The best left till last
My favourite feature on the Touch? It isn’t Safari, and no its not YouTube and it sure as hell isn’t the audio quality. It’s the Touch’s superb Photo slideshow feature. It’s very basic but to cut a long winded description short. You sync folders that contains pictures with the Touch, and then you have the ability to simply ‘flick’ through your photos with your finger. By ‘pinching’ the screen you can zoom in, and zooming out is performed by pinching the screen with an outward finger motion. The photo application treats your photo’s as one continuous ‘roll’ of photos much like CoverFlow.
However I am currently stuck because I can only synchronise a single folder at a time. I can’t synch say a group of folders with various pictures because they are all overwritten bar one.
Conclusion
I’ve been very impressed with my iPod touch. It isn’t the perfect player most were hoping for but it’s the first of what will no doubt be the next generation iPods, and it’s a good start.
The interface is a joy to use and extremely easy to pickup. The screen just barks quality at you with bright, vivid colours and the operating system behind it all has had a lot of research put into it and it shows. I cannot fault it’s WiFi capabilities even though it isn’t a new concept in a player - Safari is very fast and websites look really good and you’ve got the ability to ‘tab’ between different sites! The stock set of apps on the phone are barely Ok and make the player ‘almost’ worth it’s ridiculous price.
Is the iPod Touch worth a purchase? For it’s startling, but typical Apple price I would say no. If you’re one of those people who wants to look cool - basically every kid in the 90’s generation then, go ahead and buy it. For the most part you won’t be disappointed, until the next one comes along soon. If you’re an audio geek like me I strongly recommend the listen before you buy route, and take your favourite headphones with you before you do so obviously. I have to join the displeased audio camp of iPod users in this regard.
If you are thinking that the Touch makes a good browser you are correct however, that on-screen keyboard can be an annoyance to use when typing out website url’s, so once again try before you buy. The Touch has it’s pro’s and cons but you essentially need to ask yourself if you can be happy with 16GB of non-expandable storage, a couple of applications which for most people won’t be too useful and a huge price to boot? In any case I strongly recommend trying the unit out before you buy.