I recently sold my iPod Touch through Craigslist. I’d had it for a month, and couldn’t stand it any longer. I’m normally a pretty big fan of Apple products; my desktop computer is a Mac Mini, and I lust after the new Macbook Air, but the iPod Touch really isn’t as wonderful as Apple would have you believe. Desirable, yes, but wonderful, no. I attribute the desirability to Apple’s incredible marketing and design departments, not it’s functionality. What it comes down to is the following:

  • It’s an mp3 player, not the cure for cancer – The way Steve Jobs has hyped the gadget, you’d think the iPod Touch would cure cancer, bring world peace, bring an end to the global hunger epidemic, and bring comfort to the huddled masses. Obviously, it does none of that. But it does play mp3s. I think Steve Jobs set the expectation for the poor thing way too high, so it should come as no surprise that it doesn’t quite live up to the hype.

  • It’s not even that good an mp3 player – My little $40, discontinued Rio player is more functional at playing mp3s than the iPod Touch. What is comes down to is that the Rio has dedicated buttons that handle playback and volume. With the iPod, you have to use the touch screen, which goes to sleep. In order to, say, change the track, you have to first wake up the screen. This involves pushing the single button on the iPod Touch, sliding the unlock control, finding the the correct screen, or bringing up the playback controls, and then change the track. In most cases this involves three steps, but it can be more, depending on what you’ve been doing with the iPod in the meantime. I push one button on my Rio. Most mp3 players are like the Rio in that regard.

  • The touchscreen really makes life inconvenient sometimes – This is kind of tied in with the last point. For a lot of functions, having to use the touchscreen is a huge gigantic pain. I already mentioned the playback controls. If you want to change the volume you have to hunt around for the right screen. If you had the volume way up because you had the iPod plugged into external speakers, then, say, put in earphones and hit play, your ears will be a bleeding mess in the 10 minutes it takes you to navigate to the volume screen and turn it down. In the panicked state produced by an eardrum-obliterating blast of sound, it’s tough to think very clearly, and it can take way longer than it normally would to find the right controls.

  • Three seconds after you open the package you have a giant greaseball on your hands – Because Apple wanted to make the iPod Touch shiny and glossy and touchy-feely and desireable, it takes fingerprints like the gas pump takes your money. With all the touching and sliding and poking and prodding the iPod Touch instantly looks trashed. You can clean it, and it will look pretty, but once you put down the cleaning cloth it’s instantly greasy again.

  • The web browser is a hairsbreadth away from useless – The only sites that work well are those designed specifically to be used with smart phones or other devices with itty-bitty screens. That of itself isn’t so bad but for the fact that the iPod Touch clearly tries to make every web site available and useful to you. It makes you think “ok, I’ll just flip this little guy on his side and this web site will look good and be useful to me! I’ll zoom in and I’ll zoom out, and it will be almost like a real computer!” In reality, web sites are completely unreadable when you’re zoomed out enough to get the full width of the site, and when you zoom in close enough to read you can get maybe half a sentence on the screen at a time. It’s really, really a pain trying to browse on the iPod Touch.

  • $300 for 8GB of storage! - Re. Tar. Ded. The new Zune 80 has ten times the space for $50 less. Flash memory ain’t that special. Want another 8GB? Another $100. Apple really soaks you on memory cost, even on it’s computers.

  • The headphones suck – They don’t fit my ears, they don’t sound that great, they’re slippery and won’t stay in right. But hey, they’re white, right?

I think Apple tried to do too much with the iPod Touch. Ultimately, I want devices that do things well. I’d rather have an mp3 player that works great and a PDA that works great, and a web browser (on my laptop) that works great than an iPod Touch that handles all of that, but does so poorly. Sometimes Apple takes it’s do-everything-with-a-super-simple-interface design philosophy too far. In this case they should have done maybe two or three things well and left it at that. Also, a few more buttons would be nice.

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