I purchased the new iPod Touch 2nd Generation today.  It is my first time  owning an iPod and so far I am very impressed.  As far as I can tell it is the same as the iPhone without the Phone and Camera.  I have been trying out lots of the free Apps from the App Store.  There are some good ones and some that are not so useful.  I had to install the new iTunes v8 to use with it.  This is also the first time I have used iTunes.

The iPod Touch 2nd Generation (2G) is different than the 1st Generation iPod Touch in only a few ways.  First the 2G has dedicated Volume Up and Down buttons on the side,  this is very handy as you don’t have to go into the software to change the volume.  The 2G also has a built in speaker so you do not have to use the ear buds.  This is great if you want to use the Alarm clock or don’t feel like using the ear buds.  The battery is also supposed to last longer than the 1st gen as will but I don’t have one to compare it against.  The shape of the Wi-Fi antenna on the back is also different although it is only a cosmetic change.  (It’s oval shaped now)

I have been using the built in Wi-Fi to browse the web and it makes a good portable internet device.  I have also been listening to Audio Books a fair bit.  I had to figure out iTunes to get that to work correctly.  None of my music or Audio Books came from iTunes (They came from CD’s or other online stores).  When I imported all my Audio Books they came in as regular music in MP3 format.  After some poking around in iTunes and searching on the web, I discovered that I could select Audio Book or Speech for the Genre then CTRL-A to select all the tracks.  Then I right-clicked them and selected “Get Info” then clicked on the “Options” tab.  From there I check off “Media Kind” and set it to “Audiobook”, set “Remember Position” to Yes, “Skip when shuffling” to Yes and “Gapless Album” to Yes.  I press OK and after a few seconds the tracks disappeared from my Music list.  To see them again I had to click on the Edit Menu then Preferences and make sure Audio Books was check off.  After Syncing them to my iPod, I could access them by clicking Music then More then Audiobooks.  They played great and could press the Home button to browse the web or play as game as I listened.

So far I love it and have not encountered any problems with it.