It's not much of a se­cret that keep­ing up with Ap­ple's lat­est prod­ucts is quite the task, as they seem to bring out up­dat­ed ver­sions of their mod­els with­in months of re­leas­ing the ini­tial one. It seems like on­ly yes­ter­day the iPod Touch first gen­er­a­tion was out, then the sec­ond, then the third...and now, a fourth. The fourth gen­er­a­tion iPod ac­cord­ing to many re­views dom­i­nates the pre­vi­ous mod­els with its up­dat­ed fea­tures and new Apps.

The new iPod 4 is 4.4 inch­es tall, 2.3 inch­es wide, and 0.28 inch­es thin, weighs 3.56 ounces and is made of glass and stain­less steel to pre­vent break­age of the de­vice. The mi­cro­phone em­bed­ded in its hard­ware is just one of the many ways that the iPod 4 dom­i­nates oth­er mod­els of its kind. With Face­Time now avail­able on iPods, the view­er can em­bark on video calls with oth­er users of Ap­ple prod­ucts, as cam­eras both at the back and front make tak­ing snap­shots and record­ing videos, as well as hav­ing video con­fer­ences with friends, con­ve­nient­ly ac­ces­si­ble. One of the most amaz­ing fea­tures though, is the Voice Con­trol ap­pli­ca­tion.

With this fea­ture, you can lit­er­al­ly have back and forth con­ver­sa­tions with your iPod, mak­ing life much sim­pler. Say for in­stance you'd like to hear songs by La­dy Gaga, all you'd have to do is say, "Play artist La­dy Gaga," and the iPod analy­ses your voice and grants your wish. Al­so, you can ask your iPod what song it's play­ing and re­ceive re­spons­es, or ma­nip­u­late your playlist by sim­ple com­mands such as, "play", "shuf­fle" or "pause". Us­ing the Air­Print and Air­Play de­vices, your iPod can wire­less­ly con­nect to cer­tain print­ers, and the new Ap­ple tele­vi­sions and speak­ers. One of the most im­por­tant ap­pli­ca­tions though, is - Find My iPod touch.

This free ap­pli­ca­tion al­lows you to track down your iPod if it be­comes lost, via maps as well as send­ing mes­sages (to iPod) of it be­ing lost and a con­tact num­ber, so that if some­one comes across it, re­turn­ing it can be sim­ple. If your iPod has been mis­placed, in­struc­tions can be sent to your de­vice that over­rides silent vol­ume set­tings, al­low­ing tones to be heard from your iPod so you can quick­ly lo­cate it via sound.

WiFi when avail­able, al­lows you to con­nect to end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties on the In­ter­net Sa­fari and al­so to the App­store, mak­ing down­loads of games and pro­grams easy. With ap­pli­ca­tions that make it ac­ces­si­ble to make movies on your de­vice, read eBooks, vis­it the game cen­tres and so much more, the iPod Touch 4 is sim­ply ir­re­sistible and in my opin­ion, a mod­el that won't go out of style for a long time.

Sarah Chadee

Se­nior Press Pass Cor­re­spon­dent

St. Joseph's Con­vent, San Fer­nan­do