Product Description

Touch comes to iPod.Music Videos Photos and websites in 8GB and16GB models.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23753 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Apple
• Model: MA623ZO/A
• Released on: 2007-09-13
• Dimensions: 43.31" h x 24.41" w x 3.15" l, .26 pounds
• Display size: 3.5

Manufacturer's Description

Touch Comes to iPod.

Music, video, photos, and websites in 8GB and 16GB models

 

 

Multi-touch

iPod touch features the same revolutionary interface as iPhone. Built to take full advantage of the large 3.5-inch display, the multi-touch interface lets you control everything using only your fingers. So you can glide through albums with Cover Flow, flick through photos and enlarge them with a pinch, or zoom in and out on a section of a web page. And iPod touch features a touchscreen QWERTY keyboard perfect for browsing the web in Safari, searching for videos on YouTube, finding music on the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, entering calendar events, or adding new contacts.

Ambient Light Sensor

The iPod touch display has an ambient light sensor that automatically adjusts brightness to suit the ambient light in your surroundings. The result? A better experience for you and battery-saving efficiency for iPod touch.

 

Accelerometer

An accelerometer detects when you rotate iPod touch from portrait to landscape, then automatically changes the contents of the display, so you immediately see the entire width of a web page, your music in Cover Flow, or a photo in its proper aspect ratio.

 

Touchscreen iPod

Music

If a picture says a thousand words, think of what all the album art in your collection might say. With Cover Flow on iPod touch, you can flick through your music to find the album you want to hear. And when you do, a quick tap of the cover flips it over to display a track list. Another tap starts the music.

 

Video

The 3.5-inch display gives you video like nothing you’ve seen before on a portable device. Watch your favorite movie. Catch up on television shows, anywhere. Enjoy video podcasts. Play music videos. All using multi-touch technology that lets you bring up onscreen controls and go widescreen (or back to full screen) with a tap.

Photos

iPod touch holds up to 20,000 photos you sync via iTunes. Flick to scroll through thumbnails. Tap to view full screen. Rotate for landscape format. Or perform some sleight of hand by opening two fingers to zoom in. You can even play slideshows, complete with music and transitions. Set any photo as your wallpaper to personalize your iPod touch...with a touch.

 

Wi-Fi Web Browser

Safari

With Apple’s Safari browser built in, iPod touch is the only iPod that gives you wireless access to the web, everywhere you go. See websites the way they were designed to be seen. Sync your bookmarks or add a few as you go. Search the web using the touchscreen keyboard. Zoom in and out by tapping the multi-touch display.

YouTube

Got a bit of a YouTube addiction? iPod touch feeds it from anywhere with a special YouTube player built right in. Watch featured videos, check out the most viewed, search for something specific, then bookmark your favorites for future reference. It’s all the fun of YouTube — pocket-size.

iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store

With iPod touch, you can discover new music anywhere. Built-in wireless capability gives you access to the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, where you can buy songs with a tap. Browse New Releases, What’s Hot, and Just Added lists. Or find exactly what you’re looking for with a quick search. Tap a song to preview it or tap Buy to purchase it. From anywhere.

 

 

 

 

 

Box Contents

• iPod touch
• Earphones
• USB 2.0 cable
• Dock adapter
• Polishing cloth
• Stand
• Quick Start guide

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Customer Reviews

It's not just black and shiny
It's black, it's shiny that's all you need to know! Well not quite. Moving through the menus of the itouch is what it's all about. It is the easiest, most intuitive and fun way of navigating that I have ever seen. Other than the power and "Menu" switch all other actions are controlled by touching, wiping, tapping or pinching the screen. Touch the Music icon - touch Albums - turn your itouch through 90° - wipe across the screen to select the album from the covers displayed - touch the album - touch play. It just doesn't get any easier. The same principle applies to your photos. Once you are in the album you see the thumbnails. Touch a thumbnail and you get the picture in full size. Rotate your itouch to see the photo in landscape or portrait. Then comes the really good bit when you use two fingers moving apart to zoom in on the picture. To fully appreciate this feature you must try it yourself.

The sound and picture quality are excellent and movies are very easy to watch on the big screen. Apple do not supply any software with the itouch, all of the content control of the itouch is via Apple's itunes software. If you have had a portable media player before, you are probably used to just dragging and dropping your files through Windows Explorer. I am warming (slowly) to itunes and some of its features but am still uncomfortable with the restrictions such as uploading files from your itouch. Itunes is making me discriminate about what music I download to the itouch and as such I am avoiding filling up the precious memory with my usual dross. That said, it is very easy to find other software out there that bypasses the Apple police.

I used DVDDecrypter to extract a movie from a DVD and videora ipod converter to convert the file to the itouch's MP4 format. Both of these pieces of software are free and quite easy to use. I have also used the converter software to convert TV PVR with excellent results. Conversion time is about twice that of the movie playing time so a 2hr film will take 4hrs to convert.

The WiFi feature of the itouch is a real bonus. Assuming you have wireless broadband it means you can watch You Tube movies, surf the net, download a podcast or browse itunes from your favourite armchair. You would think that surfing the net on such a small screen may be difficult but the itouch zoom feature makes it very viable. The only problem I have seen with the WiFi is that with some routers it fails to access the internet even thought it has good wireless reception. A quick Google search identified this as a DNS glitch which is widely known (except by Apple) and is easily fixed by using OpenDNS (see the website).

Pros: Just about everything.
Cons: A bit pricey, but the pain soon disappears when you get you hands on it.

Fun, Futuristic, and Fantastic
Never before having had an mp3 player of any kind, I'm not one used to listening to music from a nifty pocket device, but when I saw the iPod Touch I finally took the plunge.
What can I say that you haven't already heard? Well here's a few things to sum it up:

Design:
The iPod Touch looks and feels twice as expensive as it actually is, just 8mm thick (slimmer than a standard CD case) with a nice 3.5 inch widescreen display and only two physical buttons on the whole device and its glossy black finish and chrome back make it something you'd like to own even if it wasn't an mp3 player.

Interface and Userbility:

The touchscreen lets you navigate absolutely everything besides turning it on and off, returning to the home screen, and bringing up the music menu wherever you are. Simple actions like selecting Music or Video are done with just a touch of a finger, as you'd expect. But where the iPod Touch really impresses is the features like browsing through your photos by flicking your finger, and zooming in and out by pinching your two fingers, or browsing through your music by scrolling up and down or flicking through cover flow. This is where the accelerometer comes in. Simply by rotating the iPod the screen will automatically switch to landscape or Cover Flow. It's trully incredible.

Features:

While the iPod Touch is not quite the counterpart of its bigger brother the iPhone, it keeps about 95% of the features without the ridiculous £35 per month contract. The iPod touch, having no phone application and other hardware misses out on these features:

Full wireless capability through mobile internet: instead using wi-fi to connect to the web.

Bluetooth: For connecting wirelessly to a headset but not much else.

Camera: Perhaps the biggest blow, instead keeping the ability to sync photos with your PC.

E-mail: To keep your e-mails with you wherever (didn't miss this at all).

Calander Appointments: Why did they put a calander on when you can't make appointments? Perhaps they'll release this in a software update.

Google Maps: While you can still view this via wi-fi, it doesn't have the full package of being able to call places on the map e.t.c...

None of these came as critical blows for me and I doubt they would for many. The iPod Touch still comes with the main stuff:

Music: Naturally, with new cover flow and touchscreen - well, everything.

Video: Supports music videos and movies with great picture and audio quality.

Photos: iPod Touch really comes into its own here. Superb.

Safari: A brilliant touchscreen internet explorer which I find almost as easy as a real PC.

Youtube: For quick and easy access to the video site. Great.

Calendar, Contacts, Clock and Calculator: All the standard functions we've come to expect, with the Contacts feature slightly making up for the lack of Phone.

The iTunes wi-fi music store: This I really like. Instead of having to load up your PC and navigate through the store, just download it straight to the iPod.

The iPod touch is a great little gadget, and while many find its "small" capacity not good enough its plenty for casual listeners like me. Here's a quick summarry of Pros and Cons:

Pros:

The Touchscreen, 'nuff said.
The Accelerometer polishes the interface.
The most user friendly interface you can imagine.
Cover flow and Photos are nothing short of superb.
Brilliant and scratchproof (yes!) screen.
Wi-fi applications: Internet, iTunes, Youtube e.t.c.
Sound and Video Quality.

Cons:

Fingerprints on screen, kind of expected though.
Wi-fi iTunes store only houses music.
Battery life could have been a bit longer.
Can only charge when connected to a PC that's awake.
Only works with iTunes, probably the most annoying part, no other USB device will work.
Chrome back is as scratchprone as ever.
Is 8GB too small? Maybe.
I don't know if it's me, but even when the volume's at minimum it's plenty loud enough in a quiet background.

The cons behind the iPod touch are extremely minimal and it's overall a brilliant purchase with which you get more than your money's worth.

9.5/10

iPod Touch - PDA for the masses?
What can I say about this that hasn't already been done to death? The interface has been talked about so much and having played around with mine a lot I can honestly say that the hype about how easy it is to use is justified. It is a huge fingerprint magnet both on the front and back but considering you're only going to be using your fingers to operate it you'd better learn to live with it and wiping it clean often. As a portable media player it's a joy to use and even though I'm used to computers this was new to me but it only took me a short while to pick it up. Even my mum who gets confused with anything electrical and gadget orientated was able to use it easily, in fact I had to be careful she didn't steal it because she was liking it so much!

I'll try not to go over things that other people have in this next bit, I'm sure most people will have seen the cover-flow and picture scrolling by now. Music is clear enough that I have no complaints, I can't compare it to other iPods as I haven't owned any before but I'm sure some better earphones or headphones would improve the quality. Videos are crisp and clear making viewing movies or music videos very possible without giving you eye strain. The browser, Safari, seems very easy to use and entering addresses is fairly easy once you get used to entering text using the on screen keyboard. Overall it's a very solid device and worth the money in my opinion.

This next bit is more about what it *could* do and how good it *could* be if Apple stop limiting it. Skip it if you're not interested in anything but the music and video playing :)

I've used a PDA in the past and they're not the most friendly of devices to use and can be a pain at the best of times. What's that got to do with an iPod Touch? Well, although it's not advertised as a PDA, it has the potential to be perhaps the most easy to use PDA on the market if Apple allow it. I know what it's meant to be but it could be so much more.

I say that there's a lot more it can do but Apple have imposed artificial limits on it presently that stop that. For example, they've disabled the ability to add, edit or delete items in the calendar application and they've also chosen to leave out the mail, maps, weather and stocks applications that the iPhone has access to. To some that might not matter but when you consider there's no real reason to leave them out it just seems like limiting it for the sake of selling more iPhones.

It isn't all bad news though. There are web applications that will run in the Safari browser (webapps) and there are some very good ones around but the main problem with that is you have to have access to a WiFi access point to use them. The alternative is to hack your iPod so that you can run and install 3rd party programs and the missing iPhone apps. There are tutorials around to show you how to do it and having done it myself I can confirm that if you find the right guide it's a very painless procedure. There are risks involved obviously and you risk voiding your warranty but for some the risk is worth it for the added funcionality.

If hacking your iPod Touch sounds too risky for you then you could always wait and hope that Apple release updates or, as they're rumoured to be doing, offering applications via iTunes at a future date to add extra funcionality. As I said, the way it stands now it's a very good product that could be better if Apple loosen their grip on it but I'd still recommend it.