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With a few exceptions, Apple's success in the portable media-player category — a market it currently dominates — isn't really a result of the company pioneering or inventing any unusual features for its devices. After all, there were dozens of music players before the iPod came along (and many more since), and there were plenty of video players before the iPod Video.

However, what Steve Jobs and his design team are extremely good at, is taking something that already exists and making it just a little better — easier to use, nicer to look at, more intuitively designed, and so on.

Take the iPod Touch, for example. It seems like a groundbreaking innovation to have a media player with a touch screen — and yet, Archos has had one for months now, although no one mentions it much. And Palm and others have been selling portable digital devices for years that play music and display photos and have touch screens.

The Touch, however, makes most of those other devices look like Stone Age tools made out of antlers and bear-skins. Palm's PDAs, for example, required a special stylus until recently, and while some portable devices and smart-phones that run off Microsoft software have used a touch-sensitive screen, there was very little about the devices that took advantage of the touch interface.

In a sense, it's a little surprising that more portable devices don't come with touch-sensitive screens. After all, most people are used to being able to interact with bank machines, information kiosks and other devices using a touch-screen interface. So why not a mobile media player?

Using the iPod Touch will make that question even more obvious, since the touch interface makes the device so much easier and more appealing than a traditional media player. Scrolling — through song lists or pages of video links — is the most obvious example of this: with just a flick of the fingertip, an entire page zooms upwards or downwards with ease. It's so much more intuitive than using a scroll wheel or directional buttons or keys.

If that was all the touch interface involved, it would still be worth mentioning, but the "multi-touch" nature of the iPod's interface is also incredibly appealing to use. When looking at a picture, or a Web page, all a user has to do to enlarge the photo or text is to put two fingers close together on the screen, and then widen the distance between them — and the opposite manoeuvre, known as "the pinch," makes photos and text smaller.

Although Apple is one of the only companies to offer a touch-screen portable media player (Archos has one too, the 704 Wi-Fi model), there are some signs that a touch interface could become a standard feature on mobile devices.

Telus, for example, recently announced that one of its new phones will offer a touch screen (LG, Samsung and Motorola have all offered touch-screen models at one time or another, but they tend to be high-end or niche-market phones). And Samsung will soon be offering the YP-P2 media player, which looks a lot like the iPod Touch, and boasts a full-screen touch interface.

There's no question that there are limitations to a touch interface. For example, when scrolling with a fingertip, it's easy to scroll too quickly or too far, because you don't get the same kind of micro-control that you would with a scroll wheel or directional navigation buttons.

In addition, when you are selecting items from a list — or links on a Web page — it's easy for those with thick fingers to select the wrong thing, just as it's easy to select the wrong letter while typing on the virtual keyboard. Apple has a number of tricks to help you figure out what you're doing, by having the letters get bigger when you hit them and by providing a virtual magnifying glass when you're trying to select something in the address field of the Web browser.

Despite the downsides of the touch interface, however, the benefits for a mobile device — no keyboard required (and in fact virtually no buttons at all) and a much more intuitive way of dealing with photos and Web surfing — are so compelling that it makes using non-touch enabled devices a distinct letdown.

Here's hoping that other digital-media player manufacturers decide to jump on the touch-interface train as well.