So… new iPod… pretty cool, pretty cool. Except, despite what the fanboys will tell you, it ain’t perfect. Nope.
Far from it. What do I mean?
Yeah, what do I mean? John? Anyone?
• There’s no FM radio support (without third-party accessories). I’m pretty sure I can buy a $200 DAP in Chinatown that has FM radio support. Is it a battery issue? (But then how did they get Wi-Fi in there…?) Or does Apple simply not want me to be able to listen to my morning radio program of choice on my iPod? LAme, Apple.
• Lousy codec support. OK, so the 16GB found in the top-of-the-line Touch isn’t a whole lot of space (more on that later), but it’s still enough to hold a couple of FLAC albums. And no, no one uses Apple Lossless to encode their music. Still no OGG Vorbis, no WMA (even san DRM), etc. The iPod is about to turn six years old. You’d think Apple would at least throw the OSS community OGG support. It surely can’t be a processor speed issue anymore.
• No way to record audio. Again, probably not a feature too many folks would use, but would it really kill Apple to throw us a bone?
• 16GB is a little on the small size. I have acquired a whole lot more music than will fit on a puny 16GB flash drive. You’re basically telling power users that they’ll have to buy both an iPod Classic and iPod Touch if they want to be totally satisfied. Yawn.
• It doesn’t come out until… er, we don’t know, actually. A “few weeks” is all we know. Quoth Matt Hickey, “I don’t have one yet.” That’s a problem, to be sure.
Minor criticims, admittedly. But please don’t think that the Touch is the end all, be all as far as PMPs go.
But it’s still pretty impressive, all things considered.