Well, I bought one. I heard rumor Thursday night that there were showing up in some stores so come Friday morning like a little apple lemming I dashed down to the local and grabbed what they had. In a stroke of Apple genius, the stores were only stocked with the 16GB model at $399. Ouch!
On the eve of the device release people were confident that hacking the touch would be simple. It’s basically they same as the iPhone so it was hoped that the current iPhone hacks would need a little tweaking but everything would be all set by the end of the weekend. Boy where they wrong! Apple completely redid the security of the device and locked it down pretty well. I think it’s clear that Apple is going to be fighting modifications….
That was not good news for me as I had been hoping to use it as a PDA along with it’s iPod abilities but this wasn’t quite yet a deal breaker. The multi-touch interface was pretty nice and having a great web browser in my pocket was still pretty appealing not to mention video playback. I loaded the device up with loads of video podcasts, lots of music, and a full compliment of photos. I was pretty stoked about it.. so what is it like?
It’s a first generation device… it’s a bit bumpy. First thing that I noticed was it’s mis-handling of photos. I told it to pull my iPhoto 08 collection onto the device, about 4100 photos. iTunes began dutifully down converting my collection, this was expected behavior. On then 3.5″ screen there is no reason to have a 3000+ pixel wide image. It’s a waste of space and isn’t going to any better then a file 1/4 the size. It then copied the images over to the device. Once it was done I jumped in to see what it looked like. I was greated with two ‘galleries’. The first was called ‘Last Import’ and was a group of all the photos I had just imported into iPhoto. Pretty handy.
The second gallery was the rest of my iPhoto images.. in one folder. 4100 images with no further orginization. I had to scroll for 2 minutes to get to the bottom. What happened to all the organizing I had done in iPhoto? All of my events were ignored on the device. It makes it unusable. At the top of the list is the old, the bottom of the list has the new. Want to see images from August? Please wait while I scroll…
Ok I thought, so it doesn’t like that very much. I use iPhoto to make the process of publishing images to my Web Gallery easier but use Adobe Lightroom for most of my editing and storage. With adobe I keep all of my images in folders according to the date taken so I directed iTunes to use that folder structure to load images on the touch. This worked better but left me with 4 folders, 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. No further subdivision. Fine, I thought, this device isn’t going to be a good way to show people pictures. I can live with that. I’ve never used my iPod for this before and I won’t miss it though it is easily the best way to show someone the power of the touch…
I can’t add calendar appointments to the device and it makes basically inaudible beeps when I have an upcoming appointment. The only upside is it will show the appointment on the screen. Passable but not great.
I can add contacts right to the device! That’s a nice touch but in practice, not that useful. Most often for me someone hands be a business card. If I have some downtime I’ll enter it in on the device but more often then not it’s going to be easier to just enter it later at the computer. But hey, at least it’s available.
So where does that leave me? The Web broweser! Of course! Now, this is a great feature. I knew the limitation of having to have available wireless to use it and that is fine. My office has wireless, my house has wireless and about 90% of the places I visit do as well. The antenna is pretty good on the device. I’d say it’s about 85% as good as the one in my laptop. Pretty good for something so small. Safari is very well laid out on the device. Multiple tabs, bookmarks from my computers and typing in addresses is pretty simple. The browser is great. If you are a looking at a web page and the text is too small just double tap it. The touch will fill the screen with it. Want to zoom in more or less? Just a pinch away. It handles cookies well so logging into websites is a breeze and it will keep you logged in for later as well. Rendering is fairly quick though you can tell the device sometimes has to work pretty hard to display everything. Think downloading and displaying a dozen image based ads is tough on your computer? Imagine how tough it is for such a low power device. It’s workable though and quite a feat for such a small device. The web browsing experience is top notch. Something to be checked out.
It has YouTube support. Ok. Not important for me but people seem to like it. Works well enough. Takes some time to stream the videos as it does on all computers but it’s workable. No more then a 10-15 second delay and they do look great.
Now here is where the house of cards starts to fall down for me. Using it as an iPod is not so good. Lets start with the much heralded Coverflow. It only works for CD album art. In the music section of your iPod touch? Lay it on it’s side and voila there it is. It’s smooth and fast. Within the Music section there are sub sections, for instance Podcasts. When you are browsing podcasts, lay the device over and voila… the images of your music album covers show up. Wait… what? Why not show me the cover art for the Podcasts? The device has it all, it shows you the art when you are in veritcal mode along the left side of the screen…
Also, while in podcast mode if you select a video podcast the video doesn’t play. It just shows the cover art. If you want to see the video of that podcast you have to leave music and go back to the home screen. There you can click on Videos and when you go back in and select the same podcast through the Videos menu it will pickup where you left off on the audio and start playing the video….Why? Why not just show the video in the Podcast section?
When you are in the video section, there is no coverflow. Everything is organized well enough with text and cover art in a list but when you knock the device onto it’s side nothing changes. This would be OK except that all video’s play in wide mode regardless of how you are holding the device. So, while you find the video you have to be in vertical but when it plays it has to be in wide… why not allow us to navigate in wide mode? When the video ends the vertical navigation loads back up and you have to rotate the device. Not a crisis, but a interface issue for sure.
Something I miss very much on this device is one button pausing. On ‘normal’ touch wheel iPods at any time, assuming the button lock isn’t on, you can press the pause button to pause and if you hold for 2 seconds it will put the device into standby. There is no such thing on the touch. Sure, if you leave the screen on all the time the pause button is there and then you can turn the screen off but if you don’t have the screen on or if you are doing something else on the device (surfing the web, looking up a contact) there is no one button way to mute it. If the screen is off you have to press a button to turn it on, slide to unlock and then touch pause. If you are in safari for instance you have press the home button twice and then touch pause. A limitation of the device? Perhaps. Any annoyance? Yes, definitely.
This brings me to my last point which will not effect some people. It’s very hard to use while driving. I’m not talking about watching video, I mean listening to music or other audio. With my 1st generation nano I can hold the device and control it with one hand. Not possible on the touch. I have to put it on my lap, hold it with one hand and use my other hand to get around. I realize that using devices like this while driving is not the intended use but it was simple to do with the others and not dangerous. I can hold my steering wheel in one hand with the nano in the other at eye level and navigate the menus easily. I understand that people who don’t drive a lot aren’t going to be affected by this, it’s no an issue on a train ect but what a hassle while driving. For someone who listens to their iPod almost exclusively in the car this is not good.
I was really hoping this device would work out for me. I like to watch a number of video podcasts but rarely find the time when home. I was hoping to use this to let me watch while eating lunch ect. I was also looking forward to the increased space as the 2GB on my nano feel pretty limited to me. I was really looking forward to having the ultra portable web browser but web access alone in places I could easily use my laptop cannot justify the $400 price tag. I will be returning my iPod touch.
Yes, I said it. I will be returning it. I have found an apple product that doesn’t work for me and it will be returned. There is always generation 2 right? It’s a great device and pretty stable. Hardware is very solid feeling though perhaps a little thin in the hand. If it’s was cheaper I’d keep it. I’m not saying it’s over priced but if I’m only going to use 20% of the features I don’t want to pay 100% of the price….
As you all know I’m a bit of an Apple fan so believe me when I say I had already assumed that this device was perfect for me. I still love Apple.. I just don’t love this device. Maybe I’ll grab one of these refurb’d Nanos… I could use the extra space…
Topslakr