iPod Touch - The Good, the Bad, and the Pretty

A friend of mine just bought an iPod Touch (1), and despite my usual dismissal of anything made by Apple, I took a look at it anyways...

Savour the moment, because I won't say this often...
Apple. Did. Good.

The Good
I'm really impressed with the motion-sensitive features. If you hold it the right way up, you get the 'Now Playing' view. But tilt it on it's side, and you get the cover browser, where you can flick through albums by album artwork. My friend doesn't share my music collection OCD - most of the covers were missing, but I'll bet it looks awesome when they're all there.

I'm also impressed by the on-screen keyboard. As someone with chubby fingers, handheld devices and touch screens have always been something of a challenge for me - the only phone that I've never had trouble with was my old Nokia 3510i with it's huge buttons.
However, the on-screen keyboard on the iPod Touch just seemed to work for me, and even browsing the web and clicking on links was easy.

The iPod managed to connect to my home wireless network without a problem, even with the WPA2-PSK encryption that has tripped up a number of other devices I've tried, and with a particular third-party tool (ommm, don't tell Apple), the iPod can even ssh into my Media Server-type thing (2).

The Bad
So... the iPod Touch left me pretty impressed, but I'm not about to become a fully paid-up, card carrying Apple fanboy just yet - there are still a couple of downsides that are stopping me from running and parting with £200 of my hard-earned student loan: :)
1 - Would cost £200 of my hard-earned student loan.
Yeah, it's pretty, but a music player would spend most of it's life in my pocket. £200? I could pick up an Asus Eee PC for not a lot more.
2 - No surprises here, but playing OGG Vorbis files isn't happening on the iPod Touch, and it's unlikely to happen in the future.
Apple, take note - the actual music is *always* more important than the music player. So if I like my music in the (open, free, better quality) OGG Vorbis format, and your player doesn't support it - that's one less customer for you. And the FOSS community is growing all the time...

The Pretty


Conclusion
Despite some predictable downsides (proprietary and expensive), the iPod Touch is a bit good :)
But I'll be sticking to my Rockbox'ed Video iPod (coming soon), and my oggy musical goodness :D


(1) - I've heard a lot of people call it an 'iTouch'... It's supposed to be called 'iPod Touch'... but anyone who can say 'iTouch' without giggling like a schoolgirl has my infinite respect - I'm still laughing now.

(2) - As promised in a previous post, I'll write a little something about my Media-server type thing in the near future.