The iPod touch is the long awaited “True” video iPod from Apple, but it proves to be a little bit more than that. Not quite the phone-less iPhone we’d been hoping for, due to Apple ripping out a lot of the functionality, the iPod touch is easily still the best iPod Apple has ever produced.

First I’ll get the bad out of the way, while there are only a few major problems, they are somewhat serious and may prove to be deal-breakers when selecting between this and other music players.

The first major issue is the capacity, coming in at only 8 and 16GB versions, the iPod touch is light on space, still better than the iPhone and its single 8GB capacity, it doesn’t provide the “Media Library” functionality a lot of people were hoping for. The storage is flash memory, which is good if you’re sweating to the oldies, only, the iPod touch isn’t a device you’d use at the gym, no, the iPod touch is a device you’d use while sitting in a waiting room or on a flight. A hard drive probably would have been a better choice, but I’d guess that it would have pushed the iPod touch past Apple’s target price-point.

The next problem with the iPod touch is that Apple crippled a lot of the software, you can’t add events to your calendar, and they ripped out a lot of the “function” apps like weather, maps, stocks, notes and most importantly mail. Obviously you can still get this information on the web and the main purpose of the applications were to save bandwidth and time because you’re on the 3G network which is slow, so pushing one button to bring up the weather was handy, it still would have been nice to be able to do that on the iPod touch’s Wi-Fi connection. It would have also been cool to have the iPod touch “bing” every time I get a new Gmail, but Apple felt they had to differentiate the product from the iPhone and I have faith that the hacker community will hack the iPhone applications on the iPod touch soon enough.

Lastly, there have been some legitimate concerns about the iPod touch’s build quality, namely the screens. The “Negative Black” effect has been proven by Gizmodo among others. However, it seems to be somewhat hit and miss as my screen is perfect so your mileage may vary and it probably would be a good idea to wait until they address these issues before picking one up. Also, my Home button’s icon is a little off-center, damn shoddy Chinese sweatshops.

Now for the awesome. As always, the entire Apple ownership experience is complete, from the purchase, to the unboxing, to the setup, to your first use, Apple’s designers orchestrate your interaction with the device from the box up. The box is small and compact, every millimeter of space is used and the device is presented for your inspection as soon as you open it, even the inside of the box-top is padded to ensure your iPod touch is flawless when you get it. After that you go through the layers of packaging to find all of the accessories and the quick start guide, you turn on the device it and prompts you to sync it for the first time, perfectly smooth and seamless.

As for the device itself, it’s tiny, but in a good way. As Mad Dog Steve would put it, it’s impossibly thin. (As I would put it, impossibly scratch magnetic, see below) For its size, it has a good weight, feels very solid and sleek, not bulky at all. In contrast to the iPhone, the bezel is matte and dark, a warm gray color, almost brown in certain light, the sharpness between it and the glossy glass display of the iPod is one of the sexiest combos I’ve ever seen, it keeps making me think about car design, specifically Mercedes-Benz interiors. The glass screen is scratch resistant up the wazoo, as you’d expect, the back, however, is not. It scratches like all of the previous generation iPods, meaning it scratches a lot and easily. It’s a shame, I’ve haven’t even taken it out of the house or put it in my pocket and the back already has a few significant scratches and edges look a little scuffed and it’s not like I could have stopped it, due to Apple’s ninja release, cases aren’t even available for it, and won’t be until October.

The iPod touch also utilizes a technology that monitors the ambient light of the area you’re in, adjusting the screen brightness to maximize battery life, this can be disabled in the Settings menu, as well as augmented, meaning you can adjust the brightness while Auto-Brightness is on and it will still adjust to the situation, but your preference, either brighter or dimmer, will be taken into account. Every device ever needs to do this.

The most important feature to me and what inevitably got me to pull the trigger is that the iPod touch has a full version of the Safari web browser, less Flash and Java, however full JavaScript is enabled and a Flash player is purportedly in the works, but knowing Apple, in the works means iPod touch 2G. Gmail works fully; it loads a little slow, but once it’s done you get the full “in-place” Gmail experience. The touch screen works surprising well even with my large/sausage fingers, I have no trouble selecting a link between two others even when the browser is zoomed out. Typing is considerably faster than what I can do on my cell phone. Pinching, double tapping and rotating the device work great for enlarging text to a readable size and the font smoothing is superb. Bookmarking couldn’t be easier, click the plus and save, and the multi-page browsing ability is awesome. However, due to the limited RAM available to the iPod touch you’re limited to the number of pages you can have opened at a time, 8. And if you’re browsing a particularly media-heavy page and switch to a new page, it will unload the media-heavy page from memory to allow the other page to load.

The integrated YouTube application is great but makes me wonder if they can play FLVs why they couldn’t include a Flash player; the iPod touch obviously has the processor for it, being able to decode h.264. The loading time for movies is about what you get from your browser, more the time to actually switch from the YouTube app to the YouTube player with its intolerably sexy animation. I’ve yet to find a video on YouTube that it couldn’t play.

The calendar is crippled, you can’t add new items, and until I find a way to sync it to my BackPack, it will remain useless to me. I was able to create some sample items using Outlook just to test the UI and from what I see it’s pretty sweet, I just wish I could use it. It seems kind of short sighted of Apple to not only break the app, but also not to include syncing of their iCal format from the web. It also doesn’t work with the default Windows Calendar in Windows Vista, lame.

Contacts are simple enough; they sync with the default Windows Contacts in Windows Vista, which I use. It takes all of the data, including picture and syncs it perfectly with the iPod touch. As always the interface is simple and surprisingly, you can add new contacts directly from the iPod touch. If you view a contact and click their website it will open in Safari, but I would have appreciated Apple including the Mail app so I could have the same functionality with email.

The clock, oddly enough, is one of my favorite features of the iPod touch. It has a very nice World Clock allowing you to add a bunch of different labeled clocks to one interface allowing you to flick through as many as you want, but no, the fun doesn’t stop there. It also has a multi-alarm function, allowing as many optionally recurring alarms as you want, a little disappointing is the fact that you can have any of your music play as the alarm, but instead, give you a few random sounds, only a few of which are actually useful as an alarm and none of them are loud enough to wake you up. It also has a Stopwatch with lap function, big surprise there. Finally, and my favorite, or at least second to the World Clock, is the Timer. Never have your eggs pop again! It’s actually a fun interface, allowing you to roll a virtual cylinder around to select the appropriate time, however, I would have liked the cylinder actually rotate to zero, vis-à-vis an actual kitchen timer with a digital display under it, however it just gives you a digital countdown, a little disappointing but far from a deal breaker.

The calculator is criminally simple and a little disappointing. Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division is all this calculator is capable of, seeing as how it’s running a trim version of OSX I kind of expected some more advanced functions, but I suppose that would have “soiled” Mad Dog’s interface.

The music functionality, which for me is almost secondary to the web capability, is fantastic, if a little overwhelming, but in a good way. There’s quite a few different ways to find your music, but surprisingly no search! It’s hard to believe that Apple who so proudly boasted about the functionality of their touch-keyboard would have neglected to include the feature in locating your music, a feature that they included in a CLICK WHEEL iPod. But I digress. All of the usual suspects are available to locate your favorite tunes, Playlists, Artists, Songs, Albums and optionally, Audiobooks, Compilations, Composers, Genres and Podcasts from the More… Menu. Oh, and of course Cover Flow, one of the coolest and most useless functions every to be devised by a design team let run wild in idealized urban-hippy bliss. What it lacks in usefulness it makes up for in raw, unbridled sex and awesome… Sawsomex. Maybe it’s just me, but I haven’t committed my 500+ album’s artwork to memory, so flicking through, while certainly boner inducing isn’t really helpful to me. But once you find your song its smooth sailing, except for scrubbing, which might just be my fat fingers, but it seems pretty clunky, I don’t seem to be able to move the virtual knob just where I want it, it seems to move in jumps. But hey! Picking another song from the same album is easy as… pushing a button and selecting another song. It’s also important to note that at any time, in any application, you can double tap the Home button and have basic audio controls popup, pretty good idea.

Movie playback is good, that is, if you can fit any movies on there. I’m able to fit all of my music (4GB), last 3 podcasts, and about 3 movies on my iPod touch, but I only keep 3+star music and rarely have full albums. Playback is simple enough, tap a movie, watch it, tap it once to get controls, scrub though (a little clunky as with the music), and fast forward/reverse, double tap to watch it in full-res, easy as pie. If you managed to get one of the good screens, the playback is super-nice, at least as good as my Dell monitor. If you didn’t, black people will look weird and shiny (v. Foreman on House).

Photos are dead simple as well, select photos, open an album, tap a photo and slide your greasy little fingers to your heart’s content, pinch to zoom in, depinch to zoom out. Hit play to start a slideshow and impress your friends by rotating the iPod touch when you get to a landscape picture. You can even set the wallpaper from the picture browser.

Lastly we have the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, also known as the longest store name ever. It works, you can browse, search and download music right from the iPod touch, would have been impressive 3 months ago, but at least they did it. I bought a song; the jumping animation is neat… I don’t see myself buying any more DRM laden music though, perhaps an obscure music video or tune when I can’t get it anywhere else, but that’s really more of an iTunes problem, and don’t even bother telling me about the iTunes Plus business, I’ll pay the “Pirate Tax” when Davey Jones rises from his salty grave and gives me a happy ending.

So all in all the iPod touch is easily the best iPod Apple has ever created. A little crippled, a little light on space and a lot rushed out of the factories, but the interface, screen (If you get a good one) and browser make this a lock for me. I give it a 4.7 out of 5, and suggest you add the iPod touch to your pile of expensive toys you don’t use as soon as you can.