Everything is operated through the touch-sensitive interface, with the exception of a set of three physical buttons: the afore-mentioned volume control; an on-off button, and the Home button that defaults to the opening interface. On the screen you can find icons for the Safari web browser, calendar, e-mail, contacts, YouTube, stock market, maps, clock, calculator, notes, settings, Apple Store, and, finally, music, videos, photos and iTunes, Apple's proprietary iPod management software. We’ll talk about it later. The user can change the order of the icons or even include and delete some of them.

Being able to surf the web and check e-mails is the iPod Touch’s great selling point. It requires an open WiFi network, of course. Configuring it for home use was a breeze: the iTouch immediately detected our WiFi network and it was a simple matter of typing our password to be connected. Once it’s done every time we turned it on at home it got connected with no fuss. Being e-mail addicts as we are we found it useful to check our inbox as soon as we step in at home, prior to turning on our too-long-to-boot desktop. Outside it depends on WiFi hotspots. We checked our e-mails upon entering a mall that offered free WiFi on its food court, for instance. But here’s a precious tip to save battery juice: turn off the WiFi feature if you just want to listen to music or watch videos.

Rotate your iPod Touch to get a widescreen image of videos and web pages. That way you get an almost similar experience to your LCD monitor at home. The Multi-Touch interface allows the user to zoom in and out of web pages with the opening or closing of fingers over the screen. That way you can read the tiny texts and hit the correct links. Hitting something correctly, by the way, is an issue with the iPod Touch. The virtual QWERTY keyboard takes time and patience to be mastered since hitting the wrong key is a frequent mistake due to the close proximity of the virtual keys. At least there’s a “.com” button to speed the typing. The iTouch supports an autocomplete word feature supported by several dictionaries in different languages.

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Figure 4: Hardware Secrets website.

Other features such as maps, weather, stock market and YouTube also require a WiFi network connection available. The maps are powered by Google Maps and, although it’s not an actual GPS, it theoretically can locate the user by triangulating nearby WiFi spots. We tried several times to do that but apparently our home network wasn’t enough to locate us. Still we were able to get a quick route suggestion from our place to the nearby sports stadium.