My first two iPods, acquired the minute they hit the stores, were original silver and 'refreshed' orange second generation shuffles which work for me as a tandem pair as I can split all my favourite tracks across them and just swap them when one's battery runs flat.

But a two year old camera that works seamlessly with iPhoto was also sucking me into key parts Apple's version of (i)Life which I had long thought I had left behind or at least had passed me by, so I tuned in with the level of bedroom WiFi commitment normally reserved for new Macworld Expo keynotes when the prospect of an iPod with a half decent screen loomed large.

A 16Gb touch was an easy decision. I ordered one next day and picked it up the day after the first preordered stock hit Australian stores.

Fifteen days and a lot of fun later, I should share some early impressions of what has become my ultimate toy. And I'm not alone in my impressions as evidenced by the uncharacteristic enthusiasm shown by more than one usually reserved geek who I gave a chance to play with it. The (8mm) thinness was the first point of excitement and finger pinch zooming has proven a real winner.

Of course I wasn't really taking a risk with version 1.0 technology. Most of it has had three months intense scrutiny in the iPhone so there were never going to be show stoppers. And my ancient mobile phone gets called so rarely that I could never see any sense tying a fun toy to a phone plan.

Yes there are a few things that we can expect to see resolved with software updates, but nothing more serious than the admitted bug which prevents calendar updates. And while I'm confident Apple will release an SDK after they stabilse the internals, if Bejeweled is a reasonable example of what you can do via iPhone/touch Safari* more access to the internals isn't super urgent and will be even less so once web apps can be retained in something more reliably persistent than browser cache.

It just does music and pics and other stuff exactly how you would expect, as well as being totally fun to play with. And I'm so far short of using the full memory that I don't expect that to become an issue any time soon.

*curiously Bejeweled runs fine on my iMac in Firefox but doesn't in Safari.