iPod Touch 2 wishlist

Posted Monday, April 14, 2008 at 4:53 pm by Jason Cartwright |

While everyone frantically tries to predict which new features the iPhone 2 will contain, I thought I’d take a moment to think of the possibilities for the iPod Touch 2.

Camera
The iPod Touches big brother (the iPhone) already has a 2 megapixel camera, this will more than likely get upgraded, however the Touch lacks a camera at all. This means that adding a profile photo to any of your contacts requires you to do the following long-winded process.

1. Take a photo of your contact with a Digital Camera
2. Copy a picture of your Contact into a folder your going to sync to the iPod Touch.
3. Connect your iPod Touch
4. Open iTunes
5. Select the iPod Touch
6. Select the Photos tab
7. Select the photos folder containing your Contact’s picture.
8. Sync your iPod Touch.
9. Open Contacts
10. Edit the Contact you wish to add the photo for
11. Select and crop the photo.

Note: this assumes that your not syncing your entire pictures folder. Unless you have the 32Gb version, I doubt you would be.

The addition of a camera on the Touch would enable users to simply snap a photo of their Contact, then press Add to Contact, select the Contact and your done.

I’d also love to be able to blog from the iPod Touch. In almost every post I try and include one or more pics to keep things interesting and visually appealing. Being able to write a blog entry, then click insert image, should launch the camera, snap the pic and it could be embedded in the blog post. Assuming you have a Wi-Fi connection, you’d simply hit Post and you’d be done – this really should be how easy it is.

In-line headphone controls
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to repeatedly pull the iPod Touch out of my pocket just to skip to the next track or adjust the volume. I understand Apple wants to keep the design of the iPod Touch really slick, so adding buttons to the exterior is probably out of the question.

If the headphones that ship with the Touch included this functionality, I believe the experience would be substantially increased. If I’m on the treadmill at the gym, the last thing I want to be doing is retrieving it from my pocket and potentially dropping it.

Home screen icons auto-update
When the ability to add your own Home screen icons came along, I quickly added some of my favourite sites – Facebook, Hahlo, Digg, Engadget, Gizmodo, CrunchGear, TechCrunch etc. At the time none of them had iPhone-style icons, since then all the sites I frequently visit have since added their own iPhone-style icons, yet I had to manually add the site again, then delete the old icon.

It’d be great if the iPod Touch (and iPhone for that matter) checked the mandatory location of a site for the iPhone-style icon each time you visited that site from your device, this would alleviate any update issues.

If you have any ideas for the iPod Touch 2, then please leave a comment.