iPod touch as PDA: two week review

Two weeks ago, I bought an iPod touch with the intention of using it as a PDA. On the whole, it's working out well so far. Here are some observations:

1. WiFi works well. Silently joining known networks is the right way to do it—the Palm TX was always obsessed with telling me what it was doing. Having said that, and despite Internode's pretty decent-looking coverage list, I've found WiFi reception in Adelaide to be somewhat sporadic. Presumably the range from any of those locations is limited. Despite a hotspot listed at 33 King William Street, for example, I can tell you that reception just over the street outside the National Australia Bank Building, at 28 King William Street, is feeble. There's no denying that it would be nice to have the additional 3G coverage of the iPhone.
2. I'm still not quite sure what to conclude about battery life. It's clearly modest at best, and watching video gives it a real hammering. I think even in the absence of any significant video habit, I would still want to be charging it daily. Not surprisingly, audio is nowhere near as taxing, and the display can be turned off while using it as a conventional iPod.
3. The Calendar and Contacts applications are significantly better than their Palm TX equivalents. (There's no real surprise there—the TX is a 3-year-old device.) I can't really fault them. They both do what they're supposed to do. Syncing via MobileMe works in both directions.
4. Mobile Safari is pretty much the gold standard of mobile browsers at the moment. It's that good.
5. The Mail client is a let-down. It feels like a decent version 0.5 of some kind of much better mail client. There are just too many basic features either done incorrectly, or lacking altogether, to call it anything other than rudimentary:
   • It top-posts on replies. This is a completely inexcusable, Outlook Express-level misfeature.
   • There's no mechanism for selecting a block of text, and hence...
   • There's no way to delete large chunks of text other than sitting there with a finger on the delete key for minutes at a time.
   These problems combined mean it takes quite some effort to not look like a moron when replying to email. Additionally, it would be good to be able to either unsubscribe from, or at least ‘forget the contents of’ nominated IMAP mail folders. I have some folders into which I directly pipe mailing list subscriptions, for example. While I delete a lot of the individual messages, I also save hundreds of them. As far as I can tell, if I open one of these folders using the iPod's mail client, I'm going to start accumulating copies of these saved messages on the iPod, even if I don't download more than the default first 50. I could be wrong here—I need to look into it further.

The interim verdict is this: the iPod touch seems to be quite feasible as a PDA.