Review: iPod touch 5th Generation

Better screenFive colour optionsiOS 6 improvementsVery thin and lightBetter earphonesApple Maps!Lightning port is a resetYou still need iTunes

In an age where your phone can hold all the music you own you may be wondering why you might still need an iPod touch 5th Generation.

The answer is that the iPod touch is not just an iPod anymore. While Apple still sells the old fashioned iPod Classic and has just rebooted with the iPod nano 7th Generation, the iPod touch has taken over as the champion of the iPod brand – it's essentially a media player par excellence that has morphed into a handheld gaming console thanks to the sheer number of excellent, and very cheap, games available via the App Store.

It's this gaming and app angle that really gives the touch its raison d'être. If you can't afford the premium tariffs that the iPhone attracts and you still want to take advantage of the thousands apps that Apple's App Store holds then the iPod touch is your cheapest route to entry.

The latest iPod touch 5th Generation takes the best features of the iPhone 5, like the taller 640x1136 pixel, 4-inch screen and the iOS 6 software update with Siri, and adds a few little quirks of its own, like a choice of coloured backs (black, grey, pink, yellow, blue and a sixth Product Red) and a new strap called an 'iPod touch loop'.

Along the way the camera has been upgraded to an iSight camera with a built-in flash that's capable of 1080p video recording and the processor has been upped to a duel-core A5 chip, giving it twice the processing power of the previous single-core A4 chip. Both the screen size and the faster processor are important for gaming, but more of that later.

Memory configurations have been simplified. The new 5th gen is available only in 32GB and 64GB flavours.

Finally, the new iPod touch runs iOS 6, the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system in all its glory, which means that both Panorama – a new mode for taking panoramic photos, and Siri, Apple's intelligent voice-activated personal assistant, are available here.

Note: neither of these two features work on a iPod touch 4th Generation running iOS 6.

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Review: Microsoft Wedge Touch Mouse

ResponsivePortableWorks well with Windows 8Easy to connect

With the launch of Windows 8, Microsoft has released some new peripherals that have been designed to complement the new operating system, and its new way of doing things. First up is the Microsoft Wedge Touch Mouse, a rather odd looking Bluetooth-only mouse.

In the past, Microsoft has launched a number of ergonomic peripherals that are comfortable to use for long periods of time. As you can guess from one look at this mouse, this isn't one of them.

But that's not the aim of this mouse. It's not designed for sitting in front of a desktop PC for hours at a time, but for quickly using with a Windows 8-equipped tablet. There's no dongle, but as long as your tablet is Bluetooth capable you can get Windows 8 to search, detect and connect to the mouse rather painlessly.

Software for adjusting what the mouse can do can be downloaded from Microsoft's website, but there's not many settings to change, so it's pretty pointless.

The mouse is small, so easy to carry around with you, and you can fit a few fingers on there to move the mouse around. As with previous Microsoft mice, the Bluetrack technology keeps the mouse responsive over a variety of surfaces.

The mouse also works with some touch gestures, such as swiping horizontally or vertically. While it doesn't seem to support multi-touch gestures, such as pinching to zoom in, it does make the Windows 8 interface more intuitive, as opposed to using a traditional mouse.

The Microsoft Wedge Touch Mouse is certainly not going to be to everyone's taste, and we had some serious reservations when we first saw the design, but it's actually not that bad at all if you want a light mouse to quickly work on your tablet when a touchscreen won't do.

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Hands-on review: IFA 2012: Dell XPS One 27 Touch

In association with Sony

Dell previously had a 27-inch all-in-one XPS, but this new model brings a couple of new tricks to the party. Firstly, it has a touchscreen, built specifically for Windows 8.

And secondly, there's a new tilt stand meaning it can be used at varying angles from upright to pretty much flat.

It's a real powerhouse of a machine, featuring an as yet unspecified Intel Core i7 processor, though we'd suspect it's the 3.10GHz i7-3770s inside the current XPS One 27. You probably don't get the screen wipes you can see in the picture above!

The unit comes complete with a wireless keyboard, but no mouse.

The display has a whopping 2,560 X 1,440 resolution, meaning there are 3.7 million pixels in the highly impressive panel, though it's still some way off the 2,880 x,1,800 resolution of the MacBook Air retina display. The touchscreen features 10 finger capacitive touch technology.

Also expect other specs to be similar to the current XPS One 27, which has 8GB of memory, a huge 2TB of storage (with a 32GB SSD for rapid start) and a 2GB Nvidia GeForce GT 640M.

The above is the slider cover for the webcam, but it shows the attention to design Dell now makes. There's a full array of ports as you'd expect as well as a Blu ray Combo drive.

The design follows on from other XPS systems, with a smart grey and black chassis. Note that we can see Windows 7 stickers here - a bit strange as we know this model will ship with Windows 8 as standard.

There's the eject button for the optical drive on the bottom right, too.

 

We were quite interested by how the Windows 8 charm bar looked on screen; it's bigger than you'd get on a notebook, but still seemed quite small for the large screen. When you're dealing with such a big device, the targets seem quite small.

 

The Dell XPS One 27 Touch UK and US release date is set for late October to coincide with the launch of Windows 8.

 

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'Hands on reviews' are a journalist's first impressions of a piece of kit based on spending some time with it. It may be just a few moments, or a few hours. The important thing is we have been able to play with it ourselves and can give you some sense of what it's like to use, even if it's only an embryonic view. For more information, see TechRadar's Reviews Guarantee.

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