Christmas came early this year to the Brister household and I guess I’ve been more nice than naughty.  Yes, an iPod Touch arrived on my door step last Friday.  Surprise! Surprise!  It was engraved on the back with the oh-so-sentimental message, “BRISTER.”    Anyhow, the packaging is huge for such a small little thing.  The device itself is scary thin, but heavy for its weight.  Because I’m a hopeless clutz, I have decided to minimize interacting with it until I find a protective cover.  (BTW:  There are no protectors yet for the Touch).  This has completely thrown off my husband who thinks I’m not using the device because I don’t like it.

The first thing I noticed is that it doesn’t come with a wall plug for charging :(.  At it’s first power up it says that it must be connected to iTunes first.  Before doing that I made a playlist for the device because it only has 16GB of space and I have nearly 18GB of music in my collection.  I wanted to leave plenty of room for video and pictures, so I loaded it up with ~3.5 GB of music.  My husband later loaded it up with pictures from our last Singapore trip and Disneyland.  Then we connected to one of the many unsecured wireless networks in our neighborhood (I guess that would be piracy) and watched some little YouTube (brain-fart earlier) videos.   The touch is an excellent little display for video and also navigates the web well if the website is set-up to support the iPhone.

As for the user interface, it’s drop dead simple to use and it works even with the protective film still in place.  Our only complain is that you can’t change the volume when playing music while the device is held in portrait mode.  Uploading music, pictures, and videos from iTunes is the same as any other iPod.  But, also, here lies the problems for me.  I don’t watch anything available on iTunes since I don’t watch network TV and I still enjoy movies on the big screen.  I want to watch the stuff I download and there is no straightforward way to upload and view this content on the Touch.  If anyone out there in the “Ether” can recommend a good video conversion tool, it would be much appreciated.

Now, that I’m passed the “wow,” I have to think about the practicality of such a device and the reality for me is that it’s probably going to get limited use since I can’t (or maybe “shouldn’t” is better word) watch videos at work.  At home I watch videos on my computer via the television set, so the only time I see myself using this is on vacation or during a business trip.  I suppose that’s reason enough,  Now if only I had somewhere to go …