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Library Navigation
Navigation (7.02)
Navigating around your media library is done by using touch controls to drag the menu up or down. The faster you flick the dragging gesture, the faster the menu will scroll. with the scroll wheel. This allows for very quick menu navigation in relatively short menus. For really long menus, use the alphabet scroller on the right side of the screen. Using this you can jump to a specific letter. With just these two tools, browsing is quick and easy.
To help compare media players' ease of navigation, we perform a timing test where we have a certain song in our test playlist playing, then time how long it takes to browse to another specific song. Typically scores fall between 7-8 seconds, with slower devices sometimes taking more than 10 seconds. On the Touch we were able to switch songs in 4.23 seconds, finishing much faster than average.
Sorting options (8.50)
The iPod Touch will let you sort your songs by playlist, artist, album, compilation, song, genre, or composer. Audiobooks and podcasts are also kept separately from other audio files. Videos can be viewed by either TV or movie. This is a good list of sort criteria, offering a good deal of granularity. We would've liked to see a few more options, however, such as the ability to sort by rating, or the date a song was added to the device.
Search options (5.00)
While the sorting and navigation on the iPod Touch are each great, there aren't many options available to augment searching through long lists. Previous iPods would let you type out You can search through your songs using multi-touch. Given that the Touch has a touch screen QWERTY keyboard, we expected the user could use that to search through songs. Apparently Apple is sold on the combination of flick-scrolling and the jump-to-a-letter bar. While we thing navigation on the Touch manages to be easy and intuitive without a QWERTY search, we can't help by wonder why it wasn't involved -- using the scroll wheel to hunt and peck out letters on older iPods wasn't all that useful, but it was still included.
Playlists (14.80)
Playlist creation on the Touch is handled much the same way as on every other iPod, which means it's absurdly easy to create them. In fact, the touch controls make playlist creation on the Touch easier than on any other previous iPod. All you have to do is first let the device know you want to build the On-The-Go playlist, then just click on albums or songs you want to add. As with our library navigation timing test, the iPod Touch was able to put together a playlist faster than any other iPods out there, which, on the whole, are faster than most other media players in this regard.
As per usual, iTunes features a few other synchronization options in the form of dynamically changing playlists. You can sync over lists of your your top rated, recently added, recently played, and top 25 most played songs. Unfortunately, these lists are based off your listening habits on iTunes, rather than what you've actually listened to with the device.
Equalizer & Filters (12.00)
As with other iPods, the Touch's equalizer won't let you customize levels. It will, however, provide you with 22 presets: acoustic, bass booster, bass reducer, classical, dance, deep, electronic, flat, hip hop, jazz, latin, loudness, lounge, piano, pop, R & B, Rock, small speakers, spoken word, treble booster, treble reducer, and vocal booster. We're guessing one of these probably covers whatever you were planning on doing to the Touch's levels.
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