Great iPod With Plenty Of Features

The Basics

Shortly after the release of the iPhone in June 2007, Apple released the iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone, but thinner, lighter, $100 cheaper and lacks a phone and camera. It is the most expensive iPod out of all that are available, but it is also the most incredible. They are available in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB sizes, each $300, $400, and $500 respectively. I don't mind the 8GB space, since I don't have that much music, but people with libraries of thousands upon thousands of songs and many hours of video will probably need something bigger than this. I still wonder why Apple couldn't have sacrified a small bit of thin-ness to use a hard drive instead.

The box mine came in is a gray on the bottom that fades into black and has "(apple logo) iPod touch" printed in a reflective silver on each side, the size of the iPod on the top and bottom, and a picture of the Touch on the front. The box is slightly inset where the home button is pictured. The iPod sits in a thin plastic holder, and below it under two plastic flaps, you will find a pair of standard iPod earphones wrapped in plastic, the sync cable, also in plastic, a black polishing cloth in the shape and size of the iPod, a small but effective clear plastic stand, and a white plastic thing which I so far have found no use for.

When you first see it for yourself, it looks amazing. So shiny and smooth. Since I can't fully describe it's awesomeness, I reccomend viewing this picture I took of it. (http://a404.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/114/l_e36ad1a4c1b6ab27c898eaeba12449cb.jpg) According to Apple, it weighs 4.2 ounces (1/4 of a pound), is about a third of an inch thick (.31) and has a shiny metal back. Beware, though, as the finish on the back is scratched VERY easily, so I strongly suggest purchasing a case at the same time, which are available for around $15-20. The screen is made from solid glass and is electrically conductive, meaning you cannot use a stylus, only your finger or a wet Q-tip (not reccomended). Another downside is that the entire surface attracts fingerprints like a magnet.

Upon first turning it on, it will display a graphic showing a sync cable pointing toward the iTunes logo, indicating that you must plug it into a computer with iTunes open before it will function, and turns itself off after about 5 or 6 seconds.

Plugging it into your computer introduces you to the iPod like any other would and allows you to name your iPod and configure the baisc settings. Afterwards, iTunes displays the settings screen as any other iPod does when it's inserted. The first full sync took me about an hour on my computer (USB 2.0, 1.8GHz, 5400RPM HDD) with 350 songs, 1,500 photos and no videos. I then went to try out all the applications.

The Touch's headphone port is on the bottom, as is the sync port. The Wi-Fi antenna is about an inch wide and half an inch tall and sits in the top-left corner of the metal back (when the back is facing you), and does looks a bit out of place there.

If the iPod has been shut completely off (pressing and holding the sleep button on the top of the iPod), it takes around 30-45 seconds to start up. If the screen is just off (pressing the sleep button once), pressing it will display the wallpaper you've chosen under a prompt asking you to drag a slider to unlock it. If you've set up passcode locking and the appropriate amount of time you've specified has passed, it will then display a keypad for you to input your passcode before it will unlock. Passcode locking, by the way, is actually quite secure. Inputting the wrong code about 6 or 7 times disables all functions for 1 minute. Although I've not tried it myself, I suppose further mistakes would disable it for even longer. Also, attempting to sync while it's locked will ask you to first unlock it before it will sync. On the solid black home screen you will find icons for all the applications. Each screen (which you can have up to 10 of) each hold 16 icons, plus a metal-textured dock on the bottom which holds 4 icons regardless what home screen you're. By touching and holding any icon for around 2 seconds, they start to shake. In this mode you can move them around and make new screens.

The wireless on the iPod Touch is pretty fast, supporting 802.11b/g and displaying a small icon by "iPod" in the status bar when connected to a network. As expected, using the wireless will drain the battery significantly faster, and even quicker if you choose "Ask to join networks" that scans for networks every 8 or so seconds and displays a dialog on whatever application you are except video applications showing available networks around you. Oh, also, Apple claims that the iPod has "up to 22 hours of music playback; up to 5 hours of video playback", but I've found that if you have the screen on a considerable brightness level, are browsing the internet and listening to music, it probably only lasts about 3-4 hours at most.

A basic feature used in many applications is the keyboard. It is a touch sensitive QWERTY keyboard that supports standard alphanumeric characters, various symbols, as well as caps lock, auto-capitalization and double-tapping to insert a period. Unless you're skilled with using your thumbs, most people will type with their index finger to type. The keyboard also features an auto-correct function with a full dictionary that is really quite smart and replaces almost every mistake with the correct word automatically that learns other words as you type. Should you choose not to replace a word, you can simple tap on their suggestion and it will not replace it.


The Applications


Browsing music is still textual (except for albums) yet very easy, and allows you to change what is displayed by using a small black dock on the bottom which you can customize by placing any 4 of Albums, Artists, Songs, Playlists, Composers, Compilcations, Genres, Audiobooks, and Podcasts on. You can also rotate the iPod horizontally to put it in to cover flow mode. This mode displays your album covers lined up and one in the middle which faces you. You can scroll it left and right to change which album cover you view. Tapping it shows a song list. Search has also been removed in the Touch, and instead replaced with a full list of songs and a small row of letters to the right which you can tap

and scroll to all the songs beginning with that letter.
Songs begin to play in about half a second after you tap their name. When playing, controls are displayed on the bottom along with the volume slider, a large view of the album art in the middle, and the title and artist on top. You can tap the album art once to display a bar which allows you to seek to any point in the song and the lyrics (if you've put them on there). Double-tapping flips the album art over and displays the list of all the tracks on that album. Sound quality, in my opinion, is quite good. If you set the equalizer (Settings > Music > Equalizer) to the correct genre, it sounds even better. I do, however, suggest purchasing different earphones, as the one that come with the iPod are really not that good in my opinion.

Viewing photos on the iPod touch is also great. The high DPI (dots-per-inch) of the LCD screen on the iPod makes photos very crisp, and are still high quality when zoomed in. The folders within the folder that has the pictures you sync determine what albums are displayed. Albums are displayed along with the first picture in the album to the right of the name. Tapping an album displays thumbnails of all the pictures in the screen and the amount of photos in gray text at the bottom. Displaying a photo shows which photo number you're on, controls for going to the next and previous photo, starting a slideshow, or additional options (e-mailing, using as wallpaper, or assigning to a contact). You can also rotate the iPod here to compensate for photos that are very wide rather than tall, or vice versa. Zooming in and out is also possible by pinching or spreading two fingers on a photo, as well as double-tapping to zoom in quickly. I have experienced no problems with video playback, which is also very good in my opinion.

Videos are smooth and sharp and play horizontally, in landscape format (which can't be changed) and load in only a couple seconds. Tapping a video brings up controls that allow you to seek, adjust the volume, pause and rewind or fast forward (by holding said buttons down). There is also a button to switch between original format and full-screen, which fills the screen by zooming in and cutting off the edges of the video. By default, videos will resume where you left off if you exit it by pressing the blue Done button as well.

Safari, the web browser, is also highly convenient and a major part of the iPod Touch. While it does lack Flash, Java and most audio and video formats, it does have full AJAX and Javascript support. Also, you can watch certain formats of video, view PDF files and documents, spreadsheets, etc. if you've enabled Plug-ins in the Safari options menu. Pages render pretty quickly (not as quickly on a regular computer with broadband, but I have dial-up so it's fast to me) unless it's extremely image/script heavy (like MySpace, which I've noticed slows down the Touch's 412MHz processor a good bit) and can be controlled the same way as photos: you can view pages in either landscape or portrait mode and zoom in and out. On the top is the title of the current page, URL input, search button and stop/refresh button. On the bottom are, in order, the back and forward buttons, add to button (allowing you to bookmark the page, add it to the home screen or mail a link to it), the bookmarks button, and the pages button. You can have many more than one page open at a time, and scrolling between them is similar to scrolling through albums in cover flow. Yahoo! and Google search engines are built in, and can't be added to or removed. When adding a page to the home screen, if the creator of the page did not specify an icon for the Touch/iPhone, it will display a small screenshot of the current view of the page.

Mail supports most POP3 and IMAP e-mail services and will download e-mail to your iPod as soon it finds unread messages. You can choose to view any folder on your account from a list, and you can specify that it automatically check for e-mail every 15 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour, provided you have a Wi-Fi connection. You can display up to 5 lines from the message under the subject, as well as labels that show whether you were in the To or Cc list of recipients. You can also choose to display up to 200 of your most recent messages.

The iTunes Wi-Fi Store allows you to preview and purchase music if you've synced when you're logged in to the iTunes store on your computer, however you can't download videos, podcasts, or audiobooks. Music you've downloaded at this store is added to a playlist named "Purchased on [iPod Name]".

There is also a built-in YouTube client that allows you to browse various catagories of videos as well as search and bookmark them. YouTube videos behave basically the same way as videos synced to the iPod, and also allow you to mail a link to the video or bookmark it. A history of the last 15 or so videos you've watched is also kept.

The maps feature, very similar to the Google Maps application online, allows you to search for addresses or businesses, or get directions, the results of which are all shown below on a map. You can also view traffic on the roads, and select between a map, a satellite view, or a hybrid of the two. Another cool little feature is the Locate Me button that uses an online database of most public hotspots to determine your current location to within a few blocks. This is not GPS, but it's useful if you have absolutely no idea what city you're in, I suppose.

A simple weather application displays highly-detailed graphics of the current conditions, as well as the tempuature and the forecast for the rest of the day and the next 5 days, of the cities you select to display. The weather updates every time you open the application. Unfortunately, there is no radar feature which would have been very convenient.

With the Calendar, Contacts and Notes applications, the iPod Touch can be used as a convenient day-to-day organizer, but the applications are not loaded with advanced features, so if you're a busy, travelling businessman, it's probably not for you.

The calendar application actually displays the day of the week and the day as it's home screen icon. You can choose to view the current day, a list of events, or the whole month. You can select a day and add an appointment or event with the location, date, time, how often it repats, and up to two alerts and notes. A dot is shown under each day that has an event, and selecting a day lists the events it has on the bottom. Calendar events can be synced from your computer.

Contacts can be synced as well or added and deleted directly on the iPod. Each contact can hold a surprisingly good bit of information, including full name, phone numbers, e-mails, addresses, dates, job title, notes, web pages, and even a small photo displayed by their name (selectable from any photo album you've put on your iPod). Most contacts are grouped by either first name or last name (whichever you choose) and can be displayed the same way.

The notes feature is pretty useful for writing down quick ideas, or for writing the first chaper to your future novel. The interface like a virtual legal pad (literally) with an unlimited amount of paper. You can store, as far as I know, an unlimited amount of text in the notes, sorted by the time they were last edited in the list, and you can also e-mail notes that you've written. Deleting notes sucks the note into the trash can icon. Quite interesting. The number of notes you have is displayed in the application's title.

Clock allows you to view the time around the world in various cities, make alarms that you can toggle and choose from a small variety of chimes that sound when the time is
reached, time things on a stopwatch or count down to something up to 23 hours and 59 minutes away.

Finally, there's also a simple calculator application included with the iPod Touch. Although it supports 10 digits, it's very basic, supporting only addition, subtraction, multiplication and divison, and 3 memory button s. However, even as simple as it is, I find myself using it alot to find the price of something with tax, conversions, data transfer rates, etc. Thankfully, it is said that the future 2.0 update coming in June will add many new features.


To put it simply, if you have a moderately sized music library, want a device that looks sweet and has both entertainment, organization and internet functions, and you don't mind spending quite a bit, the iPod Touch is for you. I also suggest reading Apple's iPod Touch Features Guide (http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/iPod_touch_Features_Guide.pdf) for a further explaination of every feature of the iPod Touch.