A buddy of mine just upgraded to an iPhone so he lent me his old iPod Touch to try out. I used it at the MySQL Conference along with my Palm Centro chick-phone to see if I could get away without dragging my laptop everywhere. And if I was successful, then I'd upgrade to an iPhone myself. I must admit, I was more impressed with hands-on use of the iPod Touch than I expected. It's small enough and light enough tha A buddy of mine just upgraded to an iPhone so he lent me his old iPod Touch to try out. I used it at the MySQL Conference along with my Palm Centro chick-phone to see if I could get away without dragging my laptop everywhere. And if I was successful, then I’d upgrade to an iPhone myself.I must admit, I was more impressed with hands-on use of the iPod Touch than I expected. It’s small enough and light enough that you barely notice it in a jacket or pants pocket. And despite the small screen, the browsing experience via wi-fi is quite good. The browser does a great job rendering sites and you can easily zoom with a simple hand gesture to view the information you need. I was mostly reading news and blog entries on www.planetmysql.org and the portrait mode of the iPod Touch worked great. You can also rotate the screen in landscape mode and it adjusts automagically, which is pretty cool.I hadn’t installed the email client on the iPod Touch (it’s now included free on more recent versions), so I was using my Centro for voice, SMS and email. At the Open Source Goat Rodeo a few weeks back, we had a “phone off” with 10 participants (5 with iPhones) to see who could SMS “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” the fastest. I believe Larry Augstin came in first using his Blackberry, Lon Johnson was second on an iPhone and me third with the Centro. But most importantly, I squared off against Matt Asay who had an iPhone and beat him soundly. (And his message came out as “The quick brown fox humpesbover heblazy dog.”) While I still used my laptop for blogging and for long emails, I was able to leave it up in my room for most of the day. But I don’t think the combination of Centro and iPod Touch is quite yet ready to cover all of a day’s activities, at least for me. If the iPod Touch had a slightly bigger screen or slide-out keyboard, then maybe that would work. That said, I’m going to install the email client on the iPod Touch and try it out further. And meanwhile, rumors of the 3G iPhone seem to be coming fast and furious. Open Source