Data Input
The on-screen keyboard looks impressive at first glance but rapidly becomes extremely annoying after just a few minutes. You cannot use your thumbs or the touch will misread your keypress and pressing O ends up registering as P and vice versa. It’s hard to develop a good technique for typing unless you’re a size zero model with fingers like E.T. My girlfriend struggles to use the keyboard with her thin fingers and thumbs, and I have no chance full stop. Holy mother of god I had a headache after 10 minutes of use with this keyboard. The only success we have had is by jabbing the keyboard buttons with our nails…
The Touch does have word recognition though, which does help a bit. It’s basically auto completion so when you’re typing a word that the player recognises it will display a match underneath and if it’s the correct word you require then you can just press the space bar to accept the suggestion. On the whole, I’ll try and avoid the keyboard wherever I can.
Audio Quality
Sound quality on the iPod Touch is what has concerned me from the moment I saw the iPhone. It’s hard to pack so much functionality in to such a small form factor without making sacrifices, something has to give. Sadly as I expected criticisms about the audio quality on the Touch began surfacing the moment the player was released in America. A lot of complaints were centered around background hiss and audio quality much worse than the previous generation iPods.
Given that my occupation is in the field of audio, I can feel any changes in audio almost immediately from device to device. I’ve used my Zen Vision:M for just over a year and a half, playing back my current albums on a new player would be an interesting experience on my Super.Fi 5 Pro headphones. I started off by playing The Verve’s - Bittersweet Symphony, which sounded awful right away. I tweaked the position of my earphones and hit the back button to restart the brilliant instrumental intro. It sounded all wrong and clearly lacked any clarity. There was no strong sense of bass or treble at all, the music sounded clouded and lacked any strong presence. Even my previous iRiver players, the H320 and H10 which I consider the best sounding players I have ever heard literally demolished what I was hearing. My Vision:M was even better than this.
Thinking that it could be because I was listening to a 192k MP3, I fired up some iTunes Plus tracks, which are encoded at a high bitrate. Imagine my surprise when I listened to Richard Ashcroft’s - A Song for Lovers. Once again the sharp notes and vocals sounded clouded. I was quite shocked, so I tried my Sennheiser HD650 headphones and the audio imperfections were even worse here. If the audio isn’t up to scratch on two pairs of medium end headphones I just hate to think what the player sounds like on your average headphones that the average consumer uses.
Format wise the iPod Touch supports AAC (16 to 320kbps), Protected AAC (from iTunes Store), MP3’s (16 to 320kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible (formats 2,3, and 4), AIFF and WAV. It would have been nice to see OGG and FLAC support but it seems that a lot of recent next generation players are ignoring this in favour of MP3’s, which are still going strong in the popularity stakes.
Bookmarking is another feature I have yet to see. I have some Audiobooks but have yet to see any way I can bookmark specific points so I can return to them later. Instead I have to memorise how far I am into the book and fast forward to that point, to continue listening. Luckily this isn’t a chore as the player relies on flash based storage. On a hard disk based player like my Vision:M forwarding through tracks is slower.
I haven’t talked about iTunes much because most people will already know what that is. You can’t use any iPod without this piece of software. It’s essentially a software suite that allows you to manage your music/podcast/audiobook collection and much more. It’s main feature is the iTunes store, which gives you access to a colossal library of music and albums priced pretty well I might add. Lately they’ve begun adding music videos and ringtones (for the iPhone) to the store too and content wise, there is a great deal of media there for your perusal.
The iPod Touch has it’s own iTunes store application that allows you to browse the store and purchase media striaght over WiFi. It’s the killer feature of the Touch and for the most part works flawlessly. When you load up iTunes on your PC it will be updated with that track that you just purchased too!