Battery Life
Given the size of the colour screen I thought that battery life could be a slight issue, but it isn’t. Apple state that the built-in fixed rechargeable lithium ion battery has a music playback time of 22 hours and 5 hours for video all on a full charge. The quoted times are nothing too special and I have yet to fully test this out. Battery performance whilst listening to music is good though and I managed to use the player for a solid 3 days - using it heavily on the way to work, and then on the way home.
Most players allow you to have a ‘Hold’ or ‘Sleep’ feature that switches the screen off to save battery power while you listen to music. The Zen Vision:M had a switch that you just slide to the right, and the Touch utilises its On/Off switch found at the top of the player. Pressing the button once shuts off the screen and keeps your music playing away. Upon pressing it again, the screen comes to life and you are prompted to unlock the player by moving a slider to the right. A neat idea there and well executed.
I have to admit being quite annoyed by the fact that Apple don’t supply an AC Mains charger cable in the box. Instead you’re lumbered with a typical USB charger cable, which allows you to fully charge the player in approximately 3 hours. This USB cable doubles up as a dock connector for the Apple Universal Dock.
Wi-Fi
A large talking point about the iPod Touch is of course it’s WiFi. Apple would have you believe that it is the first MP3/Video player to have this feature, sadly they’re out of touch with the PMP (Portable Media Player) market, the likes of Archos have had wireless browsing features for a long time now, and with the Opera browser too.
There are three applications on the Touch that make use of WiFi - Safari, YouTube and the iTunes Store. Safari is the popular web browser that Apple Mac users will be at home with right away. On the Touch it is superb and renders web pages in their proper form, not some cut down bandwidth friendly version either that you would see on mobile phones. It looks more or less exactly as it would on a desktop PC.
The browser happens to be ‘tabbed’ too. Residing at the bottom of its screen you will notice Forward/Back page navigation buttons, a bookmark button and a small ‘tab’ box. Tapping on this shows you a thumbnail full screen view of the various websites you have visited and you can just flick through them with your finger until you find the one you want. A simple tap selects the web page to view. The execution of browsing is very simple to grasp. Sadly the browser doesn’t support Java and Flash. I can understand the non-inclusion of Java as I’ve always hated Java apps for being slow and cumbersome. The lack of Flash support though stops us all from playing flash based games on websites sadly.
The YouTube application doesn’t take you to the website as such, it’s more of a custom version that shows you a video thumbnail along with it’s metadata (rating, hits, visitor count etc). Tapping on the thumbnail plays the video in landscape format. At the base of the screen quick icons reside so you can check the featured, most viewed and bookmarked videos. You can also search YouTube for content too. On the whole the application is easy to use and if your office/home is WiFi enabled you can browse and watch videos just as you would on a desktop PC via the YouTube website.
Internet performance is surprisingly fast, not as fast as you would get on a desktop PC or Mac but its nimble enough to be very usable. I rarely use the browser though for a single reason - the Data Input Keyboard.