tablet or ipod touch suggestions for present

RobertoMoir

alanrowell wrote: »

The store is poorly laid out and it can be hard to find things unless you know specifically what you are looking for. Software updates invariably result in the Touch being fried and unlike other computers (which is what the Touch is) recovering to the previous state can be a major PITA even if savvy with computers - the last two software updates resulted in 8 hours of work on each occasion just to get everything reloaded plus another few hours getting it in the right place. Even then I found that some items had disappeared and had to be repurchased or recovred from other source

My advice is NOT to use a PC with iTunes but to directly load to the Touch from the itunes store

You do realise your experiences above aren't typical for most ipod/ipad/iphone users right?

buglawton

I only load software via my Touch's own WiFi - the above may be true if you use iTunes on a PC because you then have different versions of iTunes and different Touch versions and everything has to gel perfectly. Apart from one App (MSN Live messenger) regularly breaking and needing re-installing, never had any issues. I consider Touch's software installation to be a 'holiday' from the usual overheads of installing Windows software!

redcard

buglawton wrote: »

Yes, software management is easy peasy on iPad... managing your content eg music, video etc, is NOT.

I use Mediamonkey for that - once you get used to it, can do anthing free of Apple shackles even if not Jailbroken.

Also can use the inbuilt Apple Pocasts app for occarional manual updating of favourite Podcasts, plus the free "Downloads Lite" App to be able to download and play things like you can on Windows.

How is syncing a playlist, or dragging and dropping videos, not easy?

What does MediaMonkey do that's so great?

albionrovers

Fifer73 wrote: »

As i am not very technical, I take it to use a pc with the ipod touch it would be connected via a usb cable ?

to directly load the touch from the itunes store is this done via wireless connection ?

thanks

Correct on both counts. White USB cable is supplied with everything Apple. A typical family of 4 has around 20 of them lying around ... :eek:

buglawton

redcard wrote: »

How is syncing a playlist, or dragging and dropping videos, not easy?

What does MediaMonkey do that's so great?

iTunes constantly wants to 'sync' to and fro so that it has an image of your iDevice on the computer that replicates what's on the iDevice itself. Once you have several iDevices registered on your computer, and if you were to try to copy an item from one iDevice to another, or use the iDevice connected to a different computer, complete chaos ensues!

Mediamonkey allows you to do controlled copying between iDevice and Computer so you actually know what is going where, and it also manages podcasts properly and logically, unlike the immensely confusing iTunes.

redcard

buglawton wrote: »

iTunes constantly wants to 'sync' to and fro so that it has an image of your iDevice on the computer that replicates what's on the iDevice itself. Once you have several iDevices registered on your computer, and if you were to try to copy an item from one iDevice to another, or use the iDevice connected to a different computer, complete chaos ensues!

Mediamonkey allows you to do controlled copying between iDevice and Computer so you actually know what is going where, and it also manages podcasts properly and logically, unlike the immensely confusing iTunes.

Still not getting it. We sync 3 iPads / iPhones to our Mac and never had this issue.

I set up podcasts to sync the latest one, and and watched ones get deleted. So i always have the latest on my phone / iPad. Nothing confusing about it, and it's completely automated.

I know what's going on my iPhone cos i set up the playlists and told iTunes to sync them. You seem to think iTunes is just choosing random stuff to put on your phone.

buglawton

OK a concrete example: My missus has computer 'A' set up for a set of podcast subscriptions on her iPod Nano. Plus the Nano was alread loaded with a 1000 songs. She was going on a business trip and I wanted to set up the same podcasts on a netbook so they would update while travelling - computer 'B'. Fired up iTunes on computer 'B' and connected the Nano. Immediately a mesage popped up saying something like, "you must re-synch which will delete all current content - go ahead Y/N?"

For some odd reason I decided to select the 'N' option and then used Mediamonkey instead. MM does not offer to delete all an iThing;s content. And it turns out, MM has a much more logical way of managing podcast subscriptions too.