iPod Touch: just unplug and play

Although the courier managed to mess up delivery, my 16 Gb iPod Touch finally arrived today.

I took it out of the packaging, turned it on and the screen immediately showed an iTunes icon and an icon of the USB 2 plug. Obviously I needed to plug it in to my Mac. After plugging in and setting preferences for synchronising music and whatnot I waited a short time while the media were transferred.

Soon, though, I was able to unplug and start playing (with some guidance from the included paper Quickstart sheet).

Synchronising had handled things very smartly: the iPod connected immediately to my home wireless network. It knew such sensible things as my location, timezone, and the correct time and date. My Safari bookmarks had been transferred too, as had my iTunes logon information. All I had to do was start an application and get on with it.

Although earbuds are included, I had no problem using my Etymotic ER6i earbuds to listen to a few tracks and videos. I had some problems with the controls at first — hence the need to refer to the Quickstart — but once I’d discovered how to navigate around it was very smooth and easy. The large button that looks like an embedded iSight camera is the important button that takes you back to the main menu. I’d been avoiding it at first, thinking it was something I shouldn’t touch.

I had major problems logging in to my main Gmail account. Mainly it turned out I was at the wrong URL, but the problem was acute when entering my password. Of course, the iPod echoes back asterisks, but I have a very strong, complex password similar to this fabricated example: arY,4!b*gh*jk.

That’s tricky to type on a regular keyboard, and very hard on the onscreen iPod Touch keyboard. Things aren’t helped at the moment by the sticking plaster covering the tip of my main typing finger — I dropped a concrete block on that finger months ago and the nail’s at that dangerous broken stage.

The iPod’s onscreen keyboard displays letters only as upper case, whether you’ve depressed the ‘Shift’ key or not. The Shift key itself lights up when engaged, and it’s a Shift key not a Caps Lock key. My first problem was figuring out whether I was typing upper or lower case letters.

Most punctuation is available after pressing the punctuation key which switches to the punctuation keyboard, though some characters, such as the * are available only after a further keypress. My password involves switching around from one keyboard to the other. Repeatedly.

However, once I had that ‘problem’ sorted I went on to spend quite a while surfing, checking email, sending tweets to Twitter, looking up maps, and generally having fun.

My first impression: woohoo!

Oh, and it looks gorgeous. It’s smaller than you’d think, and I love it!

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