K’s Weblog

Over the last several months, my 20GB 4th Gen iPod has been giving me some trouble, mainly because I’m hard on my gadgets and this one’s been battered about a few too many times. With hard-drive based media players this usually means that the device is as good as bricked. I’ve been hanging in there with my 2GB iPod nano that I got as a freebie with the Macbook, but 2GB really isn’t enough storage for me. I carry around about 400-500 MB of podcasts on a regular basis, and my favourite four playlists add up to about 2GB. So the nano-diet has meant much more frequent re-synchronizing with iTunes. Enough was enough.

I finally took the leap and picked up a 16GB iPod Touch. The price is a bit steep compared to that of some of the more traditional media players, but after having played with it for just a couple of days, I’m completely convinced.

The battery life (albeit on a brand spankin’ new unit) has been quite impressive so far. It easily handles a full work day with a mix of audio and video.

The multi-touch interface is near to the holy-grail of modern-day UI design. Everything moves as I expect it to, and reacts as I expect it to (a couple of 3rd-party apps notwithstanding). The UI does a great job of emulating how objects would move or scroll if they were in the physical world.

Third party software is widely available for the iPhone, and luckily for those of us who bought an iPod touch the device can be cracked (Jailbroken) to allow you to place the installed (and myriad other applications) on it. A wonderful feature to make use of the available wifi.

I’ve got lots more to say about this device in the coming days and weeks, including some examples of some great software and hardware iPod Touch hacks.

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