Save Yourself $500 On An iPad

Posted on 30. May, 2010 by Aaron in Hardware

Are you just on your way out to buy an iPad? Have you really thought about the decision you’re making? I very nearly went out and bought one this morning but after some careful thought I then realised my iPod Touch was all I ever needed anyway, read on to find out why.

First off this post is a lot more use for affiliates, webmasters, or anyone else who works on the web full time. Not the average consumer market that just want to play games, watch movies and listen to music. But I think anyone who has a vague interest from a professional point of view should get something out of it.

So where does the iPad fall down? To start it’s not what you’d describe as truly mobile, in other words it really isn’t going to fit into a pocket, and then on the other hand it’s not fully featured so it can’t replace dedicated devices in the home or office.

Really, if you’ve got a 42” LCD in the house, what are you more likely to watch movies on? If you have any serious web development or graphics work to do you’re going to open a laptop or switch on the desktop, right?

Here comes the good bit. Forget the iPad, and think about the iPod Touch for a moment, I guarantee if you don’t already own one (or an iPhone) you’ll want one by the end of this article, I’ve even got complete technophobes at work wanting one after I showed them what it can do.

I’ve now had my iPod Touch for about a year and I’d class it as one of the best pieces of tech hardware that I’ve ever bought, below are some of my favourite features that have meant it basically gets switched on every single day and used all the time I’m away from the PC.

Do I want an iPod Touch or iPhone?

For me I barely use my mobile so the iPod was a natural choice, and I now have it set up with Skype and a small microphone, this alone will save a huge amount of money as Skype now have a subscription service for about $3.44 a month for unlimited calls to landlines and mobiles (£4.59 per month for the UK users).

And before you scream ‘fair usage policy’ try this one on for size …… 10,000 minutes per month or a maximum of 6 hours a day. Unless you have no mobile as a backup, sparse WI-FI hotspots or you’re a heavily dependant mobile user I’d say save yourself a few hundred dollars on the cost of an iPhone (not to mention Phone subscriptions) and go for an iPod Touch.

Email On The Go, Nothing New But Worth Mentioning

This is pretty much standard on any mobile these days, and you can set it to push emails onto your iPod so you don’t have to check manually. You can have any type of email accounts you want set up (IMAP or POP) and for me personally I use it to sort through the junk mail and delete it on the server while I’m not doing anything important so really now all that hits my inbox on the computer is the important stuff.

Never Have to Remember Passwords Ever Again

If you’re an affiliate and don’t use Roboform, shame on you. For the tiny one off price you pay this little bit of software saves me personally at least an hour each day logging in and out of various sites and services on the PC, and it’s now available as an app. No remembering and typing in long passwords on the iPod, just one central password and you’re done.

No More Losing or Forgetting Great Ideas

You have a regular notepad and for the price of a small mic (about $5 max) you can record voice memos too.

Social Updates the Easy Way

As they say in the ad ‘there’s an app for that’. Even better is what you can do as a marketer. Twitter and Facebook apps are readily available for free (tip: don’t use Safari for Facebook, it’s horrible, use the standalone app).

Now with you being able to connect Facebook pages to Twitter you can literally just dive straight into Facebook, add the page as a favourite, update the page and Twitter gets updated with that same update on autopilot, so imagine if you have lots of fans updating your Facebook page, that’s going to be one busy Twitter page.

Blogging On The Go

This is where things get really interesting. Not only can you post directly to a WordPress blog from your iPod Touch using the WordPress app. But there’s also a Ping.fm app. For those of you who’ve not used Ping.fm in it’s usual form, you can write a blog post and send it out to multiple blogs and social pages all in one shot. Don’t need to tell you what this can do for building a nice base of those scrappy lower quality links.

Get Your Affiliate Stats Away from the Office

This was what I bought the iPod for in the first place, to use a program called Stats202 from the guys at Tracking202, but due to having to tighten the reigns on my finances at the start of the year I had to stop my paid ads.

Basically you connect it up to your version of Prosper202 and then it pulls your earnings down from the CPA networks so you don’t have to fire up the computer and download your stats from each and every network individually every time you feel the need to look at your earnings. From the earnings I made it was tracking them quite happily so if in the future I do move back to paid traffic, which is almost certain at some point. I will be renewing my subscription.

Note: If I remember right you need to create and log into your main Tracking account hosted at Tracking202 (even if you’ve done a standalone install on your own server) to access the instructions for Stats202.

Catching Up On Courses and WSO’s

This is the most useful and unexpected bonus. I thought reading PDF’s on a small screen would be a real pain but not so, anyone with regular half decent eyesight should find reading any training material a breeze on the iPod Touch (even if you have to zoom in/out every now and again for pictures). You can also categorize your PDF’s so it’s not one great big list of documents.

And here’s one thing that I found totally invaluable. The ability to add bookmarks to a PDF. I used to do something similar by printing out my courses into folders and then using Posit notes to highlight the pages but now I can hold all my coursework on the iPod.

Then there’s also Lynda.com . This really is a great site and I use it quite frequently to brush up on my web design skills. They also have freebie lessons available so you can try before you buy.

And don’t forget there’s loads of free videos to watch at YouTube, ok you might have to work through a lot of crap on there, a problem you don’t have at Lynda.com but free’s free at the end of the day and I won’t be complaining.

Remote Access

I tried it and really didn’t have too much use for it so cancelled my sub, but with LogMeIn Ignition you can easily gain remote access to your home computer from your iPod.

It was a little bit clunky using programs but I was able to access software and actually use it. I suppose another way to utilize LogMeIn which I didn’t try was accessing remote web cams for security purposes or if you’re Mr Boss Paranoia you could keep an eye on your employees while you’re out of the office, but there’s probably an app for that too.

In Summary

Overall I’m very pleased with my iPod Touch and sing it’s praises to anyone willing to listen, gets even worse when I meet another iPhone/iPod Touch user and we end up checking out each others apps (sounds a bit wrong). Games and movies are great if you want them served up on the go and I’d say the only real regret I have is I bought one of the smaller 8gb iPods but even then you’d have to fight me for it if you wanted to take it off me.

Just as a note for anyone worried about battery life of the iPod Touch, don’t be. It’s not great but I’d class myself as a regular user and it only needs a quick charge once a day, and if you’re caught away from the computer to charge it up it can be charged via a standalone power cable or battery packs that can clip straight on.

As for the iPad, I couldn’t really justify the extra cash today for something that’s not really mobile, and not as featured as a laptop for work purposes. Just to watch movies, surf the net and play games on when I already have dedicated devices to do that on in the home anyway.

Just before you buy, consider what you really want from the iPad. Granted, all the apps for the iPod Touch work on it but do you want a true mobile device or just something to make your friends envious.