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I finally succumbed over the weekend. I thought I had overcome a bout of shopping flu but it returned with a vengeance.

I bought the iPod touch.

Futureshop last week had a sale on the 16GB iPod touch for $399 CDN, a discount of $50. I went to check it out and played with it but because I didn’t have my cash back Visa card on me, I passed on it. Also, I have a 2-year warranty on my 1.5 year old Nano and I was wondering if I could get a credit upgrade on it (the sales woman had told me I could when she foisted it on me). Again, I didn’t have the receipt on me.

I went home and seeing as that was the last day of the sale, I thought I had escaped my wanton gadget lust. However, the next day, Futureshop extended the sale.

Crap. Shopping God, give me a break, will ya?

I went back with Visa and receipt in hand and bought the dang thing.

BTW, the receipt didn’t help with store credits. You can only get credits if there is something wrong with the device. I didn’t know how to voice to sales guy into giving me a deal and he didn’t know how to grease the wheel. When he tried to sell me another 2-year warranty for $100, I said no way! He was pushing it hard too, saying what could be wrong with it, yadda yadda yadda. Um, maybe I shouldn’t buy the thing all together then?

I know I could have gotten a better deal on Ebay or some other store but I’m still an ol’ fashioned girl. I like my brick and mortar places so I can return stuff. There was an opened box marked down at $369 but I passed. I didn’t want to have dead pixels or the well known “negative black effect” issue.

However, truth be told, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a good iPod touch screen and one with this defect. You really need to have an iPhone comparison to notice. Still, it’s a psychological barrier of why the opened box was returned.

So, what’s my verdict? It’s sexy as heck and just plain cool.

However, being a longtime Palm user and having gone through the Tungsten T2, T3, and the LifeDrive, I miss my stylus! I find it faster to write and tap with my stylus than using my thumbs. While surfing the net with Safari and floating the web pages with your finger is cool, it’s a pain in the arse to click on the wrong links all the time and I have small hands. It won’t respond to a tap with a fingernail but it needs a firmer pressure. To get to a link, I have to expand the web page and click it with my thumb. It’s an annoyance but I’ll get over it. Or maybe I’ll read the manual.

I also liked the Palm’s central 5-way Navigation button compared to the touch’s 1 button. It’s just handier to press a button to scroll rather than to flicking the screen… What I would have liked to have seen is Apple somehow incorporating the click-wheel to control music selection/volume and also help in web navigation. Yeah, I know space is an issue but they are the design gurus.

I also don’t like the fact that it doesn’t have apps on it. I am mainly buying this as a PDA replacement but I need to jailbreak the thing because Apple doesn’t see fit to bless the touch with the handier iPhone applications. And unlike Paul, I don’t feel inclined to roll back my firmware to 1.1.1 for the jailbreak. I’ll wait for an easier solution for the 1.1.2 firmware.

Still all these issues fade away since it owns my LifeDrive in terms of video play, storage capacity and the Wi-Fi actually works (it stopped working when I changed my router to draft-N and I was not motivated enough to find a solution given the slow hard drive).

So, despite the fact that the iPod touch can be improved upon and it’s not an actual PDA, I’m quite content with my purchase. And once Apple offers more apps or I jailbreak my iPod, my gadget life will be complete – until the next latest and greatest thing comes along.

P.S. I know this purchase was not financially responsible but can I plead insanity and say I heard the Shopping God whispering in my ear to buy it?

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