Category Archives: iPod

Apple iPod products

Windows Mobile Gets No Respect: iPhone Gets Credit for Touchscreen Revolution

Information Week trumpets…

iPhone: Catalyst For Touchscreen Revolution

Never mind that Windows CE/Windows Mobile devices have been continuously providing touch screen devices since 1996. And, of course, the Apple Newton essentially defined the concept of PDA in 1993.

But, hey, I’ll give credit where credit is due. Apple did the touch screen right. I know that I much prefer to use my iPod touch for a variety of information retrieval tasks (web browsing, reading email, etc.). But, I still prefer to use my Dash smartphone for writing email, creating a calendar event, or entering contact information.

iPod touch Froze: Forced a Reboot

Although I was one of the people critical of Apple’s decision not to allow 3rd party apps at the launch of the iPhone last year, I understand and appreciate their decision now. My iPod touch has been much more unstable after the 2.0 upgrade (and presumably adding a bunch of 3rd party apps) that it was prior to the upgrade. It seems to spontaneously reboot at least once a day. And, today, it completely froze while browsing a web page. Pressing the power button didn’t do anything. And, the touch just stay on fully lit. So, I decided to force a reboot by pressing the selection button and the power button together for about 10 seconds. The screen blanked out and after about 30 seconds, it started to reboot.

Normally, this would be a cause to moan and groan and grumble about how bad Apple’s touch software is. However, because it was so stable prior to the 2.0 upgrade, I am willing to put up with it until Apple can issue a firmware upgrade. So, yep, it was smart of Apple to release a stable product with no 3rd party apps to create an initial happy user base and then let the instabilities start later with the iPhone 3G/iPod touch 2.0 releases.

iPhone 3G/iPod touch Scientific Calculator

Sigh, here’s another example of Apple showing Microsoft “how to do it right.” The new iPhone 3G (and updated iPhone and iPod touch) got an enhancement to the original simple 4 function calculator. If you hold the iPhone/iPod touch in portrait mode, you see the simple calculator.

However, if you turn it to landscape orientation, you see the new scientific calculator.

Meanwhile, the calculator on Windows Mobile Pocket PCs has not changed since 1996 (see below).

The freeware version of Calc98 looks ok in portrait mode (see below). However, it does not rescale for landscape view. Apparently, the for-fee version does this correctly. Microsoft should just buy the rights to Calc98 and use it to replace the outdated calculator in Windows Mobile.