I hate to say it…yes HATE…but I must admit that this little thing is pretty awesome.  With the new iTouch I can access my email, check stocks, check the weather, browse the Internet (sorta) with a little hand held device.  This is great for things like when I just want to check my email and not deal with turning on a computer.  The integration with Yahoo! mail is great it is a realtime look into your folder any emails you delete, respond, forward, read are marked accordingly in Yahoo.

I did come upon this by winning it at a convention for work that I went to so the price couldn’t be much better ($0).  I won the 8GB model which holds enough music to keep me happy as that is about 2,000 songs but not my full library (running about 33GB).  I also, for my birthday, received my car connection bridge from my girlfriend so now I have it directly connected to my car and that is really nice.  No more dealing with changing CD’s and I got the connection cable that plugs into the headphone jack so I can plug into any MP3 player not just iPod.

I have it synced up with my outlook calendar which is linked through Plaxo to my Gmail account so now it is easy to see what meeting I need to be at next for work.  It is also synced with my Yahoo! contacts.  The web browser is alright and gets the job done but I wouldn’t surf the net for long with it.  Also Safari doesn’t support flash so anything with flash doesn’t work on the device but I just read something that said this will be changing soon.

For a first generation product I am very impressed.  But as usual Apple always kills the early adopters and added a 32GB model and rumors are they are going to drop the 8GB version and drop all prices by $100.  Right now the 32GB version runs $499 which is a lot of money but I would expect the price to drop to $399 in the near future.  As long as you find a way to work around iTunes, get the album art, update iTunes, get your MP3 tags inline and download your MP3’s the iTouch gets a very positive review