Forget the iPhone--The iPod Touch is Good Enough

Back in June 2007, I couldn't convince my wife that checking my email in grocery lines was worth $1,320—the cost of an original iPhone and one year of the cheapest plan. These days, the trend-setting phone costs even more money over its life, and it's more than a little restrictive and even a bit buggy. So I'm amazed at how little love the iPod touch gets. It's a slimmer iPhone with almost all its features, it requires no contract, and when you can't get a Wi-Fi signal, your plain, humble cellphone can step up to take its place. Here's why anyone considering the iPhone should opt for its oft-ignored sibling—the iPod touch—instead. Photo by sarchi.

While you won't get every single one of the iPhone's capabilities when you opt for an iPod touch, you'll save a ton of money. Buying an iPod touch costs you $300 for unlimited use, not a guaranteed commitment of more than $1,600 over two years that the iPhone involves (more, if you have to pay a penalty to get out of your current cellphone contract). Here's how I use my plain old flip phone for calls and getting info in Wi-Fi less areas, and the iPod touch for everything else.

Your Non-iPhone Can Do a Whole Lot via SMS

When I'm out with friends and somebody asks the best way to Duff's from Kenmore, or what time The Dark Knight is showing at the Regal Elmwood, I don't wave my iPod touch around, hoping for unsecured Linksys boxes. I send a text message from my plain old flip phone to Google SMS—46653 (GOOGLE)—and I get the results usually in less than a minute. If it's a long address, I'll just call 1-800-GOOG-411 and say "text message" to remember it later.

If I spot a repair shop and remember that my inspection runs out on Friday, I set a to-do in Remember the Milk via Twitter SMS, by calling Jott if I'm driving, or, if it's more complicated, sending a pre-formatted text to my RTM email address. I can also read or edit my Google Calendar agenda, check my flight status, and price items on Amazon to avoid impulse buys. You can't swipe, stretch, and pinch this stuff with your fingers, but it's real data, delivered pretty darned fast without the cost of an iPhone data plan. Here are some more cellphone tricks you can do with a non-iPhone.

The Apps Are Just as Good

The iPod touch doesn't have speakers or a camera and you can't speak into it, so it does mean a couple of apps in the iTunes store won't work on the touch. The hummed-song-finder Midomi could win me a few cool-factor points at the bar, and the Talking Phrasebook would be a killer app if I suddenly found myself wandering the Champs-Élysées. But the vast majority of games, apps, and utilities in the App Store work just fine on my iPod touch without voice or speaker functions.

I can draft ideas and entries for my WordPress blog and sync them later, read the feeds I grabbed last time I was online through NetNewsWire, duck into a Starbucks and find great restaurants nearby with Yelp or UrbanSpoon.

At the moment, there are about 1020 App Store applications for the iPhone, and roughly 970 of them, or 95 percent, work with the iPod touch. Developers, obviously, don't consider speech and speaker functions crucial to good software, nor always-on net connections.

It's a Universal Remote in a Wi-Fi-Enabled Home

If your house is wired for Wi-Fi, the iPod touch isn't a bad candidate for Ultimate Armchair Command Tool, one that doesn't heat up your lap or tie up your phone. With the free Mocha VNC Lite app, I can change over episodes of "The Riches" on a TV-connected laptop without having to get up and fiddle about. I stream recommendations and you'll-probably-also-like music from Last.fm's app while I'm washing dishes (Pandora would work as well). On nights before I have Lifehacker morning duties, me and Google Reader's awesome iPhone interface can often be found together, semi-watching reruns or DVDs and perusing for posts. And, of course, we've already shown you the awesomeness that is Remote.

I've also got an old laptop serving as a web-serving, Samba-sharing, printer-serving, backup-enforcing server that can wake up from a net signal. After seeing the text prompt and SSH server in a jailbroken 2.0 iPhone/iPod touch, I'm already having command-line fantasies...

Wife: Oh, I wish I could show you the pictures from our trip! But they're all at home ...
Me: Wait, honey, let me just wake up our server (*tap-tap-tap*) and I'll log in and pull them up ...

Lesson learned

I'm not trying to say the iPhone isn't a pretty cool phone, or that cellular data plans are a total waste of money (if still a bit overpriced). But I've found that in day-to-day life, I can get need-to-know information through my phone, hunt down Wi-Fi if I really need a good connection—yes, even in Buffalo, NY—and that the rest seems like perks you pay a stiff and inflexible price for. As close readers of this site might have picked up on, we're advocates of carving out time in your day to stay away from the web, email, and other potential time-drains. In other words, sometimes it's just better to focus on unloading the produce.

That's my take on the matter, anyway. Did you buy an iPod touch for similar reasons? Is always-on, full-web access the real reason you bought your iPhone? Do you not really see the need for either? Let's hear it in the comments.

Original here