A free commercial for Apple's iPod Touch

Please understand. I do not write this as a fanboy. I have no connection to Apple (except for those who read my blog). I think Nokia is great, love several Blackberry smartphones. True, I think the design of most Android smartphones look like they came out of Chrysler, or some older Soviet bloc nation, but there can be no denying Android's appeal.

But, fuck me, the iPod Touch is simply awesome. Truly, truly magical and revolutionary. And as much as I praise Steve Jobs and Apple for how they leverage the power of the iPod Touch in the larger smartphone wars, for this post I am going to fully ignore that.

Just pause and look at this thing. It looks beautiful. It's thinner than half a deck of cards. It is a mini-computer. It can play music, great. Play movies, that look great. Includes WiFi functionality and FaceTime -- yes, the best personal videochat service available. It can hold 1,000s of songs. The smallest model has 8gigs of storage. My first computer -- with a hard drive -- was 40megabytes. The Internet in your hand.

Yet the iPod Touch costs $229. In the developed world, nearly everyone, and that's over 500 million people, can afford this! Which means that in 5 years, at least 2 billion, probably more, can afford it. Plus, it has hundreds of thousands of apps, games galore, aids for school, productivity and more. It's even within striking distance of disintermediating managed wireless carriers. It weighs less than 4 ounces (100 grams). It can record in HD! The screen has a 960 x 640 resolution. There's a gyroscope and accelerometer built in.

iPod Touch is a thing of beauty yet which possesses near-zen levels of power and functionality.

The smartphone, the smartphone wars, are destroying everything. Every market, every business, our very notions of space and time. This cannot be stopped. Let's take a moment, however, to honor this creation; one of the most beautiful in the history of computing.