When you have the iTouch, what kinds of things can you use it for for free? (navigation directions, internet.....?????!)
The touch is basically the iphone without the phone. It has wifi, but you have to be in range of a hotspot (and maybe pay for it) or near your own or open wireless router to use the wifi. So, if you're at Starbucks and have a registered Starbucks card, for example, you get 2 free hours of wifi per day, once you register that card. (I think you have to use the card once every 30 days or so to get the free hours every day. It's supposed to be every day, but I've heard from others that it's actually implemented as every 30 days.) How useful is that? I guess it depends. I've used it to look up things as I was having conversations with friends at Starbucks, but I can't say I use the wifi very often. I keep the wifi turned off on mine, unless I want to use it. You should keep it turned off for battery life unless you are using that feature.
What it's great for is watching movies, tv shows, movies, etc when you are traveling.
It does support a bunch of the apps that are available for the iphone, but I haven't really found any interesting ones. I'm not much of a game player, but it does have an accelerometer, so the ads you see on tv with people shaking or twisting it to control the game will all work on it. There's some free games available for it also in the app store.
Since there's no 3G/GSM chip inside (for the phone part) any app that relies on being connected to the internet all the time isn't very useful. So, that basically includes navigation, etc. When you browse apps in the app store, it tells you if the app is suitable for the touch or not.
Frankly, when I first bought mine (a first gen 8G version), I had no idea why I bought it, but then after reading some posts on the tivocommunity forum, I found out how to modify the tivo desktop plus software to add H.264 video conversion to it. (It already supports conversion for the Apple ipod, however, the dimensions/rez of the conversion was not tailored for the touch). Using that, I download a bunch of video from the tivo before my trips and load it up onto the ipod. It generally ends up using about .5 gigabytes or less per hour of video when you do it this way. Since all my trips are 5 hours or more, it's been great to have an alternative to the standard airline programming.
The other thing I find it really handy for is keeping my calendar on it when I travel. I can sync my google calendar to outlook (google has a free app to do it, and you can choose the direction of the sync) and the itunes app on the PC will sync the calendar from outlook. If you have a Mac, you don't need outlook to do it. It's kind of silly that you have to have outlook to do this on a PC, but that's the way it is. (My pet peeve is they should have a way to just load standard ical files on to it, but they don't.) It's kind of annoying to do this because you have to make outlook your default mail app before you run the sync in itunes, and then switch the default back to whatever other email program you normally use if it isn't outlook. It's only a couple of button clicks to do that, but it's a bit annoying.
The other thing I do with mine, but this isn't specific to the ipod touch, is subscribe to the NPR podcast for Car Talk on itunes, which is free, but you have to download it each week, or it disappears from the itunes store, and load all of them onto my ipod touch. There's tons of free podcasts, and they will work with any version of the ipod.
-David
