Well, Barry99705: "Location: 124 miles south of the arctic circle" LOL

My guess Barry99705 lives in the city of Oulu in Finland...

yeah i played with the touch yesterday. This was the first time i saw a touch...... at the apple store.

Yeah as usual i was surprised by the responsive of the ui. But the usability really sucks. I wanted to check if it supported internet radio. So i went to shoutcast.com. The experience of browsing on that page was horrible. Especially when i wanted to input text in the search fields. I could type the search word after pinching, double tapping etc after 4 minutes. And then i pressed tune button which was so tiny that i needed to zoom on any page. Finally it registered my touch and then the safari cant download this content!!!!

So can you believe it ... no internet radio on the touch!!

Wow what a disappointment!!

MY verdict(not that anyone cares) the ipod touch does whatever it does beautifully. But what does is very very very very very limited in comparison to the tablets!!

I tried this, too, because thats how they do it in the videos. (My friend, btw, never heard of this and was convinced it was wrong.)
All that happened was that when I moved my fingers, the keyboard would present me all the fancy accented characters that are bound to this key, too, but it wouldnt let me move on to the next key to the left/right. To be honest, though, I didnt try very hard. I was frustrated within a few moments and gave up. You see, I'm born in 1967: For my generation, a keyboard is something you dont even think about, you only use it... one of the few technologies that "just work". I simply refuse to learn how to use such a simple thing as a keyboard. Let the young folks play with it, they seem to enjoy it.

I was born in 1961, and for my generation, handwriting is something you don't think about, you just do it.

The only software that ever managed to achieve that HWR theshold, was the Newton Messagepad 2100, also from Apple -- but a happier, kinder Apple, an Apple without Jobs...

So why do I keep harping about HWR? Because, and quite unlike keyboards, handwriting works without compromises on surprisingly small surfaces: You can write in the same way on a legal notepad as on a tiny sticky yellow paper; there is no such thing as "thumb" handwriting.

In fact, the only things you need are a minimally readable handwriting style (which -- I admit -- in itself might be an unsurmountable hurdle for many of the postmodernist protein sacks that try to pass themselves off as human beings) and a sophisticated HWR algorithm. Phatware has the latter: in fact, it is the same algorithm aforementioned Newton uses. All we need to do is launch a Ninja strike against their head management and force them to port their software to Linux -- preferrably to Maemo first.

Please trust me on this...

Even if they did - I seriously doubt they'd make it free software under a GPL-compatible license. I wouldn't want to see even more core technologies on the platform being non-free.

It's hardly core: the ITs work just fine without HWR. I'd call it convenience software and provided it integrates seamlessly with the system, I have no problem with paying for PenOffice for the IT.

Youre probably right, it could be seen as an add-on to be downloaded separately (like sk*pe). I thought of it as a core technology because right now its part of the firmware...

Virtual keyboards are part of the firmware as well and still I paid money for my BT keyboard. I think that's how you should look at alternative input methods.