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 After having had the new iPod touch for two weeks, it's time for a hands on review for Apple's latest gadget. But it was not easy finding one in the stores (including Apple's retail stores). It seemed that either demand was so high that Apple was not able to keep up or that it had some supply chain issues. None of the Apple Stores around the San Francisco Bay Area had any in stock for days.
Okay enough of that, let's get into this. Let me say up front that the iPod touch is the iPod that I have been waiting for two plus years. My previous iPod was the 4th generation 40Gb model and it is a great portable music player that has accompanied me on countless trips around the world. But as good as it was as a music player, it quickly lagged other models out there on the market with its small non-colour screen and the lack of video playback. But Apple's fifth generation iPod was not a compelling upgrade for me even though it had a colour screen plus video playback capabilities. The key reason is that the screen is just way too small to watch video. What I wanted was a full body widescreen iPod. Enter the iPod touch.
The first thing that struck me about the new iPod is how thin and light the device is. The iPod touch has more in common with the iPod nano than the newly re-branded, iPod classic. Think of the iPod touch as a large iPod nano. Unlike the classic, the touch uses a flash drive for storage instead of a hard drive. What it gains in terms of portability and improved battery life, it gave up in terms of storage space. The largest capacity iPod touch is only 16Gb compared with the largest iPod classic which weighs in at 160Gb.
This was a slight concern for me as I felt that I was downgrading from my 40Gb iPod to a 16Gb touch. But as soon as I examined my music listening habits on the go, I quickly realised that I typically only listened to my Favourites smart playlist which was only about 3Gb in size. The rest of my music collection was only accessed when I'm at home. This is psychological as I typically listen to music as I'm travelling overseas and somehow listening to familiar and favourite tunes helps in the adjustment process (hey, that's me !). So my favourite tunes will easily fit into the 16Gb touch, leaving ample room for video.
Having overcome the initial capacity concerns, the decision to buy the touch was an easy one. But I hit another snag. Early adopters on the net were screaming about video quality issues on the new touch, especially in rendering dark scenes in videos. This continued for some weeks without any official acknowledgment from Apple. I did not want to plonk down such a large amount of cash for a poor quality video player. I wasn't a happy camper. With no acknowledgment from Apple, I really did not know how long this problem was going to remain unfixed. Thankfully, about three weeks later, new reports surfaced that the latest batch of iPod touches coming out from Apple's manufacturing facility in China (the "week 38" models) were free of this video defect. YAY !!! So that was the model that I eventually picked up once I was able to find one in stock.
Let's take a look at the various aspects of this device.
User Interface
The iPod touch uses the revolutionary multi-touch interface introduced with the iPhone earlier this year. It is a truly remarkable way of interacting with this gorgeous device. While waiting for the iPod touch to be available, i had watched the feature walkthrough video on Apple's website countless times, thus I was completely familiar with the navigation as soon as I got my hot little hands on the gadget. So I am not able to assess how a complete novice would react to the user interface but I think such users will be able to get around after 15 minutes of experimentation. There are a number of tricks or shortcuts which are not discoverable until you actually read the manual so it does pay to read through the manual.
There are only two physical buttons on the iPod. The button on the front screen takes the user back to the home screen from whatever application they are in. The button on the top of the device puts the iPod to sleep or switches it off if the button is depressed longer. I find that I always just put the iPod to sleep rather than switching it off. Bringing the iPod back on from sleep mode is instantaneous whereas if you've switched it off, the iPod has to boot up (remember that it runs a version of OS X).
Aside from the two hardware buttons, everything else is touch based. The touch screen keyboard does take some getting used and I have found that my accuracy rate with the keyboard is around 80% now with about two weeks of usage. The only tricky part with the keyboard is with entering passwords on websites as the passwords are normally masked so it's hard to tell if you have misspelt.
The multi-touch element is only used to zoom in and out of photos and webpages. By pinching your thumb and index finger together, you zoom out. Zooming in is activated when you spread the thumb and index finger apart. Zooming in and out of photos is easy but it can be tricky when doing this on webpages. The reason is that because the interface is entirely touch driven, sometimes you do accidentally click on the links on a webpage when you are trying to zoom in or out. So some care has to be taken. But overall, the zoom process is very smooth and there is no lag in the iPod updating the display when you zoom in or out.
Music
With all the hoopla over the user interface and video capabilities, one must not forget the music pedigree of the device. Apple has been making iPods since 2001 so this is a mature area for them. Strangely though I still feel that the sound quality from my 4th generation iPod is slightly better. I'm not an audiophile so I am unable to pinpoint what it is about the music from the touch that does not sound quite as good as my previous iPod. But it is by no means bad. You can certainly improve the music experience with a better pair of headphones than the earbuds that ship with the touch.
Coverflow is a cool new way of interacting with your music on the iPod. Simply rotate the iPod into a landscape or horizontal orientation, and Coverflow is activated. I love the feel of flipping through my album collection in Coverflow mode even though interacting with the list using the traditional linear mode is probably faster.
Video
This is the killer app for me for buying the iPod touch. Full screen wide screen video up to 480 by 320 ! The video quality is gorgeous and the experience on viewing on the 3.5" display is excellent. There are a multitude of video sources for you to acquire video for your iPod. Through iTunes you can purchase movies and TV shows that you sync over to the iPod. Unfortunately it does not appear that you can buy video directly from iTunes over the iPod's WiFi connection. iTunes is also a fantastic resource for some great video podcasts that are freely available. You can also roll your own videos by converting existing video or DVDs into the MPEG4 format that the iPod uses. But the piece de resistance is Youtube video. Through the iPod's WiFi connection, you can view Youtube videos through a dedicated Youtube application on the iPod. The user experience is very good.
One user experience element that I like with the video application is that you start a video that you have paused midstream, the iPod will automatically rewind a second or two to give you the context. Very nice touch (no pun intended) !
WiFi
I wouldn't say that WiFi is a killer app for the iPod as the majority of the cities around the world still do not have ubiquitous and affordable WiFi coverage. Having said that, the WiFi capabilities of the iPod touch was a huge draw for me. I'm a very "connected" sort of a guy in the sense that I like to be able to get online anytime anywhere, especially at home. I love using the iPod as my "instant on" Internet tablet. The Safari browser on the iPod works very well and together with the multi-touch interface, it makes browsing web pages very effective. In addition to the standard web pages that you can view through Safari, there is now a growing collection of websites with specially formatted interfaces for the iPhone / iPod touch.
There are two shortcomings with the WiFi implementation that can be quite annoying. The first is setting up your WiFi connection. The iPod was clearly designed for using unsecured WiFi connections or ones which authenticate via the browser. Setting up WEP and WPA keys on the iPod touch can be an exercise in extreme patience. The reason being that you have to use the touchscreen keyboard to enter into your WEP / WPA password. My WEP is a 128bit HEX string for maximum security. When you type this into the iPod, the entire field is masked with asterisks so you cannot really see what you are typing into the field. Extreme caution will allow you to get this right. But this can be pain if you need to connect to different secured WiFI networks regularly. But it's no issue if all you do is connect to unsecured networks.
The second problem I found with the WiFI was that after having successfully set up the connection, the iPod would randomly refuse to connect to websites, reporting a "server of not found" error message. You know there's nothing wrong with the connection itself but you just cannot connect to any websites. This seemed completely random. Sometimes it'll work just fine other times it'll refuse to connect. One way I found to fix the problem was to go and effectively delete the settings for the connection and to create a new one ... remember the WEP key problem ? You've got to enter that password again ! Luckily, I stumbled upon a solution a few days ago that has been a godsend. Check out Andrew Escobar's blog for the solution - it was perfect, so this is no longer an issue.
The WiFI performance is very fast and is extremely usable. The iPod detects saved networks automatically and reconnects itself very quickly. Overall, I'm very pleased with the iPod's WiFi capabilities.
Battery
The battery life is surprisingly good especially if you turn off WiFi when you don't need it. On a 14 hour flight recently, I watched 1.5 movies, 2 TV shows, a number of podcasts and listened to music and it still had 50% juice left at the end of the flight.
Summary
The iPod touch is a long awaited and worthy addition to the iPod family. It will appeal to those who do not need a phone or where the iPhone is not available. And we can look forward to more exciting third party applications being developed for this iPod as Apple has announced that it will open up the platform to third party developers. You shouldn't buy the iPod touch if you already have an iPhone or if you are the type that insists on having your entire multi-gigabyte music collection with you at all times. The way I see the iPod product line developing is that the iPod nano will displace the iPod shuffle and the iPod touch will take the place of the nano in the product line as it is effectively a large nano. The iPod classic will be kept around for the old skool users until flash drive capacity increases to the 40Gb range but the classic will ultimately disappear as hard drive based players are bulky and not battery efficient.Please share your thoughts on the iPod touch using the forum discussion link below. LifeSpike rating : 
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