What Hi Fi Sound and Vision
07 NOV 2007
Apple iPod Touch 16GB
If the Touch had the huge storage capacity of the Classic, it would be the perfect MP3 machine
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Few products have created as much of a buzz around the office recently as the iPod Touch. Its iPhone-style, multi-touch interface is superb, letting you flick through music, video and photos with ease, and its built-in Wi-Fi makes web-browsing a breeze.
You might think a 3.5in screen is too small for web surfing, but in practice it's a delight: double-tap the screen to enlarge a page, or you can drag your fingers across a piece of text to enlarge it. It even handles tabbed browsing; just flick your finger to move from one page to another.
Just the job for the commute
At a stroke, the iPod touch browser makes all other forms of mobile web surfing look archaic; you see the web as you would through a desktop browser, not as a stripped-down page of links.
The screen's also reasonable for video, especially in widescreen. And now that Apple has announced UK movie sales and rentals through the iTunes Store, the touch is the perfect accompaniment to a two-hour train journey.
In day-to-day use, you soon discover the device's foibles. The normally excellent battery life, for example, is somewhat reduced by leaving the wi-fi on (it's the work of seconds to turn it off). And as you'd expect, running video drains the battery faster than listening to music.
And a covering case is also pretty much obligatory – the back of the touch in particular soon picks up scratches and marks (although massive credit to Apple for the seemingly indestructible touch screen – we've been unable to mark the thing, no matter how hard we try).
A change of touch
Some in the office grumbled that the touch is harder to operate single-handedly than its forebear – the classic Apple dial was arguably easier in terms of navigating-without-looking. Much depends on your style here: some spend their time flicking from track to track, while others set up a single playlist.
As for sound quality, it's up to Apple's usual exemplary standards, and they've boosted the output, which makes it even better to use with docks. We ripped a mix of CDs in Lossless, AAC and MP3, and while the first sounds best, it eats memory (200-300MB per album).
And there's the rub. The Touch is only available with 8GB (£199), 16GB (£269) or 32GB (£329) of Flash memory; so don't expect to carry around your entire collection of late-60s prog rock any time soon. If you're still intent on heaving around your entire CD collection, you may want to check out the 160GB iPod Classic. But if that isn't an issue for you, we can't recommend the touch highly enough.
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