My ever-unreliable AT&T 8525 finally had a permanent white screen of death and, rather than be a slave to AT&T forever, decided to get a separate PDA and phone. I bought an iPod Touch and it is a world of difference. Sync'ing it to Microsoft Outlook was automatic (which never quite worked right with Microsoft Windows Mobile!), the software is smooth and slick (everyone knows that), and it even gets daylight saving time right! ePocrates works, and there's lots of medical software out there. The only thing missing is Riley Kidometer, which I was running under a Palm emulator. It gives age-specific parameters for things like height and weight and a ton of other pediatric-relevant information. I'm getting around it with growth charts from statcoder. The only other things I need from that program are peak flows, which I am serving with the bililite webservices, and the EKG parameters. I'll have to look those up and add them to the webservices.
And having an MP3 player is cool, too.
The best part has been Apple customer service. 2 weeks after I bought the thing, I dropped my iPod on the workshop floor. The glass shattered (I know, I should use a case and not keep it in my shirt pocket when leaning over. פראקטיק שולע איז די בעסטע שולע אבער די פרייז איז זייער טייער—Experience is the best teacher but the tuition is astronomical). Made an appointment at the Apple Store, got the lecture that dropping the iPod is not covered by the warranty, and the Apple rep gave me a new iPod anyway. Unbelievable! They definitely have a customer for life now.
And restoring from backup should have been a no-brainer, but the new iPod had out-of-date system software. After plugging the new iPod in, I was offered the choice of restoring from backup. But when I selected it, I got an error message that the iPod software had to be updated first, which meant setting it up as a new iPod (one click), naming it (a few keystrokes), updating (one click), "restoring to factory settings" (one click to let the iPod know I would want to restore from backup), then restore from backup (one more click). Everything, even the placement of the app icons and the web pages I was looking at, was restored. Annoying, but not difficult.
