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I have had my iPod Touch now for a couple weeks and thought I would post a mini review. The very short review – it’s amazing. Could it be more amazing? Yes and I think it will be, but we’ll get to that in a second. Let me begin by giving you my initial impressions. First of all the iPod Touch is all about the user interface and as always Apple does a great job on it. To truly appreciate the genius of the multitouch interface you have to try it, but in a nutshell multitouch is a simple intuitive touch screen user interface.

There are so many things to love about the iPod Touch. For starters it really is the best iPod ever. Really it is, it may not be the largest capacity, but it is definitely the best. The screen is beautiful, the user interface is incredible and the features are great. Of course it is a great music player. It has many ways to navigate your music, including a nicely implemented version of coverflow. Video looks, to quote Steve, absolutely gorgeous, really magnificent. Perhaps one of my favorite features is the built in Wifi. Setup is a breeze and the built in Safari browser is incredible. This is the first mobile device I have seen that really makes surfing the Internet a pleasure not a compromise. Of course the built in Wifi also enabled the implementation of the iTunes store – great addition. The iTunes store works seamlessly on the Touch, great addition.

One of the common criticisms that I have heard about the iPod Touch is the capacity. While I would love an 80GB iPod Touch, I think Apple did the right thing by sticking with solid state flash memory. I think a hard drive version would lack some of the performance of the current Touch. Will we see bigger ones? Sure I would guess by this time next year we will see a 32GB model. Flash memory is expensive – but the price is always coming down. A 16GB solid state expresscard drive runs about $299 right now…. so the 16GB iPod Touch at $399 seems reasonable. My previous iPod (still in service) was a 40GB iPod Photo. So going from 40GB to 16GB might seem like a big change and it is, but you need to consider the way you use the device. The 40GB iPod enabled me to carry just about all of my music all of the time. Truth be told I probably only listened to 10% of it 90% of the time, but it was a nice feeling to be able to carry your whole library. So what has the change from 40GB to 16GB meant to me? It has meant that I must prioritize. My solution was to rate all of my music (which I have always wanted to do) and make smart playlist so that I can always carry my best music with me. Now I only carry my best stuff (which really makes random fun again). At the present I have all my 4 and 5 star music, a bunch of my new music (in a list I call music discovery), a bunch of home movies, a couple TV shows and a whole lot of podcast. Trust me when I say 16GB is more that you need even if you have a large collection if you set your priorites. It is not a device to carry your whole library, but certainly very capable of carrying the best of your stuff.

One other thing I want to address. The iPod Touch is not an iPhone. While the two share a common platform and many features, they are in fact different devices with different capacities. I have seen a lot of reviews where people complain about the things the Touch does not do that the iPhone does. In some cases it is hard to determine why it was decided not to support some features on the Touch, but at the end of the day if the iPhone better suits your needs buy an iPhone. I probably would have bought an iPhone if it had been supported on Verizon. While I am not crazy about Verizon, they do have the best service in the area I live. I don’t think much of most of the cellular companies – but that’s a whole other rant.

Apple recently announced that a SDK (software development kit) was being developed for the iPhone and iPod Touch. What does that mean? It means third party applications will soon be supported on the iPod Touch. Things will get really exciting when that happens and the iPod moves beyond just being a portable media player to being a mobile computing platform… exciting stuff!

In closing I highly recommend the iPod Touch! It is truly amazing, but the best part? It is going to get even more amazing in the future. The next generation will be larger capacity and once the SDK comes out it will revolutionize the portable media player space.