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Some of you might remember my blog post on “Why I will finally buy an iPhone”. The truth is, I did not – and I won’t.

Of course, one of the reasons was Antennagate although I would not use the iPhone for making calls that much anyway. But nevertheless, a not 100% working device for 100% of the price isn’t interesting to me.

The other reason: they delayed the white iPhone 4. Therefore, I bought an iPod Touch and until yesterday, I was really happy with it.

Consequently, this changed a bit after the Apple event yesterday and with the presentation of the new iPod line up – but more on that later in this post. Let me first explain why I bought an iPod Touch a couple of weeks ago.

To me mobile learning will be a game changer in education for many reasons. One of them is that touchscreen, mobile devices are perfect for learning applications. MindSnacks still keeps me engaged in learning Spanish and this is something other learning methods have tried and failed at. Of course, it does not cover every skill but it does not have the pretension to do so. It helps you learning and remembering vocabulary and short sentences and it does it extraordinarily well.

Thus in order to be able to cover this new and exciting niche, I needed to have a matching device. The iPad did not fancy me because of the “missing” parts like USB and Webcam. The iPhone 4 did not deliver, either so it was up to the iPod Touch which recently got the upgrade to run iOS 4 and hence support multitasking.

This makes it an awesome mobile online teaching device already today. Skype works great on the iPod and with multi tasking I can keep the call and open a pdf document or a website for the learning material and with a growing coverage of WiFi in the cities there is basically a spot to teach everywhere I go.

The main reasons for me to buy the iPhone 4 were the two cameras which would on the one hand replace my flip cam for interviews on the road, my digital camera and with the front facing camera I could (possibly) use it for video calls through Skype one day and the other one was the new retina display.

With the presentation of the 4th generation iPod Touch those bullet points are now all delivered by this device and the only reason for an iPhone 4 would be the actual phone function and, well, the white color. But is this reason enough to get an over prized mobile phone contract? Not for me and during the presentation, even Steve Jobs called the new iPod Touch

“iPhone without a contract.”

Nothing more to add from my side.

I don’t even think that the need for 3G / 4G will still be there in a couple of years from now. As said above, I can basically log in to a free WiFi connection in every city I go, even here in the province of France. It somehow reminds me of the first cellphones where you simply had zones where the phone did not have a connection and you had to wait until you entered the next area with coverage.

There will be a flip at least in urban areas where the mobile devices will run per default on free or paid WiFi providers and 3G/4G will only be activated when you enter a zone without WiFi hot spots.

The more people will be using Skype, FaceTime or Google Talk the more WiFi providers will grow their hot spots in public places and the less we will be dependent on mobile phone contracts that suck the live blood out of us.

Related Links:

1. Apple Announces The New iPod Touch: Dual Cameras, Retina Screen
2. Phone Numbers Are Dead, They Just Don’t Know It Yet