iPodTouch
The iPodtouch is so-called because it offers a ‘touch’ interface. You can actually control it by touching and tapping the screen. It manages to achieve this by a layer of capacitive material under a protective covering. If you didn’t have some electrical properties in your human body, it wouldn’t work. So this represents a true symbiosis of man and machine.
Of course, the iPod Touch wouldn’t exist today if it hadn’t been for the iPod Classic, which started the whole trend.
Aside from looking great, the iPod Touch needs to deliver results in the real world. The iPod Touch offers great performance - music sounds clear and crisp and the display is much better than you would expect, on the large and crystal clear screen. This is in a package that’s about 8 mm thin and light, so it’s easy to carry with you all the time.
One of the big features in the iPod Touch is also one of the worst. It has built-in wi-fi. That’s great when you’re at home and you can connect to your own wireless network, but when you’re out and about it’s only of any use if you can get close enough to a hotspot. Those living in the bigger cities may not see that as a problem, but not every town is blessed with hotspots. Having a wi-fi enabled iPod and the Safari browser built in is great, unless you hit the problem of finding a signal.
That’s why the feature is a double-edged sword.
One feature that could be better is the onscreen keyboard. It works perfectly, but it’s slow and it’s not that much use if you want to enter much more text than just a search phrase. For real emails and note-taking it’s just not up to the job. If you need to do a lot of ‘typing’ then the Touch is not the iPod for you.
You can use the iPod Touch as a PDA now that Apple have enabled it for applications. And the number of applications available is growing every day. The iPod Touch can be used for handling all your contacts, your scheduling, your email, your surfing, your music..the list goes on. It’s easy to think of the iPod as just an MP3 player, but the iPod Touch is so much more than that. Currently the itouch 32gb is the iPod Touch of choice - but it’s also the most expensive.
The display is a crystal clear 3.5 inch wide screen display and it makes watching movies very enjoyable. Surfing the web is surprisingly practical too, especially with the ability to zoom into areas of a page so you can focus on them. If you take into account a battery life of up to 20 hours the new Apple iPod touch is a hot product and a great gift to give - if you can bear to part with it.
The video is based on H.264 at 640-by-480 resolution. Even for someone with less than perfect vision it’s a remarkably usable screen and the quality has to be seen to be believed. The wow factor of the iPod Touch is pretty high and in some Apple stores there were queues to get one when it first launched. If you’ve never seen video playing on the Apple iPod Touch, you owe it to yourself to check it out now. The quality will amaze you.