The Music, Movies and Photos applications operate just like their iPhone equivalents - there, Movies and Music are combined into a single app, iPod. The default Playlists, Artists, Songs, Albums and More tabs can be rearranged and changed - maybe you'd rather have Podcasts listed than Playlists, for example.
From album art...
Rotating the Touch through 90° pops up the iTunes-derived Cover Flow, and you can flick through the album covers on display quickly - the animation is smooth and lag-free. Tapping an album rotates the cover to reveal a track listing - click on the one you want to start playing it, or tap elsewhere on the screen to go back to Cover Flow. Rotating the Touch back presents the cover of the album you've selected with easily reachable play/pause, track skip and volume controls. A button at the top right flips the cover round to reveal the track listing - as this happens the track list button itself rotates into a tiny album art icon.
Tap anywhere else on the album cover and a bar appears showing you how long the current track's been playing and how long there is to go, along with a progress bar that you can shuttle along by dragging a blue blob - just like adjusting the volume.
...to Cover Flow, at the flick of a wrist
The Video app works broadly the same way, just with fewer list options and video playback fixed in landscape mode no matter how you hold the player. This makes sense, because you want to maximise the viewing area. Tapping the screen brings up the playback controls, and you can double-tap to switch between fitting the video to the screen's horizontal dimensions - so you get black bars above and below the picture - and its height, so the picture fills the screen, but you may lose a bit off either end. Videos encoded in a 4:3 ratio are not stretched to fit, but appear with black bars to the sides.
Full control video
Some early users in the US complained about the quality of the Touch's display, in particular the way darker areas of the picture appeared brighter than they should have. A duff batch of screens or an endemic fault? It's hard to say, but we found the display eminently watchable and we didn't experience any problems with it, whether we were watching videos we'd sync'd over with iTunes or content accessed through the YouTube app.
COMMENTS
@Ascylto
So when you praise an apple product you are being fair and if you criticise one you are being what... unfair? biased??
/shakes head.
iPod Touch != N800
They're rather different devices.
The iPod is a good media player, but 320x480 just ain't gonna cut it for websurfing, IMHO.
The N800 is a geek-toy for developers, with a good (800x480) screen for some quick surfing, but it's too bulky to really be a good replacement for the iPod as a portable media player.
I love (not carnally, mind) my N800, and use the Navicore GPS kit quite a bit, but it's not something I'd recommend to non-propellerheads.
The iPod Touch, however, would be of little use to me.
Different strokes...
Where's Cade Metz when you need him?
What?
An article praising an Apple product?
You must really want tickets to the next Apple bonanza! But be careful ... you are at risk of getting a reputation for fairness and that would never do!
Nice, one Apple (and El Reg, for once).
90% is about right.
I have had one for 2 weeks now and generally I am pleased with it. The sound (once I got rid of the basic ear buds) is very good and mostly the controls are nice. I do however have some niggles with it.
1. The lack of specific Volume buttons to me is quite annoying, I really would prefer having dedicated buttons for that.
2. The screen for me while watching video is on the whole very nice, as long as the video is bright. Dark colours seem to be a bit muddy on my one.
3. Itunes. Unfortunatly I am not a big fan. Just a personal preference thing but not that thrilled being forced to use it.
4. Safari. On the whole it renders pages very nicely and with little issue, however it seems to have problems with pages that have frames that have a set viewable resolution and are very long. You find yourself having to scroll a looong way down sometimes as it wants to render the whole frame and not just the visible part it seems.
Also would like to be able to set the page width/rendered resolution manually. That is a wish however and not really a complaint.
5. It's soo shiny.. Too bloody shiny.. not to worry tho.. the back of mine will very soon be a mat finish from all the scratches. :P
6. Why the cut down version of the calendar? Minor issue but annoying.
On the whole tho a nice item that does what it says well.
"Click!"
Damn I can't justify why I would buy one of these, but I know i'm going to be clicking a Buy button any day now.
It just looks soooo nice.
