iPod touch 5th Generation review: biggest is better, if your thumb can take the strain

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, 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 640×1136 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.

This article originally appeared on Techradar and was published with permission. Continue the full review at Techradar.