Thursday, February 28, 2008
The iPod touch is a gleaming, rectangular example of everything that can go right in industrial design.
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
Slim, sleek and surely a hoot to use: the iPod Touch.
Good looks aside, the iPod touch and its sister, the iPhone, represent a serious innovation in gadgetry. The touch screen control was a serious gamble on Apple’s part. It could easily have turned out gimmicky. Instead, the experience of using the new touch interface is so intuitive that it’s difficult to explain. Pinch this. Pull that. Flip it sideways to change views. It just works.
With only two physical buttons, it looks like something out of Star Trek, and this lack of buttons hurts functionality in some ways. The iPhone has a small bar on the left side of the screen to adjust the volume, but the iPod touch doesn’t, which is a minor inconvenience that can become a pain.
The iPod touch comes with a software package similar to the iPhone. This means it can send and receive e-mail, has a full Safari Web browser, can play music and video like any other iPod, and can use several other handy widgets for checking stocks, Google maps and YouTube.
The touch screen keyboard takes practice to use efficiently, but there is nothing really remarkable here. The Safari Web browser, however, is an innovation. It displays a zoomed out, complete version of a Web page, and you zoom in and out on the page by pinching and pulling. It takes a few seconds longer to navigate a page than on a computer, but it works far better than other mobile browsers.
The music application features the Cover Flow system that Apple has included in all its new products for the last few years, and the system shines on the iPod touch. Flicking through cover art to select an album looks awesome, though not really very useful for finding that one song you want to hear.
The video application doesn’t support Cover Flow, unfortunately, but it does play movies very well. The screen is about twice the size of the classic iPod’s, and you’ll notice the difference.
Despite some minor annoyances, the iPod touch sets a new standard for what an iPod can be. An 8GB iPod touch is $300, 16 GB is $400, and 32 GB will set you back $500. If you are considering buying one, though, you might hold off a few weeks: Rumor has it there’s a price drop looming in the future.
Four out of five stars
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