NEW APPLE IPOD TOUCH 32GB WHITE

It’s fitting that this is the fifth generation of the iPod Touch, because what you’ve got here is, in effect, an upgrade almost as ambitious as the recently launched iPhone 5.

Like the iPhone 5, the new Touch has had a bit of a growth spurt, stretching just over a centimetre to accommodate a larger 4in, 1136 x 640 “Retina” display. It’s thinner too, slimming down to just over 6mm thick and dropping 13g of weight in the process. To be honest, it feels a bit lightweight and flimsy when you first pick it up, but the new aluminium casing – carved, like the MacBook laptops, from a single sheet of the metal – should be tough enough to cope with a few knocks in a backpack.

And though it’s not scratch-proof, it’s not going to graze anywhere near as badly as the chrome-backed Touches of old.

The new screen is visibly better than the previous Touch’s screen, offering not merely more pixels, which is nice enough, but also greater colour saturation and an even wider viewing angle. Using in-cell technology to reduce the number of layers that have to be bonded together to make the IPS LCD panel brings the image closer to the front of the Touch.

Like the new iPhone and iPod Nano, the Touch now comes with a pair of Apple’s new ‘earpods’, albeit without a mic and control pod. These do provide better audio quality than their predecessors.