The Impoverished Technophile's New Toy

I've been a Mac user for years, and my trusty 40GB clickwheel iPod has been my bosom buddy since 2004. I have been frustrated by some of its features though, especially the gaps it creates when playing back albums that should be seamless. Since the new generation of iPods was released, iTunes has been teasing me with a tickbox for each of my tracks that allows them to be listed as gapless, and as I have been using my iPod as my primary way of listening to music through my home sound system—often mixed compilations such as the FabricLive albums—my inability to play them as gapless has played increasingly on my mind and in my ears. Those little skips, like a dripping tap in the night, almost ignorable until I knew I could no longer resist getting my arse out of bed and down to the Apple shop to ease my mind.

Enter my new toy, the 16GB iPod touch. Alright, so I might be a little late in catching up with the cool kids, but I've just got ahold of this baby and I love it. Gapless playback is everything I wanted and more, reinvigorating those DJ compilations that have been subtly annoying me to an extent I hadn't even fully acknowledged. More important than that, though, is the touch screen GUI, which is so smooth that to use it feels like swimming around in a pool of all my favourite music. It really does make such a difference to be able to see the album art and to scroll through the beauty of my music collection in the blissfully rendered, fluidly animated cover flow mode. Rather than scrolling quickly through endless lines of grey artist and album names in one boring, pixellated font, I now stop on the image of each album and really weigh up whether it's what I want to listen to. Alright, so I sometimes whizz through them with a flick of my index finger for the sheer joy of speeding through a frankly magnificent collection, but by and large this new way of seeing what I have in the palm of my hand has made me stop and reconsider some of the things I have glossed over for months. I am falling in love again with so much music.

I'm also falling in love for the first time with radio. I have always been aware that there are great programmes on Radio 4, but every time I tune in I seem to catch a bad radio play, the tail end of a debate that I can't quite catch up with, or The Archers. Thanks to the BBC iPlayer on my iPod, though, I can now select anything from the past week to listen to, from Just a Minute to Stephen Fry's English Delights. I find myself laughing while brushing my teeth as Paul Merton follows me around the house. I could continue to rhapsodise about the new and exciting things I'm doing my with my new toy, and all the nifty applications that I've downloaded from the seemingly endless App Store.

The biggest drawback is that flash is not supported. This means that most websites that play videos, animations and web games don't work. Youtube, of course, does, and has its own application as standard on iPod Touches and iPhones. There have been a couple of occasions when Quicktime videos won't load properly either, but refreshing usually sorts that out. Most frustratingly, on two occasions my laptop has been unable to detect my iPod when it has been connected, and this has required completely wiping and reinstalling my iPod software, which takes a couple of hours plus the time it takes to upload all of my music again. In fact, as I write this article I'm undergoing this process. But even this isn't enough to diminish the deep affection I have developed in a very short time for my pocketsized new cohort.

This may be a honeymoon period, but if I keep finding new reasons to love it at a fraction of the rate I am currently, I'm going to keep on loving this gadget for years.