Apple iPod touch 16 GB

Author's product rating:   

Sound Quality	Excellent
Ease of Use	Very Easy
Look & Design	Excellent
Range of Features	Excellent
Value for Money	Good

Advantages:	sexy, slim design; 3 . 5 inch beautiful, bright touch screen; sound/video quality; safari web browsing
Disadvantages:	pricey, looks fragile, no flash support, low memory capcity

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Ok I recently bought an iPod Touch to replace my old iPod Nano because my Nano's batteries were beginning to die. I played around with the Touch a couple of times at the Apple store and I have to say, it's one of the coolest mp3 (or is it an mp4?) players ever. I finally got one around the last week of December at Best Buy and I'm completely happy with the Touch. It's simply magnificent. The only complaints I have about the item are kind of minuscule overall but would definitely make the iPod Touch better.

The iPod Touch features a beautiful 3.5 inch screen where you basically do all the navigating with your fingers. The brightness of the screen can be adjusted which is nice. The greatest thing about the Touch is its ease of use. Scrolling and zooming in all make sense and you just somehow know how t o use it when you pick it up. Plus navigating the Touch is so much easier than using the dial of a normal iPod. The Touch obviously plays music which you put onto the device via iTunes. The Touch also allows you to put videos onto it. Also you can download podcasts to the Touch. This stuff is pretty standard for any iPod. All these features are accessed through the touch screen which for the most part is pretty responsive.

The 3 other main new features of this iPod are safari (web browsing), Youtube, and the iTunes store. These 3 features appear as icons on the home page for easy access. Safari is pretty self explanatory. If you use a Mac, Safari is Apple's web browsing software (I think; I use a PC). It's pretty convenient to take a easy to use web browsing software with you anywhere you go. The Touch uses wifi so you'll need to be in a hotspot to use it, but most places is/are/will go wireless as wireless is the future. So basically wherever you go, you'll most likely encounter a place with wifi. One of the only "negatives" about the safari program is the virtual keyboard. The virtual keyboard is a full qwerty keyboard that appears on the screen and you tap that part of the screen for the desired letter, number, or symbol. It takes getting used to and even then you'll still click symbols you didn't want to. I think it's better than the annoying phone keypad but it doesn't replace a real keyboard. Safari works but can be a bit slow sometimes and it doesn't support flash which is kind of lame as you can't watch videos on safari but safari is free so it's not that bad. The youtube application allows you to view youtube videos. Youtube has an extensive video library so this is a nice app. Everything you can do on youtube.com you can do in this app. The video does take a little longer to load than on the computer but it works. In order to access this application, you'll need to be in a wifi hotspot. the iTunes store is basically the iTunes store on the Touch. You can buy music, but you can't buy videos or subscribe to podcasts. I guess if you're dying to get a song and aren't near a computer this program (it's not really an app) would be pretty convenient but I haven't used this much. To use this feature you again need to be in a wifi hotspot.

There are a couple other applications like a calculator, calender, and stopwatch but those are kind of useless (you can't add events to the calender). This leads me to one of the biggest negatives about the Touch. You can get other apps via apple.com but those are all online apps (more like bookmarked web pages on safari). You'll have to be near a hotspot to use them. I really want to just download apps straight to the iPod itself. In order to do that however, you have to jailbreak the Touch. You download some program and it jailbreaks the iPod. However if you choose to do this you're warranty is immediately canceled. Best Buy's crappy 3 year warranty which I regrettably bought was 60 USD doesn't even allow me to replace the item if I accidentally break it. If you want to get the most of the Touch, don't buy a warranty, be extra careful with the device, and jailbreak it.

The next gripe I have about the iPod is its capacity. At 16 (actually less; more like 14.8) GB, its capacity pales in comparison to the classic iPod. This iPod could easily replace the classic if it had even half the capacity of the classic iPod. Songs aren't big but movies are. This leads me into another minor complaint about the Touch. My old Nano (which was 2 GB) could be used as an external hard drive. The Touch is read by the computer as a camera (!?!?!?! WTF? it doesn't even have a camera) and not as a memory device. I don't get it. It would've been nice to use the Touch as a memory device as I could easily move stuff around among computers.

So more memory, allow the Touch to be used as a memory device, and allow downloadable applications are pretty big negatives. I will say the biggest flaw is a design decision. The back of the iPhone was like a gray piece of plastic. For the Touch, Apple decided to use the shiny mirror back they use for basically all iPods. I absolutely hate this back. It cries "FINGERPRINT AND SCRATCH ME" to me and I hate getting fingerprints and scratches on it (the Touch doesn't come with any sort of case and my Touch already has a few scratches on it...) Buy a case off of ebay (which I did) or something and protect it. Also the headphones that come with the Touch are not as good other headphones but these are so much better (in sound quality and style) than Apple's old headphones. They work well and in my opinion don't need to be replaced.

Overall, the iPod Touch functions marvelously. It's an amazing piece of technology as we go from button pressing to touching. The amazingness and range of its function outweigh its somewhat low memory capacity and annoying backside. Allowing it to download real applications and using it as memory device would be nice, but you buy an iPod to listen to music and maybe watch a couple of videos on those long trips (battery life varies depending on what you're doing). As such this device works well. Browsing the internet on the Touch is what separates it from other iPod models. It functions as it's supposed to and ANY negatives people say about it is about them wanting more than what they're getting. If you're looking to get an iPod Touch consider the steep, steep 350-400 USD pricetag (amazon.com has really good prices compared to elsewhere). I mean that's how much my xbox 360 was. If you know you're not going to watch videos, what's preventing you from getting a Shuffle? If you have an iPhone why are you reading this? As a sleek innovative device I think the Touch is completely worth it. You get almost all your entertainment needs in a neat, sexy package that has an amazing screen that rivals if not beats that of the PSP's. The price is asking a lot but all things considered, I think all the other iPod models don't compare to this one. Apple can't make everyone happy but they sure made me happy.