iPod Touch sans Apple
I’ve been looking at the many reviews of the iPod Touch and thinking it sounds like a pretty nice device, but it also looks artificially limited in a way I just don’t feel comfortable supporting. There’s no good reason for the built-in apps to be limited the way they are, there’s no good reason for there not to be a way to put third-party apps on it, and there’s no good reason it should be locked down to stop non-iTunes clients putting music on it.
Well, I write “no good reason” but of course there is a good reason as far as Apple is concerned: they want to control the iPod experience as much as possible, and if that means a few geeks won’t be happy then, hey, screw ‘em.
So. No shiny new iPod Touch for me. I don’t run Windows or OS X any more — note to Steve Jobs: when pixel density keeps going up, resolution independence becomes bloody important, not something to talk up and then drop — so I’d have to stuff about to put music on one anyway, and word is that they don’t play nice with VMware either.
So, I think. I have a Palm T|X sitting here. I don’t use it quite as much as I thought I would when we bought it. I do use it, but my schedule isn’t terribly hectic so it’s not as important to me as my partner’s is to her. It has a reasonable touch-screen, a stereo headphone jack, and an SD slot. And I just happen to have a 2GB SD card sitting around…
Having read a bunch of software reviews I settled on Pocket Tunes as the app to try. It does AAC and MP3 among others. My collection is a mix of AAC and MP3 and most of the PalmOS music apps don’t do AAC.
Loading it up with music wasn’t terribly difficult. CardReader on the Palm turns it into a USB mass storage device. Ubuntu’s automounter doesn’t notice it — I probably need to tweak something somewhere — but it’s a mountable VFAT volume. Copy music files into the Audio folder, turn off CardReader, and off we go.
Sound quality is reasonable. I don’t expect brilliant from a portable anyway. I think it sounds a little flat through the nice HD580s I use at home but the results are still perfectly acceptable.
Interface-wise pTunes is pretty good so long as you choose a skin with big finger-friendly buttons. The one thing I can’t tweak and wish I could is the font used in the music-selection dialog: it uses the standard Palm “normal” font which is a bit small for my eye — iPod wins over this with the modified-Chicago they’ve been using for years.
The next step is to see how it copes out and about. If this works well I can see being tempted by a Treo in a year or two, if they’re still around.
Million-dollar question: how long before someone does a Touch interface knockoff for Palm? Seems a pretty obvious move, if the hardware is up to it.
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[...] night I wrote a bit about using a Palm T|X as an iPod-alternative, but having spent some time today reading about what other Linux users are using instead of iPods [...]
Yeah, I used my Tungsten C as a music player for ages (using TCPMP and RealPlayer). Its only defect as the perfect PDA for me was mono sound.