When I think about you iTouch myself

After holding out for years, I finally got tired of waiting for ‘the next generation’ and bought my very own iPod. After the most recent product line was announced, I had a variety of choices. The Nanos are too small for my liking. On the other end of the spectrum, the sheer size of the 160GB ‘Classic’ was appealing, but after playing with one at the Apple store, I was let down by the extremely sluggish interface. The hard drive contributes to this, but the new motion graphics and sophisticated interface of the updated iPod software can’t help. There were noticeable, regular delays when browsing between menus and options which I found unacceptable.

Walking into the store, I hadn’t seriously considered the Touch. Firstly, because it seemed too small (storage-wise), and secondly, because it wasn’t due out for another week. However, I calculated that I could still fit around 300 albums (or 2 seasons of Lost!) on a 16GB model, and after asking a sales rep about why I might want to wait for the newest of the new, he pointed out that they had them in stock ahead of schedule (I was lucky to be at the 5th Avenue Apple Store in NYC). After playing with one for a while and taking a day to think about it, my choice was pretty well made up. As the rep pointed out (or had been directed to point out), Apple is leaning toward multi-functional, network-capable iPod designs in their marquee line of products, so it makes sense to swim with the current. Living in Canada, the iPhone still seems a distant possibility. Moreover, I’m not interested in having a cellphone (and the accompanying charges). So, the iPod Touch it was!

I’ve had the device for about a week now, and I’ve been filling a text file with notes as I’ve gotten to know the Touch’s functionality, dis-functionality, and possibilities. Gathered below are the edited results of these impressions. Get a cup of coffee…it’s long!

Packaging and Accessories

• No plastic covers on dock/USB connector. As my girlfriend’s 1st-Gen Nano came with these (and I assume every other iPod did too), I was surprised they were not included. It’s a small thing, but given the easily damaged/vulnerable design of the iPod connector, it seems unwise to leave it open when not in use. What about dirt and dust?
• The cheap plastic stand that comes with the Touch doesn’t allow the iPod to be connected to the dock connector or the audio out, rendering it essentially useless except as a prop for a disconnected (or upside-down) iPod, or to prop the iPod up in horizontal orientation. Really, who designed this? Maybe I’ll go lo-tech and make one of these. Guess I’ll have to buy the dock.
• Headphones are the standard iPod white earbuds. They’re adequate, but full-size headphones will be needed for longer trips.
• A simple black cleaning cloth comes with the Touch. A bag would have been nicer (like what sunglasses come in).

Interface

• Immediately and completely intuitive.
• Of course, the screen gets smudged and fingerprinted, but these are for the most part invisible when viewing the device directly (while in use). The cloth does a good job of cleaning it up without the need for a liquid cleaner.
• Elegant transitions between screens/modes. These are good-looking, but also generally well thought-out in terms of visually communicating the result of a given interaction. The transition between open and newly launched pages in Safari is a good example of this.
• Icons at top of Home screen (iPod, wireless signal strength, clock, battery) are grey, and look cheap/inconsistent in comparison to the rest of the interface, especially since the same icons ARE coloured in all applications except Photos and Calculator.
• Inability to reorder or remove the application icons on the Home screen. For example, I do not regularly use YouTube, and I do not need a dedicated icon for this app.
• Terrible icon for the YouTube application, and the Settings and Contacts icons could be improved.
• Say you’re browsing the web and listening to music, and need to turn the iPod down. There is not a physical set of buttons to control volume (as on iPhone). Fortunately, double-clicking the home button brings up a play/pause/volume control for music, which helps to compensate for the lack of a physical volume control. However, part of trusting an interface comes from knowing that you always have access to such shortcuts. So, when I double-click the home button in CoverFlow mode and nothing happens, I get confused (and frustrated!). I have to instead turn the ipod into a vertical orientation, where the double-click still does nothing, but I have a volume control onscreen.
• The Wallpaper function in the Settings section allows you to set a wallpaper for your Touch. Only problem is that the only time you ever see this wallpaper is when waking the device from Sleep (for as long as it takes you to slide your finger across). I spoke to an iPhone owner who confirmed that this is essentially the same for that device, except that on the iPhone you see the wallpaper behind the keypad during calls. Why the wallpaper doesn’t display behind the Home screen icons is completely beyond me. The black Home screen gets boring quickly.

Applications

Music

• Works as expected, with very nice menus, album artwork support, and transitions. I especially like the artwork/tracklisting dual-sided interface elements, which mimic the real-life experience of holding a CD or LP and turning it over to look at the tracks.
• CoverFlow works very well (snappy), and is a nice visual way of quickly browsing your albums. However, it does not seem to include singles (only albums), and is only as attractive as the completeness of your album artwork collection. Before spending 25 minutes manually updating all the artwork in my Library, CoverFlow was mostly a bunch of black musical notes (the default album graphic) for me.
• Along with Photos, the most polished application on the iPod Touch, and justifiably so! This is a music player, first and foremost.

Videos

• Haven’t spent much time with the videos, but after converting a handful of episodes of a show to .mov format (using FFMpegX) and loading them onto my iPod, they worked as expected. Good quality video and audio.
• Titles don’t scroll when viewing your Videos as a list. This is frustrating when browsing the episode listings of a show, most of which will start with the same show name prefix (putting the episode number/title offscreen). This makes it difficult to tell which episode you are selecting, without watching a clip from it. The way older iPod’s scroll long song titles and episode names would be welcome here.
• Can only be viewed in one orientation (Home button on right), as opposed to photos which will rotate to fit any orientation. Likewise with YouTube. Why? This seems like a feature that Apple just forgot to implement/rushed. Yet another instance of the interface’s inconsistency.

Photos

• Very nice application. Splits your photos up into the Albums which they are organized into in iPhoto. Nice slideshow functionality, with great transitions. Flipping through pictures with a flick of the finger is very rewarding, and a genuinely easy way of quickly sharing digital photos with a friend. Nothing bad to say here!

iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store

• Cool, works as expected. Nice design. I really only use this as an encyclopedia to look up tracklistings and preview songs. Combined with the upcoming Starbuck’s partnership, this is going to make Apple a lot of money, and yuppies very happy. I wonder where I can download the theme music from that new VW commercial…who Wilco? No, I’ve never heard of them.

Safari

• Depending on the site, the experience of using Safari is either seamless (you forget you’re using a mobile device), or terrible (can’t view content, difficult to navigate, uncomfortable). The general distinction I’ve found so far is between sites which are standards-based and those which are not. For example, browsing www.alistapart.com is a dream. Browsing www.torontobluejays.com is agonizing.
• You can view online PDF’s in Safari, and they look great. However, there is no pagination functionality, leaving a lot of scrolling to be done on large documents (including Apple’s own iPod Touch Features Guide PDF). Seems like an obvious oversight.
• In Settings > Safari > Developer, there is an option to turn on the Debug Panel in Safari. This is a good sign, along with the WebKit Web Inspector, that Apple intends to make Safari a better platform for web development. The Debug console integrates nicely with the browser. However, there is a weird red line on the error view (fixed in 1.1.1), and I can’t really see myself debugging on the actual iPod, so the whole thing is a bit confusing. Is this a leftover from the device’s development which they decided to leave in for end-users?
• NO FLASH OR QUICKTIME SUPPORT. Based on reviews, I knew it didn’t support Flash going in, but no Quicktime? Really? Considering YouTube videos are in Flash format, and the Videos application is surely using some derivative form of Quicktime, why can’t I view .swf‘s and .mov‘s in Safari? Let’s connect the dots, guys. This means that Apple’s own highly produced introduction to using the device, the iPod Touch Guided Tour, can’t be viewed on the iPod Touch without first downloading it to your computer and then loading into the Videos section of the device. Dumb!
• No Find function to search for keywords within a web page. I use this so often when surfing that I really miss it here. It wouldn’t be hard to implement, though I suppose it may have been purposefully left off to avoid ‘feature-itis.’
• JavaScript support is good, although the nature of the multi-touch interface renders drag-and-droppable/sortable elements inoperable on the Touch. This is a shame, but I understand the interface design decision.
• At first, I was disappointed that there wasn’t a dedicated RSS app on the Touch (though I still think there should be), but after reading RSS feeds in Safari, I was pretty impressed with the reader.mac.com/mobile format which they are displayed in by default. If you read RSS in Safari on your laptop, this interface will be familiar to you. It works well, though it could use some more polish.

YouTube

• As I mentioned, I’m not too interested in this app, but it works as expected, minus the single orientation option for viewing videos.

Calendar

• When I saw a Calendar application on the Touch, I assumed that it would function similarly to iCal. And it does. Except that you can’t add or edit events. What??? A Read-Only Calendar? You’ve GOT to be kidding. This is one of several instances where the intentional handicapping of the device’s functionality is evident in comparison to the iPhone.

Contacts

• I can add, edit, and delete Contacts…which makes it even stranger that I can’t do the same for Calendar events.
• Interface for Contacts is quite good, although when adding Contacts, I want to be able to turn the iPod into its horizontal orientation to take advantage of the larger, sideways keyboard. Alas, as in many screens, only the vertical orientation is supported here.

Clock

• Some nice, useful features, and a slick interface. The multiple world clocks are great for traveling, and the alarm clock works well (though the sound effects are kind of cheap – I would have preferred the OS X standards like purr, ping and submarine).

Calculator

• Nothing to be said really – nice interface, works properly. A tipping function would have been nice.

Settings

• Wi-Fi setup is easy, and surprisingly sophisticated for more complex network setups. I was online within seconds of turning the Touch on.
• Brightness control has an auto-brightness option to automatically adjust to ambient light conditions. This feature was introduced with the Intel-based Apple laptops, I believe, and it’s put to excellent use here.
• General Settings allows you to set a lock on the iPod with a pin number, which works well if you think somebody undesirable might be messing with your stuff. Here you can also set date, time, international, and keyboard settings, and choose your Wallpaper (see gripes above). I haven’t figured out how to remove the default Wallpaper folder (or add to it for that matter). The shipped wallpapers are your standard nature/fine art options, as well as a handful of graphics based on the most recent iPod commercials (with the silhouetted dancers on tropical looking backgrounds). However, the Wallpaper section also gives you access to your Photo library (in which I’ve created my own iPod Wallpapers album).
• There is then a Settings panel for each of the apps, which allows you to set the options you would expect. Works well, nicely laid out.

iPhone vs. iPod Touch

If you can afford the $70-100/month for service, the iPhone gives you a lot more bang for the same price (since they dropped the 8GB price from $599 down to $399). Dedicated applications for weather, maps, stocks, and e-mail, a camera, a phone, a working Calendar…and I’m sure a 16GB model can’t be far away. All I can guess is that the premium price for the iPod Touch ($299 and $399 USD for the 8 and 16GB models) is due to its first generation status. Given the wide gaps in functionality between the iPhone and Touch, the same (initial) price is difficult to stomach. Although as a friend pointed out, Apple must make a killing on the services in their deal with AT&T.

Final Thoughts

This is the first generation (2nd if you include the iPhone) of this device, and even a company as accomplished as Apple is bound to make some mistakes. Nevertheless, the kinds of inconsistencies I’ve pointed out hurt the user experience, and tarnish Apple’s vaunted design reputation. While these may be improved by software updates, and will become less noticeable as I get used to them, they remain missteps which I expected Apple to avoid. The good news is that the platform is solid; these are software/interface design issues, not hardware problems.

The possibility of purchasing additional apps (through iTunes or otherwise) would improve my evaluation of the device. Games would be nice (sudoku, crosswords, etc), and if Mail, RSS, and Weather apps are released, I would buy them instantly, given a reasonable price point in the $5-$25 range (cheaper for single-purpose widgets like Weather and more for the sophisticated features offered by Mail or other complex apps). The sheer number of apps you get on the iPhone that are missing or handicapped in the iPod Touch is really frustrating. How hard would it have been to give me Notes, Maps, and a working Calendar? Let the iPhone’s phone capabilities and camera distinguish it from the Touch…don’t purposefully downgrade my $400 device. For example, I can still check the weather forecast through Safari, it’s just less convenient. The Weather app is a basic piece of software that already ships with iPhone and OS X Dashboard. Why isn’t it here?

As you can tell, I’m not head-over-heels for the Touch. Overall, the truly impressive multi-touch interface, ability to browse the web on an iPod, generally high-quality media features, and solid construction of the iPod Touch have made me a satisfied, if not ecstatic, owner, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

UPDATE: As I wrote this, the iPod Touch 1.1.1 Firmware Update came down the pipe, and has been installed on my iPod. Haven’t had a chance to explore any changes which this update may have made, but I can only hope it’s the first update of many!