Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

(Review updated slightly to fix really obvious spelling errors, and to reflect a week plus of usage.) Updated a second time... Third Update: My iPod touch is dead. I came in last night, and the screen suddenly stopped responding to touch, though audio continued playing. It then rebooted, and still didn't respond to touch. Then it wouldn't even turn on. I saw a review on here from a few days ago talking about condensation from rapid temperature changes killing these, and I wonder if that's what happened here. At any rate, I'm done with the mobile OS X/iPhone/iPod touch platform. I have a lot of issues with it. Because the Zune software appears to be incompetent for podcasts and audio books, I have no choice but to buy an iPod classic, which is what I should have done to begin with. Just ordered the grey model from Amazon a few minutes ago. Hopefully it will last me the years that my older hard drive based iPods did. -Forgot to mention, the touch is truly dead. My computers can't even "see" it. It's not just the screen that died (actually the screen is probably just fine...) Back to the review: I've owned numerous iPods over the years prior to the 2nd Gen Touch. I bought it over a new nano or some other model because I thought potentially I'd be able to have it replace my Palm OS PDA at some point. In retrospect, I'm VERY disappointed with it, and would not buy it again. For starters-unlike my earlier iPods, the touch actually REQUIRES registration-it's locked until you do that. That's unacceptable (and actually probably illegal). I'd register it if it were optional, but this kind of "activation"/DRM isn't acceptable. Beyond that, the unit is a pain for a lot of practical reasons. -Even with hardware volume buttons, I'm finding the touch controls much more frustrating than physical buttons like the regular iPod models have. You have to look at it to hit the software button, and it's easy to (for example) accidentally hit the button to jump back to the beginning of a track, rather than pause it. Fast forwarding through a track is a pain too compared with hardware buttons. -Related to the above-mainly it's just very hard for me to use in the car-unsafe. It's occurred to me that all I'd really need to "fix" it would be a wired remote, but the wired remote that includes a radio dosen't work with the touch (and from the reviews of that product, it sounds like it's not well built anyway). -On top of software buttons being annoying, the interface is also sometimes unresponsive-and you don't know "did I not press at the right spot" or "is it just not responding to input yet"? Sometimes when I switch screens it will randomly not respond to button presses for a few seconds. It's like either the CPU isn't fast enough, or the software isn't efficient enough. -I also dislike the interface changing in the audio player application based on the unit's orientation. To me the alternate horizontal interface isn't useful at all, and the player is constantly shifting to it. I have to hold it upright for several seconds to get it to shift back to the normal mode (occasionally the lag is exceptionally long). I'd like the ability to just lock it on the normal interface. (Thankfully video is always locked to a single interface, only changing orientation if you physically flip the unit around 180 degrees.) -While its PIM abilities are far better than the "traditional" iPod models, they're VASTLY inferior to a Palm OS device from even a decade ago. The interface is clunky and slow by comparison (even if it's graphically shiny and flashy). Finding and viewing data is much slower. (And of course right now it's missing basic features like Office suite support that Palm OS devices have had for a decade). -Related to that, text entry is painful. Graffiti is slower and more annoying than a real keyboard. Thumb keybaords are also slower and more annoying than a real keyboard. But both are vastly superior to Apple's virtual keyboard here. It has some interesting auto-guessing features, but with some time put into it I'm realizing I'd never actually use this device to replace a real PDA...and without that use, I don't see any real reason not to go with a device better suited to be a dedicated media player. (It might depend on the size of your fingers, but I'm 6' and obviously don't have small fingers.) I will say the audio quality is excellent by my standards (as all my iPods have been except the 2nd gen Shuffle have been). It also syncs quickly. I like having a built in speaker-and have wanted one for years-but it's so quiet that it is of limited use, unfortunately. Even at home I'm often using headphones just so I can hear it. It's also far too quiet for alarms. That said, it is at least very clear sounding, and I'd certainly rather have it than not! Hopefully future models will have louder speakers, and they'll spread the speaker to the other iPod models. In theory it seems like I'd at least prefer the touch for video because of the large screen, but even there I strongly prefer my 5th gen regular iPod. it's still too easy to accidentally hit the wrong software button, and fast forwarding through commercials (I watch a lot of video recorded from my Tivo) is much much harder than on my 5th gen with hardware buttons. UPDATE: I'm somewhat softened on it's video playback at least. I still prefer my 5th gen as being easier to navigate video, but the extra screen inch is nice-but I use it much more for audio than video, so... The web browser is one of the best I've used on a mobile device (except for input). The separate Google Maps application seems nearly as fast as on a computer. UPDATE: I HAVE used it with WPA for quite a while now. It works (unlike most mobile devices), but it's SLOOOOOOW to connect. Like it can take minutes. A coworker with an iPhone running the same OS revision has the exact same issue. Makes WPA much less practical for many uses. (My coworker just completely disabled it and connects to an unsecure network.) -I have noticed that if Wi-Fi has been off for while, to get it it to turn on, I have to flip it on, then flip it off, and then back on again. For some reason it doesn't actually turn on the first time I flick the software switch). Basically the point I'm trying to make with this review is, it's not for everyone. Really think twice about what you want the device for. I think most people looking for a media player will be much happier with an iPod nano, classic, or even a Zune (which seems to be fairly solid, though the desktop software seems much more primitive than iTunes, and its features are lagging behind the iPod models, generally). The iPod touch is annoying enough to me that I'm seriously thinking of picking up either a (much cheaper) iPod nano/classic or Zune, and just cutting my losses with this. UPDATE: I'm still planning on picking up a new media player. Still haven't decided which one, though leaning towards a nano, just because I'm not crazy about having a hard drive in these devices (though my 5.5G iPod served me well for over two years).