PureMobile sent us in a 16GB iPod Touch for the purposes of this article. This is one of the few times an – essentially – mp3 player comes with a powerful operating system (other examples include the Linux-based Archos and Sandisk offers). Read on for more.Our iPod Touch came with 16GB flash storage, a 3.5″ 480×320 LCD like the one found on the iPhone, WiFi, a 3.5mm audio jack, a dock connector and a built-in battery. On the box it came with we found the Touch, the classic Apple white earphones, a USB 2.0 cable, a polishing cloth, a stand and a quick start guide. Curiously, there was not iTunes CD.
The first thing we noticed on the Touch is how thin it was. While width and height are very similar to the iPhone, it is only half its thickness. Another difference is that the edges of the Touch are pretty sharp, while on the iPhone are round and soft. The device only has a standby/on/off button on the top, and a single button on the bottom. All operations on the Touch are carried through its touchscreen. There is a small inconvenience regarding the brightness of the touchscreen. I personally set it to about 20%, in order to save battery life, but each time the Touch (or the iPhone) turns on, their screens will have a different brightness level. It’s never consistent.
The user interface and operating system is very similar to the one found on the iPhone and a joy to use. It comes with a Safari web browser (user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3), the special YouTube client, Calendar, Contacts, Clock, Calculator, the iPod A/V application, photo viewing, Settings and an iTunes purchase application. Personally, I think that the “Notes” application should have been there too, if not most of the iPhone applications. Segmentation makes market sense, but not common sense.
The iTunes application is pretty nifty, you can search for your favorite artist, find songs you like, preview them for 30 seconds via WiFi, and then decide if you want to purchase them or not. An interesting thing to note here is that the first time you sync your Touch with iTunes (manually or automatically), iTunes will log you in to the iTunes Store on the Touch too, although a password confirmation is needed to purchase new songs.
On the Settings you will find the ability to modify the brightness of the screen, WiFi, the wallpaper, date and time, the auto-lock period, EQ, the volume limit, the audiobook speed, TV out options, photo slideshow options, javascript on/off, cookie settings and more. With the latest firmware version Apple added the ability to have different languages on the keyboard. The iPod Touch has been hacked to allow the installation of third party applications. There are currently about 100 third party applications written for the Touch and iPhone. The ironic part is that I personally find as the most useful application of them all the Terminal.
Now, to the juice of the Touch: the multimedia. The Touch can playback AAC, mp3, Audible, Apple lossless, AIFF and WAV. Regarding video support it can do h.264 up to 1.5mbps at the VGA resolution and plain mpeg-4 simple profile up to 2.5mbps. Container video formats supported are .m4v, .mp4 and .mov. Personally, I would welcome WMA, WMV9 and XViD support on the Touch, but hell will freeze over before Apple adds support for these formats.
The iPod application itself is amazing. It is all finger-based, it allows for playlists, sort by album or song or artist and more. Using the touchscreen the user can fast forward, shuffle, repeat, play/pause, change the volume, rate and of course use the impressive coverflow. If there’s one smart playlist or ability that I am missing is to be able to sort by rating. The video application is great too, it allows for smart stretch or true 16:9 playback. There was never any performance hiccup that I noticed.
Audio quality was top notch, and we didn’t have to use the audio jack adapter that Puremobile also sent us. The iPod Touch comes with a reachable audio jack that the vast majority of headphones support. The adapter is still useful for the iPhone though.
The battery life is remarkable in this little gadget. We measured 20 hours of music, 4.5 hours with video. Charging is pretty fast anyway, so battery life is not an issue.
Overall, I believe that the Touch is the best iPod ever. And with the upcoming addition of native third party applications in February, it is bound to become a very useful gadget. Personally, I am in favor of a single device that does it all, so I still have my eyes open for a new iPhone model that fulfills my needs.
Rating: 9/10
Just FYI, XviD is MPEG-4. They’re the same on-disk format.
The key is that none of Apple’s products support MPEG-4 inside an AVI container file, which is how they are most often found; they only support it in MP4 and MOV container formats. However, there exist many tools to repackage an AVI file into an MP4 file without having to re-encode the video or audio. On *nix systems, ffmpeg and mencoder can both do it. It only takes seconds!
Just FYI, I am not a newbie in video technologies (you possibly missed my filmmaking/video blog).
The point is, it’s not just the .avi container problem, but the fact that XViD is usually muxed with mp3, not AAC, which is another detail that needs to be taken care of, should Apple decide to support XViD. In reality it’s a strategy/policy issue, not a technical one.
The lack of avi support (namely divx and xvid)in the ipods has always been a turn off for me. I had this same issue when I bought my mac mini long time ago. Was expecting that I could just download divx and play my collection of avi file I’ve collected over the years only to find that quick time hates .avi so I used VLC.
I want to get an iPod touch for what amounts to a portable internet tablet, but hate the idea of having to transcode movies to play on it. So right now i’m up in the air about getting an iPod touch and having better internet or getting a archos 605 and having better media but worse internet.
Yes, the Archos has much better format compatibility. But it’s not as nice to use and it’s much bulkier. Hopefully when Apple offers an SDK it also allows for media plugins.
Quoting Square: “Was expecting that I could just download divx and play my collection of avi file I’ve collected over the years only to find that quick time hates .avi so I used VLC.”
Quicktime is just missing the appropriate codecs. Try this, its a real lifesaver:
http://perian.org/
Perian enables QuickTime application support for additional Media Types:
* AVI, FLV, and MKV file formats
* MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivX, H.264, FLV1, FSV1, VP6, H263I, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), MPEG Layer II Audio
* AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
* Subtitle support for SSA and SRT
Its also free and opensource.
Hope this helps. 🙂
Furthermore, Apple has updated its codecs page here
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/resources/components.html
I’ve found that I only needed an XVID codec to play most of the files. Perian never worked for me for some reason…
Of course, on the desktop OS X, Divx/Xvid was never much of a problem. It is after all the second most widely used general purpose OS, it would be laughable if you couldn’t get them to work. But the iPods/iPhones still have very limited video format playback option. Hopefully a solution will emerge for either the hacked devices or with the upcoming official SDK.
If there was ever any doubt that web-apps as the only official SDK is too limiting, just try write a video codec in Javascript
Not only that, DivX/Xvid are MPEG4-ASP, which allows more features than MPEG4-SP (B-frames, QPel, GMC and others). If the iPod only decodes SP, it won’t play Xvid even when it’s remuxed with AAC in an mp4 container.
I love Sandisk, although it’s expensive…
Is there a way to get these things to play Ogg Vorbis?
I have a large collection of my music in it, and prefer it over mp3/AAC.
No, except if Apple releases a plugin SDK for their iPod application.
I have to agree with the positive review. The iPhone was very lust-worthy, but the last thing I need is another phone – I already have several – so I waited. When the Touch came out I bought it and it has been a lifesaver.
The video through iTunes has been my savior in many, many airports where I can sit through delay #5 by watching a video. The wireless has even been useful at times.
My only complaint is that you can’t enter notes directly. I’ve had to use contacts to get around it, but it’s a kludge.
I’ve had it for just over a month and it’s fantastic. Mobile Safari is much better than the other phone browsers I’ve seen. I do use it to play music or videos occasionally, but for the most part I think of it as a small internet tablet and from reading a ton of discussions about it, that’s how a lot of others perceive it too. The problem is, I don’t think Apple sees it that way. From the beginning they’ve marketed the iPhone and iPod Touch as iPods that just happen to have some neat new features. Maybe they had long term plans to turn it into a full platform, but it seems like they got caught with their pants down by user demand.
It all hinges on what they do in February. Will they allow IM programs? Codecs? Will everyone be allowed to program for it? If they don’t, If they keep it closed like all the other iPods, then it becomes much less interesting. It stays just an Ipod with a pretty interface and not the ‘next big thing’.
I like my iPod Touch, if only because it’s a nice pocket computer that blows the Windows Mobile offers out of the water technically.
I hope the SDK will be a decent one allowing access to all of the features, plus allow to implement plugins for the media framework.
What concerns me however is the talk about mandatory signatures. I’d figure, if manually loaded ELF objects don’t need signing (only the starting application itself), someone may write a signed loader stub to get around this. But then again, I’ll see Apple shutting it down the certificate faster than you can cough.
Do you know what application signing is? read up on it, come back here, re-read your post – and laugh at the ignorance expressed in the post.
The most useful app is the OpenSSH server. Then, instead of a crazy terminal, you can just SSH over from your computer. I used that to make my iPhone have a “disk mode” and also to create my own Summerboard themes.
Maybe rockbox is better anyway , i never seen an ipod that could play tracker formats(.xm .mod .s3m etc) and rockbox is slowly getting there it at least plays nsf , mid and spc .
Which Music formats does Iphone/ipod touch play?
I hate to be locked into some specific formats with a player
I’ve always thought that the iPhone is a terrible smartphone but the best iPod ever. This solves the problem. Apple is getting my cash after all.
Let me know when I can put Rockbox on it. iTunes needs to die.
In fact, you shouldn’t need to use iTunes at all especially with this player since the player is pretty much already running iTunes isn’t it?
If you can buy a song and download it over wi-fi, then you know the phone itself has the ability to manipulate the proprietary database file to add the song to the library.
So you should be able to just plug it into your computer as a mass storage device, drag your mp3 or aac files over to it and the next time you turn it on, those files are integrated and you can play them.
Apple players piss me off so much. The only reason I have one is because my GF won one at her holiday party, now I run Rockbox because I hate iTunes.
My brother just bought an 80Gb iPod classic, found out how much he hated iTunes and actually traded a friend for an 80Gb Video iPod just because you can’t run Rockbox yet on the classic.
He hated it because he put all of his music on it painfully slow with USB 1.1 then he wanted to reformat his computer. To use his iPod as a backup device he had to re-transfer the SAME files as data files because the file “Some Artist – 01 Some Song.mp3” turns into “/DF/7Z/QR9F3.mp3”
ITunes is absolute crap and it is obviously an artificial restriction since it is possible to use an iPod without it because you can with Rockbox.
He hated it because he put all of his music on it painfully slow with USB 1.1 then he wanted to reformat his computer. To use his iPod as a backup device he had to re-transfer the SAME files as data files because the file “Some Artist – 01 Some Song.mp3” turns into “/DF/7Z/QR9F3.mp3”
Solution 1: For using USB1, assuming a desktop, buy an $8US USB2 PCI card. If it’s a laptop, you’ll need to pony up $30 for a PCMCIA/Cardbus version.
Solution 2: Yamipod allows you to manage your iPod (including copy songs off of it) without using iTunes.
Both solutions seem a bit easier than running non-Apple firmware.
Solution #3: avoid iPod altogether.
iTunes isn’t crap if it doesn’t do what you think it should do. There are like a thousand other players that do what you want.
Solution #3: avoid iPod altogether.
iTunes isn’t crap if it doesn’t do what you think it should do. There are like a thousand other players that do what you want.
Granted, although the original poster apparently already has one, as does his brother-in-law. Perhaps the poster should have dissuaded his brother-in-law from getting one in the first place.
Granted, although the original poster apparently already has one, as does his brother-in-law. Perhaps the poster should have dissuaded his brother-in-law from getting one in the first place.
He did but for the big capacity and small physical size there wasn’t anything else he wanted.
Anyway, he is now quite happy with Rockbox on his iPod. Rockbox fixed everything he disliked about it.
He actually works at a pizza joint where almost all of his co-workers have an iPod. They play their music throughout the restaurant. Some co-workers insist that if you go and change the song you need to fade the song out and will yell at you if you don’t. They found that with Rockbox on my brother’s iPod it does a cross-fade by default. Now others are going to convert.
Yay for Rockbox and its 50% hit on the battery life.
I hate to say it, but this is Illegal, playing (publicall audible) recorded music in a public place, or workplace without paying for a license is illegal
So is playing someone else’s music in a cover band. Good luck enforcing it though. Not worth the trouble/effort.
I hate to say it, but this is Illegal, playing (publicall audible) recorded music in a public place, or workplace without paying for a license is illegal
In the US, clubs that have bands in can get a blanket license from ASCAP (http://www.ascap.com/licensing/termsdefined.html). I’m not sure if a pizza joint would bother. Large chain, probably, small place, probably not.
Edit: Acronym Typo..
Edited 2007-12-10 23:24
I hate to say it, but this is Illegal, playing (publicall audible) recorded music in a public place, or workplace without paying for a license is illegal
Why is everyone so quick to jump to conclusions and assume that the music being played is copyrighted? Everything they play is either downloaded for free with the artist’s permission to play freely or is homemade music.
Solution 1: For using USB1, assuming a desktop, buy an $8US USB2 PCI card. If it’s a laptop, you’ll need to pony up $30 for a PCMCIA/Cardbus version.
That isn’t a solution, that just lets you do the same crappy thing twice as fast but you still need to do it twice so it is a wash.
Solution 2: Yamipod allows you to manage your iPod (including copy songs off of it) without using iTunes.
Yamipod may be able to reconstruct a useable filename from the artist, track, song info stored in the ID3 tags but you won’t get the _original_ filename with the original folder structure.
Also, if you go to a buddies place and want to copy some of your music (non-commercial of course) to their computer you would need to install Yamipod where with Rockbox, its drag ‘n drop in any OS.
Have you timed the process between computers that have USB 1.1 and USB 2.0? If not, it’s not logical to state that USB 2.0 is only twice as fast: it’s the second major revision to the standard, but it is far faster than USB 1.0, and 1.1, which is only 12.5 MBits/second, while USB 2.0 is 480 MBits/second, so unless you’ve got a really crappy system that can’t keep up with that sort of speed via USB, it should be MUCH faster in practice.
While I doubt anyone will consider the iPod experience the “perfect solution” because of DRM existing at all (from the consumer’s point of view) and also because it doesn’t absolutely require it (from the big company’s producer’s point of view) it appears Apple has done far more right than wrong as far as producing something people actually want to use. Perhaps it sucks to some degree, but the key to its success is that everything else sucks more, if only because of the support infrastructure (or lack thereof). If you think the Apple players suck so bad, and iTunes sucks rocks, you really should check out for the sake of comparison everything related to Zune.
He actually works at a pizza joint where almost all of his co-workers have an iPod. They play their music throughout the restaurant. Some co-workers insist that if you go and change the song you need to fade the song out and will yell at you if you don’t. They found that with Rockbox on my brother’s iPod it does a cross-fade by default. Now others are going to convert.
What sort of play time do you see on single charge? When I looked at ipodlinux a long time ago, it decoded the MP3 stream in software instead of using the dedicated hardware, which killed the battery. Looking around quickly, Rockbox seems to have the same issue.
Also, if you go to a buddies place and want to copy some of your music (non-commercial of course) to their computer you would need to install Yamipod where with Rockbox, its drag ‘n drop in any OS.
Sort of. Yamipod is a stand-alone executable on Windows and only depends on GTK2 in Linux (I have no info on Mac), so it runs fine from an ipod directly. Not quite as elegant of dropping file in a folder, but it gives you a search interface so you can find songs based on ID3 info.
soooo, if i’m understanding you correctly.. you hate iTunes and love Rockbox..
check.
Sorry, I don’t mean to be too condescending here, but… in a review of a device thats primarily purpose is audio playback, does anyone have more of a detailed description of the audio quality than “top notch”? Maybe compared against some other players, iPods, Zune, or something of the sort? How do the included ear-buds match up against other players? Thanks!
I own an iPod Touch (received as a birthday gift from my very generous wife) and a Windows Mobile PDA with WiFi. As things stand right now if I had to give up one device I would keep the PDA rather than the Touch because there are tons of free third party apps for WM. Like any computer, apps are what make it, I hope Apple realizes this and releases a reasonably powerful SDK for the iPhone/Touch. I really want to like my Touch and am willing to wait a while to see what third party devs can do but if the SDK is lame or the apps too costly then the Touch gets the boot.
There’s already a crap load of third party applications for the iPhone/iPod. You’ll need to jailbreak your device though. Maybe things change with the SDK, but that depends on Apple’s digital signature policy.
max 16 gigs is nowhere NEAR enough
Touchscreen sucks balls. Whether they call it “multitouch” or not. I can’t operate this thing blindly, and hence, it is of no use to me.
A music player that you need to look at to operate is useless. For me, that is.
agreed – horrible ipod.
fantastic PDA for apple people though (once you jailbreak it)
Not totally sure why I’m posting a me-too comment, but I feel like doing it.
I have a very old fashioned iRiver H120 (or rather iHP when I bought it) that has loads of buttons on it. There aren’t that many occasions that I choose function over form, but iPod touch just seems rididulously impractical.
With all my buttons/joysticks I can change track, volume etc without taking the thing out of my pocket. I always have the pause button physically available if I want to quickly stop something (invaluable when using for learning.)
Plus with RockBox I can play asteroids on it with the joystick – and what could be better than that?
>The battery life is remarkable in this little gadget. We measured 20 hours of music, 4.5 hours with >video. Charging is pretty fast anyway, so battery life is not an issue.
This is *not* the battery life, but how long the battery runs on a single charge. The battery life is how many times you can recharge it, and it may become quite an issue.
iPod Touch and iPhone is just not an option for me.
First of all, no USB connection (proprietary connector requering adapter instead).
Second, you MUST use iTunes. There’s no option at all here.
Third, it doesn’t work as a UMS disk for drag’n dropping your files (then playable) IF you want (I want!).
Fighting third party software also make a huge negative point.
The lack of support for Ogg Vorbis and FLAC is another negative.
In iPhone’s case, lack of ringtone personalization (add your custom created ringtones) is just to sell the costumer to the carriers.
The way they’ve cut third party docks and accessories is just another negative point. If I’m paying for a device, that’s it. I don’t need to pay you again just because you want to get richer via 3rd party fees. (And not letting me create my own accessories!)
Another negative is the lack of support for replacing batteries. You just have to purchase the service and be have with it… just like Apple like.
I could go on for a long time here, but these are the most important points. The thing is, it COULD be a nice device. But because of apple’s choices and politics, it’s actually a terrible device compared to simpler ones that “just work” and don’t require the costumer to be part of your mindless hive giving up their choices.
But I bet there’s a 32GB model around the corner. I currently have a 5Gv1 30GB, and I’d have a really tough time giving up that space, given the movie file sizes.
EDIT
I bet this isn’t far from the iPod form factor:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126833/article.html
At least hopefully not!
Edited 2007-12-10 20:06
Why not review record players or at least SACD players instead?
Steve Jobs listens to LP records at home on his 100,000 dollar Clearaudio Statement record player, while he laughs his ass off at all the pimple-faced burger-eating tone-deaf hearing-damaged teenagers who buy his crappy iPots.
Your post adds nothing to the topic, and your “clever” play on the iPod name makes you look very immature.
So OSNews is to review a format developed by Sony that never took off, instead of arguably the most popular portable media player of this decade?
Like it or not, the iPod is very popular, and is purchased by more than just “pimple-faced burger-eating tone-deaf hearing-damaged teenagers”, and thus warrants a review.
By your comment are we to assume all mp3/media players are useless due to utilizing compressed/loss formats?
Sorry, can’t hear you, too busy winding my Victrola…
Forget the overpriced iPhone….THIS is the device I was waiting for. I could care less about video and web surfing, the thought of trying to watch a movie on a 2″ screen while squinting for two hours isn’t all that appealing. All I want is an excellent sounding, easy to manage/use ipod for music to replace my 3G ipod. I know there are other manufacturer’s devices for cheaper, but let’s be honest. The iPod is king, everyone else is an imitator. Why settle for less?
I do have one question. It would seem that this is entirely flash based. If that’s the case, then, I should probably wait until at least a 20GB version gets released to buy one.
The screen is 3.5″. Also there is no ‘squinting’ involved. You just hold it at a comfortable distance from the face and it’s no different to watching a bigger screen farther away. What is important is the angle subtended at the eye and the resolution, not the size of the screen (there are limits to this, of course).
Edited 2007-12-11 17:35 UTC
…and it doesn’t give you a headache trying to focus on small objects moving very fast for so long?
It just seems unnatural to me.
I take it that it’ll be necessary to use iTunes to transfer music to this device?
It looks good but I wouldn’t put up with that restriction.
I don’t suppose anyone has developed a drag and drop hack for the iPod?
If you hate iTunes, get a mac and be happy.
end the hate with your machine
…I won’t link directly to the blog post, but it appears VOIP on an iPod Touch isn’t too far away, thanks to jailbreaking and the dock connector. All very clever hardware hacking!
Most tone-deaf computer nerds wouldn’t even know their ass from a real musical instrument, let alone tell the difference between a record player or a CD player. Get yourself a proper home stereo system, instead of listening to music on cheap crappy plastic computer speakers or on iPot earphones…sad losers.
I don’t own an iPot or any other portable mp3 player. So sorry, I am not hip, cool or modern and I don’t wear glasses.
The iPot is “popular” because Apple fooled a whole generation of tone-deaf, hearing-damaged, pimple-faced burger-eating teenagers into thinking that they can not be hip, cool or modern without one and to survive in the digital age and be in the cool club, you simply need an iPot.
I got an erection after watching a video on YouTube of an iPot being blended to shreds.
iPot = iShit
Get yourself a record player and discover a whole new dimension in sound. You might actually like it after curing your addiction to crappy lossy compressed formats.
Gee, none of the stuff I listen to seems to be available on vinyl. Guess I’ll have to “settle” for hearing live music.