Apple may be keen to tout the Touch’s 3.5in display, but the first thing you notice about the new iPod is how thin it is. Front to back it measures 8mm – on paper not as thin as the 6.5mm thick iPod Nano, but you’d never really know unless you measured them both. The point is, the Touch is supremely skinny.It’s hard to describe the Touch without constantly referring to the iPhone, so closely do the two resemble each other. The Touch’s display is surrounded by black plastic, and both screen and bezel do indeed appear to be protected by a sheet of glass. Below the screen is the Home button, and bordering the player is gunmetal-grey edging onto which the iPod-standard chrome-look backplate clips.
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| Apple’s iPod Touch |
The top left corner of the Touch’s backplate has been cut away to make room for a plastic cover that allows Wi-Fi signals to pass through. The wireless window on the iPhone is larger, but it covers the bottom tenth of the backplate, so it’s somehow less conspicuous than the one on the Touch.
The Touch has the same user interface as the iPhone, though Apple’s rearranged the icons into a more appropriate order for an iPod. At the bottom of the screen is the player’s Mac OS X-style Dock, this time rendered as transparent sheet reflecting the icons that are sitting on it: Music, Videos, Photos and iTunes, the latter for the download store.
Above them, at the top of the screen, are the other applications: Safari, YouTube, Calendar, Contacts, Clock, Calculator and Settings. Contacts is new, providing the same access to your address book that the iPhone’s Phone app does. Despite the Touch’s wireless connectivity, the iPhone’s useful Weather app isn’t present. Worse, there’s no Mail either.
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| Sleek and Svelte |
Nor is there the ability to add Contacts and enter new appointments into the Calendar. In that sense, the Touch is more akin to the old Palm Pilot that more recent PDAs – it’s a device for taking your personal information with you rather than a data-entry tool. And it’s no different from past iPods that have been sync’d with contact details and diaries.
The Music, Movies and Photos applications operate just like their iPhone equivalents – there, Movies and Music are combined into a single app, iPod. The default Playlists, Artists, Songs, Albums and More tabs can be rearranged and changed – maybe you’d rather have Podcasts listed than Playlists, for example
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| From Album Art |
Rotating the Touch through 90° pops up the iTunes-derived Cover Flow, and you can flick through the album covers on display quickly – the animation is smooth and lag-free. Tapping an album rotates the cover to reveal a track listing – click on the one you want to start playing it, or tap elsewhere on the screen to go back to Cover Flow. Rotating the Touch back presents the cover of the album you’ve selected with easily reachable play/pause, track skip and volume controls. A button at the top right flips the cover round to reveal the track listing – as this happens the track list button itself rotates into a tiny album art icon.
Tap anywhere else on the album cover and a bar appears showing you how long the current track’s been playing and how long there is to go, along with a progress bar that you can shuttle along by dragging a blue blob – just like adjusting the volume.
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| Cover Flow, at the flick of a wrist |
The Video app works broadly the same way, just with fewer list options and video playback fixed in landscape mode no matter how you hold the player. This makes sense, because you want to maximise the viewing area. Tapping the screen brings up the playback controls, and you can double-tap to switch between fitting the video to the screen’s horizontal dimensions – so you get black bars above and below the picture – and its height, so the picture fills the screen, but you may lose a bit off either end. Videos encoded in a 4:3 ratio are not stretched to fit, but appear with black bars to the sides.
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| Full Control Video |
Some early users in the US complained about the quality of the Touch’s display, in particular the way darker areas of the picture appeared brighter than they should have. A duff batch of screens or an endemic fault? It’s hard to say, but we found the display eminently watchable and we didn’t experience any problems with it, whether we were watching videos we’d sync’d over with iTunes or content accessed through the YouTube app.
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