Review Of The iPod Touch

October 19th, 2007

I spent about a day messing about with an iPod Touch courtesy my wife’s work. Previously, I’ve only played with the multi-touch GUI a few minutes here and there at an Apple Store or on a friend’s iPhone. My conclusion: while cool, I’d rather have an iPhone.

The good:

• The hardware is sexy-sleek — thinner than the iPhone, with enough weight to give it substance, but also light enough that it exudes convenience. Just sitting on a flat surface, it looks like the future has arrived.
• The GUI is likewise seductive, from the moment it’s turned on with the slight shine on “slide to unlock” to the animated transitions between screens. The colorful icons against the black background begs for interaction.
• Watching videos is awesome. I have an iPod Video and the video-watching novelty quickly wore off due to the small screen. The larger screen size of the iPod Touch is a huge improvement.
• Cover Flow is awesome. It makes me want to revisit all the album art in my MP3 collection.
• Browsing photos is awesome. It makes me want to take more photos.
• Navigation and settings are intuitive and surprisingly easy to figure out.
• Tons of tiny, cool touches are revealed as you dig deeper into the device, such as the “piano roll” GUI when you click on a drop down, the special character pop-up when you click and hold on a vowel via the keyboard, and the magnifying glass if you drag over text being entered in a field — so you can position the cursor beneath your fat fingers. All these little touches add to the overall experience considerably.

The not-so-good:

• The animations might wear thin after a while.
• Web browsing had some bumps. The page loading and refreshing while dragging a page around doesn’t feel “snappy,” even sitting right next to my router at home. I also find the browser text prohibitively small for prolonged reading. While you can zoom in via a double tap or a “pinch” method, all that hand moving just to navigate a web page is a bit tiresome. Returning to a larger monitor was a relief.
• I can’t say the keyboard has won me over at this point. I became frustrated typing long passwords and URLs (blog posts would be out of the question). No matter how fast I might get with my thumbs, I doubt I’ll ever prefer it over the new Mac keyboard. I understand the keyboard is supposed to get better over time and one should “trust the keyboard” — but I haven’t gotten to that point.
• The gorgeous, glossy screen is now covered with greasy fingerprints, and therefore so are the videos.
• The iPod Touch is definitely in a strange place in comparison with other iPods and the iPhone. It just begs to be filled with tons of videos, but its storage size feels limiting. I think the iPhone would be a better bet for the web capabilities plus email, SMS, Maps, Stocks, etc. The iPod Touch has only WiFi and even in the Bay Area, I’m not guaranteed to find a ton of open WiFi networks. It would be nice to have the cellphone EDGE network as a backup which is another vote for the iPhone.

The end result is while I think this device is super cool, It’s not a “must have,” and my time playing with it has actually edged me (no pun intended) towards the iPhone. Still, the relatively lower price (definitely if one considers the monthly contract with AT&T) might inspire some to go with the iPod Touch.

So my Apple wish list grows longer (doesn’t it always?). Leopard is an absolute “must buy,” but what comes next is a toss up between an iPhone / iPod Touch / next iteration of Apple TV. Argh.

I’m also wondering what might be announced at MacWorld ’08 — either a future version of the iPod or iPhone — and in my wildest fantasies, perhaps something touchy and full OS X-like in the “portable Macintosh” department. As Nicholas Carr suggests, this whole portable touch screen device stuff from Apple might be primed to get better and better. My mind reels at the possibilities.