It's cheerful, colorful and versatile, and though it technically has competition, Apple's iPod touch still stands alone. While we still classify it as an MP3 player, the fully redesigned iPod touch is more like a smartphone without the phone, bringing more than 700,000 iOS apps along with iTunes, iBooks, and the rest of the Apple ecosystem to folks who don't want to pay full iPhone freight. This year's touch is a significant upgrade: It's faster, with a much better screen, a new camera, better headphones, and a new body design to die for.
This is the fifth iteration of the iPod touch, and it's the first model that's not getting a five-star rating. That's because it's a five-star product at a three-star price. Don't worry, it's still our Editors' Choice. There's nothing like it that's quite as good, but the entry-level price for this new model is very high. It's now $299 (32GB) or $399 (64GB), up from $199?and we called the $199 entry price 'hefty' two years ago. While that comes with double the storage (32GB, up from 16GB), it also makes the touch much more costly for all the people who want to use it for light gaming, Web browsing, and music. For those folks, last year's five-star touch is still available at $199. To find out what's new, read on.
Physical Design and Wi-Fi
The new iPod touch is the most elegant device I've ever handled?and yes, that includes the iPhone 5. It's shockingly thin, feather-light, and clad in an absolutely gorgeous wraparound aluminum body. You hardly notice it in your pocket.
Longer, slimmer, lighter, and better-looking than the 2011 iPod touch?, the new touch is available in blue, pink, red, yellow, gray, or black aluminum. At an amazing .24 inches thick and 3.10 ounces, it's almost two-dimensional and weightless. It's longer than previous touches at 4.86 inches high to accommodate a super-sharp 4-inch, 1,136-by-640 screen, but the same width as previous models at 2.31 inches wide. The new display is just like the one on the iPhone 5, and noticeably brighter than the previous iPod touch's screen. On the bottom you'll find an extremely tinny-sounding speaker, the 3.5mm headphone jack, and?Apple's new, compact Lightning connector, which, unfortunately, isn't natively compatible with any existing accessories without a $29 adapter. Apple says more Lightning docks and video-out cables are coming soon, but there's no exact timeframe.
In the box you get a pair of Apple's vastly improved EarPods?, and a "loop," a color-coordinated wrist strap that attaches to a pop-out button on the back panel of the player. The idea for the loop is to make the touch feel like a point-and-shoot digital camera, thanks to the 5-megapixel shooter that's been added to the back. The strap gets in the way when you're holding the touch in both hands to play games, though.
One of the major improvements here is enhanced wireless performance, which is especially important in a Wi-Fi-only device. Like the iPhone 5, the touch supports 802.11n Wi-Fi on the 5GHz band. In speed tests using the Ookla Speedtest.net app, we got double the Wi-Fi download speeds on 5GHz as opposed to 2.4GHz. That didn't have an effect on Web page load times, as the 2.4GHz network was fast enough that the touch's processor speed was what mattered there, but latency in wireless AirPlay gameplay was reduced.?
Performance and Apps
Built around the iPhone 4S's dual-core 800MHz A5 processor, the touch turns in solid performance. (The previous model had the iPhone 4's single-core A4 processor.) On the Geekbench system benchmark and GLBenchmark graphics benchmarks, the touch scored almost identically to the iPhone 4S running iOS 6.0. Scores on the Web-based Sunspider and Browsermark benchmarks were both a touch higher than the 4S, but the touch is in turn smoked by the much faster iPhone 5.
In real life, the performance differences between this touch, the previous iPod touch/iPhone 4, and the new iPhone 5 will build up with time. I couldn't find any app, even super-high-end games like Asphalt 7: Heat and Lili, that wouldn't run here, and those graphics-heavy apps will run much more smoothly than on the previous touch. Compared with the iPhone 5 (with its A6 processor, twice as fast as this one), I saw slightly smoother animations in games on the iPhone 5, much faster rendering of Google Earth images and faster Web pages loads. That's to be expected.
The touch runs Apple's?iOS 6, just like the iPhone 5. This OS update includes the aforementioned Wi-Fi improvements, wireless syncing, and AirPlay mirroring of your touch's display to an Apple TV, and also iMessage, Siri, Passbook, and the new Apple Maps. The older iPod touch will get most of these features if you update to iOS 6, but not Siri?for that you need a new device, but remember, you'll also need a working Wi-Fi connection.
The controversy over Apple's mapping app has just gone to show how spectacular Apple's array of third-party apps is. Within days of confirming issues with Apple Maps, we found 10 third-party alternatives in the App Store. That's the real strength of iOS, and that huge range of apps is why many people buy iPod touches. While Android is certainly catching up, you'll still find many games and other apps come out first and work best on iOS because Apple makes it easier for developers to make money from their work. (For more on that, read about One Android User's iPhone App Envy.)
The apps are getting huge, though, which is probably one reason Apple won't offer a new iPod touch smaller than 32GB. (There's no card slot for expansion here: Built-in storage is all you get.) It was easy to grab apps larger than 1GB each (Bard's Tale, Barefoot World Atlas, Asphalt 7: Heat, and Galaxy on Fire 2, to name a few), and my full load of 58 apps took up 10GB on our test device. Casual games are still much smaller, of course.
Battery life was a bit disappointing: I got 4 hours, 55 minutes of video playback with the screen at full brightness and Wi-Fi on, on an initial test. Since that's a bit less than the last generations' 5 hours, 32 minutes, and well short of the 8 hours Apple claims, I'll test it again after a few days' worth of charge and recharge cycles, and update this review.
(Next page: Camera, Multimedia and Conclusions)
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