New Apple products

Apple announced quite a few new products for the holiday season a couple days ago. The iPod nano with a widescreen for video and the iPod touch seem to garner the most attention. I am not a big on-the-go music fan and I don’t own an iPod and can really use the iPod touch with the cool touch screen interface. It also has Safari built in so I can browse over wi-fi. It works just like the iPhone and who doesn’t love the iPhone?

However, after some more thoughts, if I can only use Safari when I am in a wi-fi hotspot, what’s the point if I already plan to get myself a macbook? The only difference would be the touch screen UI, but is it really better than a macbook’s UI, with a keyboard and a mouse? No. Touch screen is cool but the iPod touch is just for play. I ain’t gonna shell out $299 or $399 for something that I can do better with a macbook.

What would be really cool is some 3rd party developers write a Skype app that can appear as an icon on the iPhone or iPod touch so I can totally bypass the cellular network when I have city-wide wi-fi access. Then I can save some cell phone bills.

Oh, a larger capacity with both flash and hard drive would be a nice addition as 16GB is really not enough nowadays. The iPod nano does have a 160GB option. I guess you can’t get ‘em all in one…

iPhone drag and drop

I had a chance to play with the iPhone at an Apple store yesterday. I found that if you go to Google Map or any Google Map mashup in Safari, you can’t drag the map! This is because the iPhone interprets your finger dragging as dragging the web page, not the Google Map on the web page.

The Google Map integrated into the iPhone itself works great though. Is this a bug or am I just missing something? Hopefully Apple fixes this soon because this means all websites that have drag and drop like Ta-da list are not usable (though I have not tried Ta-da list on the iPhone).

Update: Just headed over to the iPhone Developer Site. According to Apple’s Web Development Guidelines:

“A few other things to keep in mind about fingers as an input device:
* There are no gestures to perform cut, copy, paste, drag-and-drop, and text selection operations.
* The width of a finger limits the density of links on a page. If the links are too close, your users won’t be able to choose a single one.”

So the answer is no, at least for now.