Apple iPod touch (2012)

, the fully redesigned iPod touch is more like a smartphone without the phone, bringing more than 700,000 iOS apps along with iTunes, iBooks, and the rest of the Apple ecosystem to folks who don't want to pay full iPhone freight. This year's touch is a significant upgrade: It's faster, with a much better screen, a new camera, better headphones, and a new body design to die for.

This is the fifth iteration of the iPod touch, and it's the first model that's not getting a five-star rating. That's because it's a five-star product at a three-star price. Don't worry, it's still our Editors' Choice. There's nothing like it that's quite as good, but the entry-level price for this new model is very high. It's now $299 (32GB) or $399 (64GB), up from $199—and we called the $199 entry price 'hefty' two years ago. While that comes with double the storage (32GB, up from 16GB), it also makes the touch much more costly for all the people who want to use it for light gaming, Web browsing, and music. For those folks, is still available at $199. To find out what's new, read on.

 

Physical Design and Wi-Fi
The new iPod touch is the most elegant device I've ever handled—and yes, that includes the . It's shockingly thin, feather-light, and clad in an absolutely gorgeous wraparound aluminum body. You hardly notice it in your pocket.

Longer, slimmer, lighter, and better-looking than the 2011 iPod touch , the new touch is available in blue, pink, red, yellow, gray, or black aluminum. At an amazing .24 inches thick and 3.10 ounces, it's almost two-dimensional and weightless. It's longer than previous touches at 4.86 inches high to accommodate a super-sharp 4-inch, 1,136-by-640 screen, but the same width as previous models at 2.31 inches wide. The new display is just like the one on the iPhone 5, and noticeably brighter than the previous iPod touch's screen. On the bottom you'll find an extremely tinny-sounding speaker, the 3.5mm headphone jack, and Apple's new, compact Lightning connector, which, unfortunately, isn't natively compatible with any existing accessories without a $29 adapter. Apple says more Lightning docks and video-out cables are coming soon, but there's no exact timeframe.

In the box you get a pair of Apple's vastly improved  , and a "loop," a color-coordinated wrist strap that attaches to a pop-out button on the back panel of the player. The idea for the loop is to make the touch feel like a point-and-shoot digital camera, thanks to the 5-megapixel shooter that's been added to the back. The strap gets in the way when you're holding the touch in both hands to play games, though.

One of the major improvements here is enhanced wireless performance, which is especially important in a Wi-Fi-only device. Like the iPhone 5, the touch supports 802.11n Wi-Fi on the 5GHz band. In speed tests using the Ookla Speedtest.net app, we got double the Wi-Fi download speeds on 5GHz as opposed to 2.4GHz. That didn't have an effect on Web page load times, as the 2.4GHz network was fast enough that the touch's processor speed was what mattered there, but latency in wireless AirPlay gameplay was reduced. 

Performance and Apps
Built around the dual-core 800MHz A5 processor, the touch turns in solid performance. (The previous model had the single-core A4 processor.) On the Geekbench system benchmark and GLBenchmark graphics benchmarks, the touch scored almost identically to the iPhone 4S running iOS 6.0. Scores on the Web-based Sunspider and Browsermark benchmarks were both a touch higher than the 4S, but the touch is in turn smoked by the much faster iPhone 5.

In real life, the performance differences between this touch, the previous iPod touch/iPhone 4, and the new iPhone 5 will build up with time. I couldn't find any app, even super-high-end games like Asphalt 7: Heat and , that wouldn't run here, and those graphics-heavy apps will run much more smoothly than on the previous touch. Compared with the iPhone 5 (with its A6 processor, twice as fast as this one), I saw slightly smoother animations in games on the iPhone 5, much faster rendering of Google Earth images and faster Web pages loads. That's to be expected.

The touch runs Apple's , just like the iPhone 5. This OS update includes the aforementioned Wi-Fi improvements, wireless syncing, and AirPlay mirroring of your touch's display to an Apple TV, and also iMessage, Siri, Passbook, and the new Apple Maps. The older iPod touch will get most of these features if you update to iOS 6, but not Siri—for that you need a new device, but remember, you'll also need a working Wi-Fi connection.

The has just gone to show how spectacular Apple's array of third-party apps is. Within days of confirming issues with Apple Maps, we found . That's the real strength of iOS, and that huge range of apps is why many people buy iPod touches. While Android is certainly catching up, you'll still find many games and other apps come out first and work best on iOS because Apple makes it easier for developers to make money from their work. (For more on that, read about .)

The apps are getting huge, though, which is probably one reason Apple won't offer a new iPod touch smaller than 32GB. (There's no card slot for expansion here: Built-in storage is all you get.) It was easy to grab apps larger than 1GB each (Bard's Tale, Barefoot World Atlas, Asphalt 7: Heat, and Galaxy on Fire 2, to name a few), and my full load of 58 apps took up 10GB on our test device. Casual games are still much smaller, of course.

Battery life was a bit disappointing: I tested the touch twice and both times got about 5 hours of video playback with the screen at full brightness and Wi-Fi on. That's a bit less than the last generation's 5 hours, 32 minutes. As with all of these kinds of devices, you can make battery life last much longer by turning the screen brightness down.

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Camera and Multimedia
The 5-megapixel rear camera is one of the flagship features, but I'm lukewarm on the entire concept. Yes, it's much better than the previous iPod touch camera, which was less than a megapixel. But it's still just a decent smartphone camera. The 5-megapixel main camera and 1.2-megapixel front camera take sharp shots outdoors with plenty of light, but sharpness and focus suffer in low light. I also saw some serious problems with the autofocus locking in when the flash was needed. At least the camera doesn't have the iPhone 5's "purple flare" problem; while we could create lens flare by shooting near a light source, it was more like the less-annoying flare captured on the iPhone 4S.

In terms of video recording, we captured 1080p video with the main camera and 720p with the front camera, each at 30 frames per second outdoors. But in moderate indoor lighting, that dropped to 27 fps on the main camera and 24 fps on the front camera with focus problems.

Remember that you can get a good, basic 14.1 megapixel camera with optical zoom like the for $100 nowadays. Once again, if the touch was $199 rather than $299, I wouldn't be complaining. The rear camera here is a "nice-to-have" feature, but I don't see it as a core part of the iPod touch experience. The front camera, on the other hand, works with FaceTime, turning the iPod touch into a great video phone when you're in a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Music and video playback are as high-quality as always. These are the core iPod virtues that have sustained the line for more than a decade, and nothing has changed here. Sound is still quite bright, a little weak on bass, but that's nothing new. The touch still syncs with iTunes (although now it'll do so wirelessly if you prefer) and still plays any MP3 or AAC music or MPEG4 video file, whether purchased from Apple or downloaded from elsewhere. (It's perfectly compatible with Amazon's MP3 store, for instance.) The touch also plays Audible, Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV, but not FLAC or OGG files.

The array of streaming video apps on iOS is unmatched: You can choose from Netflix, Crackle, HBO GO, CBS TV.com or more than a dozen others. There are even third-party apps to play video formats iTunes doesn't support, such as Xvid. 

Competition and Conclusions
It still amazes me that no competitor has ever been able to touch the touch. Yes, there are a few Android-based alternatives out there, most notably and ($279). But they're clunkier, with lower-resolution screens and fewer apps. Sit them next to the touch, and they look like amateur hour. 

The true competition for the iPod touch might be $200 7-inch tablets like the and the  , which offer top-notch Web browsing, e-reading, and gaming experiences on a larger screen for $100 less than the touch. Although they each have less on-board storage and neither will slip into a pocket, if your major uses are Web browsing and gaming in the living room, or the back seat of a car, a 7-inch tablet is probably a better choice.

As a music player, the $299 touch is overkill. The sells for $149 for 16GB, a much more reasonable price for a music-focused device. On the other hand, the nano lacks Wi-Fi and doesn't run apps. Once again, it's not quite a competitor.

For teens who want to play Talking Tomcat, Fruit Ninja, and Temple Run, stick with the $199 entry-level iPod touch. And if you already have the $199 model, there's no reason to jump on this one. Need a great camera? Buy an entry-level point-and-shoot and save yourself some cash.

If you were intending to use your touch to store and play a lot of music or videos, though, spring for the new model. Once you're looking at 32GB of storage the difference between the two devices drops to $50, and the bigger screen, lighter body, and even the camera make a real difference in the experience.

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