Today I finally got some quality hands-on time with the iPod Touch (it's something I've been dying to play with since I saw the keynote). After trying two Best Buys and a Circuit City, and either not finding a demo unit, or finding one without any media installed, I decided to try the nearest Apple Store (located in Sugar Land, Texas...for those who might be curious). When I got there, I found several demo units. However, I soon found out that all but one of them had yet to be synced with iTunes. When turning them on, all I saw on the screen was the iTunes icon with a dock connector icon below it, so I assume that is what it meant. Anyway, since there weren't any in stock and the store was almost empty, I decided to put the one working demo unit through its paces. I played around with it for about 15-20 minutes, until the employees started to pester me.

My brief experience with the iPod Touch can be best explained by one word: Wow! Unfortunately, that is not only a good Wow!, but a bad one as well.

I'll start off with the bad. The demo unit I used was very, very buggy. Music would not play. It was perpetually stuck on "pause". I could skip tracks, browse albums, but no matter which song I played, it was paused at the halfway point. Music videos would also not play. You could see the first frame, and that was all. The biggest issue that I found was a bad accelerometer. Rotating the device had no effect when browsing music or pictures. I did get it to work once to initiate cover flow, but then in order to get out of it, I had to use the menu button. As I said...buggy.

Now for the good. Videos played flawlessly and there was no hint of the "negative effect". Granted, there were only two movie clips to view (The Italian Job and School of Rock) and neither of them had really dark scenes, still, things that were supposed to be black were indeed black. I did not notice any issue with dark hair or dark clothing in the clips, nor did I notice any problems with dark album art. Upon turning off the device, I was also able to see the dimmed icons under the power off slider, and not negative looking icons like some have reported. The interface itself worked quite well. Better than expected. I had no problem scrolling lists, flipping through pictures, or selecting things. I never thought I'd admit this, but I like the touch interface better than the click wheel. The calendar and contacts apps work as expected, and creating new contacts with the keyboard is very easy. Since the store had wifi, I was also able to try YouTube and Safari. I was amazed by Safari. It is simply the best mobile browser around. I didn't really expect it to work as well as Apple claimed, but I was pleasantly surprised.

All in all, I like it, and I want one:) However, I think I'll wait until they fix the bugs and correct this screen issue. Even though the demo's screen was fine, given my history of bad luck with new devices, I'd probably get a bad one.

In my opinion, if not for the skimpy storage capacity and battery life, the iPod Touch would be the best media player around (once the screens and bugs are fixed).

Sorry for the length of my post, but I can get a little wordy at times ;)