Apple iPod Touch

Review | Features

Gadget Guy Review

Reviewer: Alex Kidman

Apple's finally made a revolutionary change to its iPod line - as long as you discount the iPhone - and the results are mostly good, although the comparative asking price and low battery life do detract strongly from the overall appeal of the iPod Touch.

Features

The iPod Touch features only two buttons - a top mounted button used for quickly switching the screen on and off, and a selector button located beneath the imposing 8.89 cm display. Everything else you'll do with the iPod Touch is, as the name implies, touch-based - from flicking your finger along the bottom of the screen to unlock it, to typing URLs in to the embedded web browser. It's actually not that new - the iPod Touch is basically a cut-down version of the iPhone, which at the time of writing was available only in the US, with Europe to follow shortly. For these Antipodean shores, the iPod Touch represents our first opportunity to play in the space that Apple feels the entire iPod line should be moving.

The iPod Touch does music and video playback, as do other iPods, as well as a slew of Touch-specific features, such as the Safari Web browser, direct YouTube video playback and access to the iTunes store. All of these functions are handled via the embedded Wi-Fi built into the Touch; you'll need a nearby open network in order to take advantage of these extra features.

Performance

The Touch's finger-based input strategy is one part inspired, one part annoying. It's undeniably very cool to use finger-based navigation, and even multi-finger input is supported for certain functions. The downside we found was when doing any data entry; even after quite a bit of practice, we kept hitting the wrong letters on the Touch's virtual keyboard. Nobody's ever going to write War and Peace on an iPod Touch, so it's not a killer flaw, but it can be annoying when you're trying to enter a URL into the Safari web browser.

The iPod Touch is rated for around 22 hours battery life for music, but we were disappointed to find it lasting less than eight in our tests - primarily, we suspect, because Wi-Fi was enabled while we were testing it out. Given that the wireless configuration is a touch (pun not intended) difficult to disable, it's a trap we figure many Touch users will fall into from time to time.

The Touch's video screen makes for an excellent video-viewing platform, although the same caveats about battery life apply even more here. It's easily the best platform for iPod video, although, annoyingly, once more Apple doesn't provide video conversion software with the Touch. This means you'll need to buy additional software to actually put 
video files or DVDs onto the Touch for playback.

Conclusion

So is the much-hyped Touch worth your money? It really depends on what you want out of it. It's undeniable that it is, in essence, a cut-down iPhone, and if the extra features (including Bluetooth, and unsurprisingly, telephony) of the iPhone appeal, then you'd be better off waiting - although that could be some time.

It's a cool gadget and an insight into the future of the iPod line, but at the same time, the asking price of the Touch could score you a couple of iPod Nanos with the same storage but far better battery life, or an iPod Classic with far more storage space. Choice is never a bad thing, and it's certainly an iPod with new features and oodles of style.

Official iPhone 3G pricing from Vodafone Australia

After a couple of false starts today, Vodafone have released their Apple iPhone 3G pricing.

It appeared up on their site briefly, but was then taken down. GadgetGuy has received official notice from Vodafone of their official iPhone 3G pricing - see below the information for personal and business users.

You'll notice the term MPP sprinkled throughout the information. This stands for Mobile Payment Plan, which allows dredit approved customers the opportunity to spread the cost of the device over the duration of their contract. The MPP is to be paid in addition to the minimum monthly spend for the applicable plan.

Protecting your iPhone

Not surprisingly, cases and covers dominate the accessories scene for the iPhone 3G. Like the iPod Touch, it's a finger smudge magnet, but it's also an expensive bit of technology that you'd hate to scratch. As with the iPod, the sky is virtually the limit when it comes to styles, from executive looking leather all the way down to shiny blinged-out plastic.

One thing to bear in mind is that, unlike most of the iPod range, the touch-sensitive screen that runs the iPhone 3G can't be covered, so most cases either leave this exposed, or come with a folio-style flap that protects the screen. At a more mundane level, several vendors, including Belkin and Philips/DLO offer plastic screen protectors that simply attach to the front screen, taking the scratches that you may give the iPhone 3G - say, by dropping it into your pocket right next to your car keys. They're certainly more replaceable than the iPhone 3G itself.

The apps maketh the iPhone!

Out of the box the iPhone is really good fun to use - and there aren't enough phones that qualify as "fun" in that sense - but that's not where the enjoyment and extensibility ends. It's possible to add software to the iPhone via Apple's 'App Store', which can be launched either from the iPhone 3G itself, or via iTunes. Applications vary in size, from 1MB upwards, and in price, with an average of around $10 per application. At launch, there were more than 500 applications on offer, with around 200 of those being free, which is quite impressive.

Certainly, you've been able to add applications to Windows smartphones for quite some time, but the process has been painful; you had to find the application, download it, sync your phone and hope it all worked, as there was no real approval authority. Moreover, you had to hit different sites to get different applications. The beauty of the App Store approach is that it's all centralised, pricing is clear, and in Australian dollars, and the installation procedure is extremely streamlined.

With over 500 applications at the time of writing it's tough to highlight every worthy contender. Certainly, casual games are proving popular, from classic titles like Tetris to Sega's addictive Super Monkey Ball, as well as more sedate pursuits such as Hold 'Em Poker. Total online junkies will appreciate embedded Facebook and Twitter, and those traveling may want to grab one of the free Talking Language phrasebooks, currently in French, German, Italian and Spanish. On the subject of Free applications, we found that the Free 'Moo' app is good for entertaining young children - it turns your iPhone 3G into one of those tipping cans that emit a loud 'Moo' sound when it tips. Silly, but fun regardless, and in any case it's free.

One of the best applications that Apple offers for the iPhone 3G also happens to be, like the best things in life, free. It's an in-house Apple app called 'Remote', which turns your iPhone 3G (or, if you've got one, your iPod Touch) into a remote control for Apple TV and iTunes library files located on the same wireless network. This gives you control over your music and video wherever you are, as long as your iPhone can see the wireless network (and after a very painless pairing procedure) you can search your libraries, play back files and even browse cover view for your albums. It's little surprise that it's consistently the most popular iPhone application available yet.

The iPhone internet experience

The iPhone 3G's Safari browser works surprisingly well for a mobile phone browser. It's not as full featured as the one on your PC right now, to be sure, but it's astonishingly close. It's undoubtedly a mile ahead of anything that anyone's put on a phone to date, both in terms of the way it renders web pages, and the way you can zoom between them, run multiple pages and even rotate the screen display to make some pages easier to view.

Safari supports secure HTTPS sessions, meaning it should support online banking (although we'd strongly suggest not doing so from a public Wi-Fi hotspot), but one thing it doesn't support yet is Flash-based websites, including YouTube. Yes, there's a YouTube link directly on the iPhone 3G interface, but that's due to wheeling and dealing between Apple and Google (owners of YouTube) that sees 'selected' YouTube content re-encoded in an iPhone 3G-friendly .H264 video format.

Internet use (along with email) will form a major part of most people's data usage, and with many web pages these days weighing in at the multiple megabyte level, for things like banking and online ticket ordering, combined with the somewhat expensive data plans on offer for the iPhone, it may well be worth using the phone's calling capabilities for some tasks that can be done quickly, rather than the web interface.

The iPhone's GPS capabilities

The iPhone's GPS capabilities are in what we can only describe as a curious state of flux. On a technical level, the GPS in the iPhone 3G is very good indeed. It uses a mix of GPS, mobile phone tower and even local Wi-Fi hotspot triangulation to get your position, a solution that's normally known as 'Assisted GPS'.

Typically, you'll get a very quick - within about five seconds in our experience - lock on your relative position, followed by absolute GPS positioning within a minute or so. The inbuilt Maps application uses Google Maps to provide either a flat 2D road layout, Google Earth's satellite view, or a hybrid of the two approaches. There are no spoken directions, but it is possible to plan trips. We'd advise having an incar navigator to read them to the driver, however, as the lack of a 3D view makes reading the GPS screen a touch tricky.

Where it gets more complex for Aussie users depends on your carrier and network quality, as all the maps have to be downloaded dynamically. Within a good 3G coverage area this isn't much of a problem, but if you do get into a bad signal area, or have to drop to 2G data, Google Maps struggles to keep up. In the interests of technical accuracy, we took an iPhone 3G connected to Optus' network for a drive up the F3 freeway outside Sydney, and can report that the data speed of the network is around 65Kph - as in, that's the fastest you can drive in a 2G area and still have Google Maps keep up reliably.

Where the GPS remains in flux is that the current Apple software developer's kit prohibits the development of 'Real Time Route Guidance' software - that's the kind of thing you'd find in the average Navman GPS, for the layman. That's Apple's current position, and we can only hope they reverse it; the iPhone's large screen and, say, TomTom's approach to simple GPS guidance (along with already downloaded maps) would make the iPhone truly excellent. As it is, the GPS is merely adequate, and that's a pity given the potential.

The iPhone: so much more than simply a phone

Talk is not the apple of your iPhone, writes Alex Kidman. Music, video, GPS and the entertainment delights of the internet are all just a touch away.

Apple's iPhone 3G ignited public interest in a way that no other mobile phone handset has done. As a phone it's entirely functional, and its online capabilities are pretty well documented elsewhere. It doesn't hurt that Apple's thrown its savviest designers at the thing, either; this is undeniably a pretty looking smartphone, and when you consider that the Blackberry is usually held up as the archetypal smartphone, that's somewhere where designers could really only go upwards. Still, beyond the basic telephony, there's a lot that can be done with the iPhone 3G that both enhances its functionality and its appeal.

Not all iAccessories are equal...

There's an issue with many mobile phones and external AV equipment; while it's often possible to output to other devices (most notably speakers), this often requires the use of a custom connector. Said custom connector does have accessories, but inevitably they're produced only by the phone vendor in question - so often, say, your Sony Ericsson phone will work only with the Sony Ericsson-supplied headphones, because they're the only ones using that connector.

The iPhone is technically no different in this regard, except for the fact that it uses the standard iPod connector dock, and as you're probably aware, there's no shortage of iPod docking equipment out there. If you do need to refresh your memory, our guide to iPod speaker docks is a good start.

AVL340 - AVLabs My Tube - $399.95

So, you might think, the iPhone 3G comes with an army of accessories, right?

Well, sort of. The connector is standard, but there are a few catches.

First of all, the twitchy issue of power. The iPod dock connector has two pins dedicated to power delivery; one USB based, and one using the Firewire standard. Firewire was the connection method of choice for video for many years and, critically, the original connection method for the original iPods. For manufacturing/cost reasons, quite a number of recharging units/battery packs use the Firewire pin on the dock connector, even if they never connect with an actual Firewire interface. But the iPhone 3G lacks that Firewire pin, and won't be able to charge from it.

We tested connecting up an older battery pack to the iPhone 3G, only to have a curt message pop up telling us it wasn't a compatible charger. What makes this difficult is that there's no easy way to tell if the dock connector uses Firewire or USB pins for charging until you plug it in. You can confidently expect that anything produced from now on with iPhone 3G compatibility should work - and certainly, if you purchased an item expecting this and making that expectation clear at the time of purchase, you'd be entitled to a refund.

In terms of speaker docks, we found everything that we chucked the iPhone into worked without a problem, but some reports online indicated otherwise. One thing the iPhone 3G will do when connected to many speaker outlets (including some incar FM transmitters, as we found during testing) is offer to switch the 2G/3G phone connectivity off in order to reduce interference with the speakers. If you've ever left your mobile on top of improperly shielded speakers and been assaulted by something that sounds all too much like Kraftwerk rather than the Mozart Piano Concerto you were expecting, you're probably aware of why.

If you're after new accessories in any case, we'd strongly advise you check for specific 'iPhone 3G' compatibility listings, as even the original 2G iPhone used the older Firewire power pins, and so something that just lists 'iPhone' compatibility might not work.

As for AV output, you're currently stuck with a singular connection choice - Apple's own $59 composite/component cables. Expect this to change very quickly indeed, though. With sales in excess of a million units in its first couple of days on sale, third-party AV vendors will be lining up around the block.