An expensive innovation with excellent usability. Review on Apple iPod touch

The first look of ipod touch makes it look very similar to iPhone except in the thickness and few different menu items in the interface. They have both white and black models but white is only for higher capacities(in terms of storage space) and rare. Now they even have options for having any text laser engraved onto your ipod.good for gifting someone really very special(cos its damn expensive)

The menu items and the navigation with fingers is very user friendly innovative and pleasing to the eye as the interface elements move like real items in water in response to your finger tip touch and is perhaps one of the 1st things you notice in ipod touch. For eg to zoom a pic you just need to move two fingers in opposite direction on the screen like pulling apart and that zooms the pic similary moving towards each other zooms in which are quite interesting touch gestures in ipod touch.

The quality of music is rich and loud enough to be enjoyable for general music but if you are looking for audiophile clarity then you will be not be so happy with default accessories but you'll never be disappointed as you can always buy a separate headphone from sennheisser/creative to tailor it to your needs but that means additional expense for an already expensive product. I could hear visible difference on my sennheiser headphone on pc for the same movie but considering the fact that its meant to be good portable mediaplayer the deal seems to be fair.

Another thing you will notice is that the loudspeaker  is not so loud. There are applications like alarm but after listening to the loudness I think my mobile is a better option. Also the placement of the speaker is on the rare side of ipod hence you need to have a very quiet environment if you want to listen to it.

Transferring the music to ipod requires itunes(software) and  is something not so friendly enough. You do not have the privilege of manually copying music like the other mp3 players provide, but if you are familiar with itunes the synchronization is quite easy and the level of control over libraries is quite good. Another thing that you notice is the number of movie formats supported by ITunes, considering  bittorrent and other facilities available today HD, divx wmv etc are more popular than the mp4 supported by ipod/itunes. ITunes itself has some limitation with the formats supported and you need to do some manual encoding with a few freely available goodies(3rd party) available at https://jodix.com/ or mediacoder(search in google) and requires a bit of tweaking because if the resolution is not correct the video/sound sync will be lost. Apple themselves don't support transcoding as per tech support but latest versions of itunes do have some conversion facilities but only for limited formats which is not very popular because I have several legal DVD's which I would like to view in ipod but conversion is really difficult and not stable. Apple store has video's &  podcasts only for US region so if we need to load regional music the only way is to use the above 3rd party tools which I see as a serious design drawback from the part of  apple since their own recommended tool(ITunes) don't have the basic capabilities of a media player. Its a real disappointment and a major turndown to use ITunes which is such a stupid and complicated media management software still lacking a lot of features of some freely available media players. This is something which apple needs to work ground up.

WiFi is built in and is useful for downloading or browsing and safari is the plain and simple browser provided and is really handy if you go to free spots like in airports /coffee day. Upgrades to the firmware can also be done using this functionality(though I would reconsider because Ipod 3.0 OS was a huge download so I did it with PC/itunes).

The interface is clean, vibrant and provides lots of goodie / gadgets and of course you can download more. You are supposed to use digitaly signed one's from ITunes, but you can get through with a little bit of hacking(though I think itunes is more safer and better). There are lots of free games and other apps available on ITunes store that you can easily install. The interface is comparatively good and orientation sensitive and compared to other portable mediaplayers in market the ipod itself performs better compared to iphone, but there is a visible controversy on apple's attitude toward ipod touch especially after the launch of iphone, most updates are triggered for iphone and apple seems to ignore ipod touch even though its the same even for feature upgrades that can enhance general usage(ipod touch has more prospects than iphone but apple seems to be forcing the other way around). But I believe ipod touch is a clear winner over iphone because if you want to play songs, videos apps etc to the max then you should never be worried about battery capacity, but in iphone since you cannot miss calls you can not enjoy these like in ipod touch making it a major disadvantage for iphone and a clear winning point for ipod touch

Overall its a good player and powerful computing device with looks that are unrivalled by other players till now and if you are keen about its limitations you always have 3rd party tools to get over it(though in some cases it voids warranty so beware) so considering the brand name and features its a good - buy. Apple could've integrated a camera(like in iphone) to make it more innovative especially since it has picture managment capabilities. Another drawback is that it provides a data cable as part of standard accessory which charges the ipod but if you need to charge from mains you have to buy the charger separately shelling out another 1500 INR from your pocket(of course chinese "lucky-go" gadgets come for 100-300 bucks).which I think is unreasonable especially if you are among those who do not own a pc and listen to music more often this is an unnecessary expenditure as there is no option to recharge.

As far as the OS3.0 upgrade is concerned it comes at around Rs.500.00 and unlocks the horizontal keyboard and includes a new search capability in ipod. Bluetooth is unlocked for > Gen2 Ipod touch but pairing and sharing files between other bluetooth devices like mobile phones/ipod /iphone is not possible. I called up tech support and they showed how to turn it on but it did not detect my nokia/ other ipod touch so they recommended that its usage is deliberately limited by apple to bluetooth headphones. There are some apps availablt that claim to override and enable file sharing and stuff like that but as my testing goes they not very stable making bluetooth a not so useful feature in ipod. I think apple should unlock it completely to share photos and videos easily with other devices but they haven't done so. Another interesting fact that came to my notice after some thorough technical investigation is that it has a complicated FM radio receiver built in to the chipset but apple seems to have disabled it. Maybe some future ipod formware update might bring enable it but I'm sure apple is going to charge for it.

Overall its a good device to make you proud for quite sometime and its a recommended buy but beware of the limits.