It didn’t take the folks at Apple too long to realise that the iPhone, with the phone stripped out of course, would make a fantastic addition to the iPod range, and the iPod Touch is the result.

As soon as people catch sight of the Touch you should prepare yourself for them being all over it like a wet towel…

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the iPhone, or indeed the Touch itself, it represents a fairly significant departure from the standard iPod formula. Gone is the now famous click-wheel interface, replaced instead by a single 3.5” touch screen. The controls have been magnificently worked out, making for a truly intuitive experience. If you need a manual for the Touch, you’re not using it right. The right answer is usually the one you grasp for instinctively, which only makes the whole experience that little bit more pleasurable.

What’s particularly nice about the touch screen is that it really manages to make all the small (and most of us would admit, pointless) additions that have been made to the iPod over the years useful – by this we mean the calendar, contacts, photos and other bits and pieces too numerous to mention. The best example of this is with video and photos, where the fact that controls take up no space on the device’s face means that the screen can be big enough to really enjoy visual media.

The only problem with the iPod Touch (that we can see at least) is the combination of steep price and low capacity. At €400 for 16GB you’re not talking about bad value,