iPod Touch, The Highs and Lows, Long Beach

Wow, wow, and wow, and then some.

Seeing the iPod Touch on Apple’s website doesn’t do it justice. It is, for lack of better words, awesome. It didn’t dawn on me how thin it is. It is truly the progenitor of the Palm Pilot.

To put things back into perspective, I had a Palm Pilot, and a PPIII, and a Sony Clie, which was simply beautiful, elegant and sleek. Sony has the uncanny knack to come into the market with beautiful desings and kill it the following years. Case in hand, the early Sony Viao laptops were simply beautiful. Sony was onto to something but eventually dropped the ball. Then the Clie. It was sleek in a retro way, a la B&O until it became so bloated, it was ugly and common.

The Touch however redefines sleek and powerful. Of course the big change since then is replacing a hard drive with ram. Less space, no moving parts. But the Touch innovates further. It really is what the original Palm Pilot was supposed to be, a credit card PDA that fits in your shirt pocket. The screen is phenomenal. Completely scratch resistant, you can put a razor blade to it, it’s made of sturdy glass.

Of course the rest is pretty much a limping iPhone and that is the low for me. I have been eagerly waiting for a full screen PDA for a long time now. I felt after the iPhone would come the time of the full featured PDA. The problem with the Touch is that it doesn’t fulfill my business needs. I need a PDA where I can input calendar events and new contacts. The Touch does not and this falls short from my expectations. OK, I understand Apple didn’t want to have most iPhone features build into the Touch but by crippling it, it alienated people like me that need a good business tool that not only looks sleek but has great other features, multimedia being one of them.

To sum it up, my first wow factor was the sheer thinness of it. The second was the quality of the screen. But I wasn’t impressed with the fact that it isn’t meant to be a PDA after all but a multimedia tool designed to make you buy and download videos. Sorry Steve, it’s truly a great product but I also need it to work for me in mmy profession. I’ll wait again till the next version hopefully unloacks these two needed features or the iPhone becomes compatible with T-Mobile.

One thing I’ve said over and over, ad nauseam, is that relying solely on conventional reporting through newspapers and specialized magazines to get the feel of the real estate industry is not accurate. At best, it is a month old, if not three months.

Back in late 2005 around October, we noticed that something was changing. It took more faxes to get a transaction done! Homes stood a little longer on the market. Pretty much after that, things slowed down and changed. I turned my attention to the newspaper and NAR, along with CAR but no one reported anything. In fact, and I believe this will bite back both these organizations in the future, both was claiming the market fine.

6 months later, the news media reluctantly came out of denial and started reporting the obvious, things aren’t selling as well. Well, you could have fooled us. Nonetheless, they continued with optimistic predictions that the bottom of the wave was near. It has been a year and half since then.

The problem with conventional methods is they rely on last months numbers. Last months numbers are interpreted, and it takes another month to adjust for seasonal variations and inflation with a last minute check. That’s why we have numbers that reflect the market sometimes 3 months back. Hardly up to date.

So what’s to do? I think the wise thing is to keep your ears and eyes wide open locally. Read blogs you found were accurate in the past. I highly recommend Calculated Risk, Seeking Alpha and Barry Ritholtz, along with California Housing Forecast. All four usually cover what is happening in almost real time. Blogs like mine will sum up according to what I see. I would pick up any stories I haven’t found to be true, at least locally. Read newspapers and the specialized press media but remember that they answer to advertising and are often pressured to put certain stories on top.