4 Generations on, and still improving! (Apple iPod (3G) 20 GB)

Member Name: Crazy_Josh

Product:	Apple iPod (3G) 20 GB
Date:	04/12/04 (957 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Beautiful + Sleek, Fantastic Sound, Makes You Cool

Disadvantages: Scratches too easily, Others have more techincal features

I bought my Ipod in early September (I think), as I had been planning on getting one for a while. But I waited for the 4g version to come out, and went onto amazon and bought it for £215. I think the price is dropping slowly, but don't expect to get one for much less than £200 unless you go 2nd hand, or imported from the US.

Why Ipod?
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I don't think that I fully appreciated how much my Ipod would mean to me when I decided upon it, I really had no idea how much I would use it. I knew I had alot of MP3s, and I knew I liked listening to them, and I knew that I needed a portable digital music player of some kind. But when I went for this one, I still wasn't really sure it was the right one for me.

I had visited my local audio retailer and asked to see a 3g before the 4g was out. He went and got it out, and when I looked at it, it looked nice, and I liked the interface. However, he recommended I get the 20gb i-river mp3 player which he described as the "intelligent person's ipod". Apparently it had all the same features as the ipod, and alot more. It had (and probably still does) more output and input sockets, it had more battery life, it had a better control system, and a better file access system. Basically, this guy seemed to be trying to shift this thing as best he could. I wasn't really that interested though, and the more he went on, the more I was convinced that the store had to sell a set number of these things to meet target. Or something like that.

When I went home, I had a look at the stats and the pictures on the website, and all the techincal details the guy had given me were correct, it did seem to have everything and more.

Except there were two big problems. The i-river, however you looked at it, was damn ugly. The ipod on the other hand, one of the most beautiful pieces of kit I had ever seen. The other thing was, I had set my heart on getting an ipod, and so however much the i-river seemed a better deal, I kept going back to the ipod.

In the end it was a friend who actually convinced me. She said to me, "Go with your instincts. I can see you want to go for the ipod, so go for it, and you won't regret it." Two weeks later I ordered it, and I am so glad that she convinced me.

The Ipod Arrives
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The ipod arrived on a tuesday morning after ordering on Friday. Delivered by Amazon (it would have come on Monday but for a bank holiday) when they promised, as ever. The price I had paid was as low as there was around, and because my brother has a link to amazon on his website, he gets 5% of the price of everything ordered on there. So it was always going to work out cheapest.

The box itself is beautiful. It has different coloured signs, with the apple logo, and a picture of a person with the white buds on, like in the billboard adverts, and it was even better than I had imagined, and this was before I even opened it! And when I did open it, you are met by the first instruction Apple give you, "Enjoy". And how well I have followed this instruction.

I went straight ahead and opened the box, pushed the instruction manual out of the way, and got straight to the item of beauty itself. I obviously never follow simple rules, and although it says on the cd with the drivers on, "Install Drivers Before Plugging In", I didn't see this and plugged it in anyway. I was too excited to hang around with installing drivers. Fortunately, I didn't corrupt anything or damage anything, however there must be a reason why they say to install the drivers first so I would do that if I were you.

I guess here I should tell you exactly what's in the box itself. If I remember correctly:

-the ipod itself
-the earbuds (with foam covers)
-two cables to attach to the computer, one firewire and one usb (the firewire also plugs into the power socket adaptor)
-power socket adaptor
-cd with drivers
-instruction manual

and I think that's everything.

You should note that there is no docking station, and there is no remote control. These used to be included with the previous 20gb versions, but have now been removed. Also, there are now both usb and firewire cables included (or at least there were in mine) which I think is another change from the previous models.

The ipod itself is a beautiful, sleek, white and silver, shiny piece of kit, and takes pride of place on my desk when I am not out and about. The only downside to it's solid build is that the screen and outside is easy to scratch. In fact over time it is almost impossible to not scratch it. Minor problem though.

Plugging in and setting up
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The installation of the drivers is all relatively simple, although it can take a while if you don't have a fast USB port. (The same goes for copying music over though, it can take ages without a decent transfer speed.)

I should mention iTunes here. It is included on the CD, and is a fantastic application for browsing your music. You can also share your music over a network, adjust id3 tags, adjust volume levels, create playlists, create smart playlists, and lots more. And they are adding features all the time.

Smart Playlists are fantastic. You can create them with iTunes, as I said above, and they make the listening to music experience even better. Basically, you can create a playlist using a list of possible criteria. For example, I have a playlist of tracks that haven't been played recently and are rated highly, I also have a playlist of all tracks with a certain word in the title. My favourite is the playlist which is made up of only track 3s (which I have found are usually my favourite track on an album). There is actually a website devoted entirely to smart playlists however I am not allowed to mention it here.

When you plug in the ipod, you can either get iTunes to copy over all your music, or, if you have more music than the capacity of the ipod, you can choose the files individually (which is what I ended up having to do). As I said earlier, unless you have firewire or high speed USB, this first copying process can take a while. I personally decided that I needed to upgrade my usb sockets, and bought a firewire and usb 2 card with 3 ports for each. A worthy investment, not just for the ipod.

Sound Quality
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I had heard that the ipod's sound quality was amazing, and I was certainly not disappointed. For once I could actually hear every detail in my music, and unless you turn the volume ridiculously high, the sound quality maintains a fantastic level. I suspect that with better earphones it would be even better and that is something that I am considering investing in very soon.

If you know how to use the equalizer, you can adjust the sound ipod produces to how you want it for each genre. This is handy if you plug it into your car and you want that bit more bass that you can't get through your earphones, but sounds good in the car.

Using the Ipod for Music
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The controls on the ipod are fantastic. I have used all of the previous generation versions and I think the touch wheel on this one is the best of them. It is more sensitive than previously, and now it even has the buttons built into it! (This of course actually makes it the "clickwheel".) It is easy to scroll through your music which you can do in a number of ways. You can browse artists, albums, song names, genres, playlists, composers, and audiobooks.

Once you have selected a track, you can use the wheel to change volume, or if you press the middle button once, the scroll changes your position in the track, or if you press it twice, you can assign a rating to your tracks. I try not to rate my tracks too much, as I think I would find that I would end up just listening to 5 star tracks, and getting bored of my music collection too fast. For this reason, I instead use a system where 1 star means it needs to be removed from the ipod, 2 stars mean it needs id3 tags changing, 3 stars prompts me to look for more tracks by the same artists (or prompts me to look for something else) and then 4 stars is tracks which are fine and don't need editing at all. 5 stars has yet to be assigned to any definition. :-)

If you hold down the middle button when hovering over a track in a tracklist, you can add it to your "On-the-Go" Playlist. This is the only playlist you can edit while on-the-go (surprising huh?) and is handy if you want to make a quick playlist to store later by renaming on iTunes. Another handy feature.

One thing that ipod users have grown to love is the shuffle feature. You can have shuffle on for your entire library, or just an artist, or album or playlist. It is great if you aren't sure what you want to listen to, as it chooses for you, and sometimes you feel like the ipod has read your mind in choosing a track.

Using the Ipod for Other Things
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Music is not all the ipod does. Although music is the best feature of it, as would be expected with it being a digital music player, it does have some other good features.

There are a small selection of games. Obviously these are not up to the standard of a gameboy, but they are good for passing a bit of spare time on a train journey or in the car. (unless you are driving :-P) There is solitaire, which is the same as you would expect, just standard solitaire as you would play on a windows PC. Then there is Parachute, which is a game where you have to shoot down parachuters (or something) which I haven't really played much, but could be reasonabl entertaining if you like it.

My favourites are Music Quiz and Brick. Music Quiz plays a short section of a track on your ipod, and you have to identify it before your time runs out. The quicker you are, the more points you get, and this is good fun, but it uses a lot of battery as it has to keep starting new tracks, which seems to involve spinning up the hard-drive quite a lot.

Brick is your standard breakthrough game. Bounce the ball up off your paddle against some bricks, any bricks that the ball hits vanish. I have only got to the 5th level so far, where the ball splits in two and I lost, however I would like to know what happens on the levels after this, and whether it gets more exciting (exciting used in a loose sense, don't buy this for the games).

You can also use the ipod as a hard drive. This is useful for storing files for back-up, however I would not want to use it long term, as I have heard that the hard drive is liable to go wrong some times. I haven't had this happen, but I wouldn't want to risk vital files all the same.

The calendar I think would be good, but I don't need to use it yet, and I am not sure how practical the ipod is as an organiser. However, I keep some contact details on there for if my mobile fails me and I need some phone numbers. So that is handy.

There are other features, like a clock, a sleep timer, and an alarm clock, and they are handy as and when I need them.

Improvements from Previous Versions
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They have made some major improvements from the previous generations and I think the jump from 3g to 4g has been the best.

Most importantly, the battery life in the new ipod has been increased considerably. From 8 hours to 12 hours is a 50% increase (for those not so good at maths) and it does actually go on this long. To test it, set an album going again and again and time it until it dies, it should last very close to 12 hours, if not longer.

Although they have taken the dock and remote out, I wouldn't use the remote, and I don't see the dock as essential, it would be an unnecessary luxury for me. However, they have included a usb cable with this gen, so you don't have to worry about buying a cable, or getting firewire installed.

This gen is also slightly lighter and smaller than the versions before. But this has become expected in the changes from generation to generation, as the ipod has always got smaller from day 1.

Add-ons
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You can get many accessories for the ipod. There are hundreds of cases available for protecting it from dirt, scratches, and from the shock of dropping it. You can get a set of speakers for it, where the ipod just sits in, but they seem a little over priced and ugly to me, and theyre not really my sort of thing.

My personal favourite accessory is the iTrip from Belkin. It is basically a radio aerial on the end of your ipod, so you can tune into the music your ipod is playing through any FM radio. Although retailers can not sell it legally in the UK anymore, it is still available online and it's not hard to get hold of one. And these things are great for listening in the car.

Apple Support
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Apple support are very helpful and very efficient. I did have a problem with my ipod within about 2 weeks of buying. The hold slider stopped putting the ipod on hold, and obviously at 2 weeks old I wasn't happy. I had registered my ipod the week before, and because I prefer to talk to people than mess around on their website, I decided to ring tech support.

The queue for the call was fast, about 5 minutes, and the techincal support guy at the other end went through the regular tests and came to the conclusion that the ipod was faulty within about 10 minutes. Two days later a man from UPS arrived at the door and I handed over the old ipod. Within 7 days I had a new one in my hand. It wasn't great that it stopped working, but they replaced it quick enough, and they didn't quibble, and it was nice to have a new ipod back as opposed to a repaired one.

Since then I have had no problems at all, and would certainly not be put off by Apple's customer service in future.

Conclusion
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Well, a long review, but I have so much to say about my ipod, and I would recommend one to anyone. They are fantastic pieces of kit. I spend more time with mine than any of my family members or friends. Sounds sad I know, but it provides entertainment at any time, in any place and I just love it.

Be warned though, once you have bought it, you may be tempted to buy other Apple products. The experience of the ipod is just so good you may go off PCs completely. :-P

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