Early Reviews- iPod Touch a Hit!

The Wife has been enjoying her iPod touch. She’s purchased a calendar app and it’s already synced with the online version. In fact, as long as she has network access she can even modify the calendar from the iPod. Upon discovering this unexpected piece of functionality, she actually exclaimed “COOL!” Since then, she’s added a variety of free apps.

I was able to get the email working. This turned out to be not quite so straight forward for our situation. All of our mail is available from our server here at home. Supplying the server information and passwords was trivial. The real trick was the SSL portion of the equation. I’m my own certificate authority(CA) here, so I needed to install that certificate as well as the certificate for our mail server. There is no network browser on an iPod, so I had two problems right off the bat:

1. How to get the certificates onto her iPod?
2. How to install the certificates so they would be used properly?

This turned out to be trivial. It’s possible to use the Safari browser to grab the certificates. From there, the iPod recognizes the files as certificates and starts a quick dialog allowing them to be installed. Luckily, I’ve got my own webserver running internally at the house, so I was able to make them available. Once installed on the device, they can be accessed for removal under “Settings->Wifi-Profile.” Email was working shortly thereafter. In fact, I got an opportunity to test drive it from a foreign network and it worked without a hitch.

I can see it becoming her main in-house device. The fact is her computing needs are fairly light. The majority of her computer usage is browsing and email and the convenience of the device is pretty tough to beat.

The most interesting thing I’ve noticed so far is that, while it allegedly a music player, her usage of it so far is for everything but. The fact is that, given a WiFi network, it’s a pocket computer that happens to play music.

At any rate, music player or otherwise, she’s pleased with it. Which is all that counts.