I’ve had the idea that an iPod touch would make an excellent PDA for some time now but had never got around to exploring it properly. However, the opportunity to a 1st Gen 16GB Touch at a great price came my way and having grabbed it, I have been able to follow through with this.
As a web-worker my key requirements are to store, edit and synchronize my data, manage my time and have the best possible browsing experience. It was the latter that made the Touch my first option, given the performance of Safari as a mobile browser.
The other key consideration was the iStore apps and it was a selection of these that have made the experiment of using the Touch as a PDA a success.
The apps I use are:
Twitterific – To check on and send twits
Wordpress – To manage both my blog and client blogs I manage.
Free rss reader – Mostly for general news and current events.
File lite – For quick dumps of files from my macbook.
Evernote – Anything that I that I’ll need to access and sync from multiple sources or when I don’t have my notebook with me.
RTM – Managing my time by task.
Nuevasync – Allows to sync my Google calender to my touch calendar.
With the exception of the Remember The Milk app, all of these were free. The other functionality I needed was provided by the default apps such as the mail client, lists etc.
Assuming you can deal with the virtual keyboard, the iPod Touch can be configured to be an outstanding PDA that provides most of the functionality you can reasonably expect from a mobile device.
