MP3's at their greatest (Apple iPod touch 16 GB)

Member Name: wxcat

Product:	Apple iPod touch 16 GB
Date:	03/10/09 (73 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Apps, Touchscreen

Disadvantages: ITunes

The Apple Ipod Touch 16GB I purchased was my third Ipod I bought, the first I owned was a 512MB Ipod Shuffle and then a larger 60GB Ipod video. The huge upgrade for Apple bringing out a video playing ipod, and then larger another huge upgrade when they moved to touch screens. Has kept attracting me back to Apple and making me spend far too much money on their products.

The Touch is so much more than just a music mp3 player, which is all iPods ever used to be. Given the fact that it is essentially an Apple iphone without the GSM and sim card parts, this is the closest Apple have ever got to producing a mini computer, or tablet. What can the Touch do you ask; well first of all it plays music, videos, and pictures as standard. This is all you ever bought an iPod for, you now have a fully Wi-Fi connection, an accerolometer built in, a functioning application store on apple.com where you can download hundreds of thousands of applications and games for your media player, a full screen touch sensitive display, you can access Youtube, your mail, contacts, and it gives you a calculator and clock.

The biggest jump I think with the new iPods is the touch screens sensitivity, touch screens have always been glitchy, slow, cumbersome and freeze up on you. The iPod Touch's screen is a thing of beauty it responds to your touch perfectly, keeps up with you and just works excellently. Its made for use of your fingers and thumbs so no need for a stylus. Instead of windows moving they bounce, so if you pull it across it moves across with you, the faster you move it the faster it will move on the screen. You will see menus bounce across as you touch past them, it really puts the screen a class above everything else in the market, better than my blackberry, tons better than my tomtom (where you really need a good touch screen!). I would recommend getting a screen protector for it and cleaning regularly as you do get finger marks on the screen after a while. The other super thing about the Touch is that it can be controlled by two fingers, to zoom you use both fingers and spread them on the screen to increase zoom and closer together to make things smaller.

The Wi-Fi connection on the Touch isn't bad, the signal it picks up isn't as high as it is at home, but it picks up a good array of networks when I'm at home. You do miss the use of 3G after you've used an iPhone and come back to the Touch, but otherwise a thumbs up for the Touch. It performs well; perfection would be integrating my Touch into my Blackberry!

The eternal crutch of most Apple iPod users, iTunes, basically you need iTunes to install any updates to your iPod and to transfer your music into your iPod. ITunes has improved substantially since the first iPods; I'm not surprised no one ever used to use it before iPods came along. We're now on version 9.01, iTunes is compatible for PC and Mac, although on my PC it still loves crashing every so often. It does resemble a half decent program now, allowing you to add your music to your library and then on to your device(s). When you connect you're iPod to the computer, iTunes will auto detect it has been connected and iTunes will start up, first time you connect it you will be asked to call it a name for the device and it will sync it (Check what's on your device and see if it matches what's on your computer). Then every time you connect it again it will pop up iTunes and attempt to sync the device. The sync will also stop you loading your iPod on another pc that doesn't have that music in its library; as if it doesn't find the music on another pc it will remove it from your iPod. There's nothing simple you can do like copy and paste files on to your iPod, you have to use iTunes and have the music loaded into your library on there. ITunes will add music to your library in mp3 or aac formats and try and convert wma and other formats into your library. It seems to supports my Flac (Flawless Lossless Audio Codec) and Ogg formats in my music collection.

For early versions of iPod Touch's you get offered the software upgrade which will cost £6 (auto billed to your iTunes account), scandalous after you pay £200 for your iPod Touch that you need to pay more money to upgrade the software on the device. I did the upgrade after umming and ahhing a few weeks, and to be honest what you get for the upgrade is very worth it. You finally get access to Apple's application store for iPods and iPhones, which is one of the best features of the Touch.

The app store contains access to thousands of applications and games and it by far the most successful of any of the mobile app stores on the market. Applications can be designed by Apple and more importantly developed by any company or person and put into the app store for everyone to download and use. There are a mixture of free apps and some you have to pay for. Most companies develop apps for free use, but there are some weird ones that you do have to pay for, like National Rail charge for their app. I've only downloaded free apps to my iPod, some of the ones I have on there at the moment are Bubble Wrap, eBuddy, ECB Cricket, Flashlight, Google, Google Earth, IHandgun, iHandy Levle, iPint, Last.fm, Ocado, Paper Toss, Remote, Skype, Urbanspoon, and Wifi Zone. Apps have been developed using the gyroscope in the phone, and others that use the a-gps built into the phone for exact location tracking.

For charging your iPod you need an Apple charging cable, you can't just use any cable, fortunately as they've sold so many iPods now, almost everyone has an iPod cable if you ever need a spare. The battery life for iPod's isn't too bad, you will get the best a day on music continuously, and you will get less with videos as expected. Some apps are power hungry and will run a battery down in under 6 hours, as they keep the screen active permanently. The big downfall here is the battery isn't removable or changeable like most other devices and phones. You can't carry round a spare you have to charge yours; you need to think about this before going on a long journey with it. You can get solar and wind up chargers if you can't get power!

The price of buying a new iPod Touch 8GB is £149, 32GB is £229 and the new 64GB is £299 all with free shipping. You can get them cheaper off eBay if you so wish. You can get 4% cashback from cashback sites at the Apple Store, and you get 10% off if you are a student and order when you are on student sites. Older models of the Touch are cheaper on the net, at more close to £100. You do have to pay for having the Apple brand, as these players are well above the prices you can expect to pay for similar size players from other manufacturers. I think this is the whole part of the iPod generation, where you are paying for the brand and not the device.

I do love my iPod Touch, and it is an amazing device as you can do so much on it, but on the downsides of price, having to use iTunes and you can't replace the battery, it balances some of it out. I would still buy another one, only the price, I'm not going to pay £300 for a MP3 player would stop me.

Summary: The MP3 Player I couldn't live without.

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