Impulse purchase 16GB iPod Touch. Ooh It's Nice.

I just had to stop by the Apple store today. While playing with the iPhone I asked when the iPod Touch is coming out. To my surprise, the Apple guy said they got some 16GB models in today, and would I like one? You betcha, I do. It sure beats waiting until the end of September.

As a music and media player, the Touch is awesome. I've found surfing the Internet surprisingly easy, as long as it's only viewing. So far as I've seen, there really isn't an interface to store photos on the go, unless you have an SD wifi card, which I don't. 16GB won't get you too far with photo storage, but it holds my music collection and a representative group of photos that I want to show people.

So far as I've seen, there really isn't an interface to store photos on the go, unless you have an SD wifi card, which I don't. 16GB won't get you too far with photo storage, but it holds my music collection and a representative group of photos that I want to show people.

I saw one of these the other day and was wondering if it could be used to store photos. I'm going on a cruise next month and didn't want to take my laptop and was hoping this little gadget could be used as a substitute. I have two 2gb SD cards and was hoping I could down load to the ipod every afternoon. However, from your remarks, I'm assuming this is not a good option. (This would have been a good excuse to purchase one).

If anyone has any thoughts on this, please jump in.

Thanks,

Ben

I've looked into this subject before with Apple's iPOD Classic (used to be the iPOD Video) with 80 or 160 GB. From what I gather, the Apple music/ picture/ video players will store RAW data, but only as data. You won't get a picture, even a thumbnail. So, I thought I would take pictures using the option of RAW and high res. JPEGs. This way I could store the RAW pict and view the JPEG. Well, I'd have gone for this option already, but I've heard of some pictures in RAW being corrupted after transfering again to a computer.

Now, I'm going with an option such as a JOBO or Epson P-3000 or P-5000. Much better at storing RAW files and you can view them as well without duplicating with a JPEG, thus saving precious memory card space.

Apple does make a "camera cable" that is made to down load your JPEG images directly from a camera to the iPOD (USB 2.0).

Yeah, I got one too. Carry around 600 songs, if I need to listen to more I'll go to a club! Also got my show reels which are great as ice breakers or as a way of showing people the work when they want to see it. Nice little machine. Got all the time zones in I need for friends, work etc, and a whole bunch of photos and contact info too.

Cheers,

Mark

Now I've had the Touch for two months. My observations:

It is a superb music player. Browsing through coverflow, or by looking at song titles is great. My one request would be a separate volume control.

Photos: My iPod Touch currently has about 2000 photos. The good news is that they look great. The bad news is that you must synch photos through iTunes. If you have big files, it may take a while. That's because the photos are cut down to size. What's stored on the Touch are not the original files. For Windows users, you put all sub-folders into a big folder and that's the one you synch.

As far as I have seen, the Touch does not have a disk mode, like some of the hard drive-based iPods. It will not function as a stand-alone backup device.

Videos look great. I've got all the DiveFilm episodes loaded.

Web surfing is surprisingly easy. The Safari browser is intuitive, but very limited. You cannot download any files from the web. The only thing that can be done by wifi is purchasing songs through iTunes. That works well, and when you synch the Touch, the songs are carried over onto the computer.

If I were looking for a data storage device, I would probably get an Archos 605, which has a bigger screen and a hard drive plus USB host. I don't know if it would let you view RAW files though. My travel computer is an old IBM X23, which is quite small and light. Between that and a portable hard drive I'm good.

I put a mini gallery up on my website:

http://www.pbase.com/krancer/ipod_touch