“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.