SDK starts producing.

Available from: apple.com/uk at £269 for 16GB

MacBook Air

Our new MacBook Air was purchased as Mrs Blighty's main computer to replace a much loved but somewhat battered 12" PowerBook G4.  Mrs B works from home a lot, with her computer on her knees but also has to lug it into the office and around to the 26 schools she and her team regularly work in.  So the requirement was for a horsepower upgrade from the G4 CPU to allow the latest multi-media gizmos to be used in the presentations while also being light weight and robust for all that travel.  It sounds like the MacBook Air should be a perfect fit - was it?

The Ordering

The MacBook was ordered from the Apple store online in the UK- I played by usual trick of loading up the shopping basket and then waiting for a few days to see if I really wanted to buy something that expensive - and also to play chicken with the Apple sales managers.  Again they blinked first and I got a friendly email from Ger in Ireland saying he had noticed the saved basket and was there 'anything he could do to help.'

I usually by my Macs from the Apple store online, but it's always best to speak to a person rather than just place the order online- why? Because the sales staff have some discount discretion that you only get if you talk to them!  So I talked with Ger about what we wanted, how it was going to be used and by whom – this last bit turned out to be important as Mrs B heads up a charity that works in schools in our county and Ger disappeared for 10 minutes and then called back with education pricing and we saved enough on the MacBook Air and iWork 08 and other software to buy me an iPod Touch (look for that in a later review) 

The Arrival

The package turned up a week earlier than the advertised 'expected' date which was great news - as it turned out to be the day before a conference Mrs B had organised so MacBook Air was quickly co-opted as media player for the event.

The unboxing

The MacBook Air comes packaged in a solid and surprisingly small box, with a fit and finish like a Rolls-Royce.

I wont rework the 'unboxing bore' stories that abound the web from each new Apple product, but I will say that for the first time, this products packaging is as much a work of art as the product itself.

The migration

Migrating data from the existing PowerBook running Tiger to the MacBook Air running Leopard was not that obvious - the Tiger migration assistant requires a Firewire connection and the Leopard Wireless migration assistant would not talk to it.  The answer is simple, stick the leopard install DVD that came with the MacBook Air into the old laptop and install the migration assistant from there- there is a stand alone installer provided for this scenario.  The only problem was no-where in the documentation with the MacBook Air did I find this gem of information- it took some input from Mr Google and a search of the Apple support forums to find the answer.

Once the migration assistants were up and running on the two machines we were ready to copy the Mrs B's life from the old machine to the new.  I found the migration assistant was not has granular as I would have liked - I would have liked to choose which applications to copy across rather than the simple binary of all or none.  In the end I decided to copy them all and to see what happened...

Several hours passed while all the email (she never deletes or archives) and media files (lots of iTunes songs) copied across and the applications.  

When it finally finished we were ready to go- apple mail worked right away and overall I was impressed with how the migration tools had worked- the only thing that failed to work was Office X for mac- the associations with the all the office file extensions (.doc, .xls etc) were broken and none of the Office applications themselves would run.  A return to the Apple forums found similar but not identical issues and in the end I deleted the Office X folder and copied it back across by hand- and it had worked perfectly ever since.

The using

Using a MacBook Air is a real joy - on those few opportunities I manage to wrestle it out of Mrs B's hands - and she loves it to and the admiring glances and comments it regularly solicits.  It really is much lighter that her old machine and any other laptop I've ever used and that makes it so much more comfortable to use on your lap.  Running iWork and Office the machines just flies along and smoothly plays video files and the most creative Keynote presentations we can come up with- as a work a day multimedia office machine it is a dream.  Playing DVD in classrooms also works fine requiring just a little faffing to plug in the external superdrive (optional extra) and video adapter cable (supplied).

In use the MacBook Air feels solid and well made - actually feeling more solid than the 12" powerbook it replaces - and the fit an finish is impeccable.

The rear light on the keyboard was put to good use the first day after the MacBook Air arrived when it spend the day as the media player at a conference Mrs B had organised running a huge keynote presentation with lots of embedded movie clips.  Sitting the back of the darkened auditorium the illuminated keys were a god-send while driving the keynote and I'm sure this will find the MacBook Air a place in many conference centres, schools and places of worship for just this reason.

The screen is one of Apple's new LED based units and it is bright and clear and a joy to use.

Both the screen and keyboard light levels can be manually controlled or left up to the ambient light sensor which normally does a fine job of setting the levels for you.

My only reservation about the whole machine is that the cables on the SuperDrive and Video Adapter are very thin and feel a bit fragile- I've seen no evidence that the actually are after 8 weeks of regular use but I will wait to see if they will last a long as their heavier weight predecessors.

The final thoughts

The MacBook Air is a great little machine and as long as you don't want to do lots of video editing or GarageBanding I don't think you will ever notice the smaller drive or marginally slower CPU compared to the rest of the Apple Laptop range.  Some people call it expensive but don't forget its actually £100 cheaper than the cheapest MacBook Pro so for people who want to be able to take their laptop with them where-ever they go it makes a fine alternative to the MacBook or MacBook Pro.

Highly Recommended 5/5

MacBook Air from £1199 available from www.apple.com/uk

Welcome to Blighty

Welcome to Good Ole Blighty, land of warm beer, hot tea, green sports cars, bad dentistry and the Blighty Byte Review - reviewing the latest gadgets and gizmos for use in real life, by real people, who happen to live on the Eastern edge of the Atlantic.