2 of 5

Best of 2008: Gadget

by Christina Pomoni

Soon after launching iPhone, Apple heard the distant buzzing of customers requesting a groundbreaking gadget like iPhone, only without the call-making option. Being always responsive to customer demands and ready to meet their needs, Apple anticipated customer request and launched the second-generation iPod Touch overwhelming the market with the most advanced music player to date.




Yet the second-generation iPod Touch is much more than a cutting edge MP3 player that plays music and games, and stores contacts and calendar info.




iPod Touch has a wide touchscreen LCD display of 3.5 inch with a multi-touch sensitive interface, which allows the user to navigate through the handset easily without pressing any physical buttons. The "Home" key functions as the basic control navigator bringing the user to the main menu from any point of the intuitive interface, while if pressed twice, it accesses the volume controls, skip forward/rewind and play/pause functionality. The "Display Lock" key locks the touch screen interface preventing from accidental use of the controls. Its lithium ion rechargeable battery lasts 36 hours for digital playback and 6 hours for video playback, while its recharge time is approximately 4 hours.




Playing music is just one of iPod's and actually one of the less important ones, actually since being an advanced gadget it introduces features that are really ahead of competition. iPod users may use it as a PDA, surf on the web through the built-in wireless antenna (web browsing), flick through their photos, send podcasts and emails, play games, while the handset features also Internet radio, Nike+ (a Nike program that tracks jogging distance), Wi-Fi music downloads and an App Store where users may add thousands of custom features. Also, iPod Touch introduces classic features such as calendar, phonebook, notes, cover flow, date display, USB 2.0 compatibility and battery level indication and extra features such as Genius technology, Safari browser, YouTube viewer, iTunes Music Store with WiFi and video player.




Knowing how much technology is inside the second-generation iPod Touch, the most amazing feature is how light this handset is. Weighing only 116 grams including the battery the iPod Touch has a fine sleek design.




The second-generation handset comes with 16GB of internal storage, which allows the user to store a huge number of video formats and photos and large playlists of music, while it supports a wide range of audio, picture and video formats such as AAC, Protected AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless Mp3, MP3 VBR, Audible 2, Audible 3, Audible 4, WAV, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, MOV, MPEG4 and H.264. To connect it to a PC, the handset is compatible with Microsoft Windows Vista , Microsoft Windows XP Home , Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP 2 or later , Apple Mac OS X 10.4.10 or later.



It looks like once again, Apple penetrated the market with a competitive product. The second-generation iPod Touch is iPod Touch is a user friendly gadget with features that enable users to sort, find and play their choices among thousands of songs within seconds. The handset comes in the reasonable price of $299.

Helium, Inc.
200 Brickstone Square Andover, MA 01810 USA