Introduction
Perhaps the most confusing element is the iPod Touch's wireless feature. Obviously aimed at selling iTunes content, WiFi incidentally provides Web access via a special version of Safari and a YouTube application, but email is conspicuously absent.
What we have here is an odd duck, a hybrid. It can't replace an iPhone as a integrated combination of camera, phone and media player, and it can't replace an iPod Nano as a tiny music player or an iPod Classic holding 160 GB of material. More than anything else, it probably serves best as an introduction to Apple's revolutionary new "multi-touch" user interface.
This introduction will cost you $299 (for an 8GB model), or $399 for the 16GB version that was the only model in stock when we bought ours.
The PackageWith Apple's usual packaging panache, the iPod Touch is presented to the new owner in an elegant black bed, under which are stored its accessories: standard white Apple earbuds (sans foam covers), a USB-dock cable (non-locking), a white adapter bezel (for a dock) and a soft black polishing cloth.
The iPod Touch has a glossy, black face, just like the iPhone, but it has a shiny chrome back instead of the iPhone's softer brushed surface. The iPod Touch is surprisingly heavy for its size - presumably due to use of glass for the display and dense packaging internally.
Apple's printed "manual" is minimalist in the extreme, and you'll want to get a more helpful "Features Guide" that Apple offers as a PDF download. (We have been unable to find any detailed developer information for either the iPod Touch or the iPhone.)
We also found an odd item in the box constructed of clear plastic that remained a mystery for a while... until we finally realized that it serves as a stand for the iPod Touch. (Unfortunately, there's no room for the USB-dock cable under the stand, although that's not an issue if the iPod is oriented horizontally).
There are only two controls on the device: a sleep/power switch and a Home button. Every other element of the device must be controlled by its multi-touch screen, and there is no remote control. The only external interfaces are a standard iPod dock connector and the mini-stereo jack, which, thankfully, is compatible with standard, 3.5mm mini-stereo plugs (in sharp contrast to the iPhone's inhospitable jack design). Wireless connectivity is provided by an 802.11b/g transceiver, and it handles standard wireless security protocols: WEP, WPA and WPA2.
Like the iPhone, the iPod Touch provides a 480-by-320-pixel screen that makes photos, videos and interface elements look very good. And you can view video on the iPod Touch at arm's length that should be at least as clear and detailed as viewing a 24-inch TV across the room (since the closer device could be putting at least as big an image on your retina, given the geometry involved). A variety of audio and video formats is supported, and iTunes handles transfers from your Mac.
In fact, the iPod Touch is nothing but a pretty brick until it's connected to iTunes 7.4 or later and taken through an initialization process that requires your electronic acceptance of Apple's legal terms and additional electronic activity. (And the iPod Touch refused to work with Mac OS X 10.4.9 at all, insisting that Mac OS X 10.4.10 be installed before it could be initialized and used.)
Apple does not supply an audio/video output cable with the iPod Touch for playback on a television system, and we have not yet tested this, but the company says:
You can connect iPod Touch to your TV and watch your videos on the larger screen. Use the Apple Component AV Cable, Apple Composite AV Cable, or other iPod Touch-compatible cable. You can also use these cables with the Apple Universal Dock, available separately, to connect iPod Touch to your TV. (The Apple Universal Dock includes a remote, which allows you to control playback from a distance.)
User Interface
If you have an iPhone, there's little reason to get an iPod Touch, which offers far less at a similar price (apart from AT&T's charges). If you don't buy an iPhone, however, the iPod Touch is your only ticket to the multi-touch experience, which we expect to play large in Apple's future, and you might be able to justify the purchase on that basis alone.
What's stunning about multi-touch (which is apparently patented, proprietary and under Apple's sole control) is its dynamic, visual physicality - that is, it's a visual interface that acts like real-world objects that have mass and inertia and which you can "toss" around with a flick of your finger.
As we saw the Mac's graphical interface spread to the whole world of computing starting in the 1980's, we expect to see this advanced dynamic interface far more widespread in the future. So, what is it, anyway?
As implemented on the iPod Touch (and iPhone), the multi-touch interface starts with a single button, which turns on the device and takes you to its "Home" screen. From here, you select various settings and applications with a touch of your finger, and you can push a Home button to return to this starting point. If you're playing music, it will continue to play as you navigate around the device's virtual world (although it stops suddenly if you remove the stereo plug from the jack).
A few, natural gestures are all you need to manipulate the user interface, starting with a simple touch: Touch an icon on the Home screen to launch an application or choose your settings. Touch to select a list item. Touch and slide a control to adjust a value. Touch an input box to open a virtual keyboard, where you touch the keys with your fingertip to type.
A built-in, dictionary helps the virtual keyboard attempt to correct typing errors, but you can override corrections with an "X" button. We had no real problem using the keyboard, but it feels rather clumsy and slow compared with a regular computer keyboard that's many times larger than the iPod Touch — simply the result of mapping gross ancient technology (the typewriter) onto a tiny modern device. (Somehow, we think that there must be a better way to write on a computer, but we haven't seen it yet.)
Apart from text entry, Multi-Touch is smooth and elegant. With a long list, or a series of photos, or a stack of CoverFlow albums, you can flick and toss the virtual object, which has mass and drag and feels uncannily natural. This sort of interface makes the traditional Mac scrollbar seem clumsy by comparison.
While it's remarkably easy to use multi-touch without any study, you probably wouldn't hit on the "pinch" gesture right away. A simple way of zooming in and out, it's also very natural once you see it.
You can expect some gasps from people to whom you're demonstrating the interface for the first time. It's simply nothing like any traditional user interface, and it's immediately appealing.
All that said, however, it does take a little while to fully understand the iPod Touch's virtual world. You'll have to learn where various controls are located and exactly how they act. For example, clicking on a movie display screen brings movie controls into view. Clicking again hides them. There's an "X" in Safari that cancels the current URL and lets you type a new one from scratch. Safari's History locations are stored within the Bookmarks list. There are differences in design/interface among the various iPod Touch applications (and, of course, great differences between those and other iPods or desktop Macs).
One thing that's a little confusing at first is how the iPod Touch operates differently depending on its orientation to gravity, sensed by an internal accelerometer. In the music player, for example, you get a CoverFlow interface with the iPod Touch horizontally, and you have to turn it vertically to get a list of selections and controls such as Shuffle and Volume. The music player will adjust for either horizontal orientation but won't flip the interface right side up if you hold the device upside-down vertically.
The home page doesn't rotate if you turn the iPod to a horizontal orientation, nor do lists. But you can turn the iPod Touch in any orientation at all, and photos will rotate to remain right-side up. By contrast, the movie player doesn't rotate the image at all - it's always horizontal, and it will be upside down when the Home button is on your left.
This is all great fun, but you may sometimes feel that the navigational pathways are not quite optimal. Say you're listening to music while surfing the Web, and you need to pause or turn down the volume quickly. There's no pause or volume button on this device - you have to work your way through its virtual world.
In this case, you have to exit Safari, back to the Home page, select Music, turn the device vertically to get the appropriate view and then slide the virtual slider or touch the pause icon, and then go back again to the Home page, again select Safari and, hopefully, find yourself back where you started, quite a few steps later. That's the downside of the iPhone's radical removal of buttons.
[Joshua Blevins subsequently sent us this great tip: Double-clicking the home button will bring up a dialog box from anywhere in the iPod Touch's interface to allow you to pause/play and adjust the volume. This worked well while in Safari, but, oddly, it doesn't work in CoverFlow mode for the music player, where you must still flip the iPod Touch to a vertical orientation to access the volume control.
MediaThankfully, as far as media playback goes, all the best stuff from the iPhone made the cut in the touch. It shares the same audio, video, and photo apps as the iPhone, which is a good thing since we still love the new Apple mobile media interface every bit as much as we did when we first reviewed the iPhone. The iTunes WiFi Music Store works exactly as advertised; search is fast, sampling tracks and downloads are easy, and syncing tracks back to your host computer is effortless. Apple really nailed this. To date, most over the air music downloads on a portable media devices have been tedious, if not completely impractical.Also unchanged are our primary complaints about said media playback, the same complaints we've had about the iPod for years: we don't like managing our media through iTunes, and we don't like being limited only to those few codecs Apple supports (AAC, MP3, H.264, and MPEG-4). In fact, if Apple gave us greater codec support (or even just the option to add additional codecs ourselves) and mass storage support for drag and drop while adding media, we'd probably be able to overlook the other, smaller things that ail us about iPods.
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