A new iPod Touch and a step up in the mp3 world.

A new year rings in, and I'll be straight to the point: I got myself a new iPod. It's an iPod Touch with 16gb of space; 8 gigs extra than my previous nano. What's better is that it was a bonus christmas present, because my mother had bought it for my father Christmas last year (2012, that is. It normally takes me a month or two to adjust to the idea of time being an extra number into A.D). He never used it, and had no interest to, so he gave it to me. How jammy of me!

I was never that bothered about iPods, or any sort of portable mp3 player. I lost the last two before I acquired the 8gb Nano off my sister, who didn't want it anymore. Truth be told, I'm quite pleased with it. I know exactly why iPods and iPads and pretty much anything by Apple has been so successful: all of their products focus on being user-friendly. The iPod for example is such, because it is easy to navigate, and the learning experience is a joy for the user. Another prime factor here is how slick they are.

I might be late to this bandwagon, but I still feel like I'm catching up to the world when I'm using touchscreen interface to navigate and alter my playlists.

Its design interface is much like my own mobile phone (Sony Xperia, Android). I can turn it on by holding a button on the top-right for a couple of seconds. It has a slide to unlock function. Once I've done that I have two widgets available:

• The main menu which hosts Photos, Game Centre, iTunes (I don't know why when I already have my music on it by using the program on this computer), App Store, Settings, Utlitiesm Productivity, Reference, Newsstand and EZ Converter. At the bottom of the widget, it has an icon for Messages, Mail, Safari and Music. It also has Wifi, which I find pretty convenient as it seems to have a stronger connection than my phone does.
• The other widget is a Search Engine where the keyboard feature pops up underneath automatically. When I type in to the box for 'iPod Touch' it asks me if I want to search via Safari or Wikipedia. The latter takes me to a version of Wikipedia that obviously accommodates for the iPod Touch. 

So far, I have played with the Music feature, primarily. Given that I am monumentally controlling and organised with my music library, everything is correctly tagged and equipped with the appropriate album artwork (I don't have single songs in my library - I always need the full album). I have several ways to approach the listing of music on this device, but I usually prefer listing them by Artist due to the easy, alphabetical nature of searching for the things I want to play. I can apply the same alphabetical nature to Songs, Albums, Genres and even Composers. Any fan of the iPod can of course already do all of these things on the Nano, but the major difference is that with the Touch, these approaches are a tap away on the bottom as tabs, whereas you have to backtrack on the menu with the Nano in order to alter your approach. In this sense, it is very clear that massive improvements have been made to the iPod, and many new features as pointed out have integrated. It's more than just a simple mp3 player now.

In terms of flaws, I only despair at how small the touch-keyboard function is. It makes me feel fat, but I think I've had this problem with pretty much all touchscreen interfaces. It might be better on the much bigger iPads, but I dare not touch one of those just yet.