News

It so resembles the iPhone that online wags have described Apple's iPod Touch as "the phoneless iPhone." Since Canadians have had no opportunity to see the much-hyped iPhone, we'll just have to transfer our hysteria to the Touch, which we should expect to be just as revolutionary: that it will gleam softly, sing My Melancholy Baby, dance, show soap operas and make everyone nearby ooh and ahh.

Aside from the dancing part, the Touch will do all this, but its soft gleam certainly greases up pretty quickly. And so Apple includes a buffing cloth to clean up after the fingers go slipping and sliding over the touch-sensitive screen and chrome back. Well, perhaps the finger action could classify as dancing — the Touch will recognize more than one finger at a time, making the Touch experience a little balletic.

Apple has exercised an almost fetishistic determination to rid the Touch of any external controls. Only two remain: a sleep/power button flush with the top, and a slightly indented Home button at the bottom of the screen. The lack of an external volume control has annoyed some iPod aficionados who don't want to take the Touch out of their pockets to adjust the volume. But there is a more serious issue here: The volume control, a slider at the bottom of the screen requiring some attention to adjust, could be a problem when driving a car.

Essentially, Apple has married three things to make the Touch (and iPhone) interesting: a minimalist, futuristic design, complex gesture recognition, and Apple's first mobile operating system (OS X 1.1, a development of OS X 1.0.2, which was introduced with the iPhone). Among the tweaks made to the Touch that aren't in the iPhone are a Blackberry-inspired system of typing a period with two strokes of the space bar, a selection of several languages for the interface, your choice of a dozen localized keyboards, a setting that allows you to start playing where you left off and closed captions.

The sleekness of the design was made possible by the touch-sensitive screen, which is surprisingly easy to figure out. Navigation on the Touch makes most other claims of user-friendly interfaces look user-hostile. The touch-screen keyboard, however, is one alarming exception. In theory, the keys are so tiny it seems one touch will press three at once. In practice, however, it works. But be warned: The touch screen will not respond to fingernails — it has to be the fleshy part of the fingertip.

This brings up another issue: Will it work in a Canadian winter with frosty fingers? If the screen recognizes soft tissue and not a fingernail, has it been designed to respond to heat, or just shape? We'll know soon enough.

Apart from the design, screen and new operating system, the Touch has selectively picked some high-end features we've seen in other cellphones or MP3 players, and run them through the Apple makeover salon. Most notable is the built-in Wi-Fi, which connects the Touch to the Internet — Apple has included a mobile version of its Safari browser for limited surfing and a connection to YouTube. That's also the way it can pick up fixes and patches.

The Safari browser on the iPod Touch lacks a few features for a full browsing experience, such as Flash, support for Java applets, mouse-over events, tool tips and a few others. Interestingly, the browser is designed to act like a real browser, a feat made possible by using the zoom gesture — a "pinch" will zoom out, a "reverse pinch" will zoom in. Pages too small to be seen in full on the 6-cm screen can be magnified with amazingly clear results.

The Touch has a YouTube application, with which you can browse YouTube videos and play them, and even zoom in on the video as well. It also has a calendar function, which will sync with iCal, Microsoft Entourage and Microsoft Outlook 2003 or later. However strangely, users can not add or edit calendar or contact entries. (There are reports that some hacker has released a patch for the Calendar, allowing users to create new entries).

There is a clock that displays the times of various time zones, and can be programmed with an alarm, as a stopwatch and as a timer. The calculator is the simplest kind there is (no higher math equations or scientific calculations).

The music player has great sound, at least using good quality headphones; Apple has included its standard-issue ear bud phones (without the foam cover) with the Touch. The sound is full and vibrant, and includes a stronger bass response than previous iPods had. There are also the usual iPod preset EQ settings, such as Bass Boost and Small Speakers for further tweaking of the sound.

The playlist is easy to browse, by artist, songs, albums, audio books, compilations, composers, genres, or podcasts.

The iPod video player shows wonderful pictures on the screen. It even makes grainy YouTube videos look good, but get something filmed in high-definition and the Touch will really shine.

One word of warning here: Don't be too put off by reports of a poor screen with washed-out blacks. Apparently Apple shipped a number of Touch units with faulty screens, and should replace them.

For a better multimedia experience, you can connect the Touch to a TV and watch the videos on a larger screen via the Apple Component AV Cable, Apple Composite AV Cable, or other Touch-compatible cable, all available separately. There is also an Apple Universal Dock, available for $50, to connect the Touch to a TV and operate it with a remote control.

The photo browser can be set to run automatically, and run an automated slide show.

The most important thing to know about the Touch is its connection to Apple and the iTunes Music Store and player software. Apple has been tying almost everything to iTunes, and the Touch is dominated by it. Yes, it's a free download, but that means it pushes you to buy all your music from Apple, which is coercive. You can import non-iTunes MP3s into it; and although the Touch is reported to be able to play MP3s, running the program on a Windows machine requires converting the files into Apple's proprietary AAC format (officially, the Touch handles AAC, MP3, H.264, and MPEG-4 formats).

(It's also fussy with its software: it demands iTunes 7.4 or later, and will turn its nose up at Mac OS X 10.4.9 or lower, requiring users to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.4.10. Windows users need only the latest version of iTunes.) The iTunes software works exactly as advertised on a Mac and, to a certain extent, on Windows, but with Windows, any attempt to circumvent iTunes will be frustrated. The iPod doesn't appear in My Computer, and doesn't appear on Windows Explorer, which means it's impossible to drag and drop MP3s into it.

This also means anyone who was accustomed to using previous iPods as file-storage devices will be out of luck. Besides, the two models of the Touch are far too small for that purpose: an 8 gigabyte model ($329 Cdn.) and a 16 GB model ($440).

At these prices, one would expect more than just a media player; there are cheaper cellphones that include multimedia players, and 8 GB and 16 GB are on the small side for media players (the iPod Classic has a maximum memory of 160 GB).

Also, for an on-line device, it has few of the applications one expects, such as e-mail, instant messaging and chat — although it's difficult to imagine what the price would be with those.

Fortunately, the hacking community has penetrated Apple's barricades and started to hack the device, with such improvements as serving as a proxy server to instant messaging. Apparently, hacks can let users play Super Mario Bros, read e-books, play minesweeper, respond to e-mails and search for driving directions via the iPhone's Maps.app on the go. The Windows hack (http://tech.blorge.com/Structure: per cent20/2007/10/13/hacking-ipod-touch-the-1-click-windows-solution/) and the Mac hack (http://tech.blorge.com/Structure: per cent20/2007/10/11/ipod-touch-runs-3rd-party-apps-and-a-basic-walkthrough-of-the-install-guide/) are called iailbreaking, and are emphatically not for the faint of heart.

In general, the Touch is great at what it's designed to do — it even has a decent battery life, though it should be recharged every night. But in a world now dominated by Swiss Army knife cellphones that do so much more (though not better), it's neither fish nor fowl. It's neither a phone nor a PDA, and it's much more than an MP3 player.

What is best about it is the anticipation of what Apple will do with it next.