iPod touch 64GB review

The iPod touch got perhaps the least attention of any iPod in the line-up's latest revamp.

Stand this model beside its predecessors and you wouldn't know the difference. Externally, it's nigh-on identical, with a polished-steel back, a blanking plate where the iPhone has its camera and just three buttons: power, the home button and the volume rocker switch. For obvious reasons (no ringer), the iPhone's mute switch is missing and there's no Sim card slot. The headphone socket is down at the bottom too, nano-style.

It ships with iPhone OS 3.1 software, so is fully clued up for cut, copy and paste, and landscape email writing. It's also peer-to-peer savvy, which is nothing to do with illegal file sharing and all about enabling multi-player gaming over the Internet.

There's also Genius recommendations for Apps, much like the Genius feature in iTunes, which suggests tracks you might like to buy from the iTunes Store. This is a great sales tool for Apple, but its benefit for consumers is less clear-cut. As one blogger put it (bit.ly/8PdCA), 'I'm not really interested in Genius for applications, because it will by principle only recommend popular applications that I'd already have heard of by word of mouth and through blogs.' It also boasts the same Spotlight, stereo Bluetooth and Shake to Shuffle features as the iPhone. If you're using an old touch that isn't yet running the 3.1 software, the good news is that the update only costs £2.99.

There are some standards across the full touch line-up, including 30 hours of music playback, six hours of video playback, and built-in Bluetooth, wifi and Nike+ support. The 32GB and 64GB version, reviewed here, come with earphones with a remote and mic; the 8GB model, which is half the price of this, is missing the remote and mic. The 64GB and 32GB models also have voice control, which is missing from their 8GB sibling.

So how large is 64GB? According to Apple's figures, it equates to 14,000 songs, 80 hours of video and 90,000 photos, although these figures will depend upon the mix and the number of applications you have installed, photos you have downloaded and emails that you've received. Logically enough, the figures are more or less halved for the 32GB edition, which will take 7000 tracks and 40 hours of video, but only 40,000 photos. The 8GB touch can accommodate 1750 tracks, 10 hours of video and 10,000 photos, so the conversion is fairly linear.

It's fast and responsive, too. Shake to Shuffle picks the next track with seemingly no thought at all, and the difference between this and a first-generation iPhone is so pronounced as to make the iPhone feel positively sluggish when using demanding applications such as Google Earth.

At £299 (£254 ex VAT), the 64GB touch isn't cheap - not when you can save yourself £110 and still get your hands on a 160GB classic. What you're paying for then, isn't capacity, but features and iPhone OS 3.1's brilliant brain. When Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, announced the iPod touch, he called it training wheels for the iPhone. That might have been some way off the mark - you wouldn't buy this and then progress to the phone - but the sentiment wasn't so wide of the mark. This is the iPhone for anyone who is happy with the non-Apple handset they already own.