Go Go Gaget....iPod (Apple iPod (3G) 40 GB)

Member Name: Azurel

Product:	Apple iPod (3G) 40 GB
Date:	20/08/05 (566 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use; Huge capacity; regular software updates; Hardy; Great sound

Disadvantages: Expensive; easily scratched; Need replacement headphones

I have had my ipod for 9 months and have had no problems with battery life. Generally it lasts about 10 -11 hours on a full charge which for me is about 2 days of listening but as it takes only 1 hour to 80% charge and a further hour to full charge it doesn’t take long to recharge. The battery life is also affected by factors such as how often you change songs (as the hard drive has to spin up) and how much you use the backlight.

I’m not the safest person with fragile gadgets and before I got my ipod I was worried I would spend a lot of money getting one and then break it. However I needn’t have worried I have (though I’m not proud to say) dropped it down the stairs and been the cause of several more minor falls and has survived to tell the tale so I feel it is quite sturdy (though my first ever ipod went for a swim and never survived )

The ipod I have is a 4th generation 40gigabite one and came with a charger, firewire cable (the same cable plugs into the charger to charge it and unplugs to fit into the firewire port on the computer) firewire 6 to 4 pin adapter, docking station and headphones but no remote, though I have since got a remote and must say I hardly ever use it!

This incarnation of the ipod comes with the option of a firewire connection or a USB2 connection. Firewire ports at first were only present on apple computers with USB2 being the choice for PC users, however it is now common to find firewire ports on PC’s also. The firewire option is the one I went for as the speed is quicker than that of a USB2 connection.

As well as using the ipod as a music player you can enable the ipod’s disk mode which means you can carry all sorts of info round on it. In the past I have used it for carrying photos on by transferring them from my computer on to my ipod and then onto my friend’s computer which was a lot quicker than me emailing them and her downloading them as there was about 1gigabite of pictures! There is also a note feature on the ipod which is handy to read e-books with and it’s great when travelling. The only problem is that each note can only contain 1000 characters so you need a small shareware program (free) which will brake up bodies of text into a suitable size and link one note to the other for ease of reading. You can also use the ipod as a kind of address book/calendar filofax thingy but I have never tried this out as it’s not a feature I really need though I’m sure some people would find it useful.

Getting the ipod working out of the box is really easy. Firstly you need to charge it for an hour or so and then its ready to go during which time you can install iTunes and start loading up your cd collection, this can be quite time consuming if you have many but there are places which will do this chore for you but not cheaply. It takes about 2 minutes to upload a standard album to iTunes . When the ipod is charged you can upload the songs onto it by opening iTunes and connecting the ipod to the computer and providing you have not changed the ipod settings iTunes will automatically synchronise your ipod and upload all your music which if you have a lot can take a while.

Which brings me to another point, deciding what bit rate you want to encode your music at, the higher the bit rate the better the quality but the bigger the size, so its a trade off between how many songs you want and what quality you want. With 40gigabites of space on this ipod though its not a problem I have found yet, most of my songs are encoded between 192kbps and 320kbps with most being at the lower end, however I also have quite a few audiobooks and find that between 16kbps and 64kbps is fine for them which is great as they tend to be very large files as they are several days long!

A little test you can do if you want to find the optimum encoding for you is to rip a track at several different bit rates, then listen to the original and then one of the rips, the lowest bitrate at which you can’t tell the difference will give you the best quality for you at the lowest bitrate. There is no point wasteing valuable (and expensive) space by encoding at 320kbps if you can’t tell the difference between the original and a track ripped at 192kbps so this way you get the best sound at the lowest bit rate for you and you get the best audio from your ipod.

The ipod is controlled through a touch sensitive click wheel with a central button. The central button is the enter key and on the wheel are the forward song, back song, menu and play/pause buttons. The wheel and the enter button are used to navigate through the menus to select songs, games and other stuff. The click wheel is a great way of navigating and can scroll quickly through thousands of songs. The only problem is that when you are selecting a song with the enter button you have to be sure you don’t touch the touch sensitive click wheel, if you do this the ipod will select the track down from the one you thought you had chosen, at first I though this was a fault with my ipod but then I noticed that I was inadvertently causing the problem!

The ipod screen is easy to read and the song titles are displayed in the same clear font as the menus, though if you are having difficulty you can use the backlight which gives off a strong blue light and makes it possible to navigate the menus in the dark. You can search for songs by using different listing criteria such as title, album name, genre and artist so it’s easy to find exactly what you are looking for.

You can play through your whole music collection on random, which can bring up some unusual combinations and plays you songs you may not have listened to for a while. This is my favourite feature as it brings up old favourites.

iTunes is the official Apple software which comes with the ipod, it is easy to use and free to update, it also comes with optional integration with the iTunes music store which means you can purchase songs with just one click. As well as allowing you to purchase songs you can also download “podcasts” which are like radio programs especially for mp3 players there are even a few by the BBC as well as podcast from other countries and many individuals. The only problem I have found with the iTunes software is that if you want it to syncronise your computer and your ipod automatically you have to keep all your music on your hardrive, or else it only puts on your ipod what is on your hard drive. My hard drive is only 30gigabites and my ipod is 40gigabites which means I am forced to manually update my ipod when I add new stuff as I just don’t have room to keep it all on my computer. I am also a little disappointed that it is not possible to keep music on the ipod and then move it back to the computer though Apple say this is to stop people pirating music it does make it more difficult for me to manage my music. However there are several pieces of third party software such as iPod Liberator and redchair’s Anapod which solve this little niggle admirably.

Apple also provide regular firmware updates, these updates the instructions on your ipod and can introduce new features and upgrades, the apple website has a page dedicated to ipod downloads and it has different versions of the updates for the different generations of ipods. You simply click on the correct download for your ipod and save it to your computer, next you plug your ipod in and start the update program and your ipod will be updated in a couple of miniutes. There is also a restore option with each update which will wipe your ipod completely and install the latest firmware which is usually used as a solution to any ipod problems (this solves most problems except the major ones) but this will delete all the music and information you have on the ipod.

I really enjoy having my ipod, it allows me to pick whatever I want to listen to from my whole music collection, so no more “damn wish I had brought that cd” moments. As well as being great for portable music I can also hook it up to speakers and have a great music system or plug it in the car, so much so I never use my midi system anymore. Unfortunately the ipod does not have a built in radio though an adaptor can be bought for around £30 which I think is a bit expensive considering how cheap radios are.

The only problems I have found is that the ipod scratches far too easily, but this is cosmetic and does no real damage to the insides. Scratching can be minimised by using a case (doesn’t need to be anything fancy mine lives in an old camera case!) the other thing is that you can’t really run with the ipod in a belt case as once the 25-30 min skip protection runs out the ipod will no longer play however if you invest in an armband case this seems to solve the problem. I would also advise replacing the earphones that come with the ipod as they really don’t show it to its best (despite selling for £30 separately!)and I found them a little uncomfortable, I have a pair of Koss The Plug headphones I bought for £8 which I find to be much better. But despite these minor issues all of which are easily resolved I find this to be a really great music player and would definitely recommend it, especially as Apple have reduced prices considerably in the past year.

Summary: Great sound quality and capacity shame about the scratching and headphones but still worth the money

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