BusinessWeek reviews Apple’s iPod touch: ‘In a class by itself’

“The new iPod Touch from Apple is in a class by itself. It’s like an iPhone, only without the phone. It’s a music player, though not your best choice if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s a wonderful video player and Web browser, despite certain limitations. Most important, it’s beautiful, and I bet it sells like crazy, even at $299 for an 8-gigabyte version and $399 for 16GB,” Stephen H. Wildstrom reports for BusinessWeek.

“Although it’s called an iPod, for music, the iPod Classic, at $249 for 80GB, is much more capacious, and the newly video-enabled Nano, $149 for 4GB, is much cheaper. Besides, devices optimized for one function—playing music—do it better than the most elegant multipurpose product. The lack of dedicated [physical] volume-control buttons on the Touch is especially annoying,” Wildstrom reports.

“The chief attraction of the Touch is the Web browser which technology is shared with the iPhone and is by far the best on any handheld device. None of the others let you magnify or shrink the contents of a large Web page by spreading or pinching your thumb and index finger, or drag a page just by touching the screen,” Wildstrom reports.

“Wi-Fi can also be used to download music, but not videos, directly from the iTunes store. (The same capability has been added to the iPhone.) And the Touch can view a selection of videos from YouTube,” Wildstrom reports.

More in the full review here.

21 Comments

  1. No Squirt: “whose: belonging to or associated with which person”

    Doesn’t matter, No Squirt — the original article is still poor English usage.

    The offending sentence should arguably have been written thus:

    “The chief attraction of the Touch is the web browser, the technology of which is shared with the iPhone . . . “

  2. @ No Squirt For You

    Okay smarty-pants, lets do a comparision:

    Number of buttons:
    The iPod touch only has one button. The Zune has three.
    Winner: Zune

    Versions that come in brown:
    None for the iPod touch. The Zune is available in brown.
    Winner: Zune

    Content which can be obtained with points:
    iPod Touch: none. Zune: anything on Zune Marketplace can be purchased with points, which is way better than currency.
    Winner: Zune

    Score: iPod Touch 0, Zune 3. Who’s laughing now, No Squirt For You?

    Welcome to the Social.

  3. The Touch is a beautiful product. However, for my money its better to get an
    iPhone and simply not activate it… then you’ve got a super Touch. yea, yea, I know, with less memory. but you get Mail on wi-fi and a calendar you can post to!

  4. C3P0: Excellent analysis, C3P0. Thank you so much. I hope you sent a correction to Stephen Wildstrom.

    Class is dismissed.

    (P.S. To R: Boy, did you get that wrong. I’m many things but pretty didn’t make the list.) ” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />

  5. I’m thinking of getting an iPod touch. Could somebody please clarify about the lack of a volume control on the device? Is it that there is no “quick-access” volume control, or is it just impossible to do anything with the volume (i.e. it is predetermined, and there’s nothing you can do about it)?

    Thanks.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.