My wife wanted a small portable computer for Christmas.  She didn’t want something as big as a laptop.  We looked at the netbooks, but none were small enough to fit in her purse.  I thought the iPod Touch would be the perfect gift.

There was only one problem.  My iPod Touch was hacked a year ago.  Since then, the App Store came online and thousands of cool programs are available for everyone without the nerdiness required to jailbreak the device.  After I played around with the new Touch, I decided to reset mine and purchase the $9.95 upgrade to get all the new stuff.  What could I miss from the outdated jailbreak version I was using?

For the most part, it was a great choice.  I have scores of apps that were not available before and I have only downloaded the freebies.  Truth be told, most of the apps I have downloaded are games that I played a couple of times.  There are some nice productivity tools.  I have Evernote so I can type myself a message that updates a document on the web.  I have Facebook, Tritter, Google Apps (read only mode), a Bible with dozens of translations, VNC, wireless network file sharing and more.

I did lose a few things and two of them I really miss.  First and foremost (and almost a deal breaker) is Nemus Sync.  This app sync’ed my Google Calendar with the iPod Calendar.  It is bi-directional and there is nothing (not even a pay app) like it in the Apps Store.  The second app is the full version of Wikipedia.  You can buy a version for $8.00 but some of the reviews say the two gigabyte download doesn’t play well with iTunes or the synchronization process.

I also lost my Apache web server and wireless SSH server.  Those had a certain coolness factor, but were handy at times. I also can’t get into the OS like I could before.  I can’t find a screen capture utility which is why I had to use a picture from Flickr in this post.

Overall I’m glad I have the apps store.  I really miss my Google Calendar sync, but maybe Nemus will add it to the Apps Store.  They have other applications in there.  I would certainly pay a few bucks for it.