The gadget that kept me sane (Apple iPod (3G) 20 GB)

Member Name: phennphawcks

Product:	Apple iPod (3G) 20 GB
Date:	15/11/04 (444 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Iconic and beautiful, Firewire transfers are very fast, Unique user interface

Disadvantages: The supplied earphones suck, Playlist editing dependant on iTunes, If you want USB you have to pay extra for the cable

To be honest, I really don't think this product needs much by way of introduction. But just in case you really have been spending the last couple of years dead for tax reasons, then the iPod is the device that has become synonymous with portable music. So much so, that some call it the 21st century Walkman, while others use the word iPod to mean any MP3 player.

The first thing you have to say about this product is that it is extremely sleek and sexy. It truely is a thing of beauty, no photographs you will see of it online could ever really do it justice. The front is a white acrylic, while the back is a highly polished metal with the product information and serial number laser-engraved into it. If you buy your iPod online from Apple, you can also get a short personalized message engraved on the back as well.

When held in the hand, the product feels reassuringly heavy, without being at all overweight or bulky. The weight combined with the metal finish gives the product a feeling of real quality and indestructibility, and the low profile design slips easily into your pocket.

With the 3rd generation player you will get the following along with your player: A dock, a wired remote, a fairly basic carry-case with belt clip, a firewire cable that can connect to the dock or directly to the iPod itself, a charger with a seperate snap-on plug appropiate to your locale and a set of white headphones. You will also get a CD with Apple iTunes and a printed manual (a rarity in this day and age, most computer-related products come with PDF manuals on CD instead).

The charger doesn't have its own cable or connector, instead it has a firewire port on it. You plug the supplied firewire cable into this, the other end goes either to the dock or the iPod directly. Power is then transferred to the battery from the charger over the firewire cable. Charging takes 1 hour for an 80% charge and 4 for a full recharge from empty.

If you connect the iPod to the PC via firewire then you will then be able to use iTunes to upload your music collection to the iPod, play music directly off your computer, manage playlists, rip CDs and do other management chores. Personally, I prefer WinAmp as a music player to iTunes, but for synching tasks and iPod management, Apple's software just can't be beat. If you feel like splurging on some music online and don't have a problem with DRM technology, you can even use iTunes to buy music from the iTunes music store, though you should be aware that currently, under Windows, you can only play DRM protected AAC files in iTunes itself.

I really loved this product, and I never go anywhere without it anymore. When I was living in Salford it was all that stood between me and having a total nervous breakdown, as without my little music player to listen to at night, the rowing neighbours would have kept me sleep-deprived enough to just totally lose the plot.

The most important criteria against which any music player is to be judged is quality of sound reproduction. The sound quality from the iPod is, of course, dependant on the quality of the sound files you give it to play, but to me, given MP3s encoded at 192K the results were excelent, with crisp clear sound and no artifacts immideately evident. With good headphones, the base and treble are nice and clear and well seperated.

But it's not all good, no product is perfect and this one is no exception. There are things wrong with the iPod.

The first thing wrong with them, is the earphones. To put it politely, they plain suck. They let too much outside noise get in, are tinny and lack depth, are uncomfortable to wear and the white plastic makes them stand out a mile. If you wear them, you might as well be wearing a sign that says "HEY, I'M CARRYING A REALLY EXPENSIVE MUSIC PLAYER AROUND, MUG ME!" Come on, Apple, how could you drop the ball like that on crappy headphones, when you have gotten so much else right with this product? So if you are buying one of these gadgets, it would be an idea to set a little extra cash aside for some better headphones. I'd recommend the Shure range of isolating headphones, they're good.

Secondly, while iTunes provides pretty comprehensive playlist management, the playlist features on the iPod itself are pretty rudimentery. You can only edit one playlist on the device itself, and adding songs and/or albums to it is cumbersome. Furthermore, I've not found a way yet to remove individual songs fro mthe on-the-go playlist, as the single playlist you can edit is called, so if you have stuff on ther eyou don't want to listen to, you have to start over.

Thirdly, while the iPod is advertised as Windows/Mac, you only get the Firewire cable. This wasn't a problem for me, as I own a PC with firewire ports. Many PC owners don't own Firewire-capable computers, however, and have to resort to USB 2. While the iPod has USB support, the unit doesn't ship with a USB cable. If you have to have USB then you'll need to spend some more cash on a USB cable.

The USB cable only provides data transfer, it doesn't have the power needed for charging the iPod, so you have to fully charge it before hooking up to the PC to transfer files. If you are using an older PC with support only for USB 1.1, then file transfers are PAINFULLY slow and if you have a substantial music collection you'll never transfer all your files over before the battery in the iPod dies.

But all in all, I wouldn't give my iPod up for anything, I feel naked without it, the music it provides helps me concentrate at work and it helped me sleep at times when the people next door were determined to see I didn't get any sleep. Is the best part of £300 worth it for a music player? That depends on how important music is to you, I suppose, but to me music is very important indeed and as far as I'm concerned, the money I spent on my iPod was money well spent.

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