How important are third-party apps for the iPod Touch?
Editor's note: With the addition of the 32GB model, Apple has modified the pricing of the iPod Touch range. Current retail costs are AU$399 for the 8GB, AU$499 for the 16GB and $629 for the 32GB version.
Design
At first glance there's little to differentiate the iPod Touch from the still not available in Australia iPhone. Apple has replaced the iPhone's matt silver backing with the shiny chrome that's de rigour for this year's iPods. While it shares the iPhone's 3.5-inch 320 x 480 touchscreen, at 110mm by 61.8mm by 8mm the iPod Touch is, umm, a touch narrower and shorter than its cellular cousin. More significantly, though, it's 3.5mm thinner.
Look a little more closely and you'll notice that Apple has also removed the 2-megapixel camera and built-in speakers. The physical button count has been reduced to just two: gone is the dedicated power switch, ringer mute and volume rocker -- the last of which really should've been kept. Now there's just a home button below the screen, and a combined screen and power on/off button along the top edge. Because there's no Click Wheel, if you want to stop or skip tracks, as well as change the volume, a double click of the home button will bring up a music control interface no matter what you're doing on the Touch.
The bane of many a iPhone user has been the recessed 3.5mm headphone jack with which it was impossible to connect many standard headphones without the use of an adaptor. That's been fixed on the Touch, with the now flush-fitting jack relocated to the bottom right corner next to the proprietary USB connector, just like on the iPod nano.
One thing that didn't get changed in the transition from iPhone to iPod is the interface, which is dripping in so much eye candy that Apple really should be issuing a warning to diabetic users. Dialog screens swish from side to side, applications zoom into view when you open them and zoom out again when you close them down. If that's not enough to warm the electronic cockles of your heart, there's also the touchscreen element which just demands that you repeatedly flick through, quite literally, song lists and Web pages just for the hell of it. All this flickin' and a-scrollin' happens with a nicely damped bounce should you happen to stray past the end of a page. And let's not forget that when viewing photos or Web pages you pinch the screen to zoom out and give a two-fingered flick to zoom in. Added together these visual and tactile features are enough to entice the most besotted of punters into handing over a wad of their hard earned cash to the Cupertino crew.
Features
It's little surprise that Apple's much touted, but thus far underwhelming, Cover Flow feature, finally makes sense to us now that we've seen it in action on the Touch. Go into the Touch's music section, flip the device over on its side and -- thanks to the built-in accelerometer -- you'll be presented with a selection of album covers, which you thumb through. The effect is ruined if most of your music is running around without album art but, such is sheer pull of Cover Flow, we spent hour upon hour updating our music library with the album art.
Naturally the mobile phone features from the iPhone, such as SMS, have been dumped. Thanks to the Touch's built-in Wi-Fi you still get the Safari Web browser and YouTube viewer, although the Google Maps application has gone AWOL. With the Wi-Fi iTunes store you can purchase music tracks and download them straight to the Touch; more's the pity then that podcasts and videos still need to be downloaded and synced via iTunes. There's also calendar, calculator, contacts and world clock applications. You can enter new contacts directly into the Touch but, for reasons unknown to us, you can't enter meetings, appointments or reminders directly into the calendar.
Think again, if you were hoping that the iPhone/iPod Touch's underlying operating system -- essentially a cut-down version of OS X -- would allow you to run cool third-party applications and make up for the Touch's numerous omissions, like games and note taking. Apple won't be allowing developers to run free on the OS X-lite platform until February, at the earliest, so the only way to get these apps on to the Touch is to hack it via one of the jailbreak programs -- no easy task -- and risk bricking your iPod.
Naturally, being an iPod, you can forget about niceties like FM radios or voice recording. If you've got already got these accessories and are hoping to use them with the Touch, you might want to check whether they're compatible first. Our Belkin iTalk voice recorder, which worked fine with our fifth-gen iPod, only generates an "unsupported device" message.
Performance
The Touch is, to our ears, the best sounding iPod yet. However, jazz and orchestral tracks are lacking both the warmth and the immediacy that the best Sony and Creative players display. Vocal solos also have a hint of hollowness but when voice and instruments co-exist, one's no longer sacrificed for the other. So it's still a fair distance away from dux of the class but it's actually quite good now and so, for the first time, we can recommend an iPod without provisos about sound quality. If you already own an iPod you'll notice the improvement straight away. Shame then that Apple didn't make the same changes to the standard-issue white headphones.
Like all of this year's new iPods -- not counting the Shuffle, of course -- the Touch plays movies and displays photos. Not only that but, if you're within Wi-Fi range, you can while away the hours watching YouTube vids too. It does all this with great aplomb thanks to the bright, clear and crisp 3.5-inch wide-screen display. Like most portable players the Touch's viewing angle is extremely narrow but the auto brightness feature goes some way to making up for this. Invariably this iPod's scratch-proof glass screen will entertain more fingerprint marks than the Queen has had dinner guests. This isn't normally an issue when the screen is filled with colour but in bright environments, or when the screen is dark or turned off, it's distracting and just a little bit unseemly. Needless to say our cleaning cloth and our Touch are best of mates now. When syncing pictures across, ensure that you have your photos rotated correctly first, otherwise you'll be craning your neck around ninety degrees to view your portrait pics the right way around. That's because the built-in photo viewer can't read orientation information embedded in a photo's EXIF data and there's no way to permanently rotate photos from within the Touch.
With the supplied Safari browser the Touch should be perfect for a spot of pre-bedtime or commute-time Web browsing. The visuals are hard to fault, especially for a pocketable device, with smoothly rendered text and crisp graphics but the host little of niggles really do add up. For one it's missing Adobe Flash and there's no provision for adding it in, nor any other plug-in for that matter, until S. Jobs deigns it to be so. For those with slow broadband connections -- and there's quite a few of us in Australia -- the miniscule cache allocated to Safari makes full-flavoured Web browsing a glacial affair. Together, they pushed us towards using mobile and PDA friendly versions of our favourite sites. And, yes, many mobile Web browsers are similarly hobbled but isn't the whole Apple ethos to aim for higher? The lack of any significant cache also prevented us from loading a series of articles, blogs or, for that matter, YouTube videos to enjoy on our daily commute to and from work.
Without a stylus or physical keyboard, data entry -- be it contact information, URLs or, especially, passwords -- is a hair-pullingly frustrating task at times. In portrait mode the on-screen keys are too narrow, making mis-keyed letters an all too common occurrence. Things improve markedly when you flip the Touch and its keyboard over into landscape orientation, however only Safari seems to support this feature and only if you're in landscape mode before using the keyboard. Indeed the built-in accelerometer is a bit wasted because its use is currently limited to Safari, switching to and from Cover Flow mode, and for photo viewing. We also found the Touch's predictive text more of a hindrance than anything else. Say you're searching for "cnet networks" on Google, after typing "cnet" the Touch will suggest "chet", if you press space or any punctuation key "cnet" will be changed to "chet" unless you click on the cancel button next to the suggested word -- although with the button being so impossibly small, you're more than likely to select "chet" anyway.
Our heart is immediately drawn to the Touch's aesthetic qualities -- sleek design: check; robust feel: check; eye-popping interface: check -- yet our head says that AU$419 for an 8GB player or AU$549 for the 16GB is too much. Combine this with the flaws in the implementation and the unfulfilled potential of its OS X foundations, means we can only recommend it to those who are besotted by its looks and interface -- and we suspect they've already bought theirs. The problem is the Touch promises so much yet, for now, fails to quite deliver. If it did, it would redefine both the PDA and MP3 player categories and be exceptional value to boot. Maybe in half-a-year's time, or with its next iteration, it will be just such a product. For now though it's that precocious kid in class who just hasn't fulfilled his potential.
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