This year**, I received an iPod Touch as my main Christmas gift (16GB version, natch). Given that the thing is so damn expensive it was a three-way split between Paula, my folks and me, and hence not a surprise because I paid for some of it!

First impressions are very favourable. The device is reasonably thin (around 8mm), and extremely well built, as you’d expect from Apple. There are only two buttons: the on/off switch on the top edge, and the round ‘home’ button at the bottom of the fascia. Initially I had trouble figuring out how to turn the damn thing off though. Turns out you have to hold down the on/off switch for a bit, then a slider appears on-screen which you have to, er, slide to turn the iPod off.

The screen, as you probably know, responds to touch (hence the minimalist controls compared to standard iPods). In a word: it’s gorgeous (hang on, that’s two words). Bright, with vibrant colours, it’s superb for viewing photos and especially videos. Definitely a fingerprint magnet though.

However, the major triumph (as far as I’m concerned) is the Touch’s user interface, which is both easy to understand and a joy to use. It also looks fantastic: text is easy to read, even at small sizes, and there are graphical flourishes everywhere that bring a smile to your face (then again, I’m a sad geek when it comes to UIs). The on-screen keyboard that appears during text entry is a tad on the small side, but only those with the chubbiest digits would really have any major trouble with it: the rest of us just need to type a bit slower, and avoid using our thumbs!

I do have a few quibbles though. The Touch automatically locks itself and switches off the screen after a certain period of time: this delay is configurable in the UI, but obviously the longer the delay the more you’ll eat into the battery life. I don’t have an issue with this locking per se, however as there are no external buttons for controlling the volume, pausing or changing tracks, this has to be done using the relevant on-screen controls. What’s not immediately obvious is that you can double-tap the home button to overlay volume and transport controls on the current screen, and this works even when the Touch is locked so at least you don’t have to ’slide to unlock’ first. Regardless, it’s still not as convenient as hardware controls (you have to be able to see the screen for one thing), and I’m sure Apple will fix it in future hardware revisions (after all, even the iPhone has a volume control button).

My other issues are with the firmware, and are much more annoying. First, browsing albums doesn’t work properly if several albums share the same name, even if those albums are by different artists. Think “Greatest Hits” albums, for example. The net effect is that only one of the albums will appear in coverflow, but this one album will include tracks from the other albums having the same name. So if your iTunes library contained “Greatest Hits” by Queen and “Greatest Hits” by the Bangles (yeah, okay, stop sniggering at the back), then only the Queen album would appear in coverflow: tap it, and the track listing would show all of the Bangles “Greatest Hits” tracks as well as the Queen ones. This bug (and I do consider it a bug) also affects iTunes, but can be worked-around to some extent by using the album sort tags. Unfortunately, these tags seem to be ignored on the Touch, hence the only practical solution is to rename the album itself so that it is then unique. At the moment I’m adding the artist name to the end of the album title, like so: “Greatest Hits [Queen]“. Very clumsy.

My second gripe concerns compilation albums (why does so much hardware and software have trouble dealing with these?). In iTunes, you can tag a track as belonging to a compilation album. When viewing a list of artists on the iPod, those who have only contributed to compilation albums are not supposed to appear in the list, thus stopping those ‘one-hit wonders’ from cluttering things up. However, on the Touch this feature is broken, and the artists list contains everybody. I mean, I’ve got Acker Bilk in my artists list for crying out loud, just because he performed one poxy track on an ‘oldies’ compilation. Again, I consider it a bug because the other iPod models (eg. the latest Classic and Nano) don’t do this. As a workaround, I’m using the ’sort artist’ tag in iTunes to group all such artists together at the end of the artists list on the iPod: still in the list unfortunately, but at least they’re not interspersed with everyone else.

There are rumours of an iPod Touch firmware upgrade being released to coincide with Macworld Expo next week, and I sincerely hope these two issues get sorted. Okay, they’re minor issues in the grand scheme of things, and it seems a little churlish to complain about them when the rest of the device is so fantastic, but hey, there’s always room for improvement, right?

* maybe ‘hate’ is too strong a word, but “it’s a love-minor quibbles thing” doesn’t have the same ring to it
** well, technically it’s last year now