Apple iPod touch

Practically speaking, it's easy to get up to speed on the keyboard. With a bit of practice, you'll be tapping out a couple of lines a minute, and we had no problem reaching the same kinds of speed on the iPod as you could expect from a Blackberry. The orientation sensor is handy, too - hold the touch landscape and the screen pivots (it's animated, of course) to keep the text upright. The only problem is the touch's connection options: the iPhone might only have a lowly EDGE receiver built in, but at least it's enough for some data transfer on the move. The touch is hamstrung with 802.11b/g only.

The calendar and contact features are useful, but fail to set any particularly striking precedents. Both take the relevant details from iTunes, which in turn grabs information from a third party application such as Outlook. But neither particularly shines. The Contacts application is reasonably useful, but the calendar is read-only. If someone suggests a meeting to you while you're away from your PC, there's no way of getting the information into the touch.

Music to your ears

Lest anyone forget, it plays music, too. Like the classic and nano, the touch includes Apple's Cover Flow, a handy way of browsing albums by cover. And uniquely, the touch automatically grabs your iTunes account details from your PC, allowing you to buy songs over a WiFi network. In its present version the service is frustrating, though. Although iTunes allows you to buy videos with its desktop client, there's no way to access this through the touch. It's also annoying that free podcasts are blocked.

Actually using the touch as a music player is occasionally troublesome as well. The lack of physical buttons means you have to take it out of your pocket to change tracks or the volume, which isn't as much of a problem on the train as it is on a treadmill. We also found that the orientation sensor would occasionally mis-read our intentions if we tried to use the audio controls while walking: sometimes loading the landscape-only Cover Flow unprompted, and stubbornly sitting there until we returned to the home page and went back to the music application. Usefully, double-clicking the button on the front of the Touch produces a set of floating audio controls, which is useful for changing the track or volume settings without quitting a different application. But even so, the touch isn't the simplest digital music player we've ever used, and the iPod classic offers more in the way of elegant simplicity, besides being better value in terms of storage space - the 160GB version of Apple's flagship player is some £40 cheaper than the 16GB Touch.

Time to buy?

But if you're prepared to embrace the touch as more than a simple music player, it pulls the rug from under every handheld internet device we've seen. Browsing the internet is a smooth, desktop-like experience, and most importantly, Apple has succeeded in making it fun. Admittedly, once our initial enthusiasm had waned (albeit after some time), we struggled to find a truly practical use. Presumably, on your own sofa, you're within reach of a full-sized PC for internet access. You could use the touch at internet cafes, but with pay-as-you-go wireless networks so astonishingly expensive, it isn't really a practical way of checking email. Bluetooth would be a useful addition for those with data plans included with their mobile phones, but Apple refuses to be drawn on whether the touch has a transceiver built in - if there is, it isn't currently enabled. But, as a consumer-level media device for occasional internet browsing, the touch is superb. Enjoyable to use and good-looking, there's very little to dislike. Although we're left with just enough space to mention Apple's unfair pricing: the 16GB touch costs $399 in the States, and £269 in the UK - a real-life price difference of around £69.

Author: Dave Stevenson