[Vai Freak] Glacius

This is a dramatic change. I'm not an mp3 player freak, nor am I an owner of Apple/Mac products.

.. Until now.

The iPod Tocuh was released somewhere in September 2007, and I never admired it at first. But I ended getting it as a "desperate gift" (long story) in KL during my Christmas shopping with my family.

My previous mp3 player, the Zen Neeon, had only 512mbs, 32 hours of playback time, a radio, voice recorder (requires a mic, I think?), has 3 buttons and an irritating 2 way scoller.

There was a few reasons why I switched:

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. The small space for mp3s, especially when I wanted to flood it with my new-found favourite, Dream Theater mp3s.
. The scroller. You don't expect me to scroll through 300 files when the screen shows only 3 files per screen/page.
. It was too soft (now that I know how loud the iPod can get..)
---

But there was a few reasons that I refused to change:
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. The battery life of the Zen is definitely longer per charge.
. Volume control can be controlled through buttons, instead of a touch screen.
. Size.
. Custom EQ settings.
---

But then again, being short of time, and since I couldn't find my Guitar Grimoire series (which will take 4-6weeks to ship over according to Borders), we were in Low Yat, and I had nothing in mind, but an iPod Touch, or a new set of good headphones.

Knowing that if I get an iPod Touch, scrolling through an amount of files is no problem, especially when I saw my friend's iPod Classic. Best thing is, the touch sensitivity, is amazing.

Good thing it wasn't a Microsoft product, or it gets all sort of weird viruses.

So, the iPod Touch. What can I say? The size is big - but that's good. Which means that you have a bigger screen to look at when it comes to files and all. The fonts are exceptionally big, so adults of all sizes will be able to read them well. Response in terms of the touch-technology, is amazing. Very responsive. It's user friendly too.

Now, looking way past the music player, it has other features (or applications) available:

. Safari (To go online)
. YouTube (To go online and directs you to Youtube.com and watch videos)
. Calander (To add events like how'd you do on a handphone)
. Contacts (To add brief contacts of people)
. Clock
. Calculator
. Settings
. Video Player (only able to watch mpeg4, mp4 and H.264 files I think..)
. Photos
. iTunes Store

From a basic mp3 player/radio user, switching to that, it's like taking a jump from one village, to a satellite.

For iPod users, the capacity is indeed, rather small. It has only 8gb or 16gb released in the market. Whereas, correct me if I'm wrong, the iPod Classic has 80gb or 160gb. That's rather normal, especially when you have a lot of photos and videos to put in the iPod.

And of course, this thing does look like the iPhone, but it does not run smoothly like one. Nor does the original set comes with applications from the iPhone either. Noe does the iPod Touch comes with a camera like the iPhone. But that doesn't really matter to me, because if you wanted something that takes pictures and if you're interested in photography, get a Nikon D80s.

But the useful applications were definitely not featured in the iPod Touch, sadly. Like, who in the world uses the iPod Touch to keep contacts when most people who has it would have a handphone? Having Notes would be interesting and more practical, but they missed that out.

Anyways, besides all the mentioned, like Volkswagen with the W12 concept, they would use what they've researched before, and put it all into one piece. Yes, the light sensor, an XYZ-axis sensor, and a double-finger feature from a MacBookPro. The light sensor can be set through the general settings, if you want it to waste more battery by detecting current lighting conditions, giving you a better brightness setting to see the iPod while using it. Tilting the iPod Touch 90 degrees sideways, allows you to have different features, like scrolling through the albums for the artists you have in your iPod when you're in the music player. By doing the same in the Photo side, you're able to view them either in portrait or landscape during a slideshow or something.

Also, here's for those who never downloaded the actual instructions for the iPod Touch from apple.com, using your thumb and index finger to pinch or to reverse-pinch a picture or a website, makes you zoom in and out manually, and works better than double-tapping when you want details of the pictures or website documents.

It's brilliant.

Best of all, like any other Mac computers or laptops, they have a very high colour resolution. That I'm not informed about, but the colours on my laptop has nearly no match to it. It's amazing.

It's very good in its own ways, but here's a downside to the iPod Touch's appearance. Being a shiny black object with a chromed backside, it's extremely vulnerable to scratches. And if you're going to say that every object in this world is prone to that, the iPod Touch is 2 times more vulnerable than whatever you have in mind.

Besides that, when I first got my iPod Touch (And I'm not sure when they released the 1.1.2 update), the firmware version was 1.1.1. I didn't really make a big fuss out of that, but I realised that I could not create events in the calander no matter how hard I tried. Later on, with the help of tuaw.com, I found out that the 1.1.2 update was for this minor bug.

And besides that, the EQ setting was rather depressing. Although there are quite a number of choices to choose from, but you can not have your own customised EQ setting on the iPod Touch itself.

Overall, it's better than I'd expect. But being a Malaysian, the price is a problem.




Now this side of the review would be that the hackers of tuaw.com are constantly working around the clock to make your iPod Touches a little bit better. They managed to work out codings that keeps the iPod Touch intact and how iTunes being the only programme to react to it in terms of transferring files and all that. Meaning to say, they're able to crack it. The proper term you need to use google to search that up, would be "jailbreak". With that, you're able to install additional applicatons, like the ones you missed out from the iPhone, and - believe it or not - GameBoy Advanced, NES and the Sony Playstation emulators for you to play on the iPod Touch. The controls? It's going to be on the screen itself, so I think you can pretty much imagine.











Wrote this a few days ago when I was in PD ..