Touch notes

A couple of things I have noticed about my iPod Touch:

1) If you do a big swaparound of music, several GB or so, the portrait-mode cover art and the thumbnails are wrong but the right picture is displayed in coverflow (landscape mode.) A full restore fixes this.

2) Before restoring the device, iTunes has to download a 150 MB disk image. Not surprising after the fact, but it increases the already long time it takes to restore over USB. I don't suppose it's feasible to have a connector which could connect to either USB or Firewire, which is a pity as USB is noticeably slower than Firewire.

3) Turning off wireless increases battery life hugely.

4) It optimizes photos - I added a thousand or so, expecting to fill up the Touch. iTunes spent all night optimizing them, as there's no point storing 2460x1280 on a little screen like that: it's a pity this can't be done offline, as this means I have to leave the Touch plugged into the computer all night and thus within reach of the children in the morning. But, when they're on the device, they look great and in slideshow mode you can fast-forward at 20 images per second at high quality. And they only took up a gig or so. [Edit: it doesn't take that long, even for lots of photos]

5) It's tough putting a decent sized music collection on 16GB: my old 40GB 4G used to have everything on it that I would ever want to listen to, but you need a different strategy for 16GB . I won't bore you with mine but it uses half a dozen playlists and smart playlists, fortunately you can drop them all in a folder to keep them out the way (of accidental deletion, mostly!)

6) The back scratches whatever you do. My case hasn't come yet because of the postal strike. I'll be having words with Danny (who works for the PO) when I see him about it!

7) It is a beautiful, wonderful device. And it sounds brilliant, I think even better than my old iPod.