CrunchGear

Yikes, remind me not to ask BusinessWeek’s Cliff Edwards to the Bloggers Prom.

For starters, I’m not a guy who likes guys and secondly, he’d probably complain the whole night even though I had my mom iron my suit and borrowed some money from my dad so’s I could pony up for a limo. Oh and thirdly, he downloaded a Jennifer Lopez song and I just can’t get on board with her as an actress or as a musician.

His qualms include that the Touch needs to be connected to a computer running iTunes before it can be used. I sort of agree. That was kind of an odd choice but it did serve to get everything set up from a synchronization standpoint. I remember thinking that I would have been mad if I, for instance, would have bought the Touch in an airport or something and wanted to start browsing the internet and downloading stuff to it right away.

But he’s also perturbed by some things that seem kinda common sense-ish, like if you have more than one iTunes account, you have to log into the same one you want to use on the Touch before you sync it because the Touch uses the most recently active iTunes account to download songs over a wireless connection. And he was frustrated that the song he downloaded directly to the Touch didn’t show up in iTunes because he chose the "manually manage my account" option, which doesn’t automatically sync the music that he wanted automatically synched. He also doesn’t like that he can’t use Safari or YouTube unless he’s connected to the internet. Those are both internet-driven apps, though.

Other gripes: no direct video downloading (I agree), no Bluetooth (I agree), no built-in e-mail app, microphone, or camera (meh). His biggest gripe, however, is the lack of built-in speaker and "because there are no speakers, you can’t sample a new clip with a companion who might offer that extra advice on whether you should shell out 99¢ for the track."

I’ll be the first to tell you that portable music devices haven’t lived up to their full potential for quite some time and easy, straightforward direct-to-device downloads are long overdue. But I’ll also tell you that when I opened the iPod Touch, I was definitely wowed. And this is coming from someone who uses a PC (although I’ve owned and sold three Macs) and has historically purchased non-Apple music players. It may not be perfect, but it’s still quite an impressive doodad.

The iPod Touch Fails to Wow [Businessweek]