What's not on the iPod touch
Bill Palmer sent along this list he put together of all the iPhone features you won't find on the iPod touch. When a lot of people, including myself, first saw the iPod touch, we called it the "iPhone without the phone," because it seemed to pretty much have everything the iPhone had without actually being able to call anyone-- MobileSafari was in there, as was YouTube, Gmail and Yahoo Mail (via the browser). But as Palmer notes, it's not as complete as we first thought.
The EDGE network is probably the most obvious and biggest omission-- the iPhone will let you do what you want from anywhere, while an iPod touch only works where your laptop does (unless you have an EDGE hookup, obviously). The Mail application is missing, as is the Notes application (that one has raised a lot of hackles, too), and Bluetooth is gone as well. There's no camera, volume buttons, or dock. The screen isn't quite as good. And strangely enough, Google Maps, Weather, and Stocks are all missing, too. Those seem so easy to implement, and such big selling points, that you wonder what the story is there.
Palmer doesn't mean to knock the iPod touch-- he says it's still the best iPod ever, and it really is. If someone did a list of features on the video iPod (or even the Classic) vs. the iPod touch, there'd be no contest. But if anyone was really worried that Apple might cannibalize their own iPhone sales by releasing the iPod touch, a feature list like this shows there's a lot less chance of that.
