Hey U Guys

Over the past month, I've put up three reviews for Universal movies that included Frost / Nixon, The Unborn and Duplicity. The difference with these three reviews was that I had watched all of them on the Apple iTouch given to us very kindly by NBC / Universal Studios. In this article, I'll be looking at the pros and cons of using the device and exploring how I think that the ways in which we watch films will be changed by devices like the iTouch.

I'd really appreciate your thoughts in the comments section after you've read it as all these are just my opinion and I'd very much value yours, even if you completely disagree with everything I write!

The 'Apple iPod touch' as it's officially known, was originally released on 13th December 2007 and since then, has spawned a 2nd generation which was launched on September 9th, 2008. You can now buy 8, 26 or 32Gb versions of the clever touch-screen device which allows for multiple movies to be saved and watched whenever convenience (or battery life) allows. You can think of the iTouch as an iPhone without the phone part.

Convenience is probably the key word here. I probably watch on average around 10 films per week, most of which will be sat in my nice comfy chair, in front of my big LCD TV with my surround sound turned up as loud as the neighbours will allow, they won’t necessarily be watched in a device with a 3.5 inch screen.... or will they?

In this summary of thoughts, i'll primarily be focusing on the movie side of use, rather than using the many other functions that are offered. I'll start by quickly going though how you'd get the movie onto your device. You'll need to have iTunes (which is free) installed on your PC or Mac and once installed, you connect your device to your computer which will be automatically detected. From there, you can use iTunes to begin copying your music and movies across. To get the best quality of movies for the iTouch, you'll need to go to the Apple Store through iTunes to purchase a movie. You can either chose to rent or buy these. To buy, they vary in price but to rent, they will cost you around £3.50.When you rent the movie, you will be give 30 days in which to start watching it. Once you begin, you then have a further 24 hours to complete the movie before the rental is automatically deleted by the device. It's not a bad system, as long as you're sure that you'll be able to watch it within the given 24 hours period.

Here's my quick list of pros and cons from using the iTouch:

As you can see, the pros far outweigh the cons, but the battery life and, for me, the fingerprints were a big issue. I think I am a bit too sensitive about the fingerprint issue than I need to be but every time I touched the screen to find out how long was left on the movie, I’d seem to spend the next 5 minutes trying to clean the fingerprint off the lovely clear panel. I think this is probably a personal issue that i need to let go! The battery life will no doubt improve with future generations but at the moment, you can watch around two movies of around 2 hours each on the device before you'll have to give up. This is probably sufficient for most users who will give their iTouch a recharge before needing any more juice. But if you were travelling on a long haul flight or a long car journey (as a passenger!) where you're desperate to pass the time, two films may not be enough.

Ultimately, the device was very easy to use, lightweight, good sound, clear picture.... and just brilliantly portable. The fact you could take 10+ films with you, and hundreds of music albums, a load of photos and no end of Apple apps is just brilliant and I think the future. But that's what I'd like to look at now. How I see this method of watching movies working.....

I was lucky enough to be given an iRiver PMP 140 in 2003 to review for my friends' company. I still have the device today and I would say that I've probably clocked up around 200+ hours of watching on the device. I used to work in the city of London and everyday would religiously get the 06.38 train from Wallington to London Bridge and then London Bridge to Canon Street to my job in the city. Door to door, this was around a 50 minute trip. Being a huge Jerry Bruckheimer fan, I got heavily into my TV series including CSI, Without a Trace and then later on things like Cold Case, Prison Break, 24, Enterprise, Stargate Atlantic, NCIS and many (MANY) more! Each episode would clock in at a brilliant 45 minutes making it perfect for my journey. This was amazing for me. Every single day, i would watch one episode on the way to work, and then another on the way home. If you average that there are around 20 episodes in a standard US drama series, I could rattle off an entire season in around 2 weeks. Sometimes faster if I was into a series that much and I'd sometimes watch another episode at lunch time too! As I'm not a big reader, but am a BIG film and US TV series lover, there was no better way for me to pass a dull 45 minutes on a train journey than plugging myself into my iRiver. Bear in mind this was 6 years ago, a lot has changed. the iRiver was big, bulky, fragile and had the worst navigation system on it than any device I've ever seen. That said, I loved it to pieces because I had a lot of good times with it :).

A lot has changes since then, especially with mega-corporation, Apple bringing out devices to rival the world's market leaders. iTunes first introduced video support through iTunes on May 9th, 2005 and then started selling videos through their store in October of the same year. The first iPod to be sold with video capability was the iPod Nano on the 5th September 2007. This was quite a long time after the first full length feature film was sold through iTunes on the 12th September, 2006. Since this time, almost exactly 3 years has passed and I still don't know too many people who use the service for all their movie needs.

Bazmann wrote an article a couple of days ago (and this will be a new regular feature) looking at and reviewing the weekly 99p release on iTunes, which opened my eyes slightly into the cost of downloading a movie from iTunes. The issue I see here though is that currently, on iTunes, if you want to rent a standard movie, (at random I have chosen Role Models to use as an example) a vaguely new release starring Paul Rudd (our review here). To rent the movie will cost you £3.49 and to buy it (that means you can download it and the file is yours to keep until the day you die) will cost you £10.99. If i go to Amazon.co.uk as an example, to buy the DVD of the same movie, it will cost you £10.98. So, at random, I’ve picked a movie which is cheaper (just!) to buy by going to a standard online outlet store than buying it through a download facility. Here I have to ask myself WHY!? The DVD will have had to have been pressed, boxed, packed and then shipped to Amazon which all costs money. The Role Models MP4 file will have been delivered to Apple once, put on a server by a techie and is then be made available to download at more money?! How does that work?

Moving onto more technical matters, and using Role Models again by way of an example, the file to download is 1.36GB. That is no small file. I have a 20mb cable internet connection at home which would probably take in and around an 25 minutes to download. Possibly faster if Apple is running at optimal speed. My 20Mb connection is probably higher than the UK average of speeds. I was at a friends' house last night who informed me that he has a 2mb connection. At 2Mb, downloading the Role Models movie would take him forever! The other issue is that he is capped so this would be a large dent in his monthly download limit and could end up with him being charged an excess or being cut off until he pays his Internet Service Provider more money.

I've gone off on a slight tangent but these are all part and parcel issues of downloading movies - but will that stop progression of an online service? For the time being I think it will, but I still believe downloading movies is the future. It has to be in these times of trying to reduce waste and getting things faster than ever, and most importantly to the consumer, cheaper. When download becomes quicker and video files can be encoded to a smaller file size but still keeping the quality, these sort of things wont be an issue. But until that time, people will keep on buying their movies from the places they know. They get to keep a hard copy of what they've bought, they don't have the issue of their hard drive being wiped out and losing all they've bought, they don't have the issue of having to book up their computer every time they want to watch the movie, and at the moment, it's cheaper to buy the hard copy anyway!

Things like online backup are going to be huge in the future to combat these sort of problems. Amazon already have their own one called Amazon S3 but their prices are still very high. Until prices drop and the consumer can get value for money, faster download speeds and smaller files, they wont be using these download methods..... give it 10 years and I’ll review this article and I think I’ll find things have changed dramatically! Let's find out then!

Let me know you thought on movie downloads in the comments below. Do you agree with me, do you completely disagree? Let me know!