Me and My World

You’ll say you can’t compare apples with pears so how can you really compare the iPhone 4 and iPod touch 4G? Well the former is a more complex version of the later. Or better said, the iPod touch 4G is just an iPhone 4 without the phone part of it. So therefore the two devices should be nearly identical, or so you’d be lead to believe.

ipod touch 1


The iPhone 4 is magical, or at least that’s the premise we’re going to start this comparison with, and that’s why the iPod touch 4G will have to mimic a few iPhone 4 features so customers will think the next-gen iPod touch 4G is totally cool, even magical, by association, and buy it immediately, even if they already have a previous-gen iPod touch at home.

Watching the live keynote last week, I got the impression that the iPod touch 4G is exactly an iPhone 4, only a lot slimmer since it doesn’t have all the radio parts needed for its phone function. It looks like I was wrong, and so was everyone else, to assume that the iPod touch is almost a perfect copy of the iPhone 4.

Moving past the obvious differences: one’s a phone while the other one an MP3 player, different overall design, different size, we find two gadgets that are two powerful mini computers capable of all sorts of things: gaming, music and video playing, apps, photo taking and video recording and video calls. But their specs and features aren’t all that similar, and you should definitely be disappointed to spot the following differences:

iPhone 4 vs iPod touch 4G

Touchscreen display
IPS technology vs non-IPS technology
Battery size
5.25W/Hour vs 3.44W/Hour
RAM
512MB vs 256MB
Storage
16/32GB vs 8/32/64GB
Back Camera
5-megapixel vs 0.7-megapixel
Calling Alert
Ringtone and Vibration vs No Vibration for FaceTime

As you can see from the comparison above, the iPhone 4 wins when it comes to the tech behind it. Sure, the iPhone 4 also happens to be a lot more expensive than the iPod touch 4G, but I still find it weird for Apple to cripple the iPod touch 4G like that and let customers believe the iPod touch would be pretty similar to the iPhone 4. At no time during the official keynote did Steve Jobs say some of the features on the iPod touch 4G are different than those found on the iPhone 4, although he didn’t say these two devices are practically identical either.

But the resemblance was definitely implied, and we’re definitely not thrilled to see such marketing tactics put to work here. And if you’re going to say the iPod touch 4G is a lot slimmer than its predecessors, and that’s something that can explain why the iPod touch 4G is inferior in specs, then think again. We never asked for a slimmer iPod touch, did we?



Read: iPhone 4 vs iPod touch 4G: Almost Identical But So Different [The New iPhone 4 & iPod touch 4G Should be So Similar, But They Really Aren’t] » TFTS – Technology, Gadgets & Curiosities