Apple iPod touch review

Dave Stevenson Read more October 7, 2009

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£229

Price when reviewed

Naming a more fervently-anticipated consumer product than the iPhone is head-scratching work. It was no surprise, when it landed, to see queues of people camped outside US Apple stores, and videos of people simply opening the box appearing online. In the UK, you’ll be waiting until November before you can buy one. But the iPod touch is here now; set to be available from the 28th September, and similar enough to the iPhone to represent a legitimate reason not to splash out at all on Apple’s mobile handset.

The similarities are striking. Both touch and iPhone have 3.5in, 480 x 320 touchscreens, coated with glass for protection and an increase in apparent contrast. Both run a touchscreen version of OS X, and offer applications including Apple’s Safari web browser, one for watching YouTube videos, plus calendar and contact features. Both units use flash memory for storage – while the iPhone is currently only available with 8GB, the touch is available with either 8GB or 16GB of storage.

The biggest disappointment is the screen. It’s dimmer than the iPhone’s, and our unit had some serious contrast problems. Dark areas of the screen fade to total black far too quickly, which means if you’re looking at a photo that isn’t all vibrant colour, darker details are lost entirely. It’s also a noticeable problem when watching films: we found ourselves constantly adjusting the viewing angle of the screen to keep the action visible. It’s possible that Apple will revise the screen specification before long, but for now the poor contrast detracts from an otherwise superb user experience.

Smooth operator

The operating system is stunning. You’ll never wish for a stylus, and there’s enough power within the iPod’s slim 8mm frame to keep applications springing into life virtually instantly. It’s beautifully animated -everything spins, fades or slides into view, which not only lets you know precisely how you got to the window you’re at, but also gives a tiny shiver of excitement at the completion of little tasks: not something often said about opening a browser window.

All the data-centric applications of the iPhone are gone. There’s no Google Maps application, and while maps.google.com works, you can’t drag the maps around with your fingers. Fortunately, the browsing experience is superb. Pages are rendered quickly, and zooming in or out is easy. Simply touch the screen with two fingers and move one finger away from the other. It’s quite incredibly intuitive, even on large pages. The only times we encountered problems was on pages with lots of Flash (some work, some don’t), and Digg.com displayed a few odd bugs. It’s also worth noting that YouTube is the only online video site that works properly, and only then via an entirely separate application.

Keep in touch

The only way to access email with the touch is via Safari, as the email client of the iPhone is gone. Fortunately, Apple’s midas touch extends to touchscreen keyboards, and the touch has one of the finest models we’ve yet to see. Touch a key and the letter you’ve pressed pops up, allowing you to drag your finger left or right if you’ve made a mistake. There’s also some clever technology behind it: type “hell” for instance, and the iPod will assume you’re going for “hello”, and increases the area around the “o” key, so even if you do make a small mistake, you’ll probably end up with the correct result.
Practically speaking, it’s easy to get up to speed on the keyboard. With a bit of practice, you’ll be tapping out a couple of lines a minute, and we had no problem reaching the same kinds of speed on the iPod as you could expect from a Blackberry. The orientation sensor is handy, too – hold the touch landscape and the screen pivots (it’s animated, of course) to keep the text upright. The only problem is the touch’s connection options: the iPhone might only have a lowly EDGE receiver built in, but at least it’s enough for some data transfer on the move. The touch is hamstrung with 802.11b/g only.

The calendar and contact features are useful, but fail to set any particularly striking precedents. Both take the relevant details from iTunes, which in turn grabs information from a third party application such as Outlook. But neither particularly shines. The Contacts application is reasonably useful, but the calendar is read-only. If someone suggests a meeting to you while you’re away from your PC, there’s no way of getting the information into the touch.

Music to your ears

Lest anyone forget, it plays music, too. Like the classic and nano, the touch includes Apple’s Cover Flow, a handy way of browsing albums by cover. And uniquely, the touch automatically grabs your iTunes account details from your PC, allowing you to buy songs over a WiFi network. In its present version the service is frustrating, though. Although iTunes allows you to buy videos with its desktop client, there’s no way to access this through the touch. It’s also annoying that free podcasts are blocked.

Actually using the touch as a music player is occasionally troublesome as well. The lack of physical buttons means you have to take it out of your pocket to change tracks or the volume, which isn’t as much of a problem on the train as it is on a treadmill. We also found that the orientation sensor would occasionally mis-read our intentions if we tried to use the audio controls while walking: sometimes loading the landscape-only Cover Flow unprompted, and stubbornly sitting there until we returned to the home page and went back to the music application. Usefully, double-clicking the button on the front of the Touch produces a set of floating audio controls, which is useful for changing the track or volume settings without quitting a different application. But even so, the touch isn’t the simplest digital music player we’ve ever used, and the iPod classic offers more in the way of elegant simplicity, besides being better value in terms of storage space – the 160GB version of Apple’s flagship player is some £40 cheaper than the 16GB Touch.

Time to buy?

But if you’re prepared to embrace the touch as more than a simple music player, it pulls the rug from under every handheld internet device we’ve seen. Browsing the internet is a smooth, desktop-like experience, and most importantly, Apple has succeeded in making it fun. Admittedly, once our initial enthusiasm had waned (albeit after some time), we struggled to find a truly practical use. Presumably, on your own sofa, you’re within reach of a full-sized PC for internet access. You could use the touch at internet cafes, but with pay-as-you-go wireless networks so astonishingly expensive, it isn’t really a practical way of checking email. Bluetooth would be a useful addition for those with data plans included with their mobile phones, but Apple refuses to be drawn on whether the touch has a transceiver built in – if there is, it isn’t currently enabled. But, as a consumer-level media device for occasional internet browsing, the touch is superb. Enjoyable to use and good-looking, there’s very little to dislike. Although we’re left with just enough space to mention Apple’s unfair pricing: the 16GB touch costs $399 in the States, and £269 in the UK – a real-life price difference of around £69.