Product Review:
Ipod Touch
I have been the proud owner of an Ipod Nano 3g for quite a while now. When the Iphone came out I was really impressed. But I really didn’t want the phone aspect of it. I thought to myself it would be very cool if Apple were to release an Ipod that had all of the Iphone’s features without the phone of course. Well after a little while Apple did just that. The Ipod Touch is pretty close to the Iphone in almost every way, except that it doesn’t have the phone features.
I really wanted to try the Ipod Touch so I contacted Apple to see if they could send me out one to review. Apple sent me an Ipod Touch that was 16 GB in size. The Ipod Touch comes in a box that is very similar to the Iphone box. In the box you get the Ipod Touch, your standard white Ipod headphones, the docking cable, some stickers and a small plastic stand. They also give you a black cloth to deal with all those fingerprints you will get on your Touch.
One thing I thought was interesting is that on my docking cable for the Nano there are small little buttons you push in when you’re inserting it into the Ipod. The cable for the Ipod Touch does not have these buttons.
When I first turned the Touch on it had little to no battery power so I had to leave it plugged in for awhile before I could start playing with it. Once it was charged I got my first experience with the Touch screen. To unlock the Touch you have to slide this button across. It’s amazing how simple, yet effective, it is and I wanted to keep sliding that little bar across.
The screen is gorgeous. On the opening screen you see the world and the blue’s look electric. Once you get to the home screen there is a lot that you can play with. This Ipod had the software update installed so you could access things like Google Maps or E-mail, which were absent when the Ipod Touch was released.
The first thing I had to do was put some music on the player. So I went into my library and dragged a couple of albums to the Touch. Once I had some albums on there I plugged in the headphones to hear how it sounded. The problem was I could hear nothing at all! I was looking for some volume controls on the outside of Touch but I couldn’t find anything. I guess I should have looked at the quick start pamphlet. It turns out the sound was turned all the way down and I had to slide the little slider with my finger to turn it up. I thought the sound was pretty rich and full. No surprises there. Next I tried cover flow. I had been using cover flow on my 3g Nano, but the experience is definitely different with the touch. Flip the device horizontally and cover flow appears. It’s really cool to be able to flick through the album art with your finger.
After that I wanted to try out one of the most important features to me. That was the video aspect. Watching videos on my Nano is fine but it pales in comparison to the Ipod Touch’s 3.5 inch (diagonal) glass screen. I grabbed my Beowulf DVD and ran it through Handbrake using the Ipod Touch setting. After transferring it to the Ipod Touch I sat down to watch a little bit of the movie. Wow! I could definitely get used to this! The movie automatically plays in a horizontal position. You have the same basic controls that would find on any player except that these are all touch screen based. The screen seems really big compared to my Nano, but I thought the image looked a tad dark. From what I have read the Touch still does not have as nice a screen as the Iphone. But since I did not have an Iphone to compare it with I am just going by what I have read.
Next, I decided to view some photos. I synced some of the photos that I had in Iphoto to the Touch. If you’re holding it vertically they orient themselves that way. If you flip the Touch horizontally it will automatically re-orient the picture to the way you’re holding it. This is thanks to the accelerometer in the Touch. With the photos I was able to fool around with some of the multi-touch features. You can squeeze you to fingers apart to enlarge the photo. You can also just flick to the right of the screen to see the next photo. It all works very well.
At this point I thought I should talk a little about my experience with typing on the Ipod Touch. I could not believe how easy it was to type. I was able to go pretty fast without making any errors. This will come in hand when you’re using the built in browser or typing an E-mail.
Next I tried out the built in browser which is Safari. It works pretty much like any browser except that it does not support Flash or Java. Most devices don’t really lend themselves well to the browsing experience and I wanted to see what it was like with the Touch. It works really well I was able to navigate to www.gadgetboyz.net and everything showed up the way it should. I went to www.quicktime.com and I was able to click on trailers and watch them just as I would on my Mac. I was really impressed and I could zoom in if the text was too small. It was definitely a useable as a browser.
I am not going to go into every app that comes with the touch, but so far I have covered the ones that are relevant to me. The calculator and clock apps work as they should. There is a YouTube app which worked well. There is a contacts and calendar app that both work as they should. The other application I used that was important to me is E-mail. It worked flawlessly and you could view attachments like a PDF, or a Microsoft Word or Excel document. Plus you can see very rich E-mails that include html. I wish I could find some sort of fault as all I have done in this review is praise every aspect of the device, but Apple has done such a great job with the UI and the whole experience, it’s hard to fault it.
Overall my experience with the Touch was excellent. The only fault I could find is fingerprints on the screen. But this is inherently going to happen when the only way you can interact with the product is with your fingers. If you’re in the market for a new Ipod and can afford it, the Ipod Touch would be an excellent choice.
Highly Recommended.