The new iPod touch looks different in another way. Available in gray, silver, pink, yellow, blue, and Product Red, this is the first colorful iPod touch line. Each features a white face save the gray model, which offers the black front that we're accustomed to on previous models. Colors cover the back and wrap around to the sides. The colors lean toward pastel rather than bold, but they give these iPods a fresh, more playful countenance than their somewhat antiseptic looking predecessors.

The iPod's height makes a difference in a variety of ways. That extra screen space, like with the iPhone 5, allows an additional row of icons on the Home screen, which may mean paging through fewer screens to find your apps.

Apps that have been built to take advantage of the taller screen are just as nice. With the Photos app, for example, you can see six rows of thumbnails instead of four and a half. Pull up the Settings screen and you will find 10 entries on a single screen rather than eight. And then there are the apps written for the larger display that provide more elbow room.

Fire up the Videos app and watch a widescreen movie on both this and the previous iPod touch and you will discover that when viewing a movie in the non-widescreen mode, you actually see more of the image on the new touch--less material is taken away from either side when the top and bottom of the video is expanded to fill the iPod's screen. Switch back to the widescreen mode and both models show the entire width of the movie, but the new iPod touch's black bars above and below the video are narrower as the display was designed with widescreen video in mind.