The iPod Touch: initial thoughts

Over Christmas I got an ipod touch, which was one awesome present. My last iPod was a mini and had officially died a couple of months ago so for the past few months I have been listening to music and podcast of my laptop which has been a pain, but now I have an iPod I can’t wait to listen to them. The great thing about the iPod touch as many of you know is it has safari, finally a proper web browser on something other than a computer. So I thought I would tell you my initial thoughts.

iPod

The whole iPod functionality is great really easy to use and looks amazing the only thing that bugs me is if you want to watch a video podcast if you go to the podcasts section under music and then click play it only play the sound so you have to go to the videos section and watch it from there, this can be annoying and is a flaw in the OS. Coverflow is a great way to browse for music but only if you are not looking for a specific song. One feature I can’t find is search, this would be a great feature to implement where is it? There are some obvious flaws in this iPod but it is a first generation.

Safari

This is the best browser I have ever used and I think better than the ones on computers the only down side is it lack of plugins such as flash. I really like the UI it gives a feel of smoothness, I think its UI is what we should expect to see soon in Mac OS X , such as buttons are not aqua they are rounded and can be coloured and drop down menus look less like aqua and more like iTunes. I believe this is a hint of what is to come on the mac.

Youtube

This is a great feature to have, but it sucks there is noway to comment noway to view peoples pages and you can’t see your subscriptions which is disappointing. If flash was in safari I would go to the site to watch them so I cold be more a part of it.

iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store

This is one of the big hard hitting features and it is is great, The store is easy to navigate through and find the song you are looking for and with just two taps you can buy as song. I have had some problems, the first two songs I downloaded disappeared upon sync. I downloaded three songs but when I did a sync the first two disappeared apple were happy to let me downloaded them again but it is odd that the third stayed. I have bought more songs which seem to be fine and stay on my iPod.

Conclusion

This is defiantly the place where Apple will put most of their attention, and I can wait till next month when we will get apps for it. This and the iPhone are the next step in computing but there is still a lot more that can be improved to make it easier and better. So I will give it a 4.5/5 the extra 0.5 is because it is a first try and a bloody good one.