Another iPod ?! An honest, non fanboyish review... (Apple iPod touch 16 GB)

Member Name: Poor_uni_student

Product:	Apple iPod touch 16 GB
Date:	29/11/08 (51 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good wifi, Easy to use, Fairly small and compact, Appstore is packed with useful programs

Disadvantages: Scratches easily without a case, youtube feature is a bit redundant, Supplied headphones are rubbish

Bought one of these around a year ago now, finally giving in to the revert to apple syndrome when looking for a decent mp3 player.
Got it for around one hundred and eighty quid off ebay, which at the time was quite a bargain. But the more you played with this thing, the more you realised that it was so much more than just a music player. I'll cut the crap and get to the features and a brutally honest review on what I think of them...

Wi-fi and Safari(Apples answer to internet explorer or firefox) - Seems fairly robust, great for simple tasks like checking your email or facebook. What's even beter is that you can take this pretty easily in your pocket or handbag, and use it in places where there's free wi-fi, like KFC and Maccies. A helluva lot more convenient than even the most tiny ultra portable laptops on the market today. One downside to it though is a lack of a flash player to watch for example video's embedded in the page.

The music player - As a simple mp3 player, there are a few flaws, but this doesn't detract too much from the overall player. The biggest one is for me the lack of tactile controls (read as:real buttons). This can get a bit annoying if you don't want to hear a song on an automatically created playlist and have to take the player out of your coat, turn the screen on, slide to unlock and then press skip, before doing the same in reverse again to put it away.
As for the actual quality of the music, i can honestly say I've had no complaints. A word of advice though, ditch those poor apple headphones, a tenner on ebay will get you a decent pair of Sennheiser CX300's(Read: Very good headphones).

Touch-screen - This was one of my biggest off-putting factors with buying a touch, what would the touch screen be like, because I'd had some very off-putting experiences with other players and phones. Turns out this is done very well,with a typical style that is really apple-esque.

Youtube - Not really used this feature despite it being a fairly big factor in choosing the touch to be honest.when at home, its much better to use your computer to watch them in full screen view, and when out and about the youtube + headphones is a bit, well, useless.

The app-store - This has been a really good feature added in the past few months, and allows you to use lots of programs to add to the functionality of your touch, like games, last.fm scrobblers(bits of software that send off your mp3 listening to a social networking style site), and niftly little shortcuts for things like your mail.
Be aware however, that your touch will need to have the newer software on to make use of this. Most newer touches will, but older preowned ones may not, if in doubt ask. If it hasnt you can upgrade through iTunes for a fiver, or some naughty sites will do it for free(that's not to encourage illegal activities :D )

Overall, I think i've made a fairly good choice buying the touch, the only problem being that they've bought out another version... Grr. That's typical of apple though, and you can expect any device from them to be the latest trend for about as long as new-look's clothes, and pretty soon you'll find yourself wanting to buy a new one with all the new gadgetry and goodies.
Oh, and you may want to get a protective case for it too if you want to keep it from being scratched... Check out my review for the invisible shield for a closer look at the one I've used.

That's all for now People, but feel free to browse my other reviews for brutally honest reviews on some of the other things i've gotten my mitts on.
By all means leave me a message or comment and ill try my best to respond.And please rate my review, bad, good, whatever, it'll help me get better at them!
Thanks for your time,
Poor_uni_student

Summary: You could do a lot worse! Try it for yourself in HMV or Zavvi...

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