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By Chris Meadows

145719-ipodtouch4a_500 Rumors are flying fast and furious about what features the iPod Touch will have, and even when it is going to be released. It should go without saying that, if it uses the same new “Retina Display” as the iPhone 4, it is going to be one of the best pocket-sized reading gizmos ever. The 326 pixels per inch display is on par with the resolution of laser-printed paper, making it very possibly the most legible handheld display ever.

But what about other uses? We could be surprised. In fact, the new iPod Touch might just be good enough that you don’t need a new iPhone at all.

Below the jump, I’m going to run down some of the rumors, then talk about why the new iPod Touch might be a better option than the iPhone—at least for me.

Rumors Rumors Everywhere

Gizmodo notes a MacRumors posting showing what purports to be a leaked photo of the new iPod Touch faceplate, with a hole for a front-facing FaceTime camera. Engadget points out that the latest beta of OS 4.1 includes support for placing FaceTime calls by email address as well as by phone number—something that will be necessary if FaceTime is to be used with the Touch, which naturally lacks a phone number.

Chris Foresman at Ars Technica looks at some rumors surrounding the iPod Touch and other iPod models that are often mentioned in the iPod refresh events. He is skeptical of some of the rumors, but not about FaceTime on the iPod Touch:

This is something we do expect Apple to include in a new iPod touch. When Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone 4′s FaceTime feature earlier this summer, he said Apple expected to ship "tens of millions" of FaceTime-compatible devices. Leaving the feature out of a new iPod touch would make it very difficult for Apple to meet that goal. Given how much Apple has spent advertising the feature, and the fact that it works without cellular networks, it seems highly unlikely Apple would omit FaceTime from the iPod touch.

Ars also reports on another rumor that the next iPhone release is going to be moved up by a few months to early 2011, due to the antenna issues with the iPhone 4. This is also the timeframe when iPhones are supposed to become available for Verizon.

And one last iPod rumor: the iPod refresh event might be on us sooner than expected. CNet reports that a Brazillian Mac magazine claims to have heard from an anonymous source within Apple that the event might take place sometime between August 14th and 16th.

iPad Nano?

Another rumor that Ars Technica is taking with a grain of salt is the idea of a 7” iPad device. It would bring interface difficulties with it—anything designed for a 10” iPad will be harder to hit with fat fingers on a 7” device—and give developers yet another screen size to develop for.

But Foresman quotes Ars writer John Siracusa’s speculation that the next version of the iPad will have a doubled resolution screen—not quite as high-density as the iPhone’s Retina Display but possibly just as good at the distance the larger iPad is held from the face.

Who Makes Phone Calls Anymore?

I’ve recently taken on a new full-time job, after sixteen months of life on unemployment, and in the rush of having money again have been considering a number of possible purchases—including an iPhone 4. But some articles I’ve been reading lately have started me thinking about whether I really even need one.

On CNet, Michelle Meyers writes about applications that will allow iPod Touch users to send and receive cell phone text messages as if they had a “real” phone number. This allows Meyers’s ten-year-old daughter to use her iPod Touch as if it were a cell phone for the purposes of exchanging texts with her friends. The program Meyers’s daughter uses, Textfree, plans to add voice capability at the end of September:

In other words, using Wi-Fi on her iPod Touch (along with microphone-equipped earbuds), my daughter will be able to actually call and talk to me. And an iPhone customer–say, a college student like [Textfree developer Greg] Woock’s son, who’s grown accustomed to getting everything for free–could use his Textfree phone number as an extra one that doesn’t cost anything to use.

I’ve already had the ability to send and receive text messages on my iPod Touch (when I had it) or my iPad, thanks to Google Voice. (In fact, if I had a microphone, I could actually have made Voice Over IP calls on my first-gen iPod Touch. Given that later ones have a mic built in, I could thus do it now.)

Another straw on the camel’s back was this Wired article, which I found via a reference in Techdirt. Clive Thompson writes that people are making far fewer phone calls these days than they used to, because the blind voice call is being replaced by other communication methods such as instant messaging, e-mail, and social networks that don’t have the telephone’s drawbacks.

Consider: If I suddenly decide I want to dial you up, I have no way of knowing whether you’re busy, and you have no idea why I’m calling. We have to open Schrödinger’s box every time, having a conversation to figure out whether it’s OK to have a conversation. Plus, voice calls are emotionally high-bandwidth, which is why it’s so weirdly exhausting to be interrupted by one. (We apparently find voicemail even more excruciating: Studies show that more than a fifth of all voice messages are never listened to.)

I hadn’t been thinking much about it, but I suddenly realized that this is why I honestly don’t use the telephone that much. I had just thought it was because I didn’t really have any friends who I’d want to telephone, but I do have plenty of friends—it’s just that I have other ways of keeping in touch with them.

It didn’t used to be this way. Back in college in the early ‘90s, sometimes I would call friends elsewhere and talk for hours. I mean, like four or five hours at a time. (And given that I was using one of those AT&T phone cards at the time, it was kind of pricey.)

Perhaps tellingly, these were friends I’d made on the Internet, and talking on the phone was a way of finding out what they sounded like (and also, a number of them didn’t hang out on the IRC or chat rooms that were what we had before instant messaging, so it was the only way to communicate in real time rather than through e-mail).

The Phone Loses Its Luster

But now…well, I just got through with a two-year cell phone contract from AT&T, and I cancelled it because I was paying $60 and more a month for voice service I seldom used. The big thing I did use was text messaging—but hardly ever for sending messages to other cell phones. I used it for updating my Twitter, and also taking and posting twitpics via the built-in camera.

And I also used the built-in web browser for reading Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail, though given that I was using a RAZR2 rather than a smartphone, the experience was less than satisfactory. I used my iPod Touch instead whenever I could.

But as the contract was ending, I realized it was really dumb to keep paying $60 a month for voice service I hardly used and text/web service that wasn’t all that great. So I traded it in for a bare-minimum Boost Mobile phone on a bare-bones ten-cents-a-minute-or-text-message pay-as-you-go plan that I can stop funding at any time.

It doesn’t do all the things my old phone did (I can’t seem to access Twitter with its web browser, and as it would cost me 35 cents for each day I use the web, I usually don’t bother—and don’t miss it very much), but it sure does save me money. I only carry it for emergencies, and for those times that I do need to make or take a phone call away from my apartment. (Which, anymore, is mostly my parents.)

When it comes to actually contacting one of my friends, there are other ways I would do it. For that matter, my parents and I talk just as often via Google Talk voice chat as the phone. With Google Talk, I can see when they’re at the computer and call them then.

And when I need to make a phone call at home, I use Google Voice and can call anywhere in the USA for free, and speak either via a headset on my computer or via the landline phone that came with my DSL. It also handles voicemail for me, and provides a single contact number that will ring both my home and my cell phone.

(And a brief aside: My new job is in the same building that used to be the MCI call center where I worked seven years ago. The new owners didn’t bother to remove the wall of phones where MCI employees could make free long-distance calls on their break; they just disconnected them. As I was saying to one of my co-workers, it’s funny to think that such a relatively short time ago free long distance calls could be considered a “perk”.)

iPod Touch vs. iPhone: A Question of Economy

The new iPod Touch is expected to have a rearward facing camera and front-facing FaceTime camera, just like the iPhone 4. It will have the retina display, and most of the other features of the iPhone 4. (Or at least the important ones. I’m not sure it matters too much whether it has, for instance, GPS.) I could make FaceTime calls to anyone else who happened to have one, or use it for standard VOIP as long as I had Wi-Fi.

If Apple keeps to the same pricing conventions as they have the last couple of years, the 64-gig one should cost around $400—$100 more than the 32-gig iPhone 4 (with two-year contract), or the 32-gig iPod Touch for that matter. But the important thing is, it won’t come with the contract which would require me to pay $60 or more per month for two years. (And it will hold twice as much music or movies, too.)

Of course, I could pay $799 for the iPhone to get it (supposedly) contract-free—but when my sister-in-law offered to give me an iPhone 3G to use in the meantime, I researched the matter and found that AT&T apparently won’t let you establish new service with them without a contract. What’s the point of buying it at the higher price without one, then?

Now that I just got out of such a contract, why would I want to go right back into phone contract bondage when I hardly even talk on the thing to begin with? In this economy, I don’t even know if I’ll have a source of income in two years.

What I do want is the iPhone-like ability to have Internet access wherever I am, but AT&T removed a lot of the appeal of doing it through the iPhone when it added data restrictions to its iPhone plans. Under the old system, I could at least have jailbroken my phone and tethered it so I could have Internet access on my laptop or iPad as well as just the iPhone. But why would I do that when I’m going to run up against hard usage limits?

On the other hand, if I get the iPod Touch, I can wait for some wireless 4G service such as Clearwire to come to my area, get a MiFi-like device with that, and use it with any wireless device that I have.

It would really be nice if the iPod Touch took a page from the iPad’s book and came in a model with 3G Internet access available on a month-by-month, contract-free basis. I could buy it when I especially wanted it, such as when I was going on a trip or something, and forego it the rest of the time. (Yes, I know I could get an iPad with that feature, but I can’t put an iPad in my pocket so the usefulness of being able to whip it out wherever I am is kind of limited.) Of course, the phone companies know people would just take to using Skype or other VOIP with it, given that it’s a lot easier to carry around than the iPad, so it’s probably not ever going to happen.

If you’re looking for a pocket-sized e-book, net-surfing, messaging, and video-calling solution, you might want to ask yourself if you honestly make or take that many phone calls. If not, you might do well to consider the upcoming iPod Touch and a separate pay-as-you-go handset rather than the iPhone 4.

 
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