OMG! Ponies!
Before the announcement earlier today the question was, will it be the fat iPod nano, the touchscreen iPod, or what?
Turns out both the ‘fat nano’ (miniature iPod with complete video support) and the multitouch iPod are for reals! And the iPod touch has Wi-Fi! And they’re going to have a mobile iTunes store, something that was ‘obviously’ missing from the iPhone package. Hilariously enough, when you’re in a participating Starbucks store, your iPod will automatically tell you what tune Starbucks are piping in to your ears, with a button to instantly purchase it: Starbucks want to set themselves up as a music promoter!
For £199 I would personally be very tempted to get an iPod touch purely as a super-duper web browser and video player (since experience shows I spend little of my life in situations where a portable music player is in itself useful).
Compared the specs of the iPod touch with my Nokia N800 internet tablet:
- Lower screen resolution: 480×320 as opposed to 800×480.
- Closed development platform, versus a Linux operating system on the N800
- No doodle program. No mention of notes.
- No video camera (which I have not been able to make use of anyway)
- You can’t upgrade the memory; no SD Card slot
- Multi-touch rather than stylus. I would really like to not have to use the stylus.
Better web browser: Safari versus Opera (I think); zoom to div makes text easier to read than Opera’s page zoom. More fonts. Apple's excellend Unicode support.- iTunes rather than the bare-bones media player on the N800
- Better battery
- Easier to charge (docking station)
- Support for H.264 codec in videos, which is what hi-res videos from YouTube are in
- Support for AAC audio, so randomly chosen podcasts are more likely to work
- Copy videos by syncing with iTunes, rather than the clumsy methods I use now
- 16GB rather than 1GB (with the SD card I currently own)
- Pocket-sized rather than satchel-sized