Mini Review iPod touch 16gb
Overview
Early in September, Apple announced the new iPod touch would be available by the end of the month. I had read a lot of good things about the touch and when I finally got my hands on one, I just had to have it….So here I am with a touch in the hand and here’s what I think about this new gadget….
The first thing that strikes you with the touch is how thin it really is. 8mm is thin! The handling is easy and is comfortable in the hand.
When you first switch on the device the battery on my unit was almost fully charged. The screen appears with an image of a synch cable inviting you to plug it in to a PC or Mac. (This is a dilemma for since I work in both formats!) The touch took quite a long time to sync first time around, it must have been 15 minutes with a USB2.0 connection and a Macbook Pro 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo.
On the front of the touch is only one button known as a “home” button. Pressing this once brings up a “slide to unlock” message. (Why no-one has ever thought of this in the windows mobile arena amazes me!) After unlocking the device, you are confronted with several nice looking icons:
Along the bottom of screen is Music, Videos, Photos and iTunes which I suppose speaks for itself. A light finger press takes you to each section as you would expect.
Music
All the standard iPod stuff is in here. The interface is easy to use one handed and if you flip the screen horizontally, the orientation changes and Coverflow mode appears. This mode allows you to flip through your CD collection as if you were flicking through a real physical collection which is nice… Having used an older iPod for some time, I much prefer a list…
Video
Again does what it says. You can purchase videos / TV shows on iTunes and upload here. The playback is flawless with no stuttering. The graphics processor must be decent! At this time, the only TV shows available are from the US and they may not to everyone’s taste! Err…Friends anyone!! I suppose in the future, a British TV company will jump on board and release something through iTunes…I’m not holding my breath!
Photo
This is quite possibly the nicest feature on the touch. You can synchronize your photo’s from Apple’s iPhoto app on the Mac with the touch. When the device sync’s the Mac does a conversion for the screen size which took a while in my case since I’ve got 2600 photo’s! When you rotate the touch, the screen orientation changes automatically from landscape to portrait and is very quick to flip. To zoom in you simply pinch two fingers outwards and inwards to zoom out. At first this does seem a little awkward but you soon get used to it! You can also flip your finger from side to side as if flipping through a photo album. Very nice.
iTunes
This is distinctly separate from the music player app in that you need a wifi connection to browse iTunes as you were using a desktop PC or Mac. The interface makes good use of screen real estate but isn’t quite as good as the real iTunes on a desktop. There’s a search function and with perseverance you can usually find what you’re after….You can preview tracks for 30 seconds and choose to buy and download using your wifi connection. The downloaded music is synced back to your desktop when you connect. The music playback is just as good as the iPods gone before.
Higher up the screen are more icons:
Safari – Apple’s own web browser.
When first used, a message appears inviting you to turn wifi on after which you need to enter your wep code. All this took seconds and a webpage appear unbelievably quickly! The browsing experience is quick (although I do have fairly quick broadband at home) in fact the web browser is almost as quick as a desktop pc! The screen is very readable and navigating web pages is easy. When you view the photo’s you can pinch in and out with two fingers to zoom in and out same as viewing photo’s. There’s a bookmark button along the bottom and you can sync your favourite web pages from your PC or Mac.
YouTube
I’ve never been a big fan of YouTube simply because the videos look like they’ve been uploaded mainly by airheads with too much time on their hands! But for research purposes I watched a few videos and the playback was fine, no stuttering / buffering problems and the picture quality is good. The one good thing about YouTube on the touch is that you can bookmark the videos you’ve watched for viewing later. I’ve found that once the wifi is turned off or you’re out of range of a hotspot, then the videos aren’t available anymore which I suppose is logical in not filling up the memory.
Unfortunately YouTube wasn’t available when I trying to photograph it….
Calendar
The Calendar is very clean and clear to read. A month view is displayed and if there are any appointments, a dot shows next to the date. It’s not quite as sophisticated as Pocket Informant I have to say but it does remind me of Psion’s old calendar… But the one BIG disappointing thing about the calendar is that NOT editable on the go. You can only view appointments! The only way to change these is to update your Outlook or iCalendar on Mac or PC and re-synchronize. Why o’ why has Apple crippled this device as a potential PDA?!
Contacts
Again the Contacts is very clean and easy to use. The nice feature here is that you can flick your finger on the screen and the list of contacts rolls smoothly. Once you’ve found the contact, you simply tap and up comes the whole address etc. Nice. The surprising thing about the contacts app here is that it’s EDITABLE when the calendar isn’t! Very odd!
Clock
Does what it says on the tin. The initial view here is a World Clock showing your local time zone. Along the bottom are further icons for Alarm, Stopwatch and Timer. In my opinion, the Alarm is a complete waste of time since this device has no speakers. This must be a ‘carried over’ feature from the full blown iPhone which actually has speakers. The touch’s alarm consists of a few simple beeps in different patterns – very 1980’s…
Calculator
Nice looking calculator but there’s only basic functions here and no hint of a percentage key. With all this technology and processing power in this little device, why couldn’t Apple have given me a scientific calculator?
Settings
Pressing the settings button brings up a whole sub menu of options to change all aspects of the device including brightness, music playback, video, photos etc, I visit this section quite a bit when I remember to turn off the wifi!
Battery Life
I’ve read around a few web sites that the battery life is not as good as Apple claim. Obviously this depends on how you use the touch, but the one important thing here is to remember to turn off the wifi !! I noticed the battery draining quite a bit when this was turned on and thought I might have a faulty battery until I realized what the cause was…
Memory Capacity
It seemed to me silly to buy an 8 Gb touch when for only 70 quid more you can have double the memory! That said, I have 2600 photos, 3000 music tracks and I still have 6 Gb left. I can see me filling this up quite soon. I’m not quite sure why Apple made a touch with only 16 Gb when the older models came with at least 30 GB.
Conclusion
For nearly 6 years now, Apple have dominated the music player market to the extent that Microsoft with their Zune media player has got it’s work cut out to compete for market share. With this in mind, I was interested to see how far the new iPod touch would have “PDA” functions possibly making a dint on Windows Mobile market share.
I believe the Windows Mobile interface has a long way to go before it looks as good as the interface on the touch. I would also say that the touch has a few things that could be improved such as the iTunes, Calendar, Calculator and Clock. Is it too much to ask of Apple to make the calendar editable?? This feature works on the iPhone…
Will I be buying an iPhone? Not yet. The 8Gb is too small a capacity and there’s no 3G and HSDPA. When the iPhone reaches this point, then I might reconsider. Next year maybe…..
In the meantime, I’m quite happy with the touch, but you have to keep in mind this is a Video iPod with a touch screen NOT an iPhone without the phone.
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