Pros, Cons of iTouch iPod

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been thinking about getting an iTouch to replace my original design iPod mini. Most of my iPod use is for podcasts that I listen to during my morning workouts. I’m thinking that I could also watch some of the news shows and other more news-related offerings on the iTouch when I use the stationary bike, and listen to other stuff (including some music) when I’m doing other exercises. I also use my iPod during flights, but not a lot otherwise.

I like the wireless features a lot, and the touch screen is great.

I was wondering about the ease of use of the keyboard, which I haven’t quite been able to master when testing the screen at the local Apple store - does that get easier with practice, or are my fingers always going to be too uncoordinated to deal with it? Any other pitfalls that people have experienced with the iTouch? Any recommendations?

2

I recommend waiting a little bit. Apple is making an announcement on Tuesday, September 9. As usual, they’re being secretive, but it’s believed that the announcement has something to do with the iPod and perhaps the iPod Touch.

3

I’m typing this on my iPhone now, which has an identical kwyboard to the iPod touch, and I’ll tell you how long it took to type out my response at the end.

I wasn’t very used to the keyboard at first, but I found that the main thing I has to get over was the fact that you’re going to screw up, and that secondly, the auto correct feature is actually pretty useful, and you probably should just keep on typing anyway.
I’m not so sure the iPod touch will be all that useful for watching naything, though. It’s a pretty small screen, and you’re going to be bouncing up and down a lot on your bike. Can’t you use your tv of you’re at home, or watchthe screen if you’re t the gym?

This post took slightly under 5 minutes to type.

4

I’ll be at a gym, and I’m usually on the recumbent bike. I do watch the screen at the gym, but it’s far too often talking heads that aren’t saying much that I have any interest in. I know it’s a pretty small screen, but it’s bigger than the conventional video-capable iPods.

Thanks for the info on using the keyboard.

5

The keyboard does take a bit of getting use to. The lack of tactile feedback makes it harder to get any speed out of your typing. But it does get easier with time, and the auto-completion does work pretty well most of the time for words that it does recognize.

The Touch does offer a great deal of bonuses though. For a mobile device the screen is pretty sizeable and of good quality. Plus, you get some nifty built-in apps and an absolute crapload available through the App Store, many of which are free. (And there are blogs out there that review App Store apps. I myself review all of the free apps available.)

I would certainly wait another week or so. The G2 iPod Touch will be announced at the next Apple event on the 9th, so it will be worth waiting to see what the new model will offer. Even if you end up not wanting the new version, you should be able to find first-gen iPod Touches pretty cheaply.

6

I have an iPhone which, by and large, looks and operates like the iTouch albeit with a few more features.

The typing does take a little getting used to. If I am stationary I have found I can be pretty quick with it after a little time getting used to it. You still will not want to compose real lengthy messages this way but it is fine for a few paragraphs. Certainly it is a huge improvement over typing on a cell phone keypad. My friends have noted my texts have gotten longer and on their more normal cell phones my texts frequently get split into multiple messages (looks like one message to me).

When moving however the touch screen gets a lot more dicey. When I am on the Elevated train here in Chicago (which lurches constantly) I end up with all sorts of typos. I have gotten fairly good at it anyway but definitely slows things down.

As noted above the auto-correct does a pretty good job most times although on the flip side sometimes I want to type something incorrectly (e.g. “kewl” or “I has skillz”) or use slang and the thing decides it knows better and corrects the word on me. Can be annoying in those cases.

My friends with a tilt phone, where the screen slides away to reveal a qwerty keyboard, can definitely type faster than I can (partly because they can more readily use two fingers instead of one).

Overall though it is good. Your first few tries can be annoying but you learn its quirks pretty quickly and become adept with it without too much trouble.

7

One of the biggest “cons” for the iPod Touch, in my opinion, is the lack of a “hard” volume control. You have to use the touch screen to control the volume which can be awkward, especially if you only have one hand free at the moment. Playlist creation is a bit of a pain, too; once it’s made, the only way to edit it that I’ve found is to delete it and start over (though that may well be a general iPod thing; this is my first Apple mp3 player).

8

The thing that has annoyed me most about my Touch is the smudges on the screen. I don’t type on it much (though I have gotten better through practice and I find I have greater accuracy if I use both thumbs to type than when I try using just my right index finger), but just normal listening use left smudges on the screen that drove some tiny part of me nuts. I did finally get around to getting a case with a plastic cover for it, though, and that’s helped.

The screen size is decent; I watch videos on mine sometimes and, while not the most ideal size, it is better than the old video iPod I had before. I wouldn’t use it for an extended period of viewing or anything where detail would be particularly important, but I’d say it’d probably be fine for a news show during a workout.

And yes, the apps are awfully handy. I don’t usually use all of them myself, but being able to download a bubblewrap-popping game makes it worth it.

9

What good is having a phone you can’t make phone calls on?

10

That’s the downside. The upside is that nobody can call you on it.

11

The iPhone has hard volume controls on the edge, and the rumour is that the next version of the iPod touch will as well. Wait till September 9th when Apple makes their announcement to see whether they introduce a new one.

IMHO, the iPhone could use volume and skip/seek controls on the headset. Though I think that even more, it’s crying out for a system-wide voice-command facility.

12

First, it’s not the “iTouch,” it’s the iPod Touch.

I’ve had mine since March, and I love it. Here are some thoughts:

  • It really really really needs to have a mute hard key, so if someone starts talking to me I can mute it. The workaround is to unplug the headphone jack, which pauses the playback. Volume hard keys would be nice too.

  • The size is not optimal for some activities, such as biking or running.

  • The screen size is perfectly adequate for watching movies/videos.

  • Of the time I spend with it, 99% is listening to podcasts. The iPod line (except the Shuffle) has a very nice way of handling podcasts.

  • The web browser on the Touch and the iPhone is actually usable - not like the unusable P.O.S. browser on my Blackberry.

13

Apologies for the hijack, but… link please?

:smiley:

14

I don’t have any problem with the keyboard. It’s not quite as easy as a physical button keyboard, but once you get used to it it’s fine. Main cons for me:

  1. Memory. Whereas the old style ipod has up to 160GB because it has a harddrive, the Touch I believe is limited to 16GB because it has flash memory. Podcasts and videos tend to take up a lot of space so you might want to figure out how much memory you need.

  2. No copy and paste! (yet…maybe they’ll have it on the new model or even the old model with an update)

  3. No video taking! (yet…there are hacks that let it take video so it’s not a hardware limit, just a software one)

15

Thanks, all. Very helpful comments. Once again the SDMB has helped fight a bit of ignorance, no matter how small.

16

I have a 16Gb Touch. I got it before the first software update came out, and my original plan was to use it to watch shows on the airplane. I figured that between that and my Treo, I could get away with leaving the laptop home on short trips. Although I would like a lot more storage space, it’s really a very nice video player. The screen is, IMHO, just the right size to watch on the go. And the screen is gorgeous.

Pretty quickly, I discovered how useful the web browser is. It really displays about anything that doesn’t make heavy use of Flash animations, and the zoom function is inspired. The only things I miss are Flash support, a way to organize bookmarks into folders, and I haven’t figured out how to open a link in a new window, even though the browser supports multiple windows.

When the first paid software update came out, I got the email client. And I have to say, this is the nicest mobile email client I’ve ever seen. It renders all the HTML emails pretty much flawlessly, replies and forwards are easy, and PDF and Word attachments are really easy to read.

When the 2.0 update came out this summer, things got really interesting. The App Store opened the device to all kinds of neat tricks. Today, I’m able to VPN in to our corporate LAN, and then open a Remote Desktop connection to my desktop PC. Anything I couldn’t do from my iPod, I can now do remotely on my desktop. If you really want to see what the Touch can do, spend a little time browsing the App Store on iTunes.

There are definitely some shortcomings, though. The Touch is really not a good player for runners. Although it’s light and thin, it’s just too tall and wide to fit in running shorts, and the absence of volume and playback controls you can operate in a pocket is a problem. Because of all this, I still run with a first-gen Nano.

16Gb is fine for music, but the Touch is really about multimedia. A lot more memory would be great. Today, you can buy a 32Gb Touch, and I’m hoping that Tuesday will see another capacity bump. Maybe 64Gb?

The keyboard works fine for short messages, and is part of what makes the Touch so extremely portable (it’s smaller and lighter than my checkbook). But it’s really not adequate for longer compositions. I would be thrilled to learn that the next Touch has Bluetooth, and support for a small folding keyboard like this one.

17

32GB actually (and rumours of a 64GB version out to be announced on Tuesday).

Unfortunately I decided I didn’t need to pay the extra £50 for the 32GB and went for 16GB and have regretted it ever since - the actual formatted capacity is 14.64GB and my music collection is currently just under 14GB which leaves very little space for video, photos etc.

Other than that, I love it, and the screen is plenty big enough to watch stuff on.

The only annoying thing I have found is that sometimes when browsing through music, while a track is playing, for no apparent reason the iPod freezes momentarily, stops playing the current track and returns to the homepage, forgetting what it was playing (so if you try to restart the tune, it instead plays the first tune in the alphabetical list). I haven’t worked out what triggers this yet, but it seems to be touching the screen in a certain way…

18

Looks like I’m not alone with the “crash to home screen” problem:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6153364

And the most annoying part is that it loses the play count info of all the songs you’ve played before the crash, so it doesn’t update the playcount/last played info when you sync to iTunes.

19

The most annoying part for me, a heavy podcast listener, is the poor ability to fast forward and rewind through a podcast. It used to be that one “spin” on the wheel took you forward or back about a minute, perfect for skipping advertisements, opening credits, and the like.

With the Touch, you get a bar on the screen and you slide your finger to move forward or back. Perfectly fine for a three minute song, but impossible to use accurately with a 30 or 45 minute podcast.

Just my 2 cents.

20

You can also fast forward and rewind using the skip forward and back controls - just hold your finger on the button and it winds slowly at first then increasingly fast. Of course, if you have twitchy fingers, it’s possible to accidentally skip to the next track.

At least, you can FFW and RW this way on ordinary tracks and video so I assume you can on podcasts - I never listen to podcasts.