Problems with the iPod touch
Saturday, September 15th, 2007As I mentioned previously, the iPod touch currently has only 16GB of storage at most, with a price tag of $400. That’s too expensive to replace my 8GB 2G iPod nano ($250 at the time), and too small to replace my 60GB 5G iPod. If the touch became cheaper than my nano or got at least 32GB of storage (my music collection is just over 17GB now, and I can live with only a fraction of my video and photo collections) I’d be interested in buying one.
But there’s a few other problems I have with it. After hearing reports on iLounge that some Apple Stores had received shipments of the iPod touch, I went to the one in Braintree to check it out if they were one of the lucky stores. Sure enough, they had it. As I was playing around with one, it dawned on me that both it and the iPhone don’t sort videos very well. The other video iPod models have submenus for Movies, Music Videos, TV Shows, Video Podcasts, and Video Playlists. The iPhone/iPod touch just have a single Video menu which lists every single video synced to the device. While they are separated by kind, if you want to go to a video podcast, you have to scroll through every movie, music video, and tv show that’s on the device first (video playlists aren’t supported at all). On my current iPod, that would mean going through 283 videos, which starts to become a lengthy task. While the capacities of Apple’s current multi-touch devices will probably limit most users to a few dozen videos, this will start to become a problem once flash drive capacities start closing in on the current hard drive capacities.
There’s also a bunch of handy features present on the iPhone that are missing from the iPod touch. No Notes and no way of adding events to calendars, for starters. Despite the Wi-Fi capabilities, there are no widgets for Google Maps, Weather, or Stocks - but there’s a widget for YouTube, not to mention the same Safari browser the iPhone has. The Notes especially are a feature I’d like to have. Hopefully Apple will add a lot of these apps to the touch in future firmware updates.