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iPod Touch Gets an External Microphone?

Wednesday September 10, 2008 6:17 am PDT by Arnold Kim
Apple introduced the new iPod Touch yesterday which contained a couple of minor hardware tweaks over the previous model. Most notably, this included a built-in speaker and volume control buttons which were both absent on the 1st generation iPod Touch.

One item we failed to report, however, was that Apple appears to have also added external microphone support (with an accessory) into the iPod Touch as well. Apple introduced two new earphones accessories yesterday: Apple Earphones with Remote and Mic and In-Ear Headphones with Remote and Mic.

The microphone feature of the headsets was advertised as allowing you to record voice memos on the new iPod Nano, but Apple's product page indicates that the Mic also works with the iPod Classic as well as the new iPod Touch:

The remote and mic are supported only by iPod nano (4th generation), iPod classic (120GB), and iPod touch (2nd generation). Audio is supported by all iPod models.

Adding convenient microphone support into the iPod Touch opens up the possibility of Voice Over IP (VOIP) applications such as Skype which would allow you to make telephone calls from your iPod Touch over Wi-Fi networks. Apple has said that they would not restrict Wi-Fi VOIP applications as long as they did not run over the iPhone's cellular networks.

The microphones portion of the headsets will not work with the 1st generation iPod Touch. The new headset's audio and skip/next button reportedly work on the iPhone, but the volume controls do not.

There remains the possibility that this is a misprint on Apple's website and the iPod Touch does not support the microphone portion of the headset.

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