Official iPod touch Discussion Thread

[Jesse Hollington]

So, with Apple's announcement of the iPod Touch today, what are your thoughts or first impressions?

Post them here....

[MadBob]

Nice idea way too small capacity and who needs WiFi? not me. now a 160GB Classic, that's way more use.

[Neonecron]

Capacity is waay to small. I tried to cut out music I don't listen to that often (or don't like anymore) but couldn't squeeze down to even 16GB. Really disappointed since I was waiting for the touch screen to get me back on iPods, though the classic iPods are tempting.

[reelbgpunk]

The main emphasis of the widescreen is most likely video. With such small capacities you can barely hold any. No thanks. I'll stick with my 80gig 5th gen. Of course Apple could update the firmware for that one unless it wasn't powerful enough for the new stuff, but they won't. All in all I wanted a new one before today but now I have no reason to get one.

[AmazingDM]

This is pretty lame
this just screams wait til 2nd gen

touchscreen is cool and all but what use is it when it's in your pocket or something?
such a tiny capacity I'd rather get an iphone than this.

hey Jhollington do you have any good pics of the back of the ipod classic?

[toothpaste]

Nice maybe I can now avoid buying an iphone since the ipod touch has a web browser allowing me to connect to the internet. Just figure out how to access my machine at home and I'm set.

[Scarpad]

They finally give us a Widescrren Ipod for mainly video use and hobble it with 16gb. Dumb. Obviously its a cost saving move to use the already existing Iphone form factor. But it's not a goo consumer move.

[derring do]

Posted elsewhere on this, but it looks like a trial to me. I'm assuming this device is all flash, and no hd? They wanted a "touch" interface like the iPhone on a pod, and they wanted to test-drive WiFi. This is a good first step, but it looks more like a Touch-Nano to me. Interesting, and I'd take one if they were giving them away... but nothing I'd pay for.

I'm very tempted by the silver 80 and 160gb classics, however.

[cxc273]

Baby steps, I suppose.

I'm not too crazy about the smaller capacity, but when I gave it some more thought, I began to think I could live with it.

It won't replace my 5G 60GB iPod, but I am starting to think it would be a nice complement. First, it would replace my aging wi-fi-less PDA, which I only use to maintain my contacts and calendar. Second, it could become my daily commute iPod, as I mostly use my 5G to listen to podcasts on my bus ride to the office -- I don't really need to carry all 60GB with me each day. Third, the wi-fi capability would allow me to check e-mail and such at the many free Internet places around my town.

So there are some compelling reasons to get one. I'd love, however, to see a Touch with, say, 100GB or more of storage, although that would make it thicker and force the inclusion of a hard drive. I'm sure folks are starting to say similar things in the future iPods forum as discussions fire up for the 2G Touch!

[Derek McNelly]

Meh, I'm not really impressed.

The Nano and the Classic line look cool, but the Touch shouldn't really be the "High End" iPod.

I feel the Classic should be the flagship iPod.

[studogvetmed]

You know if you HAVE to have all of your music with you, there are other options, if you don't, though, there is a cool new offering.

With the way video is consumed it makes perfect sense, at least to me, to come up with some kind of rotation to get what you want to watch over the course of a day to fill an iPod, it's also feasible to knock down and only load 1000 songs to accomidate an iPod.

Sure it's a new way of thinking, and for ever person who thinks it's a crock, another will be all over it. I think Apple is wise to start moving to flash, less hard drive failures, however in doing so we'll have to wait for capacity to catch up.

[DarkWrench]

It looks nice, but as others are saying, the capacity isn't enough.

[~NeonFire372~]

I'll take a 160GB classic, please. No, I don't want fries with that.

[cxc273]

I'm going to hold on to my 5G 60GB for the moment, as I still have ample room and it serves me well.

I'll probably pick up a Touch as soon as it shows up in the refurbished bin on Apple's store, however.

[Mr. E.]

I agree that used strictly in its iPod capacity, there isn't enough memory. Especially when I'm traveling, I like having my entire library at my fingertips, which I currently do with my 5G, except that I always have to weed my video content to make it all fit, so a device that's better for viewing video but holds less seems unlikely to replace my 60gb 5G. The 160gb 6G, however, is very tempting. However, the iPod touch wouldn't have to replace my 5G. On any given day, I largely listen to my latest podcasts, my favourite tunes, and the stuff I most recently added. I could easily fit a day's worth, probably a week's worth, of content in 16gb and use the 5G for longer, out of town trips, but the only reason to do that would be if the other features of the iPod touch were useful enough to make it worth leaving 90% of my library at home every day.
Does the Touch include an e-mail app? I didn't see that mentioned, but it seems important and easy to integrate. I know I could use web-based e-mail, but firing up the web browser for that seems unnecessary.
And a chat client still seems to be missing, which is even more important when you don't have SMS to fall back on.
I would still like SSH access to my home machine, but I guess there's probably not enough demand for that, though it's hard to imagine it'd be difficult to integrate if this thing's built on OSX like the iPhone.

As tempting as the iPhone is, I just don't think I'd use my 24/7 connectivity enough to justify the hundreds of dollars I'd have to spend on the data plan over the course of two years. But finding a wi-fi hotspot is usually easy enough (I'm soaking in one right now), so if the iPod Touch would offer the feature(s) of the iPhone that aren't dependent on a cell service, like e-mail, and the features that seem to be missing from the iPhone, like a chat client, I could see this easily becoming my new daily iPod. But as it stands now, I'm not sure. If I was going to run out and buy an iPod today, I might prefer getting an extra 100 gigs rather than being able to browse the internet and see who's currently playing at Starbucks. It's close, though. If there was VoIP solution, that would probably tip the scale, 'cause I may spend 8 hours a day soaking in WiFi, but I get no AT&T reception here.