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I hear you asking, “Why does Steve want an iPod Touch?” Here’s my story:

For as long as I’ve lived I’ve been a dedicated organizer. I make lists. I like to electronically organize all kinds of data. I like to put things in order. I keep all the bottles on my side of the medicine cabinet with the labels facing outward. I’m one of those kinds of people.

Since I was about high school age I’ve been carrying some kind of electronic organizer, which was about when they were invented. For many years it’s been a Palm device and I’ve been happy. (There was a brief stretch when I used Microsoft Windows CE because of work stuff, but I quickly went back to Palm.) There are many, many great little apps available for the Palm, many of them free. Most Palm apps are written to take full advantage of the tiny screen, not worrying so much about being pretty as being useful.

I’ve gone through many models of Palm devices, including three Treo’s, Palm’s popular cell phone device. I’m currently using a Treo 755p with Sprint service.

It’s not a bad device. It’s also not a great device. The Treo has gotten better over the years, but there’s still the occasional random crash or lockup. I can live with it. The Sprint plan I’m on is also great, for $30 a month giving me unlimited internet and text messaging. I don’t use the actual phone portion much, but I do use a heck of a lot of internet and text messaging. For the most part this little package works pretty well for me. I have programs I’ve settled into for managing appointments and tasks and other little things.

But Palm is really starting to show its age. The company pretty much hasn’t put out anything substantially new for something like 5 years. This is starting to hurt in a couple of ways. One, there’s not really a big cottage industry turning out new cool Palm apps anymore. Things have gotten stagnant. Two, some of the built-in apps don’t work in conjunction with other modern apps.

As an example, our family has really taken to using Google Calendar.

It’s a very, very nice (and free!) group scheduling program, and Terry and I basically keep everything in it with different calendars for each family member all merged into one display. And through the use of some 3rd party tools it’s not hard to keep these calendars all in sync with the calendar app on my Mac and the calendar app on my PC at work. Everything is dandy.

Except that the Palm scheduling app is old and doesn’t understand certain types of appointments like ones that repeat across multiple days, so I can’t really sync our calendars with it very well. Ouch. And that’s just one of many examples of why Palm seems to be slowly spiraling around the death drain.

So along comes Apple with the iPhone:

Now things are getting interesting!!! Except… It’s way expensive. You have to switch to AT&T and the monthly charges to get the equivalent of what I have now with Sprint would be nearly 3 times as much! And after some deeper investigation it’s clear that the apps are pretty, but not nearly as functional as what I have on my Treo. Not only that, but adding applications was a problematic unsupported mess, so there really wasn’t a good path for getting it to be as functional as my Treo. The desire to get one dissolved. And it wasn’t just a matter of putting it out of my mind because it was so expensive, I actually just didn’t want one at all.

Then Apple released the iPod Touch.

By itself, this was no big deal. It was basically an iPhone without the phone and fewer apps.

But then the iPhone/Touch SDK (software development kit) was announced. To borrow a phrase, this changes everything.

What made the Palm so very, very useful was not really the built-in software, it was the plethora of 3rd party stuff that was available. Take an iPhone/Touch SDK, mix in hordes of nerdy Apple fanboys, and you should end up with scores of really good and interesting apps.

Now we’re talking! Both the iPhone and the Touch should rapidly get far more useful after this SDK comes out. (There are still some nagging questions about some aspects of the SDK, but I’m confident things will work out fine.)

The iPhone, though, is still too expensive on a monthly basis for my wallet. I just can’t bring myself to commit to something like that.

After a lot of thought, I realized that the iPod Touch would really be a useful device for me in the long run. Why?

• It’s got a WiFi radio. For most of my waking day I’m within range of a WiFi connection. If I want to do some quick surfing or checking of email, my couch plus the Touch will be a nice little combination. When I’m not in WiFi range, I’ll still have my Treo, which will work fine as a fallback device if I need to hit the internet for something.
• It doesn’t require an Internet connection to be useful. Applications like the calendar use local storage. As apps appear that use the SDK, there will be many more that may be somewhat more useful with an Internet connection, but will also work just fine without one. Things like list makers or fancy calculators or games, for example.
• I have little doubt that there will be many, many great apps that I’ll want to run on this thing. Probably within 30 days or less of the day the SDK comes out.

It’s still a bummer that I’ll still have to carry two devices, the Touch and Treo. But I’ve been doing that for a while anyway with my iPod Nano and my Treo. This isn’t that much different. Perhaps someday in the distant future the iPhone version 3 or 4 or 5 will come out and the monthly cost will be reasonable and I’ll switch over. But until then I’m confident I’ll be happy for a long time with the Touch that’s showing up here next week. Not only will I be happy, but I’ll actually get a lot of good use out of it, too. Now that’s a bonus.