Ear Candy (Apple iPod 5 GB)

Member Name: thegeek

Product:	Apple iPod 5 GB
Date:	28/04/02 (2566 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Massive battery life, big capacity, fits in your trouser pocket

Disadvantages: Interface sometimes footery, case picks up fingerprints and smudges easily, no continuous play

I'll be honest. I bought two iPods at a very attractive price from a shop that was about to close down. They were cheap, but I didn't think I could justify the cost of keeping one to replace my Minidisc Walkman in day-to-day use.

I put one up on eBay, but the other box sat in my room and taunted me. I just had to open it to have a play with it. Twiddle the scroll-wheel. See how the sound quality compared to Minidisc. Find out if it really does take ten seconds to transfer an album onto it.

Well, I decided that I quite liked it, and I may as well take it for a longer test-drive, so took it away on a long train trip, and came back home loving the iPod.

So what's so good about it?
Well, Apple are onto a winner with their Digital Hub idea.
You get yourself a Mac, and use iTunes to rip all of your CDs onto it. (You should note that this is the bit that can take some time - new iMacs can rip tracks at 7 times the time it would take to listen to them, but I have an older PowerBook, and it can only manage up to 2x)
Then, take your iPod, plug it in with the enclosed FireWire cable, and as if by magic, all of your music will fly onto the player, along with any playlists you've set up in iTunes. While the iPod is plugged in, it'll also be charging up for that magical 10 hours of battery time. I only really use my player for a couple of hours a day, so I couldn't say if it really does manage 10 hours - but it hasn't run down yet.

The interface on the iPod is really intuitive, and will be very familiar to iTunes users. There's a big jog dial-type scroll wheel with a button in the middle, and you use that to select your tunes by Artist, by Song Title, or by Playlist. You can pick your favourite song to start the day with, and let the iPod choose the rest at random. With 5GB - or 10GB on newer models - for it to choose from, you can get some nice surprises that you forgot you had in your co
llection.

I've not had any problems with sound quality, other than dodgy artifacts on tracks downloaded from the internet. Rip your own and you'll have no problems.

The headphones supplied, though, are a bit tacky. They're white, and fit in your ear a rather odd way, and I got rid of mine fairly quickly. On the other hand, it's a handy way of spotting other happy iPod users on the tube...

If you're willing to turn off automatic updating of playlists, iPod features a FireWire Disk Mode. This means the iPod will show up on your desktop when it's plugged in, so you can use it to transfer files. My poor wee PowerBook wasn't well one day, and was giving disk errors every second. Worrying that it was about to implode or something, I plugged in my iPod, and chucked a gigabyte of important files onto it. It took a few seconds, and now I always use it to back up my important data - and you never know when it could be handy to have a backup in your pocket.
As a copy-protection measure, you can't use this method to take music back off the iPod. Apple are quite keen on reinforcing the "don't steal music" message.

There are a couple of things that let iPod down, though. Switching Random Play on and off can be a little bit fiddly - sometimes you wanna hear an album in order, and sometimes you wanna hear it differently. To switch between the two, you need to go into the Settings, which could be done better.
There also isn't really an option for continuous play - if a track on a CD ran on to the next one, by the time it's made it onto iPod, it'll have aquired a split-second gap. Bah.
Oh, and the 20-minute anti-skip memory doesn't seem to exist. Walk along at a speed somewhere between "old lady" and "powerwalker", and you'll get the occasional jump.
Finally, iTunes in Mac OS X doesn't let you see what playlists are on the iPod, but
iTunes for Mac OS 9 does. I'm sure there's a software fix not far off..

To sum up: a fantastic player with some shortcomings - but not enough to put me off using it daily.

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