A spy in the G.O.P.

Last night I went to the Republican caucus in Boulder county, Colorado. I've stayed Republican for the last few years mainly so I could vote in this year’s primaries, a decision I regretted as I headed towards the Chamber of Boredom.

I walked up at 7 p.m. for the 7 p.m. start time, and groaning at the 7 to 9 p.m. sign out front, but apparently I was supposed to show up early for registration. I walked up to the table and the lady said she had already closed the envelope for my precinct...which, though true, didn't mean the envelope was sealed, and she was nice enough to let me register anyway instead of having to stay late to do it. This relieved me as I had no intention of staying for the whole caucus. So I filled out my name, address, phone number (holy crap was that done with a heavy heart, though I can't wait to tell the first G.O.P. caller this year that if they don't stop calling me, I'm voting for Barack Obama), then my voter number. Oh, that's odd. What's my voter number? No problem, she said, it's on this sheet, though the A-K printout actually ended at F. I think I was supposed to take care of it afterwards. I had no motivation to, as she also gave me the official "vote for president" card, which was all I came for. I immediately circled Mitt Romney and walked into the high school auditorium.

Lots of people were gathered by the door, but I figured I could just take a seat on the wings...the room, however, was pretty full, and I took a seat in the penultimate row in the back right. After a not-so-quick rundown of the rules, each candidate could have two people speak for him. The six speakers went in random order: but it was two each for Newt, Paul, and Romney, and none at all for Santorum. Ron Paul's supporters boiled down, of course, to "Our guy's a real candidate, I swear." The Newt Gingrich people, again, expectedly, scared the living crap out of me: one said he wanted not a Boy Scout in Chief, but a Commander in Chief. Guess the G.O.P. isn't even going to pretend to be the family values party anymore, I noted dutifully. The other said the Founders went against the British without accepting the likely calculated outcome; we should do the same and vote for Newt. He talked about Newt going against a vague group of enemies he counted as the "most demonic" in American history. I think he meant The Big O's administration, but demonic? Really? We want a guy, he argued, with the "horsepower between the ears" to stand against Obama. I assume the horsepower comment was not a direct quote from the West Georgia tenure committee.

The Mitt supporters were a little different. The first, like the other four, was a male, and he spoke to Mitt's successful experience turning around a corrupt Olympic host and his success in other business ventures, like at investment firms named for Batman villains. He also said Romney would restore dignity to the White House, (wait a beat), which has been missing for the last three years. I honestly don’t know what he meant. The second was a woman, who started off by saying that she had known Romney since 1985 and that we might not know that Romney, in 1995, along with Utah senator Orrin Hatch, had...and at this point, I immediately filled in her backstory for myself, that clearly she was Mormon, and Romney had been her stake president, and that he is, in fact, a good man, right? But she talked about how Romney and the senator had helped her adopt her kid from China. Then she said she wanted to speak to what she called Romney's diversification, and that people expect him to be Mormon-centric, but that he and Hatch, both Mormon, had gone out of their way to help her, even though she's Jewish. And then she said she helped on the Salt Lake Olympic Committee when Romney asked, and how she felt she had to after all he'd done for her family. And, oh yeah, at the end, just as an aside, she mentioned when her mother was dying right before her daughter was born in China, Mitt Romney flew them out there. Okay, that was just awesome. The coolest, most personal moment of the night.

We broke up into precincts and, after we picked some precinct officials, tallied our presidential votes. I was pleased when Romney won (12 to Gingrich’s 6 to Santorum’s 9 to Paul’s 2), then later carried the whole school. We then picked some more volunteers/election judges/paying delegates, etc., in a drawn-out war of attrition.

Finally, we closed with my favorite part of any caucus...the resolutions! Thankfully, I got my hands on a printed copy this time. They were a little less nutty, but still pretty fun. Such as:

Resolution 1:

Whereas Obamacare represents the most ambitious overreach ever of the government into the lives of ordinary citizens, and

-actually, let's just stop there. Drop the ever. And most ambitious overreach? Beats Prohibition? Slavery? Or is citizens our weasel word of the day? Anyway, it ended with the idea that Obamacare must be repealed...if there's anything we need to make sure the GOP emphasizes more, it's Obamacare.

Resolution 3, which ends:

Be it resolved that the Boulder County Republicans Support an Amendment to the Constitution which requires that the budget be balanced annually such that a deficit budget cannot be approved; Secondly, we believe that the deficit should be addressed by spending reductions rather than by tax increases, and a three-fifths supermajority vote of both Houses of Congress be required for any tax increases.

The balanced budget thing sounds awesome unless you ever accidentally crack open a freshman Econ textbook; I was one of few in my precinct to have made this mistake. Secondly, I get it, you think the government is too big, quit beating me over the head with it, and third, taxes are some special law that require a more onerous burden to change in one direction but not the other? Brilliant.

Res. 4, ban bailouts, should've run that one by W.;

Res. 5 on voter ID:

Whereas Photo Identification is not required in the State of Colorado for any registered voter; and
Whereas producing a photo ID is a normal act in everyday commerce; and

...wait, where are you guys shopping that you have to show a photo ID to buy stuff? I have no real reason to be against this, other than I'm not sure what it's code for; it's just that, on my numbered list of political priorities, this occupies the spot right next to Avogadro's number.

Res. 8 and 9 were awfully similar, both on Second Amendment rights, and equally annoying as I don’t care for guns; however, I loved 8's line:

Whereas an armed citizenry correlates generally with low crime rates; therefore

because it sounded oh-so-scientific.

Then we got the last two, which weren't prescreened and therefore weren't printed. The first involved being pro-life, which is fine with me but sort of random, and the second was about United Nations Agenda 21, which was referred to as socialistic and communistic and discussed in terms of extreme environmentalism and as a threat to national sovereignty, but which I was the only precinct member (a precinct in which 29 voted for a presidential candidate) to vote against as fear tactics get old after a while. The U.N.’s gonna make us change? Aren’t we their Enforcement Division?

Then I came home and saw how well the comeback kid, Rick Santorum, is doing, and frankly, it pissed me off. I think most Mormons have an overdeveloped persecution complex, but in this case I think it fits. Other than not wanting to vote for a Mormon, why would anyone support Sanitarium over Governor Romney?  He was that memorable in his Senate terms? Is it his wealth of private sector experience? Give me a friggin' break. I know the G.O.P. is not the party of tolerance, but it still infuriates me. And it came as a surprise, too, except in Missouri, where Santorum surged after endorsing Governor Boggs' re-election campaign.

Earlier in the night, in an effort to rouse volunteers, one of the women in charge told us if we're okay with Obama, to go ahead and sit on our thumbs. If Santorum's the candidate?

Gladly.

Amazon Kindle review (2011)

 

Note: This review is of the $79, ad-supported, non-touch device named simply “Kindle”, as the Kindle 2 and 3 / Keyboard once were before it.

The new Amazon Kindle is a superb device, boiling the essence of the Kindle product line into a simpler, smaller package than any that came before it, and working so well it renders its compromises meaningless almost instantly.

This Kindle is the latest in a line of Amazon’s dedicated e-readers, which are built (save for the DX) around six-inch e-ink screens for impressive legibility and battery stamina. Each has featured wireless networking, eschewing the need for a PC and allowing book downloads directly to it. Yet the Kindle plays well with other devices, allowing its books to be shopped for (and pushed from) computers and smartphones, as well as syncing page locations from the device and back with the various Kindle apps on smartphones, tablets, computers, and, blessedly, the Web (read.amazon.com).

With each revision, the Kindle brings something minor-sounding, but important, to the table. The second Kindle promised faster page turns. The third Kindle brought a higher-contrast screen (sometimes called Pearl) that makes a world of difference, particularly in less-than-ideally lit environments. (I’d been craving a 3 for a while, just on that screen alone.) It also allowed for superior one-handed operation, with back-and-forward page buttons on both sides of the screen and a lighter weight and smaller chassis.

The latest Kindle continues the trend, shedding the keyboard (sometimes thought superfluous), dropping size and weight, and discarding even the option of 3G networking, depending alone, instead, on Wi-Fi.

In fact, in going from my Kindle 2, I gave up 3G, a keyboard, speakers and, according to some, my dignity, now that I have ads directly on the device. Here’s why those compromises were worth it for me:

3G: The Kindle’s ability to hook up to cell-phone networks is cool. You can buy a book from anywhere, they say, and have it downloaded in 60 seconds. Honestly, I might’ve thought my Kindle was broken if a purchase had ever taken sixty seconds to get to me; I can’t say, because they were always much faster. Also, if you’re using Kindle apps, it can sync up your latest location all the time, so you can always pick up on your phone or whatever. This is all cool. (And it’s easier to set up for the tech-phobic, since it’s connected out of the box.)

However, in a year with the Kindle 2, I’ve already built a backlog of books. If I run out, I’m almost always in Wi-Fi range, and it’s easy to plan ahead if I need to buy a new one. Also, I don’t care about the phone apps anymore, because this thing is so light and the screen so nice that I’ll take it everywhere. (It uses a similar screen to the Kindle 3, now called the Kindle Keyboard on Amazon.com; I wouldn’t be surprised if they are the same. Look at it below.)

Keyboard: I don’t take notes in paper books or electronic ones. I do, however, love the ability to search through my books I’ve read for favorite passages using the quick search built into Kindles. (It takes just a few seconds to return a sorted list of every time a word or phrase appears in a book.)

So this new Kindle doesn’t have a keyboard, per se, but rather a pop-up onscreen keyboard that you navigate with the directional button below the screen. Due to the screen’s improved refresh rate, the keyboard is not that horrible to use, and the rest of the time I get to enjoy the benefits of a smaller, lighter device. It’s an easy trade-off.

Speakers: I used my speakers all the time, if only to demonstrate to people that my Kindle can, in fact, play music. (I kept an MP3 copy of Them Crooked Vultures on it for just such occasions.) That’s because most people see it and think it’s some kind of conventional tablet. More fittingly, the text-to-speech capability can also read most books aloud to you. The speakers were louder and sounded better than you’d expect. I just pretty much never used them. This Kindle doesn’t have a headphone jack, either, so it can’t play audio at all.

Ads: Ah, the kicker: I don’t really own this thing because Amazon will send me a string of ads forever and ever. (For $109, you can buy this device sans the ads.) It’s true, I will get a lot of ads, and I can’t pay the $30 later to get rid of them, which I think is lame. [EDIT: Actually, you can do exactly that.]

That said, there are no ads in your books. They appear on the lock screen (see the first picture above) and on the bottom of your list of books when viewed on the device. (That smaller ad at the bottom corresponds to whatever ad was on your lock screen last.) See below:

I found the lock screen ads completely unobjectionable and the one at the bottom of my reading list relatively distracting. (That Amazon one is probably the most understated that I’ve seen.) But you really don’t see it that often.

Some people take a strong, principled stand against ads in their reading; I just hope they never flip through the last few pages of any of their paperbacks. I had another, more personal reason for giving the ads a shot, which I won’t get into now, but they’re fine. Not sure I’d buy the ad-supported version as a gift for a loved one, but I found it fine for personal use.

So what else am I missing on this Kindle? Well, it has only 2 gigs of storage, except that’s 1,400 books, and I’ll never need more. Its battery life is listed at a mere month compared to the two months of the new Kindle Touch. I don’t even think I’ll get a month out of it but a week is plenty for my standards. (My Kindle 2 got me maybe two days if I read a lot; I’ve read a lot the last couple days and I’m not even down a quarter yet.)

And it doesn’t have a touch screen. Everyone who picked up my Kindle 2 thought it was a touch screen, and many were disappointed when it wasn’t. (Which is weird, considering the Kindle 2 has 52 buttons on its face.) Okay, first off: touch technology has made people idiots. The reason touch is such a great feature on, say, an iPhone, is not because touch is an inherently superior way to control things, but because getting rid of physical keys and having a bigger screen allows for vast improvement in certain uses, like video playback and Web browsing. However, some people buy touch screen feature phones and find they don’t do anything better than their last phone, which just had buttons.

And anyway, I don’t want to touch/leave fingerprints on a screen I’m reading from. My laziness prefers the side-mounted page-turning buttons to having to reach all the way to the screen. Further, the device is so light and the bezel so small that sometimes I put a thumb on the screen to grip it, and I’m glad it doesn’t turn the page when I do so. That said, the touch is said to improve the usability/speed of the onscreen keyboard.

Oh, and this Kindle doesn’t come with a charger, just a USB cable to charge off your computer. This is like how iPods stopped coming with wall chargers after a few years. It’s a little annoying, though it’s a standard micro-USB port on the device and USB cable, so it may well work with other chargers you have already, or you can buy a charger from Amazon for $9.99.

Despite all this: using the thing is a breath of fresh air. Why can’t everything work this well? You think you’re going to regret getting the cheaper model, but Amazon did a very commendable thing and made their low-end product a joy to use. It’s got a beautiful screen, amazing battery life, and convenient, comfortable dimensions. Plus it still has those nice Kindle touches, like the ability to arrow over to a word and see its definition in a popup, without ever leaving the page.

If you’re thinking of getting a Kindle now, and can live with the trade-offs, my advice would be: go for it.

Samsung Captivate review

Back in February, I met a stranger at a McDonald's in a Wal-Mart for my first Craigslist purchase, completing my transition to manhood.

Only technology is worth such a dangerous risk to life and limb, and at first I was underwhelmed with my purchase: the Samsung Captivate, an Android smartphone for AT&T.

As time has passed, I've found myself liking the Captivate more and more. But the key question remained: can a phone running the Google-provided Android software replace the iPhone in my heart?

Not quite. But it's a ton of fun regardless.

* * *

To answer the question on every iPhone lover's mind—why?—embrace one simple reality: I'm a nerd, and I wanted to try Android for myself. Buying the phone off Craigslist kept my contract status with AT&T intact, meaning I'm still just a few months from freedom.

Second: the iPhone had lost a bit of its luster for me, for multiple reasons. First, I've been using one for years, and wanted to see if anything better was out there. Second, my 3GS is limping to the finish line. The headphone jack is getting loose (for now, the sound's still fine), the white plastic case is riddled with cracks, and the battery life was sinking fast. I figured I'd spring for a battery replacement, and the Captivate could hold me over for a bit while Apple took it apart and sealed it back up. (I was later told at the Apple Store that I just needed to restore my phone, and for the most part, that was right.) I've been upgrade-eligible for the iPhone 4 since it came out, but at this point I'd rather wait for the 5 before taking a punch to my soul in two-more-years-of-contract form.

So, enter the Captivate. Many of its internal specs rival the iPhone 4's: sixteen gigs of storage, 1 GHz processor, half a gig of RAM, 5-megapixel camera, and 720p video recording. It's missing the front camera and the absurdly sharp 3.5" Retina Display of the 4, but it has a 4" Super AMOLED panel of its own with unparalleled black levels. (Seriously, even a movie like Batman Begins looks detailed on it.)

The hardware was superb: the larger screen makes for a bigger footprint, but the Samsung is very thin, and at first it seemed to match the iPhone 4 in innate desire to leave my hand. I've since adjusted, for the most part, though thankfully it's impressively durable, including when a coworker dropped it several feet the first Monday I had it.

The software, however, is a different story. It's not awful, it's different, and it was particularly painful at first when I tried to use the Captivate like an iPhone. It's no iPod in terms of media playback, even though the somewhat-cheesy Samsung music player is actually an improvement on Google's default offering. Its camera is not a touch-and-go affair like the iPhone's; rather, it has a bunch of settings, similar to a digital camera. Once I got used to it, it's actually quite good, though the video recording quality can't match the iPhone 4 even if it smokes my 3GS. Here are some random shots to demonstrate:

However, Android taught my phone a few tricks the iPhone doesn't know. Free turn-by-turn navigation, with spoken directions, awaited me in a Google Maps upgrade. It works great. It's pretty annoying, too, with how much it talks, but it works. The Gmail app is fantastic, and comes very close to replicating the Gmail website on your desktop. However, the e-mail program for your other accounts is a piece of, um, garbage, so I went to the Market, where I found the competent K-9 Mail, which is plenty good for my work account.

The most impressive Google app, though, was Listen, the podcast manager/player. By default, the podcast management on an iPhone is a pain. Some iPhone users complain about having to plug their phones into their computers to sync content—personally, I like having a fresh backup of my contacts and pictures. But downloading podcasts in iTunes on your desktop, and then syncing, is by far the most straightforward way to get podcasts you like on your iPhone—while you can download individual episodes from the iTunes app on the phone, there's no sense of subscriptions on the device, nor any way to automate grabbing new podcasts.

So Listen is an app that lets you subscribe to, check for, and download or stream podcasts, even over 3G. It's really cool. I pulled down a 50-meg episode in a couple of minutes while driving, and listened to it right away. It's funny that Google beat Apple considering podcasts are, you know, named after iPods.

However, while Apple itself doesn't match Listen, the battle wasn't over. Listen was so good, you see. that I started looking for equivalents on iOS. And then Gizmodo posted about Instacast on the App Store, which was infinitely times more expensive at $1.99, but which completely smokes Listen, which has a confusing UI and imprecise navigation.

And that's the big downer on Android, coming from an iPhone: it's not the same as iOS, which is fine, but the app situation is still a bit behind. Official big-time apps, like Facebook and Twitter, are just enough behind their iOS counterparts that you notice (TweetDeck for Android is nice, though). And the selection is weaker. There's no Instacast on the Android Market, no Tiny Wings, no Instapaper, no Simplenote, and no Calvetica.

Other cool Android features include apps like Chrome to Phone, which let you click a button in Chrome on your computer and immediately open the same page on your phone, which is great if you have to go but want to finish that article. You can also push apps to your phone from the Android Market website. I really liked voice actions, too; the voice recognition is quite good, and phrases like, "Navigate to Coors Field" just work, which is insane.

I really missed Visual Voicemail, though, but I eventually switched to Google Voice for my voicemail with no ill effects on either phone (I switch between the two without mercy).

So if it's just a bad iPhone impression, why do I like the Captivate so much?

Because I broke it.

* * *

In a sense, the Captivate came broken. I'm not talking about the abysmal battery life (guy kept in a box for a few months before selling it; the battery has recovered, but it took forever to charge and burned out in a few hours at first). I mean that the software on the phone, as it came from Samsung and AT&T, was terrible.

Being on an iPhone, I'd almost forgotten how much carriers delight in messing with you. So of course my phone had a few non-removable AT&T apps for stuff like navigation, even though there's no way it's better than Google's free offering.

The problem, really, came down to Android itself, or rather, the way it's used. Android is free and open-source, so any manufacturer can use it. Most try to differentiate their Android phones by making their own modifications. This has two negative effects:

1) It makes your phone slower.

2) While Google updates Android frequently, you can't get the upgrades until your manufacturer and carrier re-add their speed bumps and deem it fit for public consumption.

This was particularly key for me, as the Captivate was on Android 2.1 when I got it. Though 2.3 is out, it's only on very few phones (basically just the Google-led Nexus phones), but 2.2 was a major upgrade in speed and some functions. For example, voice actions and Chrome to Phone don't work on 2.1.

In many ways, Android is like Windows, particularly before Windows 7. It competes with a more simple Apple system, and OEMs like to mess it up for some reason.

Like Windows, Android has a reputation as being for "power users"—it's had many features the iPhone hasn't, such as multitasking, from day one. Okay, fine. But I like to micromanage my wireless networks. So, for instance, I'll switch off 3G before a long phone call, especially at home. 2G uses significantly less battery, and I'm told it sounds better, at least from this here apt. You know how you switch off 3G on the Captivate? You don't! I guess you just hope to wander into an area where the 3G signal is dead, because then it will switch itself. When the official 2.2 update rolled out…nothing changed on this front. Also, the Samsung battery meter was bad enough that it's worth mentioning. It's more like a dumbphone meter with a few different stages of charge vs. uncharged, except it looks like it's trying to show a percentage, and in that it's not very precise. You can always check the percentage manually by drilling down a few stages into the Settings menu, which never gets old.

Anyway, complaint, complaint! Here's the thing. I'm not the only person annoyed by AT&T/Samsung's lame decisions, and some of those people are programmers, and some of them are quite good. Online you can find what are called ROMs, which are reworked versions of your phone's software that you can install, and there are different ones available for many Android phones. And some of them are really, really good. A coworker who'd rooted and tweaked his EVO into oblivion found one for me called Serendipity, which was, I think, on version 5.12 by the time I tried it. It was based on a 2.2.1 version of Android that let me switch off 3G, install a battery percentage meter, and which ran like butter. (It was such an improvement in smoothness over the way the phone came it's almost unbelievable.) It had a bug or two, but they were less annoying then the bug in Samsung's 2.2 that kept me from sending picture messages to certain people.

After a while, I learned what I could, then decided it was kind of weird to have two phones, so I figured I'd sell it. Using a program on my PC, I began the restore process, but when it ran long I got impatient and yanked the USB cable, and killed my phone completely. Nothing would get it to turn on again; it just kept flashing this odd phone and computer error icon.

Whoops.

Well, the community around this phone is so cool, they had a fix for that, too. What you have to do is manually force the phone into download mode. All the normal methods I'd destroyed, except some weird failsafe involving attaching resistors to the micro USB port. Seriously. A trip to Radio Shack, a sacrificed USB cable, and some software loading later, the phone worked again. It was so nerdy, but so cool. I've been attached to it ever since.

Since then, it's caution to the wind, and I tried another cool ROM based on the Galaxy S II software (the Captivate is part of the original Galaxy S line). It was great, but not quite ready for prime time, and I'm back on Serendipity, now on 6.4 and better than ever.

So I didn't get the world-class experience it would take to dethrone Apple, but it was awesome anyway.

Unsung iPhone apps

As one of my friends finally upgraded to an iPhone recently, I’ve decided to list my favorite apps you may not know about.

Some iPhone apps are famous for their little tricks, like Shazam, and official apps for services like Facebook and Twitter are indispensable. For games, everyone should download Angry Birds, of course.

But here are four I really like that you might not yet have given a try:

Bing. Yes, Bing, Microsoft’s search engine; it’s a little worse than Google on the desktop, but I love its mobile app. It’s got plenty of features, like voice recognition and social network integration (huh?), but also does cool tricks like barcode scanning and the bird’s-eye-view Bing maps. Once upon a time (New Year’s Eve 2009) this helped me find a street that Google Maps had spelled incorrectly, and thereby deliver two female friends some personal effects they’d forgotten, though in retrospect this only contributed to a long-drawn out and disappointing series of events that ultimately…you know what, Bing is solid. Its location awareness actually makes it my favorite app for checking movie times, too.

Meebo. Meebo is my favorite instant messaging app, working with multiple accounts simultaneously. It works great with iOS 4. I don’t generally stay signed in on it, but it’s nice in a pinch.

Dictionary.com. Maybe this just marks me as a huge word nerd but one of my favorite programs on the Mac is Apple’s built-in Dictionary. This app downloads a dictionary for offline viewing, and does pronunciations over a network connection. I like it cause it’s quick compared to navigating through websites.

YouTube Mobile (m.youtube.com). Google’s mobile YouTube website is so much better than Apple’s YouTube app it’s embarrassing. It allows you to select and stream “HQ” versions of videos, even over a cellular connection. They load quickly and look great over 3G, so much so that it makes you wonder why Apple’s app downscales videos so intensely. Plus, with iOS 4, this site has a cool hidden feature of sorts. If you start playing a video in Safari, you can hit the home button to go back to your homescreen. Of course, the video playback stops. But, if you bring up the multitasking menu with a home button double-tap, you can swipe to the music controls and hit play next to the Safari icon to continue streaming YouTube audio. This is nice if, like me, you use YouTube to stream music and don’t actually care to watch the video. Plus you can turn the screen off and save battery.

(Side note: if you’re Mormon, the Gospel Library, Mormon Channel (stream general conference), and LDS Tools apps totally rock, too, though I keep Lee Falin’s Scriptures app around because it still outperforms the deeper Gospel Library. Nice to see the church update its website and make some great mobile apps; now they just need to crack the nut that is MLS.)

As for other apps, I recently downloaded Calvetica and think it’s cool. Its week view seems ideal for a Retina Display, but I’m still getting used to it. What other apps do you like?

New iPod Day

New iPod Day has come and (nearly) gone, and I must say, either it was disappointing or I’m getting too old for this. Has Apple lost its ability to amaze? I doubt it, but for the second year in a row, I’m down on the holiday lineup. Here’s the blow-by-blow:

iPod touch: There has never been a year when I wasn’t disappointed by the iPod touch, and 2010 is no exception. The first iPod touch, after months of anticipation following the announcement and release of the original iPhone, came with crippled software (no Notes, no Mail) and relatively small capacities (8 and 16 GB). The second-generation one was better, sure, and was barely revamped last year. This year, somehow, I fooled myself into thinking things would be different. The iPhone got a major redesign and some cool features; isn’t it time the touch did, too?

The iPod touch is sometimes called an iPhone without the phone, and I was hoping that all the upgrades to the iPhone 4 would trickle down into the touch. (I’m upgrade-eligible for the 4, but I’m not excited about re-upping with AT&T and their new $350 early-termination fees.) The upgrade I wanted most? The camera, for sure. The iPhone 4’s shooter is great for a phone camera, and soundly beats my 3GS, which is already capable of some good shots. So today when Apple announced a new iPod touch with that high-resolution screen, video calling, and high-definition video recording, I had one question: does it take pictures? During the keynote, though, I saw a shot of the camera app and sure enough, as it does on the current iPhones, it had a slider to switch from video to still mode.

Later this afternoon I went to the Apple website in search of more details, already knowing that the camera records in 720p, just like the iPhone 4. Does it get the same five-megapixel pictures? Not quite. According to Apple’s iPod touch tech specs, the iPod takes still pictures at 960 by 720 resolution. Let me do the math for you: that’s 0.7 megapixels. Not seven, point-seven. That sucks. I haven’t seen any samples from the camera yet, but I don’t doubt they’ll underwhelm.

I wonder how much the price difference is in camera parts between the touch and the 4; as it is, it’s cost them one touch sale so far.

iPod nano: The new nano is nuts, a tiny clip-on player with a 1.5” multi-touch screen. Peculiarly, the nano has lost the abilities to record and play video. I have a fourth-gen nano with a 2” screen and while it’s not ideal for movie-watching, I have caught some stuff on it while travelling and it’s not too bad. I liked having the option. Now it’s gone.

At first glance, the new nano appears to be the perfect exercise iPod, with its ability to clip anywhere and the adjustable screen orientation. But I don’t see the benefit of a touch screen over the ability to just hit “next” without looking at it.

When the iPhone came out, the touch interface was so obviously right for it: it gave you a huge (for the time) screen to use for videos and that computer-like web browser. When rivals copied it with products like the BlackBerry Storm, it was hilarious, because most of them didn’t have the same strengths as Apple’s platform and weren’t nearly as suited to the all-touch style. What does the nano get out of going that route?

The nano’s touch interface does allow a tiny player to have a relatively big screen. I guess that’s cool, I just would have rather had last year’s body (which, while bigger, was already impressively small) and a 32 GB capacity.

iPod shuffle: This one’s a huge win by today’s standards, with Apple giving up on the horrendous third-generation shuffle (a masterpiece of miniaturization that required headphone-cable controls) and returning almost exactly to the second-gen form factor: a small clip with a few buttons. Personally I still like the first-gen, with its built-in USB plug for easy syncing with any PC, but the new shuffle is tiny, looks durable, and at $49 for 2 gigs, might beat the nano as the exercise companion of choice. (Also, at that price, does the shuffle cost Apple more or less to make than its headphones do?)

iPod classic, or: I’m just glad they didn’t kill it. This year the iPod classic didn’t get a price cut or a storage upgrade, instead remaining at $249 for 160 gigabytes of stuff. I’ve always wanted a video iPod of this style since before they were called classics, but never quite pulled the trigger. I suspect I will continue to hold off, though it would be sweet to have all my music, pictures and videos on my person at all times.

So that’s it. If I was to buy one now, perhaps I’d get a touch, then feel, as I suspect most touch owners do, that Apple resented me for not buying an iPhone. (That’d be a weird feeling for me.) I think I’d use a shuffle and enjoy a classic. The nano? Eh. It doesn’t make sense to me. Why spend $149 for eight measly gigabytes when I could save fifty bucks and get a gorgeous fourth-gen banano?

iOS 4 impressions

Apple's iOS 4, the latest version of the company's iPhone and iPod touch operating system, is out, awesome, and, on the iPhone 3GS at least, the company's smoothest-running new operating system in years.

iOS (previously iPhone OS, and kinda/sorta OS X before that) updates should be met by users with equal parts anticipation and skepticism. iPhone OS 2.0 brought the now-legendary App Store, but was stupid buggy. That's not even mentioning what Gizmodo dubbed the iPocalypse, when the iTunes activation servers went down and my phone was useless for half a day. It took multiple updates to feel solid, but eventually the 2.family surpassed 1.1.4 on pure stability while adding sneaky-cool improvements like Google Street View. iPhone OS 3 added a ton of smaller, nice day-to-day features (copy-and-paste, MMS, more prevalent landscape keyboard) but brought with it lag on older devices. (Makes sense; the first two iPhones had half the RAM of the 3GS, though they became smoother in later iterations of version 3.)

iOS 4? Well, perhaps it's too early to say for sure, but it's very, very good. Some highlights:

• Runs like a dream. The 3GS has only half the RAM of the iPhone 4, reportedly; still, the phone is responsive and everything works just as well as you'd expect. Special attention was paid to transitions and animations and that makes the whole experience feel right.

• Home screen wallpaper. This is exactly the kind of Apple update that makes an Android user laugh in derision, but it's cool. Honestly, changing the wallpaper, icons and sounds was the coolest thing I ever did on my O.G. after jailbreaking it, which should tell you how lame jailbreaking is for the average bear. It's nice to have a little variety.

• Multitasking. Everyone calls this the must-have feature for 4.0; outside of Pandora, I didn't think I'd care. And I sort of don't, though I'm getting used to double-tapping the home button to switch between applications quickly. Pandora's great, plus it works with the lock-screen music controls, which were previously iPod-only. Those controls still bring up the back, play/pause, and skip buttons, which is kind of weird as you can't go back on a streaming Internet station (touching the button does nothing), but, quirks aside, it works great. Pandora's so smooth that I keep thinking it's the iPod app, so now I'm getting in the habit of bringing up the multitasking menu and swiping left-to-right across it to get to the music controls there, which also show which app is playing audio. The number of apps in the multitasking menu is insane. Right now I have 23 down there, and you scroll through them four at a time. It's not like I'm going to remember that I was doing something 18 apps ago and use that menu to switch to it.

• Super syncing. My 3GS syncs in a minute or two; on 3.1.3, if I went a few days, it would easily take more than twenty. That wasn't the case when the phone was new, so it could have been some sort of issue with my phone or computer, but regardless, I no longer dread adding a new song.

• SMS character count. You can turn on a counter now to see how close you are to 160 characters. I can't articulate a good reason but I really wanted this. I guess I just don't want to send my friends messages that spill into two (though one friend recently sent me a text that was a mind-blowing seven messages long).

• iBooks. I don't know if this should count, since it's technically a separate app. iBooks is cool; I haven't decided yet if I will ever use it beyond reading Winnie the Pooh someday. The built-in PDF viewing is useless for the few page-sized PDFs I put on it. But I really like the page-style reading. I've tried a few self-contained book apps before that require scrolling and, ever since I read this article, they're really annoying to use.

• Bluetooth keyboard support. I'm considering buying one of Apple's sweet Bluetooth keyboards to use for long e-mails. I'm not proud of what a huge nerd that makes me (and I'm fast enough on an iPhone keyboard that I'm told I resemble a 13-year-old), but there you go.

And here are a few other things that aren't quite highlights:

• Global inbox. This is a cool idea, seeing all your new e-mails in one place, though it makes permanently deleting my work e-mails (I get a lot that I delete quickly) kind of a pain.

• Spell check. Don't really care. The phone already corrects for typos really well; if you would have spelled a word correctly, but hit the wrong key, it'll usually get it right. That's a bigger problem for me than spelling. (You know that means there's some horribly misspelled word in here that I've missed.)

• Faces/Places in photos. I don't sync with a Mac, so I don't get to use the facial-recognition that comes with iPhoto and now syncs to iPhones and iPod touches. However, at the bottom of my list of albums there is now a big "Places" button that takes me to a Google map of the U.S. with little pins everywhere I've taken a picture. This is stupid, since my pictures are already kind of organized, and since it places three pictures I took on a drive from Boulder to Longmont in Missouri for some reason. I would rather be able to see one more album on the last line without scrolling. But I'll live.

The iPad, revisited

“By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?” —Steve Jobs

* * *

So said Jobs in a killer e-mail exchange with a Gawker blogger who wrote him to complain about…well, I’m not sure, exactly, but it seems the blogger was mostly upset with the the unusually harsh restrictions Apple puts on their iPhone OS platform, where they approve or disapprove every program in the App Store, and don’t support the common Web technology of Flash.

(Brief aside: Flash is lame, but the tech enables some cool stuff, like Hulu. It reminds me of the furor over Windows Vista’s built-in copy protection, which would constantly check your hardware for compliance when playing back certain kinds of copy-protected content. Well, that’s annoying, right? But now you can watch a Blu-Ray on Windows, while you can’t on OS X. Kinda the same deal. Not big enough for me to switch from an iPhone, especially since Hulu seems to want to block phones anyway, but Flash isn’t all bad.)

You should really read the exchange, because it’s hilarious how quickly the guy gets defensive about his, um, choices in entertainment. But Jobs’ quote (which I loved) about creating things struck me, because it helped me express why I was so disappointed by the iPad.

The iPad, to me, seems like a fantastic device for consuming content. Reading websites, watching videos, checking Facebook—the device was almost purpose-built for some of these functions. And it seems good for e-books, if you’re the kind of sucker who’s into them. But, particularly for someone who writes occasionally, the iPad seems horrific for content creation. I hate the typing experience, even though I love the touchscreen keyboard on the iPhone.

And in our universe there exist laptops, which are way better for some kinds of content creation with their built-in keyboards, and are only a little worse (and in some cases better) for most types of information and entertainment consumption.

But I’m rethinking for two reasons. The first was an article on Gizmodo by a writer who says he can replace his laptop with an iPad in part by typing with a Bluetooth keyboard. Fair enough. Maybe not ideal, but it’s at least an option. The second was Apple’s latest TV ad for the device, which allowed me to see the product as something with potential, rather than as a computer for morons.

It can do some cool things: like when the guy flips the iPad over to someone to show them what’s on the screen (much better than trying to huddle around a laptop), or my favorite, the sheet music application. If I were a musician, I’d kill for a device that would let me take all my sheet music everywhere. And then I guess they wouldn’t let me be a musician anymore.

So I am beginning to come around. On the other hand, it’s not like you can set your iPad on top of a stack of sheet music at night and have it learn it all by the time you wake up. So while the technology is slick, and the form factor has much more potential than I initially recognized, I still wouldn’t spend five hundred dollars for the thing as it is today. But I think I’ll no longer be shocked if the iPad becomes a huge success—if it hasn’t already.