This Christmas the Big Man in Red was good enough to leave me an iPod Touch underneath our Christmas Tree. It’s almost a year since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone and its ground-breaking interface but today has been the first time that I’ve had a proper chance to play around with the latest toy from Cupertino.

From the moment you turn it on, the Touch draws you in with just the simple intuitiveness of its interface. It may very well have come with a manual but if it did I sure as hell haven’t read it. Actually I’ve just had a look in the minimalistic packaging and you get not so much a manual as a leaflet that gives a cursory overview of the Touch’s salient features and the customary sales pitch for iTunes. Twelve hours after powering it up I have yet to find a feature that I can’t figure out in more than a few seconds. In fact my clumsy fingers have unearthed even more more features through my inept tapping.

First to the browser. The Touch comes with a special version of Safari as standard. The Web is doubtless scattered with reviews so I won’t re-hash what is already there. What I will say though is that having a fully-featured web device on a mobile device is nothing short of revolutionary. I’ve played around with the mobile version of Opera on Blackberries as well as other browser offerings on things like MDAs and Palms but all they are now consigned to the trash heap of technological history. Sure I’d rather have the open-sourced Firefox on here but that’s but a minor quibble. The web experience on the Touch is fantastic. Within a few minutes I had setup bookmarks for my Google Reader, Facebook and the Economist. That I’m writing this blog post from the Touch, albeit very slowly, is further testament to just how well-rounded the browsing experience is. Even with the Javascript-heavy WordPress, most things appear to just work.

Music on the Touch is just your standard iPod fare although there are some nice features such as flowing cover art. I haven’t had a chance to upload any videos yet so I’ll reserve judgement for the moment. I will say that the screen seems slightly smaller than my PSP so subtitled films may be difficult to watch. Videos on the in-built YouTube browser seemed fine though.

Now before this turns into an Apple love-in, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that iTunes is a pile of utter toss. I’d actually like to use stronger language but seeing as this is a family blog, I’ll try and keep this clean. iTunes is nothing short of an affront to humanity. Its clunky, unintuitive and possesses an almost pathological desire to annoy me. Trying to do something simple like adding a song involves fannying around with libraries, playlists, party shuffle and the riddle of the god-damned Sphinx. Why there can’t be a simple drag-and-drop interface for adding songs is beyond me. For a company that prides itself on interface design, Apple should really be able to do better. The iTunes Store interface is also nothing short of crap.

Lest I end this post on a negative wave, I’d like to emphasise how much I’m in awe of my Touch and am looking forward to playing with it in the coming days and months. And of course a final word of thanks to the Girlfriend for arranging my present with the Big Man in Red. Happy Christmas and many happy returns.