Everything this can do, so can your cell phone. In fact, there is no difference at all between an iPod Touch and an iPhone other than the fact the Touch can’t make calls. People say “I like having the applications and using the web browser”…correct me if I’m wrong but cell phones can do this as well. And about the applications: they are (mostly) worthless. Apple loves to advertise the fact they have over 75,000 apps (“An app for everything!”) but what they fail to mention is that over half of these are buggy, poorly designed, and completely useless. I can’t tell you how stupid some of these apps are: on every Touch I have ever looked at that was owned by another person, their app menu was full of fascinating things like a Zippo lighter you could light using the screen, a fish tank, and bubble wrap that you could pop. There are literally thousands of these utterly worthless time wasters available for download, and they serve no point whatsoever. Anyone fascinated by these things needs to grow up–nothing is more pathetic than seeing a group of adults fascinated with an app that lets you pull the trigger of a gun and hear it go off. That’s not to say there aren’t some useful apps, but they are few and far between, and offer nothing a good cell phone with a data plan can’t do. Furthermore, your cell phone would do it in more places anyway, seeing as the Touch can only get online through Wifi anyway, meaning a lot of your most useful apps are useless unless you have an Internet connection nearby. It’s like you’d be able to pull out the restaurant finder app and use it while driving in the city–unless you are near a Wifi hot spot.

This is just an expensive little device that doesn’t know what it wants to be–music player or time waster. If you want something simply to store your music, please go out and find yourself a decent device without all the bells and whistles this comes with. This is not a music player, this is a TOY. And a status symbol for some people to show off with.

The web browser is excellent, and can display “desktop” versions of websites just fine. It supports JavaScript and (a big one for me) PDF files; however, it does not support flash. The WiFi range is not as good as my laptop, but it works on campus and in internet-enabled cafes.

I’m now using it on a daily basis to manage my time, browse the web whenever WiFi is in range, and pass the time when there is nothing else to do (such as at a bus stop).

The sound quality is inferior to that of my old player, and the joke of an equalizer just plain sucks. But this only holds true if you’ve used a higher-quality non-iPod music player or something like Rockbox, which has a far more advanced equalizer. On the iPod, you can only select presets, which are prone to producing distorted audio. But as mentioned before, I didn’t buy the touch for high-quality audio.