Pros: web browsing; full computer in your pocket; multimedia playback; intuitive touchscreen controls
Cons: no To-Do application; no camera; weaker signal reception than laptop; needs 3rd-party mic
The Bottom Line: The 16 GB iPod Touch hits the sweet spot of capacity, responsiveness, interaction, and multimedia playback. Oh, and did I mention all the apps?
MaxWebster's Full Review: Apple iPod touch 16 GB (2nd Generation) MP3 Player
The 16 GB iPod Touch hits the sweet spot of capacity, responsiveness, interaction, and multimedia playback. Oh, and did I mention all the apps?
Great music playback is a given. You can carry around your entire music library with you, or selected playlists. (Now with iTunes 9, you can also sync selected artists and/or genres, avoiding the old requirement to make playlists just to sync a precise set of songs.)
Let me compare and contrast a minute with other iPod models I have known and loved:
By default, the screen spends most of its time off while music is playing. You can choose how long before the screen turns itself off. You can adjust the volume using buttons on the side. However, it is just a little cumbersome to turn the screen back on and then flick a finger to onlock the iPod, if all you want to do is skip to the next track or pause. The playback stops if you unplug the audio jack, so this is the quickest technique if interrupted by boss or wife (or both). I really wish there was some hardwired way to skip and pause though without going through the screen; for me, that makes the Shuffle a better bet for strapping on during a workout.
The song info is easily available while it's playing, even before unlocking the iPod if you just hit the power button to turn on the screen.
Rating a song requires a little hand-eye coordination. You have to hit a little icon while the song is playing, then hit the right spot in a "star bar" to set the rating. You either stay in this rating screen, or go back to the main song screen showing the album cover. If you want to rate several songs in a row, you can stay on the rating screen; however, that screen displays all the songs from the same album as the currently-playing song. Which can be confusing if you accidentally brush one with your finger -- all of a sudden, you've left your playlist and are now listening only to songs from one album.
This ability to jump from current song to other songs on the same album is actually something I've wanted for a while. However, tying it to the rating screen makes both of these features confusing. The trickiness of the rating interface, plus the number of finger swipes and precise clicks, makes it somewhat harder to rate songs on-the-go (in the car, on the subway, etc.) than with the Classic or Nano models, which rely on a predictable number of center-button clicks, and audio feedback when using the scroll wheel to assign star ratings.
Battery life is excellent, easily a few days when doing nothing other than listening to music. When the battery starts to run low, you get several warnings before it dies entirely. Charging is very quick; seems like only a few minutes before the battery gauge shows 50% or more. This is convenient when the warning shows up 15-30 minutes before you're planning to run out the door for a long drive.
Tilting the player sideways brings up the Cover Flow view. I rarely use that mode, because as noted above I like to skip around my music without giving my full attention to the iPod. The Touch has very good textual navigation, with lists that scroll smoothly and slow down gradually when you flick a finger. Long lists also get alphabetical A-Z entries, tiny little icons on the right side, yet surprisingly easy to hit. If you're off by a letter or two, just hold your finger down and move it a bit, and the list will jump to the next or previous letter.
Unlike Classic and Nano models, shuffle mode is not something you have to go through the menus to turn on, or turn on for the whole library. You can choose a Shuffle menu item while viewing the songs for any artist, album, playlist or genre. Or, while any song is playing, you can turn Shuffle Play on or off through an icon. (Again, a little fiddly to find and hit when you're not paying full attention.)
Even with the small size of 16 GB, you can fit many many many hours of music (enough to fit all possible moods) plus a few hours of TV shows, with free space for voice memos, e-mail, full address book, and so on.
Let's move beyond the normal music functions, to using the Touch like a PDA or even a full computer. One of my first science fiction books was "Imperial Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke, where the characters carried around super-PDA-type devices. The iPod Touch is the first thing I've held that made me think that prediction has come true.
First and foremost, web browsing is just like on a computer, with some Minority Report-style finger gestures to expand and shrink the text. You figure out if the page is interesting by reading the large headline text and scrolling to the approximate spot. Then you zoom in to read the paragraphs of interest and/or click on the most helpful link. For most pages, if you turn the Touch sideways, you can get text in a readable size that displays the main column of a blog post or news article. For those pages that assume a wider display, there is a dance of "read 1st half of line, flick finger to see other half of screen, flick back to beginning of next line". But griping aside, that's the way to do it. For years, people have been telling me I would need to code special versions of web pages marked up especially for mobile devices. I stood my ground until the iPod came along, which works perfectly well with normal web pages the same as you would use anywhere else. Even when a web site offers a special mobile edition (for example, the San Francisco Chronicle), I find the regular view more convenient.
Wi-fi is great, and more and more in urban areas there's free wi-fi wherever you happen to sit down after a leisurely stroll. Ironically, I get the worst reception in my own house, where certain rooms get a stronger or weaker signal depending on odd things like whether the curtains are open or closed. My Macbook laptop doesn't suffer from the same signal jitters.
I really wish the Touch had a camera, as that's one aspect of the iPhone that I would like to write apps around, yet I only have a Touch that can't take pictures.
On the built-in side, iCal and Address Book let me dispense with most of the "PDA" work I used to do with a Palm Pilot. However, the Touch doesn't have a built-in or dedicated To-Do app. Nobody seems to want to touch this idea in the entire tech world. The Palm Desktop's To-Do app still seems to be the gold standard, and it hasn't been updated in many years -- still limited to 16 categories, no "tags", and so on. If someone did come along with a great To-Do app, I would be afraid to spend a lot of time converting or re-entering all of my Palm tasks, for fear that something better would come along. Most of the ones in the App Store seem to be special-purpose like making grocery lists. So I think for this area, we're stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation with no one willing to take the first step.
3rd-party apps do fill many useful niches, and you can load up the Touch with free or almost-free apps to do almost anything. Most apps other than games use standard UI controls, so they are very easy to learn and very responsive.
I still see a little divide between "connected" and "disconnected" apps. For a game, it's playable regardless of whether you're in range of a wi-fi network. Ditto for reading an e-book. However, most apps that do anything network-wise are kind of useless if they can't connect. I wish Urbanspoon, Yelp, and even Safari wouldn't conk out with "can't connect" messages when I'm just bring up restaurant listings or a web page that should be remembered from my activity a few minutes ago while I was connected to the network. With the iPhone you can always be connected either by wi-fi or by cellular connection; but for us Touch owners the App developers could give a bit more thought to disconnected use.
One common criticism that I don't think is warranted: the Touch only runs one application at a time, you can't have other things running in the background. That's fine with me. When I'm playing Bejeweled, I don't want the wi-fi to be on so some other app can receive updates. We see how well that strategy works in the browser world, with a bunch of tabs constantly running Javascript, Flash ads, and pages that refresh themselves. You're just trying to read some blog and the computer feels like it's been dipped in molasses. The Touch is a welcome relief from that rat race. In fact, I'll often pick it up for a minute or so to check Twitter or Facebook, when my desktop computer starts grinding to a halt with an hourglass or spinning rainbow. The Touch doesn't suffer from inexplicable slowdowns or battery drains like that.
Last gripe, another jealous shot at the iPhone. There are a number of useful applications such as Voice Memos and Skype that aren't usable with the Touch, unless you buy a third-party microphone. These are cheap, under $20, yet a little bit cumbersome because you either get audio output, or audio input via microphone, but not both at the same time.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 250 Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection
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