So my daughter’s best friend got an iPod Touch for Christmas. And she brought it round to our house. Whereupon a light went on in my daughter’s head and she asked to borrow my iPod Touch. Being very tech savvy (hey, it runs in the blood, you know?), she showed her friend how to browse the App Store and grab freebie after freebie.
Move over DS?
They were hours playing around.
Leaving aside the question of whether the iPod Touch (or iPhone – and either way, the iPhone platform) can replace the Nintendo DS as a mainstream kids gaming device, lending my iPod Touch out in this way brought out some interesting observations. On the plus side, the kids loved playing the games, demos and novelties. Loved. With a capital ‘L’. The App Store discovery process itself became a shared experience for them (“Hey, search for YYYY, it’s really cool”, etc.)
However, on the negative side, I have to balance this against a number of cons that rear their ugly head when you try and ‘share’ an iPhone or iPod Touch with another family member…
- The installed maximum of 144 applications is not enough and the iPhone’s ‘page’ system isn’t ideal. In my case, I had over a hundred apps of my own installed, ready for me to use/review/enjoy. Leaving only a few dozen spare slots for my daughter (the ‘guest’ user) to fill with kids novelties, pet games and general trivia (iSoda, anyone?). First of all, she kept wondering where her new installs went, since the iPhone’s installer automatically puts new apps in the first available slot, counting from the ‘left’, page-wise. I’d already been trying to educate her that the last couple of ‘pages’ were for her use and trying to get her not to fiddle with ‘mine’! In order not to confuse her further, I ended up having to shuffle all my 100 or so apps into all spare slots on the first 7 pages, rather ruining much of my rough categorisation (‘Music’, ‘Games’, etc). Ah well.
The second problem is that she kept physically filling up the slots and then the installed apps didn’t appear at all. With an App Store currently running at almost 20,000 apps, maybe Apple’s apparent insistence that nine pages of apps is enough for anybody might rank alongside Bill Gates’ alleged ‘640K of RAM is enough for anybody’ quote from the 1980s, in the tech history books? And I’ve already ranted about the need for app folders…
- Having just the one password for iTunes/Apps has proved to be a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it means I can buy commercial apps by just entering one password, but a curse when a third party (e.g. my daughter) gets involved because of the way many free applications also seem to need to pop up the iTunes password prompt when there’s really no need. So, do I give her the password to give myself a quiet afternoon but then end up worrying that she’s going to rack up a huge bill with commercial stuff?
There’s a lot of inconsistency in the way the App Store works: some commercial high priced apps don’t prompt for the password, while many freeware ones do – this is something Apple needs to standardise because the current situation is horribly messy. A simple system of ‘commercial = need password; freeware = no password needed’ would be simple, elegant and would solve my device-sharing problem.
- The iPhone OS was designed to be used as a phone/PDA/music player first and foremost – gaming surely came later. And the iPhone/iPod Touch batteries, already somewhat marginal in terms of capacity, have been thrown over the edge by the influx of 3D games that hammer processor and screen – my daughter started with a fully charged Touch and said the ‘low battery’ warnings started about 90 minutes later. I solved the problem by plugging in one of Proporta’s handy mobile batteries, but then there were wires everywhere… I’m hoping for a beefier battery in July’s iPhone and iPod Touch refresh.
- Of course, lastly, there’s the con that my daughter liked the iPod Touch so much that I’m having to fight to get it back. Sigh. Time to head down to Comet for another one?
Steve Litchfield, AAI, 15 Feb 2009