Deciding recently that for some inexplicable reason I was now in the market for an MP3 player, I began to look around at what was on offer. My first leanings were towards flash based players as I wanted something small, light and affordable. The iPod shuffle held my interest for sometime as it offered everything I needed and only the things I needed. I didn't need a built-in radio, voice recorder, tiny display etc. the kind of features that are used as selling points for competing products. In the end I decided to go for the smallest of the full size iPod's the 20GB model. I've always wanted one but have been put off in the past by the price, PC compatibility and reported battery life. Talking to several colleauges who also own iPods I learnt that the technical issues such as battery life had been resolved with the newer generation of players. They are still relatively expensive but I figured if I bought anything else I would end up feeling disappointed eventually.
Love them or hate them the iPod has definitely found its way into a class of gadget just that little bit apart from the rest. A class in which I'd include Victorinox Swiss army knives, Zippo lighters, Maglite torches and the Dyson vacuum cleaner. Not only is iPod a very strong brand, they look good (if simplicity is your thing) and have a undeniable 'cool factor'. There are undoubtedly more feature rich MP3 players on the market and there are certainly cheaper players around but nobody has yet come up with the holy grail of consumer electronics the 'iPod Killer'.
From the moment my order arrived it was clear that Apple's attention to detail is superb. From the engineering and style of the packaging to the build quality of the contents. The hardest thing the cope with was that on taking the iPod out of the box it required 3 hours of charging before use (based on recommendations of existing users on the Internet). Since placing the order last week I had been going through my CD collection importing some of my favourites into a copy of iTunes I had downloaded from the Apple website. Building up my iTunes library in advance meant that straight away I had around 1000 songs (5 GB of AAC files sampled at bit rate of 160) to load onto the iPod once charged. I decided to stick with the iPod default format of AAC rather than rip to MP3, mainly as I don't have many MP3's already and the quality and compression of AAC files are allegedly slightly better at bit rates less than 192 compared to equivalent MP3's.
After charging I had one extra thing to do before use, put my nice new shiny unscratched treasure into a sturdy clear plastic case called the iSee made by Contour. It makes the player a little bulkier but doesn't affect it's looks too much. Unfortunately, now it is in the case I am very loathe to remove it for fear of scratches... which renders the optional docking station that I'd also bought slightly redundant as the dock is designed to hold an unsheathed iPod. Perhaps it will get some use when I'm feeling slightly less anal about protecting my purchase from damage. A common criticism of the iPod is that the materials used in the construction of it's case while of high quality are very easily scratched, especially the mirror finish chrome back plate. I don't know if it's true or not but I hope to avoid ever finding out.
Initially I had some problems getting the iPod to be detected by my PC for it's initial formatting (they come pre-formatted for use with Macs). This problem had me swearing for a while until I tried switching from using firewire to USB 2.0. With USB it was picked up immediately. The firewire port on my PC works fine with my camcorder so I can only think that it is the iPod that is being fussy about the connection. Once formatted it took only a few minutes for iTunes to synch itself to the iPod transferring all of the songs in the library with a little coaxing. The entire library should have been copied over automatically but for some reason it kept stopping requiring me to select 'update ipod' three or four times.
Other than those two initial hiccups everything else was simple. I've not really had a great deal of time to sit and play with it so far but I have been using it at work while sat at my desk. The quality of sound is good and the user interface very intuitive. You switch it on and it plays music.... much like any other MP3 player but with just that little bit of extra style.
Recent Comments