Wireless Connections

All iPhones are built with the ability to communicate with cellular towers. As a result, iPhone users can connect to the Internet in any place with a compatible cellular signal, as well as anywhere their phones can establish a Wi-Fi connection. By contrast, the iPod Touch can only connect to the Internet through a Wi-Fi connection.

GPS

The iPhone comes with a GPS chip while the iPod Touch does not. The lack of a GPS chip prevents some enhanced features of Internet services from being fully utilized. Only pictures taken with the iPhone, for example, can be geotagged. Geotagging, used by services such as Google Maps, binds a picture with its location on the globe. Browsing to Google’s homepage presents GPS-capable phones with the option to search “in your area.” Furthermore, iPhones can always present options for identifying your location in services such as Facebook or Foursquare, whereas the iPod Touch must be connected to a wireless router that has been set up with location information.

Speed

Although Apple takes steps to ensure the browsing experience is comfortable in both devices, iPod has slower hardware than the iPhone. The iPhone 5 uses the newest 1.3 GHz A6 processor, while the iPod Touch relies on the 800 MHz A5x processor. Both of these architectures are dual-core, but the A6 gains speed in increased efficiency and a triple-core graphics processing unit. The iPod Touch also features half the memory -- 512MB to iPhone’s 1GB. As a result, opening and switching between multiple browser windows is slower in the iPod Touch.

Camera

Much of the mobile Internet browsing experience today is built on taking and sharing photos. To that end, iPhone provides a larger-format 8 megapixel camera. The iPod Touch offers only a 5 MP camera. Both phones feature a similar-quality, front-facing camera for video chat.