Along with my Late 2008 MacBook I was successfully tempted by the Back-to-School offer to get an iPod touch along with it. Not that I need the device but I thought it would be a nice toy. Particularly for those moments when you sit at the kitchen table discussing an issue and urgently need to look up in which countries they drive on the left hand side (aka ‘wrong side’) of the road on Wikipedia while everybody is too lazy/social to get up and use a computer.
As Apple’s surcharges for higher capacities are ridiculous and even the largest iPod touch doesn’t have a capacity that could contain my complete iTunes library, I went for the smallest one. Which of course I completely filled with stuff within a day.
Unfortunately the iPod touch’s sound quality is quite poor. Both on headphones and through the Dock’s line out the music sounds a bit ‘flat’ compared to the iPod 3G or the iPod shuffle (let alone my CD player).
In contrast to that I am very pleased by the headphones that came with the iPod. While I found the iPod 3G’s headphones both uncomfortable in my ears and made to cheap plastic that became very stiff in the cold, the current generation of headphones seems to be a good fit for my ears and even on my old iPods, their sound quality seems fine.
Other impressions were quite good:
- Grease – OMG, I have ultra greasy fingers. And the shiny iPod touch constantly reminds me of that.
- Network – Wireless networking works reasonably well but it could be a bit faster and better at finding networks.
- Software – Despite Apple’s fascist development model for the ‘touch’ platform, there are plenty of applications already. Some of them are even good. Others at least give a nice ‘a-ha!’
- Remote Control – I am particularly enjoying Apple’s iTunes Remote Control application which lets you control iTunes from the iPod touch. Of course such things could have existed for a long time if Apple let other developers communicate with ‘their’ applications, but it’s still a nice app. Lets me pick and turn on music without having to get up.
- Dock – while the iPod touch fits in my iPod 3G’s dock, the adaptor it came with to give a perfect fit doesn’t fit in that dock. A shame.
With iOS 4.3 Apple stopped supporting the 2G iPod touches, meaning that this and higher versions of iOS are not available for the iPod.