IPod Previous, Pause, and Next Buttons

I have a 2nd generation IPod Touch.  There is a feature that is constantly giving me trouble.  When I play music the Previous, Pause, and Next icons are so close together. I am often trying to pause a long podcast or audio book or speech and I hit Next or Previous because they are all right on top of each other.

Many times what is happening is that I have it laying on the table hooked to some speakers and I try to quickly pause because someone has come in to talk to me or I need to answer the phone or the door.  When I hit previous or next I end up having to navigate back to the track I was on and then fiddle around trying to find where I left off.  Some of the difficulty in this is the slider bar is hard to be accurate with using fingers and some of it is that I did not pay attention to the time index, since I was just listening and not watching the time.

I realize I have a really old IPod.  I am just hoping this is a better experience in newer versions of the IPod if I buy one.

On a related topic, I would like to see more Android devices that are IPod equivalents.  I'm looking for something less expensive than a phone that has PDA functionality, a camera, the ability to install the apps that I use, and optionally GPS functionality.  If it had everything else I don't really care about the GPS, but it would allow me to have GPS functionality always in my pocket and not have to buy a GPS device separately.