TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

iPod Touch review: Old vs new and playing music

By Chris Meadows

I have already looked at the (first-gen) iPod Touch in terms of the overall user interface, and at the variety of e-reading options available for it. What I have not yet covered is what some would say is the iPod’s very raison d’être—how well it plays music.

But before I get to that, a few words about the original iPod Touch vs. the neato-spiff new iPod Touch that Steve Jobs premiered the other day: except for a few features that are nice but not essential, there’s not a lot of difference—except in price. The refurbished models available on the Apple Store have had their price slashed even further—which makes now an excellent time to pick one up.

Old Touch vs. New Touch

The main differences from old to new are that the new iPod has a built-in speaker and a built-in volume control. It also claims a longer battery life, though how much of this is due to new hardware and how much is due to the 2.1 firmware (which was also supposed to improve battery life) is still unclear. Also, the new one can use the Nike+ transmitting pedometer gizmo. There are also some cosmetic shape changes.

That’s it. Apart from that, they both still have the same screen, same wi-fi, same storage capacity, same more-or-less everything. It would be nice to have that speaker for when you want to do something without headphones, and the lack of a volume control can sometimes be irritating—but on the other hand, if you are mainly interested in e-book reading you will not need the speaker anyway, and there are inexpensive ways to work around the lack of volume control (which I will cover in a separate entry).

The 32 gig old Touch is available, refurbished, for $319, versus a new 32 gig new Touch for $400. Either way, that new Touch now costs what I paid three weeks ago for my refurb, and boy am I wishing I had waited.

iTouch vs. My Old iPod

I had really been missing having an iPod when I finally broke down and ordered the new one. I made do with all sorts of hacks to try and make up for what I was missing—I listened to a few mp3 albums on my Nokia 770 until its earphone jack went on the fritz.

Then I bought a cheap Chinese mp3 player and listened to audiobooks on it, until it died. (Amusingly, said mp3 player advertised the ability to read e-books. Which was sort of right. It could display text files, on a screen the size of a postage stamp. It displayed about forty characters at a time.)

Finally, I got the iPod Touch, and on the whole, am satisfied. In addition to all the new stuff it can do, such as read e-books, it does everything the old iPod did just as well as it did.

Except for one thing.

No More USB Drive

One of the neat things about the old iPod was that it would act as a full-fledged USB hard drive in addition to an mp3 player. I used this a number of times for trucking documents down to Kinko’s, or for bringing episodes of Kamen Rider Faiz in to watch at work when it was slow.

But the iPod Touch does not have that ability out of the box. Presumably it’s related to Apple’s desire to keep the iPod locked down and prevent foreign code from executing on it.

However, there are a number of utilities that can be obtained to get around that. Some of them require jailbreaking the iPod, but even if you do not want to do that, there are still several apps available for transferring files to and from a storage space on your device. Some of them even include viewers for common document types, including PDF and rich text. (Note that this storage space will remain separate from your apps’ space and music library—you cannot load new e-books on board this way.)

One such app is called Air Sharing. Air Sharing adds hard drive storage to your iTouch or iPhone that can be accessed via wifi, rather than the sync cable. It also includes viewers for several document types such as RTF or Safari web archives, but no PDF.

Anybody who has an iPod Touch or an iPhone should go and download Air Sharing right now: for the first two weeks it will be free to all takers, then it will return to its normal price of $6.99.

But now that we have covered what the iPod Touch does not do, let’s look at what it does.

Music to My Ears

Music on the iPod sounds great. It sounded great on my old iPod, a 20-gig click-wheel model, and it has not changed much. Just as with that old iPod, the iPod Touch does not offer a true customizable graphic equalizer, but a number of presets. That being said, the presets sound pretty good—even the default is decent.

The standard iPod earbuds included with the device actually sound pretty good. Those who are worried about being mugged may want to swap them out for something less obvious—but given Apple’s market share these days, it is not as if potential thieves really need a telltale any more.

We Have Assumed Controls

In contrast to my first mp3 player, an old Diamond Rio 600, my click-wheel iPod had controls that were elegant in their simplicity. For the newer click-wheel models, most of that elegant simplicity has gotten buried under an avalanche of additional photo and video options, but it was at least easy enough to operate without looking once you knew where all the controls were.

The problem is that the iPod Touch (and iPhone) only has one hardware button (or two if you count the sleep/power button on top). The rest is an entirely smooth touchscreen, which you cannot really do much with when it is hooked to your waist or in a purse or pocket. Fortunately, you can buy a very inexpensive remote control device that entirely solves that problem. I will cover it in my next entry.

But when you can see the controls, they work pretty well. The main music playing screen displays album art (if any is available) in the middle of the screen. There are play and track skip buttons and a volume control slider at the bottom of the screen. At the top, a tap in the middle of the screen opens another display with elapsed and total time (and a slider to move through the song), options for random or looped play, and Genius.

There is also a button to flip to a display of all the tracks in the album. This screen also contains the option to rate the song with 1 through 5 stars.

If you turn the player on its side, you are treated to the "cover flow" display, showing the art of the album currently playing, with the covers of albums that come before and after displayed to the side. You can slide through album covers with your finger, or when the song changes the covers will zoom to the left or right until they find the one for your next song.

I’d Be a Genius

The main new feature introduced to the iPod Touch with firmware 2.1 is "Genius." In my opinion, Genius by itself is well worth paying the $10 for if you have not yet upgraded from firmware 1 (which comes loaded onto the old Touch).

Genius makes random playlists based on what songs it thinks are "like" the song you are playing right now. It bases these choices on data from everybody else who has iTunes 8 and Genius enabled.

Genius is not as accurate yet as the soon-to-be-defunct Pandora, and at present it only has data for music that is fairly mainstream—no animé soundtracks, or obscure groups like Payne’s Gray. And of course it can only work with what is on your iPod at the moment, unlike a streaming service such as Pandora.

But on the other hand, it does a decent job with the music it can match. That is fairly good for this early stage, and it will improve as more people install iTunes 8 and contribute their Genius data to Apple’s servers. And if you use the version of Genius built into iTunes 8, it can recommend new music for you to purchase.

Maybe Not the "Funnest," But Still Pretty Darned Fun

All things considered, the second-generation iPod Touch will be a great bargain at its new lower price—but even the first-gen iPod Touch is still a very decent device. The first-gen plays music, reads e-books, and runs most apps just as well as the newer version, with the only important changes being the speaker and hardware volume control. The speaker you can live without, and my next entry will describe how to do without the volume control for either the old or the new version.