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I recently purchased an iPod Touch and have REALLY been enjoying it. Besides the beauty of the form factor — fits in your hand so well and lets you control it with simple finger movements on its touch screen — is the application platform. Visiting iTunes App Store, you can see the huge variety of what’s currently available. And this is all still new for developers.

Last Tuesday, HMAUS (Hawaii Mac Users), held a presentation with Rich Warren on the iPhone platform. Besides picking up some great tips on cool apps and why the SDK is worth signing up for, Rich demonstrated the Japanese keyboard entry with word/character suggestions. Very cool! For example, just typing (in Romaji) “iyu” came up with “一週間”. For me, that’s really handy. (Of course, there is the problem of learning to type on a “virtual” keyboard where there are no buttons, but the auto-suggest does help, in any language.)

One of the beauty points about the iPod Touch is that it has all the features (except the camera! ) of the iPhone without the phone part — and therefore, no worries about having to sign up for an expensive monthly contract with a company that doesn’t always have it’s customers’ best interests in mind. In other words, you can get the same “coolness” of the iPhone (using wifi) but using your existing phone and plan.

Even if you don’t buy one, at least visit an Apple store to see for yourself how they feel to operate.

Being a Mac guy at home, I decided to try out Apple’s new MobileMe during their extended trial period. I had heard from lots of support blogs, and even from Walt Mossberg’s column that MobileMe was just too shaky to be reliable. Well, I tried it anyway. And, Walt was right.

In the two days of testing I did using an XP connecting to the Apple “cloud”, I lost contacts, calendar events, and my patience. The last straw was, I lost all my contacts except three; myself and one other that was a duplicate!

Then this morning I noticed this article (”last modified 8/18/08): ” MobileMe: Syncing with Microsoft Outlook and Exchange” which says:

MobileMe syncing allows you to sync your contacts and calendars with Outlook, unless Outlook is connected to an Exchange server. In this situation, syncing your Outlook data with MobileMe is not supported.

Oh. Now, I’m thinking, wasn’t MobileMe supposed to be for RoadWarriors, as Apple’s attempt to do Push Email to take on RIMs Blackberrys? And aren’t most of those folks using Exchange? So, then who is MobileMe for?

MobileMe Test Album

Yes, it seems that MobileMe has shifted to being a replacement from the .mac services for people who don’t have an “Enterprise” that uses Exchange… Disappointing…

On the plus side, it does make pretty photo albums.