Samsung Takes On iPod Touch, With Flair - New York Times

In the swimming pool’s worth of ink that has been spilled on Apple over the years, not enough fuss has been made about the iPod Touch.

In essence, it’s an iPhone without the cellphone bill. It does almost everything the iPhone does â€" runs 600,000 apps, plays movies and music, displays e-books, takes pictures and videos, checks e-mail and Web sites â€" but without requiring you to sign your soul over to Verizon or AT&T. When you factor in the monthly fees, the two-year cost of an iPhone is at least $1,880. The iPod Touch? $200.

The one colossal trade-off, of course, is that the Touch can’t connect to the cellular network. It gets onto the Internet over Wi-Fi only, so it’s no good for turn-by-turn GPS instructions. But the Touch handles phone calls or text messages just fine, at least in Wi-Fi hot spots. Plenty of apps let users call and text on Wi-Fi, like Skype, Line2, TextFree With Voice, and Apple’s built-in Messages app.

(Millions of adolescents and teenagers get by just fine on a Touch instead of an iPhone, to the great relief of their budget-minded parents. Take my ninth-grade son: I don’t pay a nickel to call or text his Touch. Between the school, home and friends’ houses, he’s perpetually on Wi-Fi. The only time he’s ever unreachable is when he’s in transit.)

This is all old news, of course; no wonder Apple is selling about 22 million Touches a year. The surprise is that the iPod Touch has become the undisputed caretaker of its big fat niche without much challenge from rivals.

Samsung has taken notice.

Its family of Touch rivals, called the Galaxy Player series, arrived last winter, and now a second generation has already appeared, thinner and better. Last week, the best Galaxy Player yet landed: the Player 4.2 ($200, same price as the Touch).

Now, the current iPod Touch has its charms. It has that Retina display â€" a screen so sharp and fine, you can’t see individual pixels. It’s the thinnest, best-looking player on the market.

Maybe more important, it belongs to the Apple universe. It connects to the world’s biggest app store, an attractive and well-stocked music/movie/TV store. There’s a panoply of cases, accessories and docks for it. Its charging connector is such a standard that it mates with cars and hotel alarm clocks everywhere you go.

In other words, a dark-horse alternative like Samsung’s needs a pretty convincing pitch.

As it turns out, the pitch is fairly convincing. It’s as if the company were trying to say: “We are to the iPod Touch what Android phones are to the iPhone. That is, we’re much more open. We offer choice that Apple doesn’t â€" of screen size, of manufacturer. We don’t obsess over the suitability of every app in our app store. We don’t have Apple’s weird phobia about removable components, like batteries and memory cards. When you get tired of Apple’s take-it-or-leave-it perfectionism, we’ll be here for you.”

In many ways, the Player 4.2 is identical to the Touch. It has about the same advertised battery life (40 hours of music playback, five hours of video). You use it the same way: multitouch screen, on-screen keyboard, no voice commands. Like the Touch, it has both a back camera (no flash) and a low-resolution front camera for doing video chats. There’s built-in Bluetooth for playing music through your car or wireless headphones.

The Player 4.2 is beautiful. Its plastic shell, with comfortably rounded edges, can’t hold a candle to the mirror-finish metal back of the Touch, but of course it doesn’t hold fingerprints, either.

The Player is not as light or as thin (0.35 inches thick instead of 0.28), but the slight thickening makes possible a removable back panel. Inside are two things the Touch doesn’t offer: a removable battery and a memory-card slot.

You’ll probably need to buy a memory card, in fact, since the Player comes with only about four gigabytes of free memory for your files. But the point is: the capacity of your Player is up to you. Choice is good, right?

The Player offers a number of undeniable hardware features that trump the Touch. For example, it has stereo speakers instead of mono, cleverly positioned at opposite ends. True, you won’t detect much separation of right and left channels unless, you know, you balance the thing on your nose. But over all, the Player’s volume and clarity are much better than the Touch’s.

The Player also has some goodies that are extra-cost options on the Touch, like a wall charger and earbuds with a microphone on the cord.

Because this machine runs Android (the outdated version 2.3), it can run most of the 400,000 apps on the Android app store. All the essentials are there: the Android versions of Angry Birds Space, DrawSomething and so on. In fact, the full, ad-free versions of Angry Birds, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and FIFA 2012 come installed.

If you pair the Player with a non-smartphone over Bluetooth, you can make and receive actual phone calls right on the Player, even when you’re not in Wi-Fi.

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com