Inbox:There's been so much hype about the iPhone, Apple's combined mobile and iPod, that it's easy to forget about the iPod Touch (right), the big-screened iPod without the phone part, writes Mike Butcher.

Similarly priced, but without the need to shuffle off your old trusty mobile, the Touch packs many of the iPhone's features best features.

I've been living with an iPod Touch for a month or so now. At first I couldn't see a great deal of use beyond what a normal iPod would afford me.

At 16GB (the 8GB is €299, the 16GB is €399), the Touch's largest memory size, it doesn't exactly compare with many of the other media players on the market, even with Apple's iPod Classic which can pack a massive 160GB.

However, playing music is just one aspect of this chameleon of a device. Okay, yes, it has a calculator and a clock, but I'm not talking about those.

Nor am I talking about the calendar and contacts applications which will sync to your desktop address book and diary. For starters, the touch screen interface is the most alluring aspect of the Touch. Viewing photos is a great experience, probably better than any comparable device on the market today. The screen is incredibly bright and you caress and tap your way through the interface so intuitively, that I was able to pass it to my four-year-old son, who, without thinking, started to flip through photos.

This interface has been gasped at ever since the iPhone was released at the start of the year, but it really is impressive.

So much so that I have started to expect similar touch-screen zooming and flicking from other devices and have to check myself before I flick my fingers across the laptop screen. Likewise video, transferred via iTunes looks great on the Touch.

Although you will have to use a converter programme like Quicktime to convert video to the iPod format, once transferred you can really wow your friends with some great home movies on the Touch.

However, it was the web browsing which really stunned me. The ability to look at the real, full-blown web on a mobile device via WiFi is really quite fun. Instead of looking at WAP pages, as one does on a mobile phone, you can see the whole web page and then zoom in to view crystal-clear typography and pictures.

It also changes how you interact with the web in that instead of having to flip open a laptop and lean over the screen, you find yourself checking Webmail, and RSS feed or the odd web site, or even reading a long article, slumped back on a sofa as if you were reading a book. The Touch also has the iTunes Music store embedded as an application, using its internet connection to allow you to browse and buy songs. Useful if you have some time to kill in a cafe.

The iPod Touch is a beautiful product, both in terms of the interface and the physical form. It's not going to knock a hard-core music player like the iPod Classic from its perch, but the combination of media player and browser is a pretty darn good one, and alm-ost makes it a real communicator - as well as entertainer.

With more memory, no doubt in the pipeline, I can see the Touch taking over from where the iPod left off.