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| Photo by ®em©o |
One of the biggest problems of the iPod touch were usability problems. For instance, I was not able to control the slide in small enough increments to effectively rewind or fast forward. While this might not be a big issue with a 3 minute song, it was extremely annoying when listening to a 2 hour podcast and wanting to rewind some seconds. With the dial of the 5G I am able to fast forward or rewind very precisely.
Another usability problem of the iPod touch is actually a feature: the accelerometer. It will automatically rotate the screen when rotating the iPod and there is no way to prevent it. Well, at least I didn't find any. This made watching videos while lying in bed a serious pain in the butt. With the 5G I can just hold it any way I like and watch my videos without breaking my neck.
Plus, there are no buttons on the iPod touch, except for volume control. If I want to pause, I first have to "wake" the iPod touch (or even worse: unlock it) and the same goes for resuming. All of this is just one button press on the 5G. Same goes for skipping a song, or jumping back to the one you just heard.
I also had sometimes the problem that I wanted to listen to a particular song and I navigated through the menus of the iPod touch only to accidently click on one of the categories at the bottom of the screen while trying to select the last item in the list. Sure, I occasionally misclick on the 5G too, but there I can correct the mistake with the back button. On the iPod touch I have to nagivate through the menus all over again. Same thing when the song is over: on the 5G I can come back to the same position by default when pushing the middle button (to play the song again or selecting the next album of the same artist). On the iPod touch, you will instead have fun finding your song or artist again in huge scroll lists.
But those are only usability issues. Another huge factor for me is the closed system that Apple not only does everything in their power to control how you modify it, or which apps you can install, it also applies a censorship policy that would even have been prude in Victorian England. Of course there is always the possibility to jailbreak it, but any system update will also remove the jailbreak and that is quite annoying.
So the only real choice for me was to "downgrade" to a real mp3 player. As a small bonus, I also got a 120 GB replacement harddrive which is double the amount of space on the most expensive iPod touch.
I only found two small downsides of the 5G compared to the iPod touch: the audio quality is not quite as good and the iPod is not as responsive. But those two downsides are nothing compared to the major annoyances of the iPod touch/iPhone system.
