Once bitten twice shy, and since the Dirty Operating System that was stolen from innocent Apple programmers in the early days, Steve Jobs has been quite wary and litigious. Again I can’t blame him entirely. Often the Press and even the Courts don’t “get it”. Even the windowed interface and the desktop, (Windows), though  invented by Apple they  never locked down the credit for it. So now when Apple is doing things like patenting disappearing buttons, and re-inventing paper, I’m sure thy can’t help but be very nervous about sabotage.

I find it hard to believe that an Apple designer left the Top Secret iPhone in a bar. Have you ever seen a job application for Apple? It might be easier to get a job at the FBI – how could a certified Genius-Apple-Person have been that much of a slacker in the first place? I do get why they were mad at Gizmodo. If I had found the illicit iPhone I would have returned it and wrote about that adventure in my blog. I would not have bought it or sold it. I’m sure that finding the way back up the Apple phone tree to return it to it’s rightful owner would have been a whole separate nightmare. That is how I would have handled it. I’m an Apple enthusiast. Yep, Steve,  “You’re still the one, and we’re still havin’ fun”. Lighten up Apple, it’s bad for your image. And I’m not going to apologize.

“Long before we ever heard of GPS, satellite phones or ESPN, a truck pulled up to our house, the year was 1961. I was worried at the time about how many home runs Mickey Mantle was going to hit but brother Frank had planned a project called “Moonbounce 1961.” Frank had pipes, pipebenders and other materials necessary to build a satellite dish, delivered to our house, with the intention of bouncing a signal off the moon.

Long before any 3rd world nation dreamed about missile testing, we actually had these tests going on in our back yard. Cape Canaveral was set up in our father’s garden and Frank was firing projectiles into the night sky. This went on until our neighbor, poor old Mr. Hurley, complained to our mother, and sadly Frank’s launching pad was shut down.

Long before we ever heard of e-mail, Frank was a HAM radio operator, fluent in Morse code, one of the many languages he had embraced. I still remember his call letters “K1MJC.” The custom was to send your uniquely designed postcard, with your call letters, to people you had contacted. Our walls were covered with these postcards from people from all over the world. Our basement was filled with tube testers and short wave radios, and we always needed to know “Grenwich Mean Time.” We had transmitters, diodes and that miracle of modern technology… the transistor. We hung antennas further and further from our roof into the woods, because the longer and wider they were, the further his signal could go. We always heard Frank’s footsteps on our roof.”

Sushi Guru Lite has cool looking sushi icons on its home screen. When you tip the iPod Touch on its side the real life pics of apetizing sushi float by enticingly on a black background. This App is food porn. It has information in it too, but it is hard to get past the almost sensual presentation of the premium fish.  It will present you with the basics about each bite, but ony about  a paragraph on each one.

Sushi Chain Lite  is a fun mini game where you make sushi at a sushi bar and serve the customers. You are on your own there’s no cook like there is in Diner Dash. This is a fairly difficult cooking game more similar to Gordon Ramsay’s cooking game than to Cooking Mama, although the artstyle is similar. You have a recipe book that gives you an idea of how to assemble the sushi. A telephone is your link to the food supplier who will deliver fresh toppings and rice when you call. You better keep plenty of supplies on hand because the sushi bar is a conveyor belt. It gets pretty fast and freaky. If you are fond of food games, don’t miss this one.  This Lite  version is free. I give it an 8 out of 10.

Our Groceries was another one we tried which was similar. It also gave you the option of sharing lists with family members. Although that feature seems to be standard with almost all of the other grocery Apps. This one was a 5 out of 10.

Grocery IQ has the advantage of scanning bar codes off items with the iPhone. With the iPod Touch you just start to enter the barcode numbers or the name of the item and it will guess it. With it you are able to add your items speedily, and much faster than writing them down, or with any other Apps we tried.  It gives you the chance to organize the store you go to by aisle. So no more back tracking at the store because you put something down at the bottom of the pen and paper list. When you favorite the items, you can re – add them for weekly shopping. It gives you plenty of space to add lists for other store, and other items besides groceries too. If you regularly shop at a discount store for bulk goods, having the additional list is handy. It’s only 99 cents too. This App gets an 8 out of 10.

Whole Foods has an elegant shopping tool. We don’t have one in our area (South Eastern Ma.) yet, and frankly I could be a little envious. We prefer a local family market to the large chain stores any way though. With the Whole Foods App you can pick from their large selection of premade and deli foods. There are pictures of items, category filters for vegetarian and vegan, healthy food suggestions, calorie info, and recipes. It has tons of info and a very good grocery list function. And it is free. Too bad for me, and it gets a 9 out of 10.

Grocery Gadget is good for taking pics of food yourself and adding them to your list. It has a large drop down menu of products, but not as specific as Grocery IQ where it is all listed by name of manufacturer, like World Harbors Maui Mountain Sauce and Marinade Teriyaki 18 oz. And in Grocery Gadget I ended up typing the whole words ‘Teriyaki Sauce’ and it never made any suggestions and didn’t come up with the product I wanted. Grocery IQ had it in at “T – e – r” and offered several brands and a multitude of flavors. Typing “K – e – t” into both Apps brought different results in the Ketchup test. Grocery IQ offered about 30 different kinds of Ketchup in several different brands. Grocery Gadget offered the wrong word for auto fill as well as the spelling of Ketchup. But there were no brand names or sizes. Grocery Gadget expects you to input everything except for a rudimentary general shopping vocabulary. This App, not so geeky 4 out of 10.

AllRecipes.com Dinner spinner App allows you to pick from the two top spin wheels for Dish Type and Ingredients. At the bottom you tell it how much time you have and it will come up with some recipe suggestions. It’s fun and works fine. It’s a little short on recipes but the price is right.  It’s free. This one is an honest value, an 8 out of 10.

iFood Lite is a comprehensive cooking assistant free version. You can browse recipes, or choose from suggestions. To use the shopping list function you’ll need to get an account and sign in. So does the recipe box. There are recipe videos that are heavily laden with ads. It offers guidance with knife skills and decorating. iFood was ok to look at recipes, but they contained beaucoup Kraft cheese products. In the free version most of the functions are disabled because they want to sign you up. This gets a 3 out of 10.

A final warning that nothing is rosy even in the produce aisle. Most of the coupon Apps and some of the grocery list Apps were pretty shabby software that was thinly veiled attempts to just grab your information, and location. For now none of the coupon Apps seemed legitimate. Many of them have “offers” instead of coupons. Such at 15% off at a bycycle shop. What I’d really like is a real App of food coupons, instead of health and beauty aids or department store items.

Truely the Touch is a device that should get a lot more love. If you have routine access to wifi it can be used as a VoIP phone. Regular Skype fees and rules apply. The app,  short for Application works smoothly and is a breeze to download and install from the App store. As a tool it will do everything for me from helping to figure out if the new sub-floor in the laundry room is level, to assisting me in planning menus for the week. It will tell me if anyone is Tweeting withing 5 miles of me, and it will determine where any wifi hotspots are while I walk the dog.

At first my fingers tried to treat the touch screen like a DS. but the feel of it is quite different and much more sophisticated. Long nails are a no go unlike the Japanese shojo oriented DS. The quick glide is effortless and there’s no friction to kick up the wicked gamers arthritis in my hands.

Ok, ok, no it isn’t entirely a love story. We went online 12/26 to find the cheapest iPods in our area. Which was Walmart. They were out of stock online, but it said available in store only. The 32G 3rd generation iPod Touch was going for $269.00 and the 8G was also listed as “in store only” for $183.00. The 8gig iPod touch apparently is a second generation iPod with the update to the 3.0 software, making it a close out item. A 3rd generation – ish iPod Touch.

When we got to Walmart though they were priced differently. After a short conversation with manager “Nick” we actually got Walmart to give us our iPods at the price which they were advertised. I had them over a barrel when I showed them Best Buy with iPods in the same price range.

Having past that hurdle we went on to the next step at home. I had all ready downloaded the PDF of the manual and read it Christmas night. Yes, that is what geeks do. The 8 gig synched and worked out fine. Music on that one is only about 1 gig and it will mainly be used for apps and games. The 32 gig has 7 gigs of music on it and three e-book readers. But in the course of picking up some movie geek apps for the 32 gig we ran into some problems. Shortly after down loading the IMdb app none of the apps on the 32 gig worked. They all quit on start up. It turns out that not every app is optimized for the iPhone / iPod Touch 3.0 software. Quickly resetting and re-synching it worked it out immediately.

Then there is charging. The only way to do it so far, is to plug it into the iMac, when it is on. Not the keyboard. Not when it is sleeping, or running on low energy settings. The first night I just plugged it into my somewhat antique iBook thinking, ok it will charge over night. Nothing doing. I knew enough not to open the old iBook with the iPod plugged in because that ancient version of iTunes was sure to crash like a MoFo if I did. The second night we shut off the iMac plugged in the 8g and went to bed. Got up to find a dead battery yet again. So far, not so good. I’m expecting the Power Mat to come in for review any time now. I am hesitant to try plugging the iPod into my MSI Wind Windows machine. Call me superstitious or just wary of OSX and XP iTunes incompatibilities. Jobs and Gates may be getting along better in their old age but that doesn’t mean I have to believe.

The 32g needed charging after two days of use, since mine the 8g was being used constantly to try one app after another, and the other was being used mainly to listen to tunes, which takes less juice. However after synching the 32g iPod it had all of my apps on it too. Now my partner was treated to things like WiFi Get, iHandy Level, and Princess Ai. We really need to read the rest of the manual, because my partners iPod is full of manga! It was worth the laugh though.

Over many years of buying Apple products it seems like they revel in selling you things with no instructions. As if to imply that everything they make is self explanatory. Yes, the ease of use is there, and the manual is on the hard drive. You actually can fudge your way along with any Mac without having a clue lots easier than with Windows any day.

It’s true that now that I have it I don’t know how I lived without it before. The way I look at it, it’s a way to have an Apple computer for $200. Why are people waiting around for an “Apple Tablet” including us, when here it is right here. It has an awkwardly long name. Luckily that marketing miss-step hasn’t killed it.

In fact the App Store with around 80,00 different apps in it is a software revolution. The apps like Photobucket and Tweet Deck are sleek, elegantly designed and useful. It puts the browsers to shame. It even makes YouTube look good. The apps take the Internet, simplify the information, and make it functional and easy to use. Your weather, schedule, videos, photos, websites and thousands of other possibilities.

No it isn’t a phone. Yes it is. The iPod Touch is really a WiFi Phone but Apple being in bed with AT&T right now can’t really come out and say that. If it isn’t a phone then how is it that we are video phoning to one from the PC or voice chatting on it with the iPod headphones and microphone?

The sound, even on music videos from You Tube and iTunes were dramatically improved over listening to them on the iPod classic. Or when using the set of Gummie ear buds on the MSI Wind. I could hear bass lines in Skandal’s Shojo S and in Chii’s Theme from Chobits, that I had never heard before. All in all the Christmas iPod experience was pretty sweet. Even at Walmart. Xmas spirit is alive and well somehow.

I’m looking forward to reviewing games on the things of course as well, so bring them on. I give the iPod Touch 3rd Generation 9 happy bouncing icons out of 10.

The Go may bring about a new opportunity for Sony. For three years the Nintendo DS dominated the holiday season sales getting higher numbers than the PS3, PSP and PS2. This year the DS Lite has gotten alot of attention, not for innovation this time though. The DS Lite falls apart. Unfortunately the plastic they are made from disintegrates after a few months. With consumer awareness enlightened by YouTube and blogs this winter buying spree might not include the Nintendo handheld.

The Go will have WiFi and Blue Tooth giving it the possibility of running a browser. Media from a PC or the proprietary M2 flash media card will work on it.  Any DRM-free files or online music from Amazon, iTunes, or eMusic should work. Of course movies and TV shows can be purchased directly from the PlayStation Store over Wi-Fi. No news about prices for those yet. Perhaps they are going to attempt compete with the Apple Ap Store in that area. Ap Store has over 20,000 games and the iPhone and iPod Touch user base is 50 million so Sony would have their work cut out for them.

What I’ve said before is that a machine with Skype on it, or any handheld running a VOiP service is going to be the next big thing. In even competition for purse and pocket space this year with the game consoles are phones as well. Because people want to carry one gadget that does three things and not three gadgets that do just one, they are going to go for something that does the most tricks.

1. Consumers want communication. In North America the preference is for voice, or video communicator. 2. Consumers in North America want email and text messaging, with photo and video options. 3. Consumers want video games. In that miasma are some people who want a QWERTY keyboard, and some that want joystick thumb controls. The problem is that to make that thing, with all of that stuff , it would look like crap and it wouldn’t fit in your pocket. Unless Apple makes it. I’ve all ready given space and time to the ‘iTouchPad’ and if the rumors are true there might be some surprising spikes in the fall buying numbers.

Apple has made it look so easy in recent years. Hell I bought the first Newton. It was a machine that was 10 years ahead of its time. It took Apple that long to perfect the iPod and then the iPhone. When Internet giant Google entered the software arena, they couldn’t get out of their own way. Like trying to get the camel through the eye of the needle, the making and selling of products is quite different than what Google normally does. Hence Android seems to also be going the way of the Mylo. Without actual hardware, or an actual paid development team Android is remaining a prototype rather than a viable consumer choice.

The PS3 Slim is now out there making it’s own inroads and it looks like it may be the new PS2. In North America the PS3 has done well, but it hasn’t been a landslide just yet. The PS2 still dominates almost ten years after its release. Don’t forget that the sales line up last year was DS, Wii, PS3, PS2, in that order that beat the Xbox360 in sales. The Wii gimick is due to be yard sale worthy any time now. With the price drop on the PS3 Phat and the new Slim PS3 arriving, we might see game consumers flocking not only to Sony but Apple.