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People who’ve read my list of annoyances regarding iTunes and the iPod Touch may be wondering why the hell I still own a Touch - if I dislike it so much, why not get something else?

Well… First of all, things aren’t that black and white. There are few things in life I have only negative, or only positive, feelings for. I own an iPod Touch because I still feel that the positive sides outweigh the negative - not by much, but enough for me to spend 1500 swedish crowns (about $200) on one.

So, here are some things I like about the Touch:

#1. Size. It’s small, and has a lot of really neat tech for its size. It’s small and thin and fits into my pocket easily.

#2. The on-screen keyboard. The best I’ve used. Seriously, this is just friggin awesome. It took a few weeks to get used to, but now I’m almost ready to sell my old workhorse Psion 5mx.

#3. The app store. Not the one in iTunes, ’cause iTunes is crap - the one on the device itself. One place to get all your apps - it’s simple to use and only lacks a few features I’d like (such as some more advanced search functions - search by price, for instance). I’d like it even more if I could add repositories of apps myself, liks I do in Synaptic in Ubuntu. And yeah, this means a unified app manager wasn’t first seen on an Apple machine. Sorry =) Anyways, it’s neat. Could be neater, but still.

#4. Wi-fi. I hope I don’t need to explain why this rocks - seriously; surfing the web, watching Youtube vids, using Spotify - anywhere there’s wifi. Awesome.

#5. 3.5″ stereo output. Me like standards.

#6. Fun navigation. OK, the flow-placement of icons isn’t perfect, and when you got 10-11 pages of apps like I do, it’s kind of cumbersome - but it’s fun. Like one of my students said, sometimes you just got to take it out and just flip the pages, fort no reason whatsoever - and then put it back in your pocket. it just feels like… the future. (I just wish the future was a bot more practical)

#7. Apps, apps, apps. This is the machine’s real strength. Some time, I might share a list of all the apps I use, but like I said - I got like 10-11 pages of them, and there are 4×4 per page. OK, i haven’t filled up each page, since I’ve sorted my apps thematically, but still…

Well, that’s about all I can think of right now. #7 is the strongest, I think, but the list might grow… Anyways, hopefully now people’ll stop saying I’m just an “Apple-hater”…

Oh, and the iPad? Seems like an oversized version of the iPod, so you can pretty much safely assume that everything on the Annoyances list and everything but #1 on this list applies to it, as well.