Review iPod Touch

Apple's new iPod Touch is a little confusing. It looks just like an iPhone, but it's not a phone and it lacks other iPhone features, such as a camera and Bluetooth. And, while the iPod Touch neither looks nor acts anything like a traditional iPod – and offers only a tenth the capacity of a similar-sized iPod Classic – it does perform iPod functions, and that's how Apple positions it.

Perhaps the most confusing element is the iPod Touch's wireless feature. Obviously aimed at selling iTunes content, WiFi incidentally provides Web access via a special version of Safari and a YouTube application, but email is conspicuously absent.

What we have here is an odd duck, a hybrid. It can't replace an iPhone as a integrated combination of camera, phone and media player, and it can't replace an iPod Nano as a tiny music player or an iPod Classic holding 160 GB of material. More than anything else, it probably serves best as an introduction to Apple's revolutionary new "multi-touch" user interface.

This introduction will cost you $299 (for an 8GB model), or $399 for the 16GB version that was the only model in stock when we bought ours.

With Apple's usual packaging panache, the iPod Touch is presented to the new owner in an elegant black bed, under which are stored its accessories: standard white Apple earbuds (sans foam covers), a USB-dock cable (non-locking), a white adapter bezel (for a dock) and a soft black polishing cloth.

The iPod Touch has a glossy, black face, just like the iPhone, but it has a shiny chrome back instead of the iPhone's softer brushed surface. The iPod Touch is surprisingly heavy for its size - presumably due to use of glass for the display and dense packaging internally.

Apple's printed "manual" is minimalist in the extreme, and you'll want to get a more helpful "Features Guide" that Apple offers as a PDF download. (We have been unable to find any detailed developer information for either the iPod Touch or the iPhone.)

We also found an odd item in the box constructed of clear plastic that remained a mystery for a while... until we finally realized that it serves as a stand for the iPod Touch. (Unfortunately, there's no room for the USB-dock cable under the stand, although that's not an issue if the iPod is oriented horizontally).

There are only two controls on the device: a sleep/power switch and a Home button. Every other element of the device must be controlled by its multi-touch screen, and there is no remote control. The only external interfaces are a standard iPod dock connector and the mini-stereo jack, which, thankfully, is compatible with standard, 3.5mm mini-stereo plugs (in sharp contrast to the iPhone's inhospitable jack design). Wireless connectivity is provided by an 802.11b/g transceiver, and it handles standard wireless security prot ocols: WEP, WPA and WPA2.

Like the iPhone, the iPod Touch provides a 480-by-320-pixel screen that makes photos, videos and interface elements look very good. And you can view video on the iPod Touch at arm's length that shou ld be at least as clear and detailed as viewing a 24-inch TV across the room (since the closer device could be putting at least as big an image on your retina, given the geometry involved). A variety of audio and video formats is supported, and iTunes handles transfers from your Mac.

In fact, the iPod Touch is nothing but a pretty brick until it's connected to iTunes 7.4 or later and taken through an initialization process that requires your electronic acceptance of Apple's lega l terms and additional electronic activity. (And the iPod Touch refused to work with Mac OS X 10.4.9 at all, insisting that Mac OS X 10.4.10 be installed before it could be initialized and used.)


If you have an iPhone, there's little reason to get an iPod Touch, which offers far less at a similar price (apart from AT&T's charges). If you don't buy an iPhone, however, the iPod Touch is your only ticket to the multi-touch experience, which we expect to play large in Apple's future, and you might be able to justify the purchase on that basis alone.

What's stunning about multi-touch (which is apparently patented, proprietary and under Apple's sole control) is its dynamic, visual physicality - that is, it's a visual interface that acts like real-world objects that have mass and inertia and which you can "toss" around with a flick of your finger.

As we saw the Mac's graphical interface spread to the whole world of computing starting in the 1980's, we expect to see this advanced dynamic interface far more widespread in the future. So, what is it, anyway?

As implemented on the iPod Touch (and iPhone), the multi-touch interface starts with a single button, which turns on the device and takes you to its "Home" screen. From here, you select various settings and applications with a touch of your finger, and you can push a Home button to return to this starting point. If you're playing music, it will continue to play as you navigate around the device's virtual world (although it stops suddenly if you remove the stereo plug from the jack).

A few, natural gestures are all you need to manipulate the user interface, starting with a simple touch: Touch an icon on the Home screen to launch an application or choose your settings. Touch to select a list item. Touch and slide a control to adjust a value. Touch an input box to open a virtual keyboard, where you touch the keys with your fingertip to type.

A built-in, dictionary helps the virtual keyboard attempt to correct typing errors, but you can override corrections with an "X" button. We had no real problem using the keyboard, but it feels rather clumsy and slow compared with a regular computer keyboard that's many times larger than the iPod Touch — simply the result of mapping gross ancient technology (the typewriter) onto a tiny modern device. (Somehow, we think that there must be a better way to write on a computer, but we haven't seen it yet.)

Apart from text entry, Multi-Touch is smooth and elegant. With a long list, or a series of photos, or a stack of CoverFlow albums, you can flick and toss the virtual object, which has mass and drag and feels uncannily natural. This sort of interface makes the traditional Mac scrollbar seem clumsy by comparison.

While it's remarkably easy to use multi-touch without any study, you probably wouldn't hit on the "pinch" gesture right away. A simple way of zooming in and out, it's also very natural once you see it.

You can expect some gasps from people to whom you're demonstrating the interface for the first time. It's simply nothing like any traditional user interface, and it's immediately appealing.

All that said, however, it does take a little while to fully understand the iPod Touch's virtual world. You'll have to learn where various controls are located and exactly how they act. For example, clicking on a movie display screen brings movie controls into view. Clicking again hides them. There's an "X" in Safari that cancels the current URL and lets you type a new one from scratch. Safari's History locations are stored within the Bookmarks list. There are differences in design/interface among the various iPod Touch applications (and, of course, great differences between those and other iPods or desktop Macs).

One thing that's a little confusing at first is how the iPod Touch operates differently depending on its orientation to gravity, sensed by an internal accelerometer. In the music player, for example, you get a CoverFlow interface with the iPod Touch horizontally, and you have to turn it vertically to get a list of selections and controls such as Shuffle and Volume. The music player will adjust for either horizontal orientation but won't flip the interface right side up if you hold the device upside-down vertically.

The home page doesn't rotate if you turn the iPod to a horizontal orientation, nor do lists. But you can turn the iPod Touch in any orientation at all, and photos will rotate to remain right-side up. By contrast, the movie player doesn't rotate the image at all - it's always horizontal, and it will be upside down when the Home button is on your left.

This is all great fun, but you may sometimes feel that the navigational pathways are not quite optimal. Say you're listening to music while surfing the Web, and you need to pause or turn down the volume quickly. There's no pause or volume button on this device - you have to work your way through its virtual world.

In this case, you have to exit Safari, back to the Home page, select Music, turn the device vertically to get the appropriate view and then slide the virtual slider or touch the pause icon, and then go back again to the Home page, again select Safari and, hopefully, find yourself back where you started, quite a few steps later. That's the downside of the iPhone's radical removal of buttons.

[Joshua Blevins subsequently sent us this great tip: Double-clicking the home button will bring up a dialog box from anywhere in the iPod Touch's interface to allow you to pause/play and adjust the volume. This worked well while in Safari, but, oddly, it doesn't work in CoverFlow mode for the music player, where you must still flip the iPod Touch to a vertical orientation to access the volume control.]


We won't dig into all the details of the iPod Touch's applications - a subset of the iPhone's - but we can take a brief tour around the virtual block.
iTunes Wi-Fi Store

On the iPod Touch, the iTunes store shows "featured" and "top ten" musical selections, as well as genre categories and a search box. As on the Mac, you can preview selections for 30 seconds before buying.

To our surprise, Apple is not selling any video content on the iPod Touch's Wi-Fi music store (although you can download videos from your Mac), nor are games available for purchase. And the iPod Touch has no access to Internet radio, as your Mac does, despite its wireless connection.
Photo Player

The photo browser may be our favorite iPod Touch application. It opens to the albums you've downloaded, and you see an array of thumbnail images when you choose an album. From there, you can play a slideshow or touch an individual photo to open it. The images look great on the iPod Touch screen.

Flicking and pinching work well for displaying and exploring the photos, which rotate to stay right-side up, no matter how you orient the iPod Touch. Touching an image brings up controls for the slideshow and a button for returning to the chosen album. (The controls don't rotate with the photos, though – they're always oriented vertically like the Home page.)
Video Player

The video player seems a little simpler by comparison, but it works well enough. Again, you touch a video screen to show or hide playback controls (and they automatically hide themselves after a few seconds, too.) There's a volume slider with Pause/Play, plus buttons for shuttling forward or back. You also can touch and drag a slider at the top to navigate to different locations in the video.
Music Player

The music player has two distinct modes: CoverFlow and List views. CoverFlow is very album oriented and more limiting – you can't even control volume in this orientation, which you get whenever the iPod Touch is horizontal. You can, however, click on an album to get a song list, then choose one song or another by touching it, and a button on the lower left lets you pause and resume playback. The lack of volume control in this mode seems odd.

In the vertical music player mode, you do get volume control, along with transport controls like you see in the video player. There are two sub-modes, which provide for setting ratings (0 to 5 stars) and for choosing songs from a vertical list that has "Shuffle" as the top-most choice.
Safari Mobile

Safari on the iPod Touch isn't the same as Safari on your Mac. Most notably, it lacks Flash and support for Java applets. An Apple document lists limitations:

Safari on iPhone does not support:

* window.showModalDialog()
* Mouse-over events
* Hover styles
* Tool tips
* Java applets
* Flash
* Plug-in installation
* Custom x.509 certificates

Regular Web browsers have enough trouble dealing with all the wacky sites out there, and Safari Mobile has it worse. Even Apple's own websites have problems, for example: HTML error and No Go on iPod.

That said, however, it's quite amazing to access the Web on a tiny device like this, with its unique user interface to make scrolling and zooming pages possible, and such features as Bookmarks, History, clickable URLs, a finger-touch keyboard with a built-in ".com" key, and support for multiple pages. A quick trip to our Web Samples page on an iPod Touch (or iPhone) should help provide an idea of Safari Mobile's capabilities on this little device.

Our impression after working with Safari Mobile for a few hours is that success depends greatly on the design and content of the website in question. We actually found www.macintouch.com to be pretty usable, and we tested the iPod Touch's keyboard by typing up a submission and posting it. On the other hand, there's a proliferation of overly-complicated, Flash-heavy sites out there that are tough sledding for a big, powerful Mac tower, let alone the little iPod Touch with its little screen and tiny processor. Rendering of web pages definitely feels slower on the iPod Touch than on a Macintosh, although it's not painfully slow, given a good wireless Internet connection.

The key is finding simple Web pages and applications that are well-suited to this special device, and we expect these to become more common with growing popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch (and similar devices in the future). For now, it's fun to explore the capabilies, and certain, appropriate web resources should work well.
YouTube

A special YouTube application seems a slightly odd choice for the iPod Touch's limited palette, but it does offer a variety of content and leverages interface elements used elsewhere in the device. Playback controls echo those in the video player but there are also bookmarks and history, as in Safari Mobile, plus feature selections and search, as in the iTunes store. In our limited testing, we encountered occasional stutter/pauses during playback, despite having a fast Internet connection, but we didn't spend enough time to analyze the glitches thoroughly.
Desk Accessories

Rounding out the iPod Touch suite are a simple Calculator and a neat World Clock (supporting multiple time zones), which also includes a Stopwatch, Timer and Alarm, plus Calendar and Contacts applications that download data via iTunes from your Address Book and iCal.

Contacts can be added and deleted, and those changes are synchronized by iTunes back to your Mac. The calendar, inexplicably, is incapable of adding events. And there's no note-taking application at all.
Performance and Compatibility