Product reviews: Apple iPod with touchscreen
February 23rd, 2009 | Published in Uncategorized
When looking at the iPod Touch, you have a choice: you can either see it as an giant leap for iPods, or a small downgrade from iPhone. With the Touch you get a thinner form factor, roomy 16 GB of storage, and Wifi! You do lose the phone capability and various apps.
At 2/3 the thickness of its iPhone counterpart, the iPod Touch garners lots of attention. Yes, chrome backing is more prone to scratching, but it really is quite pretty. Getting rid of that propriety headphone jack was also a huge improvement. Now you no longer need that weird adapter-Way to go, Apple!
Many features from the iPhone stay with the Touch such as the awesome multitouch screen, a super intuitive Safari, a fast iTunes sync. A few new features like showing the music HUD by double clicking Home are very welcome- they really make the end user experience for the iPod touch refreshing.
The iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store is flat out GOOD! Not only is easy as pie to find songs, click the animated icon for a preview and download it(in seconds) to your iPod; it’s even better how it syncs back to your computer’s iTunes library with no problem. And with iTunes Plus just coming out, iTunes music is better than ever.
Battery life is SWEET, well over the 5 hours of video claimed by the boys in Cupertino. I was able to choke out 6 hours and 45 minutes of constant “LOTR”, and “I Am Legend”.
There are, however, as with all gadgets, some issues with the thing.
Many people’s biggest complaint is that the touch’s screen is not as good as the iPhone’s screen. As I already said, when you look directly at the screen while playing video, the deep blacks look strange and opalescent, almost like a film negative. I have tried this on three iPods and they all returned the same result. The only way to solve this problem, in my experience, is to tilt the touch away from you slightly, so that the top left corner is angled down. Not a fun way to watch video. The iPhone does not have this problem in any noticeable way.
One of the quieter breakthroughs of the iPhone was the physical volume buttons on its side. I was hoping this was a sign that Apple had recognized the need for quick, no-look volume adjustments. With an iPhone, you can turn volume up or down without pulling it out of your pocket. I view the lack of physical volume buttons on the Touch as a step backwards.
I found that there can be some lag when doing video-intensive activities. I was actually trying to find a single frame of a movie to show off,
