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iPod Touch 5th gen – specs and pricing

The new iPod touch has many of the same features as the iPhone 5 itself

While the iPhone 5 will undoubtedly garner most of tonight’s spotlight, the new iPod Touch 5th Generation would cause a major stir of its own if given the chance to stand alone.

As with previous devices it’s obviously been designed around the capabilities of the new smartphone, but despite that it’s certainly no afterthought.

SUPER MODEL THIN

At 6.1mm thin and weighing just 88g it makes it even the super-slender new iPhone sound a bit of a heffer. Basically, these are the kind of figures that phone designers dream of. It also comes in a variety of colours, for the first time, and matching wrist straps are available too.

iPod Touch 5th gen

Really, really, really, really thin (Photo: John Bradley/Wired)

It uses the same Retina-branded 4in widescreen display with a big 1,136×640 resolution – that new display gives it practically a 16:9 aspect ratio (1:1.775 vs 1:1.778 – if our maths is correct) and so makes it a great device for watching widescreen video content. At 326 pixels-per-inch you won’t have nay complaints about onscreen detail either.

Of course, to make best use of that screen will mean needing more storage, and as always with an Apple device, storage costs plenty, and is non-expandable.

iPod Touch 5th gen

Lots of colours – a first for the Touch (Photo: John Bradley/Wired)

It’ll be £249 for the 32GB version and £329 for the 64GB version – with all five colours priced equally.

BEAUTY INSIDE

Whichever one you buy, inside is a dual-core A5 chipset, making it the first dual-core iPod Touch. Graphics performance should be equal to the iPhone 4S, pretty impressive then but not up to the fancy graphics demo we saw for the iPhone 5, unfortunately.

iPod Touch 5th gen

The graphics chip can’t keep up with the iPhone 5’s (Photo: John Bradley/Wired)

The new device uses the new Lightning connector. Those with lots of docks and cables will probably bemoan the change, but given the dimensions of this device, it’s about time the old connector went. Adaptors will be available.

On the plus side, the new connector is double-sided, so you can shove it home either way around, which we think is a stroke of genius.

PHOTO SHOOT

The new camera is a big upgrade, with a 5-megapixel camera that shoots at f/2.4 for better low-light performance. Most excitingly, it has the Panorama feature from the iPhone 5, so you can take huge stitched photos with a wave of your arm – we’ve seen similar systems before, most notably from Sony and we’ll need to test it thoroughly to see how it compares.

FIFTH ELEMENT

Overall, the new iPod Touch looks to be a great update. We’re a little disappointed that it can’t keep up graphically with the iPhone 5, as that may limit its game-playing life, but apart from that this is super-sleek, super-stylish portable media player – and a lot more besides.

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