I was just as googly when the iPhone / iPod Touch came out as any geekhead but now that I've had time to play with it I'm not as impressed. There is no doubt that the interface is a lot slicker and swoopier but as far as usability? Meh.
The Palm interface is rather tired looking ... but for a few shiny pixels they could have still been the one to beat but they dropped out of sight rather than keeping up. I have at least half a dozen 'must have' apps on my Palm that work wonderfully and synchronize nicely with my PC. There will likely be no updates for these as the developers have gone out of business or have switched to the iPhone platform.
Other than looks I don't see many benefits to the iPhone platform over the Palm. The iPhone Safari web browser is head and shoulders above the pokey Palm Blazer browser but there is likely no reason Palm couldn't have developed a much better browser if they had wanted to. As for stability, both devices crash or need to be reset periodically. The virtual keyboard on the iPhone is only barely more usable than the one on the TX (using mKbd).
I'm a big fan of reading ebooks using eReader and was thrilled that an eReader app was available for the iPhone. This was going to be the killer app that made me love the new platform. But, reading on the iPhone screen isn't as nice as reading on the Palm screen. The screens are almost exactly the same size but the Palm renders fonts much crisper and the backlight isn't as blazingly bright white which makes reading for long periods much more pleasurable than the iPhone.
I love new stuff; I love updated software: but I want stuff that's compatible. I want to make my computing life better not have to start all over again every few years.
i just looked at your france-croatia photographs: they're BEAUTIFUL. the "cascades" you have there, amazing. this puts me to shame utterly. i was in india with the boyfriend recently and i took soemthign like 4 photos. everything seemed either too close or too agitated to my eye.
Thanks for the comments. :) I'm lucky in that Katherine is into photography as much as I am; not to mention the scenery just begged to be photographed. India is on the list for future travel so we'll see if I can match your photo total of 4. Did you enjoy the trip anyway?
we enjoyed it immensely and will go back. eveything is startling - this is part of why, i think, photo was difficult for me. i don't think i have the visual language to talk about things through photo. ken took a million shots however. i wrote what i call snapshots of moments and things. i highly recommend visiting india.