iPod touch

I was in the local Apple store and the iPod touch was getting a lot of attention while the iPhone and Air were getting much less attention. One of the sales dudes came over and asked me if I had any questions about the touch and I said that I was waiting for the price to come down to $199. His response was that he was too and that he would have one himself right now if it was.

That is the story of me and all Apple products. They insist on pricing them just high enough so that I am able to resist buying them. I am in aw of their uncanny anti-marketing ability.

The iPhone and Air are great products and get most of the fanfare, but I see the touch as a super-great product with a truly amazing collection of computing capabilities built into even a smaller form factor than the iPhone.

I know absolutely zero about design ("ID" or Indiustrial Design), but I like the iPod touch better than the iPhone because it does not have that annoying shiny edge around it. The touch has a more subtle gray that does not distract my eye and makes the color icons seem to really be floating in a sea of black rather than contained by that silly chrome (?) border that feels to me as if it makes the screen smaller and more cramped.

The touch does not have a cell phone or camera, but does have Wi-Fi and the full Safari Web browser and most of the same software applications.

The display screen is the same size as the iPhone (3.5" diagonal), but the physical device is significantly smaller, 8 mm thick as compared to 11.6 mm for the iPhone (1/3 thinner!), 61.8 wide as compared to 61 mm for the iPhone (slightly wider), and 110 mm high as compared to 115 mm for the iPhone. And it weighs 4.2 ounces as compared to 4.8 ounces for the iPhone. Oh, and you can get a whopping 32GB of storage, as compared to a max of 16 GB for the iPhone.

Oh, and I am not even looking at this for playing music, but as a next-generation PDA device. A true handheld computer. In fact, a true Internet in your pocket.

For some reason, I cannot find a link to get to the specs from the Apple store web page, but here are the iPod touch Technical Specifications. Or start from the main iPod touch page.

-- Jack Krupansky