That's for the great question! iPhone vs iPod Touch

G from It's Not About the Badge possed an interesting question over on a recent post of mine.

His question..

Hey I am thinking about getting a different ipod after christmas. Would you
get a classic for 249 or spend the extra and get the touch ipod, or as I will
call it, the iphone without the phone part.

If you aren't in the market for an iPhone, this is definitely something to consider. I love my iPhone, but I can see where it might not be suitable. But the iPod Touch does offer a lot of the same non-phone benefits as the iPhone.

When thinking about whether to get an iPod Classic (or similar) or the iPod Touch, I think you need to base your decision on which features are important to you. It will eventually come down to functionality vs capacity. As much as I love my iPhone, it still pains me to choose what stuff I want on it.

I bought the 8GB version. Since the video on this device is amazing, I've been carrying with me video podcasts and TV shows for me and the kids. Video takes up a fair amount of space and soon you'll find the 8GB isn't as big as you'd hope it would be. When I'm playing in a long poker tournament or travelling, the capacity of whats on the device starts making me long for something else. The larger capacity of the iPod Classic would alleviate a lot of this problem and just allow me to carry everything.

But here's the trade-off, you get gobs of storage capacity and the lose all your extra functionality. For example:


Let's start with the main reason to get either device, Wi-Fi. both have it and both use it. This may seem small to some of you, but this feature is EXTREMELY handy. One downside to the lack of phone features in the Touch is Wi-fi is all it has. With my iPhone, I'm always connected to the Internet as long as I have EDGE. The Touch doesn't. But as long as you can find free wi-fi to hop on, your golden. Both the phone and Touch offer iTunes downloads over wi-fi (warning - this can be extremely addicting and a little hard on the credit card). iPod classic has none of the PDAish features and thus no need for Wi-fi.

The iPod Classic offers none of the Internet based functionality. No Safari can be tough to lose once you've tried it.

So it comes down to this, if you are only buying one of these devices, what would you rather have? Internet over wi-fi with an amazing display or the capacity to carry your most if not all music and video?

I love my iPhone, but I'm seriously considering using my early adopter rebate to buy an iPod Classic to store more stuff. Besides, I can't use the iPhone at the WSOP! They've been banned!

If I've said nothing useful here, let me know. I spend a couple of days trying to get out everything I wanted to on this subject. My brain is usually faster than my fingers can type.