Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsPoor Man's Ipod
Reviewed in the United States on August 19, 2020
My Ipod Classic is starting to have problems after nearly ten years of use and the disk space is quickly filling up (I have about 90GBs of music) so I decided to buy the latest Ipod Touch. I never owned an Ipod Touch before so I read the reviews and they were all glowing. It has 256GB of space (about 230 usable) which was more than enough for me. It was a lot of money, but Apple has a reputation for making high quality products so thinking it was going to an investment for the next ten years, I bought one. I wasn't planning on ever using the apps, I just wanted to use it as an mp3 player. I was concerned that I heard next to nothing about that certain function, but I thought it would be just as good or even better than an Ipod classic. Wrong.
To start out, here are the pros:
1. It's small, but large enough that using the touch screen isn't awkward.
2. It has Bluetooth, which is very quick and easy to connect.
3. It has a speaker, in case headphones aren't available. It doesn't sound great, but for being such a tiny speaker, it's not bad at all.
4. It's very responsive to touch.
5. It's basically an Iphone without the phone part. You can read email or text with it, though. It has most of the same basic apps the Iphone does.
6. I spent way more time fiddling with it than actually using it for its intended purpose, but the two or three times I listened to it, the sound quality was very good, about the same or even slightly better than the Ipod Classic.
7. Unlike the latest Iphone, it comes with a standard headphone jack.
Here are the cons:
1. I couldn't just drop my songs in it and then listen to them. I had to connect to wi-fi first in order to download the Apple Music Player. Doing that was a royal pain. It took me days to get it to connect with wi-fi.
2. When I downloaded the Apple Music Player, unbeknownst to me, the Ipod Touch decided to download every single song I ever bought on Itunes, even though I had automatic downloads turned off. I was planning to just download my mp3's from my computer, so I was a little miffed about this. I was able to delete the songs off the Ipod Touch without deleting them from my Apple Music library (I made sure I had wi-fi and automatic syncing turned off) but it was a pain. I had to do one song at a time and if I did too many, the Ipod Touch would freeze up and I would have to restart it. I had thousands of songs to delete, so this took me about a month.
3. The 'fun' part began when I put my mp3's on the Ipod Touch. It was an extremely slow process. It took about double the time it did on my Ipod Classic. It also began 'updating' mp3's that were already on the Ipod Touch and didn't need to be updated. If I didn't stop it, it would 'update' these songs infinitely until Itunes finally froze up and crashed. Unlike my Classic Ipod, it wasn't a 'set it and forget it' type of thing were it would stop when all the songs were on the Ipod. Eventually, when I tried to stop it manually, I would get error pop-ups. Then after the last Itunes update, it refused to put any songs on the player at all and Itunes completely froze up on me. Itunes definitely wasn't the problem here because it worked perfectly when I put these same songs on my Ipod Classic.
4. I did a factory reset hoping that would take care of the problems getting songs on my Ipod Touch. I noticed it worked a little faster, but when I decided to redownload the thousands of mp3's onto my Ipod Touch, it began doing the 'updating infinitely' garbage again. When I tried to stop it, it gave me another error pop-up and I noticed on the Ipod Touch screen that it was still trying to 'update' these stupid songs even though I had stopped the process. That's when I had it and started the search for another brand of mp3 player.
5. Another thing that was very aggravating to me--I have a certain way of labeling mp3's and they're all in the same format, like this: Artist - Song Title. It's definitely not Apple's way of labeling, but it hasn't been a problem for the Ipod Classic or any other mp3 player I've owned. It's a huge problem on Ipod Touch though. The screen is so small that when I was scrolling through my songs, I couldn't see the whole title. I could only see the artist's name. I had to play the song to know which one it was. This was extremely irritating for me.
6. I've read a lot of reviews from others saying they bought this for their kids to play with. In my opinion, it's too delicate and expensive to be a toy. Unless your kid is older or takes good care of their electronic devices, I wouldn't spend the money on it. I'm sure there's some electronic device out there that is similar and is actually made for kids.
So, unless you're buying this for the apps and not as a substitute for the Ipod Classic, I wouldn't bother with this at all. It doesn't hold a candle to the original Ipod. There are other mp3 players with Bluetooth out there--like Fiios and Sony, for example. I'd go with them instead.
