Almost immediately after upgrading my Touch to 2.0, I went in search of a good Tasks application. I found one with Appigo, and thought it was so good that I modified my iPod Touch as a PDA and Entertainer post to talk about it. In my view, it turned the Touch into a full-fledged PDA.
Since my revamp of that post, I’ve had a few days to try out a few other things on the Touch and thought I’d share the results of my tinkering with you.
Before I get into specific apps, I’ll mention a couple of other observations:
- It appears to me that there is a mechanism in place for apps to automatically update themselves, and that it works. I installed the New York Times app, and the next day it updated itself. Pretty cool, eh?
- A sound feature has been added for incoming mail. Whenever mail arrives in your inbox, you hear a few little beeps. From the testing I’ve done so far, this beep alert seems to only occur for email … it sure would be nice if it beeped for upcoming appointments, too. Perhaps in some future revision.
- There are lots and lots of new settings in the settings panel. And, some third-party apps have their own settings, too.
Now to the apps. Note that the screen shots herein do not adequately represent the fantastic quality of the Touch screen and interface. To keep the image file sizes down, I have saved them from their original 115KB high-quality format to a lower quality format of a lot smaller size. Otherwise, the images would take too long to load.
The second app that I loaded onto the Touch was eReader. I’ve used eReader for years, first on my Palm devices, then on my Windows Mobile devices. Since it was listed as one of the top 10 free apps in the App Store, I figured they had done their typical good job with it.
At first I was disappointed with it: I could access my library of books using it (books I had already purchased), but could not download them:
After messing around with this for way too long, I went to the site in my computer browser and looked at my account settings. Turns out that my account listed a credit card that I had not used in a long while, and the credit card numbers are a part of the activation code on eReader books. I updated my CC information and was then able to download books from eReader. Here’s a sample of what one looks like on the Touch:
The next app I spent a good bit of time playing with was WeatherBug, a free app that was in the top 10 listing in the App Store. This has three screens: a summary of general conditions (temperature, etc.), a radar map, and three frequently updated camera shots from the area in which you live. Here is a screen shot from Saturday that shows the storms that were in my area:
And, here is a snap shot of one of the photos from the other side of town:
This is really a cool app, and I love it. It stays up-to-date on the conditions, radar, and photos. Pretty much real-time info.
And, of course, how can you not have Bejeweled on a device if it is available?
I think you get the picture: Keener loves the Touch 2.0 upgrade. No point in me getting into every app I’ve tried out, as this page would load really slowly if I filled it with too many pictures.
The only other thing I’ll say about the apps is that there are plenty of good ones already available, and there are more to come. For example, we can expect to see eWallet and ListPro from IliumSoft pretty soon. And, I’ve heard that Pocket Informant might be made available, too. No doubt we’ll see many more fine apps added to an already great selection.
Thoughts and questions?