First off, I'd like to thank Apple for making me feel like a giant greaseball. The very first thing you'll notice about the iPod Touch is the fingerprints. They should have called it the Fingerprint iMagnet. The extremely glossy finish gets smudged up rather quickly. When it's clean it's a sight to behold though.
Basics:
There's only 3 buttons on the iPod Touch. The Sleep/Power button. The Home button and the volume rocker +/-. Everything else is accessed and controlled via the touch screen. The screen is glass. There's no give at all when you press on it. Text entry is done with a virtual keyboard. Your only feedback is "clicks" when you press and the letters zooming in momentarily after they're pressed. Typing is quick and smooth though and it has a built-in spellcheck that shows suggestion and if they're correct, you just hit the space bar to type out the rest of the word. The interface is intuitive and easy to use. Also, I was surprised at how accurate the touch screen was, even with my fat sausage-like fingers.
The back is a very shiny and polished stainless steel. I don't know what type of stainless steel it is, but it scratches very easily. As of the time of this writing, Apple still does not have cases for this version of the iPod Touch. This version of the iPod Touch looks and feels very sleek and futuristic. It's definitely eye-catching and a pretty good conversation piece.
Internet:
I needed a pocketable Wi-Fi web solution. I also wanted something that could handle some TV shows, games and photos as well. The Apple iPod Touch does all of these things well. It uses a portable version of the fabulous Safari browser and some neat tricks to make browsing convenient and easy, considering there's no mouse and you're navigating everything via the touch screen. Wen using the browser, you can turn the screen 90 degrees to have it orient itself in landscape mode which gives you a wider view of the webpage. To zoom in you put two finger on the screen and slide them away form each other. The zoom out, you slide them towards each other in a pinching motion. This sounds odd, but it works quite well once you get the hang of it. Safari loads pages pretty quick for a mobile device and opening new pages is a breeze. You're able to have multiple pages open at the same time and switching between the pages is as easy as a swipe across the screen.
There is direct access to YouTube via the YouTube application. It is a program that is used to interact specifically with YouTube. Videos are searchable and they easily bookmarked and links are put into e-mails automatically if you want to share the link. When you play a YouTube video, it plays in landscape mode and as far as I can see, it plays it in "high quality" is it's available. The interface is responsive and easy to use. The YouTube application interacts with YouTube using a custom interface and opening certain pages in Safari. However, you cannot view the desktop version of YouTube and watch videos. The Safari browser has a specific plugin that allows it to play the mobile version of the video links. To use the desktop version of YouTube, you must have Flash 9 installed. Unfortunately, you can't install it yourself. So many videos and other Flash features on some sites are unavailable.
Music:
As the Apple iPods go, for music the iPod Touch is pretty good. Sound reproduction is excellent and the multitude of equalizer presets make it easy to find the sound you want. I'd have liked to see a manual EQ setting but the presets work well. A common complaint is that iPods have poor bass. The included headphones (which I don't use) are OK sounding but they have a poor dynamic range.
Speaking of sound, the iPod Touch 2G has a built-in speaker. While it's probably not going to win any awards for loudness and sound quality, it does have decent sound reproduction considering that the tiny little speaker is entirely contained within the body of the iPod Touch. The speaker is good enough for games and alerts and perhaps watching a video on YouTube but I wouldn't want to listen to that speaker to watch an hour long video for instance.
Video:
With is high resolution screen, the iPod Touch has a display that is crisp and vivid. At 3.5 inches diagonal it's large enough to enjoy a TV show or watching a YouTube vid. However, it is small and as a personal preference, I don't think I'd be able to watch an entire feature length film on that tiny screen. Converting video to put onto the iPod Touch is relatively simple. My next review will be on software for the iPod Touch, and in that review I'll be talking about software solutions for encoding video that'll play on the iPod Touch. Video controls are simple and intuitive and if you stop playing a video and/or exit from the video player app, when you return you'll pick up where you left off. This is a default behavior that is configurable within the settings menu.
Wi-Fi:
I was impressed at the useable range of the Wi-fi. It does really well, especially when you consider how small the device is. It gets about the same range as my MacBook does. The wi-fi on this device is stable and it is fast. It is picky when connecting to access points that use WPA2, but simply restarting the iPod Touch solved that issue.
Battery Life:
I was quite impressed with the battery life on the iPod Touch. I listened for about 6hours to streaming music over Wi-Fi internet. When it is playing music is shuts down the screen. When the screen is off, it sips power. At full brightness, that tiny screen will slurp up your battery power really quick. The screen brightness is adjustable with a further modifier that uses a light sensor to determine the appropriate brightness within a certain range of the base level of brightness you select. From what I can gather, this setting can decrease your battery life a bit if used. From the settings menu, you can turn off the Wi-Fi and that will save you a considerable amount of power. You can put the device to "sleep" with the touch of a button and it automatically disables the screen and the wireless and stays in sleep mode using a trickle charge that uses barely any power at all.
Miscellaneous features:
You can set the iPod Touch to lock the screen with a passcode. This can be enabled to auto-lock after a certain period of time. This is handy in the event you lose it, all your private data can be kept private. There's also the option to automatically erase the data after 10 failed attempts at entering a passcode. This is to keep someone from trying too many guesses. Since your iPod Touch has it's data backed up on your computer, if you find your iPod after someone got the data erased, iTunes will automatically restore your data.
The e-mail application is fast, simple to use but highly configurable. It has presets for MobileMe, AOL, MS Exchange, Yahoo and Gmail as well as any other e-mail service via POP3 or IMAP. i tested this with my own IMAP e-mail server and it performed quite well. Attachments are handled by the internal viewer. Much like the Preview app on OS X, the iPod Touch has an internal file viewer that can open a multitude of files including PDF documents, MS Word (even up to Word 2008), Excel Spreadsheets, texts, RTF Docs and Photos-- all of them open very quickly with excellent formatting.
The App Store. This is the portal to access many applications that can be installed on the iPod Touch. There's many categories, including games, education and productivity. The sheer amount of apps available make the iPod Touch a very capable device. Moat of these apps you must pay for but the price ranges for most things is between 99-cents and 5 dollars. There are quite a few free apps, and some are ad supported. Meaning that a tiny banner or link will appear within the app interface. There aren't too many of those fortunately.
There are many features, almost too many to cover within a reasonable amount of text. There's also many applications for the iPod Touch that I was extremely pleased with. I won't cover them all in this review but I will spotlight just one...
iPod Touch App Spotlight - My App of the Week:
Pandora Radio
This is an iPhone/iPod Touch (most apps I will talk about are compatible with both) widget from the same people that brought you the Music Genome Project. Basically, they put songs together that are similar in genre but similar in many more ways than that. Pandora Radio on the iPod is a free app. It costs nothing to download or sign-up for. Registration is mandatory but free. It works quite simply. Connect to the internet search an artist, song title, genre or album then Pandora Radio does the rest. As your listening to is, it shows you the album art and you can click the "i" button to get more information about why they're playing that song. It's really interesting to see why they picked a song, especially when you like it. It sort of helps you understand why you like certain songs. It bases the songs it on your preferences, so if you don't like a song, you can give it a thumbs down, and it won't play that song again. By the same token, if you give a song a thumbs up, it will use that song to pick additional songs.
So, you're bummed out that you don't have that nifty iPod to play with Pandora Radio with, huh? Have no fear, because there's a a mobile version for your cellphone available, there's also the online version that you can use with just your browser! It has all the features and more of the mobile version. Here's the website:
Any questions? Comments? Send me a PM!
~Koresh