I was lucky enough to win an iPod Touch recently for completing a questionnaire - something that I very rarely do - and I thought I'd jot down some notes on my first impressions. I come to the iPod completely cold. I once played with a relatives iPod but other than that I've never used any piece of Apple hardware. I was, of course, over the moon to have won something but I wasn't sure that the device would live up to the hype surrounding it.
My first impressions were certainly very good. The iPod Touch is amazingly thin which is emphasized by the curved shape of the back. The screen is bright and clear and the touch sensor is far and away the best I've ever used. It came with a single track pre-installed which I thought was a bit tight. I would have thought that Apple could cut a deal to stick half a dozen sample tracks on the device along with a sample video and a couple of imges. Instead I had to go digging around for things to sync on to it before I could experience the true potential.
One of the first things I did was upgrade the software from version 2.2.1 to 3.0. I had to pay for this upgrade which stung a little as normally upgrades like this would be free. It did give me shake shuffle though which I think I'll use quite a lot.
I have really come across any problems with the iPod but I've hit a ton of problems with iPants, erm I mean iTunes. I've got a music collection of around 10K tracks which by current standards isn't really that big but iTunes treats it like it's climbinb Everest (I use plenty of other media plays and only one struggles as much as iTunes did on this collection - Banshee is best BTW).
After importing my media collection I found that when I plugged the iPod in it would indicate it was syncing and then do nothing. It would seem thereis a problem with iTunes when the library is larger than the device that is connected. Once I had set it to sync only selected playlists it burst in to life. Gathering the gapless play back information took about 3 hours and rendered the machine almost completely unuseable during that time. I'm sure it would be possible to gather the required data in a more friendly matter.
The most recent problem I've come across is the autofill feature. I found a reference to it in the help file but the description of how to use it was so poor I had to resort to an article on Ars Technica to figure out how to use it. I initially selected settings that would cause autofill to use up all but about 2GB of my device (e.g. drop about 5GB of music on it). After 30 minutes of it telling me that it was autofilling and using most of one CPU I killed iTunes and tried again with just filling 0.5GB. This time it succeded. Quite why choosing a couple of hundred random tracks from ten thousand requires half an hour of CPU time I don't know.
Over all I'm really pleased with my new iPod Touch. I'm not so pleased with iTunes but I'd tried that out in the past so I knew it was iPants and wasn't too disapointed when it hadn't improved. I suppose if I have one real grumble it's that the iPod is locked down so that it can only be used with iTunes. I mostly work under Linux and I would have loved to have synced up with Banshee. I've pretty much given up on ever doing anything "cool" under Linux though and I might just give up and go back to Windows - lifes too short to be constantly fighting city hall.