Eye up the new iPod touch and you’d be forgiven for thinking nothing has changed. Externally, Apple’s finger-friendly iPod is the same as the previous generation, but inside it’s all new. Read our iPod touch 3G review now to see if it’s worth a punt.
Apple’s squeezed in a more powerful set of chips to make the new iPod touch “up to 50% faster” and it feels it. We tried a selection of apps and games, from Touchgrind and Spore to Facebook and Spotify and found the new iPod touch blitzed through them all.
Apple has built in new PowerVR SGX graphics hardware too, so just like the iPhone 3GS, this new iPod will be able to squeeze the most from complex visuals into the latest games and apps.
There are other similarities to the iPhone 3GS too. Apple’s Voice Control features have made the jump to the new 32GB and 64GB versions of the iPod touch. The high-end players now come packed with mic-equipped headphones, ready to react to your spoken commands. Just like the iPhone 3GS, the system works very well, letting you direct the new iPod touch towards specific playlists, artists or songs without rummaging in your pocket.
Synced up to the all-new iTunes 9, the iPod touch will also serve up Apple’s new Genius Mixes, which blend together music of the same genre and style to create a virtual radio station from your library’s contents. In our case it paired up Elbow, Radiohead, Doves and… The Seahorses, but you can’t win ‘em all.
Read our iPod nano 5G review now
But it’s not all good news. We’ve already noted that Voice Control is limited to the high-end models of Apple’s new iPod touch, and in adding a speedier set of innards it seems the big-screened player has had to take a hit on battery life. Apple now states it’ll last for 30 hours playing music, down from 36 for the previous generation, although its rated six hours of video playback remains the same.
In practice, however, those six hours are hard to notice. There’s still plenty of juice to last a long-haul flight, and if you’ve yet to make the jump to Apple’s touch platform, the new iPod touch provides the most tempting reasons yet: new features that’ve proven their worth on the iPhone 3G, and a larger capacity option dishing up 64GB of flash, just itching to be stuffed with songs.
Yes, it’s an incremental update, but one that should be tempting enough to turn heads.
