Hands on with the new iPod touch, iPod nano

I'm at the Apple event and have just finished using the new iPods.

First impressions with the iPod touch are good. It's understandably just like using the iPhone, although with slightly fewer options on the screen.

Physcially it's slightly thinner than the iPhone and lacks the metal edge. Personally I think it looks slightly better, but the touch screen and widescreen CoverFlow technology are impressive. I think it'll make a lot of people happy this Christmas.

The new nano also remains impressive. The screen is remarkably bright and, although it's smaller than the iPod 5G, video is as good to watch. Although the video on the 5G iPod was never as good as on the new iPhone (or iPod touch for that matter)

Only the old iPod, or iPod classic as I guess we should get used to calling it, is a disappointment. Even though 160GB is a remarkably large hard drive in such a small space, it's clear that the orginal iPod has run its course. Frankly, even the 60GB model was more than enough, let alone the 80GB model. The only reservation is that the iPod touch lacks the space of the iPod classic; and the iPod classic lacks the cool interface of the touch. What I really want is both, but for that I guess we'll need to wait for the price of flash memory to match the price of today's hard drives. Give it a couple of years.

Getting back to the touch. It's great to see the addition of WiFi and even better to see the inclusion of the full Safari browser on the unit. This makes all the difference between the iPod touch and other units, such as the Zune. The only dissapointment is that you can't access other people's music libraries on the iPod, as you can when sharing a network in iTunes.

All in all a great bunch of products though. Can't wait to get our hands on them for lab testing.

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Comments received

pvincent said on Wednesday, 05 September 2007

80Gb is more than enough for you, maybe, Mark, but personally, I want my entire 3000+ CD-collection on my iPod, at a bitrate that's good enough for listening to on decent speakers or headphones. That means about 60Mb per CD, 60Gb per 1000 CDs, or 180Gb for my whole collection. So even the 160Gb of the new Classic doesn't quite cut the mustard for me. In 10 years time or sooner we'll have Terabyte flash drives in our portable players (iPod or otherwise). Now that will be more like it...