After two days of frustration, I've now successfully gotten the new version of the iPod Touch software loaded and am now just doing the sync of the applications I've been acquiring since Thursday.
The time is now 00:44 on Sunday a.m.
The process of loading the new software and all the associated backups takes longer than you might expect (even on my mere 8 GB version of the Touch) at a good 30 minutes.
Just tried out the Remote app. Super cool! Change the volume on the iPod and watch it update the volume on your iTunes. Cool. The response time is impressive, less than a second, and that with the music streaming to an Airport Express. Only minor disappointment is that the cover flow view doesn't work when I'm looking at the album view but it makes sense given the bandwidth requirements that would be associated with that.
The Facebook app is an improvement over the browser one in many ways, although I do feel like I'm missing some functionality as it seems simplified somehow. The more frequent uses of images is nice, as is the the chat function now included.
The AIM apps seems to not make it easy to switch back and forth between accounts. Once I logged in with my AIM screen name I can't seem to get back and login with my .Mac account. It seems once you have picked an account type, you're stuck with it.
The PayPal app is very stripped down i.e. no choice of funds source, not enough confirmations, etc. I did my test sending $5 but I'd rather use a browser for anything more than that just to have some control over the transactions parameters.
NetNewsWire worked well in terms of synchronizing with my online account, but felt a little sluggish at times compared to the other apps I downloaded. That said, I'll definitely use it help my get through my feeds more often.
I downloaded Sudoku because my girlfriend likes it and I saw that Electronic Arts made it. The interface looks beautiful and functional so far and a big improvement over the browser versions I saw before now.
More apps and credit card transactions to come but this is a great addition to an already great device.
Now if only Apple could get their infrastructure together to handle the infrastructure requirements for this scale of launch. The software update for the iPod version 2 was 226MB which is no small amount, but if the iTunes store can handle music and video and Apple can normally manage big OS and app software updates, they should be able to handle this without the kind of hassles customers had to put up with in the last couple of days.
Still worth the wait, but I saw a little better management of this kind of thing on the XBOX360 servers, than I saw on this one from Apple. They better buck up a little next time round, Apple lost ground in my books on the technical gaffes on this launch.
Hopefully I can get a hold of an iPhone in the next week. I had not luck today although I didn't start until mid-morning. I'm convinced Rogers only brought about 50 into the city where I live (I heard 17 at one location and 5 at other), no doubt so they can brag about the "success" of their launch day. Too bad the rogers.com website was unusable most of the day, but I find it quite slow at the best of time when logging into my wireless account. I often get errors just signing into my account and looking at phone upgrade paths. At least the fido.ca site was functioning at much better capacity. I'm considering Fido instead, just to get more reasonable pricing on the voice plans now that we can add on Roger's face-saving 6 GB data plan.
