Thin is in
Although it has not yet generated as much buzz as the iPhone, the iPod Touch could be the best product designed in Cupertino. The most striking feature of the iPhone was, after all, its touch screen and navigation. More than a few people touted the iPhone as the best iPod ever, and some claimed they were not even interested in it being a phone. A lot of that may have been the Apple’s decision to push its first handset through AT&T with restrictive contracts and an initial price of around $700. All that got people talking about how great a $400 iPhone without a phone would be…not a bad marketing move on Apple’s part.
Apple rewarded the patient in September when it unveiled the iPod Touch, the no-phone iPhone. So what do you get? Of course, the Touch offers all the large landscape LCD and touch navigation, but it also got thinner. The Touch is only 8mm while the iPhone case is about 11.6mm thick. So how does one reduce the thickness by over 30 percent? By taking out the mobile phone functionality? Nope.
Cellphone companies have pressured camera designers for years to reduce the height of their modules. 
However, there is a limit to how close you can get the lensing to the imager chip. In the iPhone case, the camera module is about 7.5mm - almost the full thickness of the Touch. The lens barrel alone is more than 4mm long. Sorry guys, but there’s no workaround for the physics here. The Micron MT9D112 2MP camera-on-a-chip active pixel array is 3.5mm wide and 2.7mm high, and the quarter inch format lens needs the room to focus.
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