My iPod is dead, long live my… iPhone and my iPad?

So, it is true. I plugged my 16 GB iPod touch into a power adapter the other day, some­thing I had done a hun­dred times before this, I heard a lit­tle “pop!” sound, and it died. Noth­ing I did, no swear­ing, no press-this and hold-that for ten sec­onds then shake it all about, no por­ing over mes­sage baords… noth­ing brought it back. Finally, I sent it off for diag­no­sis, and $15 dol­lars in ship­ping later, she’d dead, Jim.

Well, okay, I could have it back for $180 and a new logic board. Or for $60 and an extended Apple­Care con­tract… you know, if I could go back in time.

So, I’ve decided not to fix it, and I am now iPod touch­less. I miss my iPod, but not as much as I thought I would. In fact, what I miss most are my shop­ping list app (get­ting gro­ceries last week was tres quaint, fum­bling with a piece of paper and a tiny sharpie), get­ting my work email in the same place I get my real email, my address book, and my calendar.

I don’t miss the games at all, and I had a lot of them. I miss Twit­ter a lit­tle, and Face­book. I have wanted the cal­cu­la­tor once in the last two weeks. And I miss being able to grab it to check a score, browse to IMDB, or check the news while I’m parked in front of the TV.

I am now rock­ing my old G4 iBook on the couch (which I have to plug in to the wall, since the bat­tery last about 4 min­utes), but it is not the same, for purely lazy/cool rea­sons. (Which is to say, I do not plan on try­ing to jus­tify why I can’t just use a G4 with Tiger and a web browser to do all the things I could on my iPod touch.)

So what will I do? I’ll wait for the fourth gen­er­a­tion iPhone this sum­mer. I’ll get the lit­tlest one, since I never really pushed the 16 GB bar­rier on the touch. And I’ll put less on it. Fewer games, fewer books, fewer crap/cool util­i­ties. Mean and lean, my iPhone will be.

And then… I’ll get an iPad. Ding ding ding! That’s the sound of a cash reg­is­ter. That’s also the sound of an Apple mar­ket­ing guru get­ting his wings! They just turned my one two-year-old device into two brand new devices! Huzzah!

I’d be per­fectly happy with the small­est iPad, since it won’t have any music on it (what’s the point, I’ll only be using it at home). But I enjoyed the games, the brows­ing, and what lit­tle read­ing I did on my iPod. It is just a mat­ter of time. Well, and money. I can’t wait.