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Apparently you waited until this Xmas to get your iPod Touch too. Google news is mentioning that this is the first time that iPod Touch sales have outstripped the iPhone. Most likely your decision had something to do with Skype coming out with an App this fall. Finally here was a way to freely and legally make calls, chat or even video phone – one way – I’ll get to that. Your iPod Touch – the great geek gadget with the ungainly name can do what the iPhone does (sans camera sadly. There is no tie into a phone company or AT&T at all. Where ever there is Wifi you can use your iPod Touch like any laptop.Texting to a friend’s cell phone is a little dicey. The The Short Message Service – Point to Point (SMS-PP) which was invented in Sweden by Nextel in the early 1990′s doesn’t quite match up well with today’s technology. “There is an App for that” isn’t an expression these days for nothing. I downloaded and tried Fring. That is an App which will aggregate several different messenger services, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype and others. Which worked fine and “pushed” or alerted me often, mainly with Twitter updates. After a short time I shut it off preferring to get the Tweets manually. All the services worked ok, but we noticed that it took a very long time to receive a text from iPod to iPod – even on the same router. The numeric indicator that should up on the App’s icon in the Home Screen didn’t show up there unless you had the App open. That wasn’t useful. It also seemed pretty impossible to text back to Text Plus from a Virgin Mobile phone. The App will behave differently depending on the carrier. Sometimes asking the recipient to use a reply code, which was confusing, and didn’t work anyway.
We tested Text Free next, this App will send you an email on your iPod Touch when someone uses the service. You’ll have to switch from email to Text Free to reply, but it does work perfectly with Virgin Mobile. After guesstimating that we spend around $480 a year on texting when both of us have all day wifi access, the iTouches would pay for themselves in a year, as long as we keep our App store purchases down to Free.
Skype so far works fine for text chat between iPod Touches. Either Mac or PC can video phone to an iPod Touch, but responding is tricky. We have yet to test the microphone from the iPod Touches. Research online seems mixed. Some are saying that because the iPod Touch does not have a built in microphone technology that the mic included on the earbud set included with the iPod Touch 32G won’t work. If it wouldn’t work then why would Apple put it there? That will be a separate review.
The iPod Touch has very handy easy to use network settings. It will tell you what Wifi is nearby, and it is simple enough to join. If you need to test the signal strength of the available networks or more features the free App WiFi Get detects networks and gives more detailed information. Jwire is the leading Hotspot directory App. With it, when you are offline you can use this WiFi yellow pages to drive to a place that has free Internet. Included you will find locations such as coffee shops and libraries.
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