One i short of a Pod? (Apple iPod mini 4 GB)

Member Name: drewboy

Product:	Apple iPod mini 4 GB
Date:	28/02/05 (1031 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Simplicity, Sound Quality, Looks

Disadvantages: Battery, Formatting, iTunes

Oh how I love me gadgets. For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with small electronic devices. Some were very useful, others not so much (still don’t understand why I thought I would need an electric hairbrush….) however this latest addition to my gadget collection most definitely fits into the former.


What is it?
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Basically, it plays MP3 files. When you download a song on the internet, or burn a CD onto your computer, this is the format (with a few others similar ones) that is used to store them. The files are a lot smaller than they are in CD format and this allows a LOT more music to be held in a similar size of storage space. What an MP3 player does, is to provide a set amount of storage space (similar to your hard dive) where these files can be stored and provides the ability to play them back while on the move.

So what’s good about this one?
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The guys and gals at Apple are a clever bunch of people. MP3 players are by no means a new thing, I had one of the first ones years ago that only held about 6 songs and lasted about an hour before the batteries died. Cool gadget, but pretty useless in terms of usability. Of course, as a product they evolved of the last few years but what Apple did was to put it in an incredible easy to use and visually attractive package, and heavily market it to make it known to much more than just the computer and internet addicts among us.

So, after they had successfully introduced us to the standard iPod, they brought to the market what I can only describe as a gorgeous little piece of technology. Measuring only 6” tall and 2” wide the compact nature of this toy very versatile and easy to carry about. This is further enhanced by the included belt clip which I have found invaluable and rather than detract from the look, fits in perfectly as it is white to match the central control and the earphones. The player itself is metal and you can order it in a number of different colours. I chose to have the light blue cover and this really does make the device look classy and feel very solid. So far, I have not got any scratches on it and from the feel of it, I don’t think that it is really going to be very susceptible to them.

Uploading your tracks is very easy to do. Once you have formatted your iPod if you are a PC user (more about that later) and installed iTunes which is supplied with it, all you have to do is attach it to the computer via USB and it will automatically sync with iTunes and update with everything you have saved there. As the iPod has only 4gigs, if you happen to have more than that stored in iTunes, it will automatically chose what to put on based on what you listen to most. You can if you want deactivate the auto-sync feature however and simply choose what you want to put on there as well. A very handy feature when connected to your computer while uploading (and when its finished) is that it will charge your iPod at the same time. I have found this very useful as if I am out and about at Uni or going to work and my battery runs out, all I need to is attach it to a USB port in a computer here and it will charge up for me. Very useful with the battery life, I can tell you!

Navigating through the options and menu’s is simplicity itself. All the functions (apart from the hold button) are controlled by the ‘clickwheel’ in the middle of the iPod. This is a marvel in itself. Coupled with the screed above it, the navigation basically works like a simple file system. First you have the ‘root’ menu’s where you have headings like ‘music’, ‘extra’s’, settings etc. Then all you would do is click the centre button to go into the sub menu where you will find the next options. For example it ‘music’, you will find selections like ‘playlists’, ‘artists’, ‘albums’, ‘songs’ etc. Again, you click the centre button to get to the next sub menu where in this example, you will find the list of either artists, albums and songs that you have stored on the device. The best thing I can liken it to, is when you click on start in XP and then hit programs. You hover over what you want and the next menu come up, then you can follow the arrows till you find the file you are after. VERY user friendly. To go back a menu, all you do is hit the ‘menu’ button at the top of the circle and it will take you back one menu so you can chose another. While you are actually in a specific menu section and listening to the songs, you have the option of skipping backwards and forwards through the tracks by clicking the left or right buttons (and by holding them down you can skip though the song). At the bottom is the play/pause button which doubles as the off switch when pressed and held.

The best bit about the navigation though has to be how you scroll up and down the categories/tracks and control the volume. The pad itself is touch sensitive so that if you want to scroll down the menu, you simply run your figure over it in a clockwise motion, and if you want to go up, you go anti-clockwise. The same is the case for the volume (which you can only control when you have the song you are listening to showing on the screen) as you just run your finger clockwise to turn the volume up, and the opposite to turn it down.

At first the touch sensitivity does take a bit of getting used to, but once you have the hang of it it becomes second nature and you will wonder why a lot of other small electrical goods don’t employ the same system.

Of course one the main reasons you are going to buy one of this gizmo’s is to listen to your songs, and here the sound quality is pretty impressive in my opinion. I have read a lot about people complaining that it’s just not as good as you would get out of a stereo and such like, however I can honestly say that’s its pretty damn close. And to be fair, it’s a tiny devise you can carry around – something you can’t do with your stereo! I listen to quite a wide variety of music on mine ranging from piano pieces, though to orchestral stuff, right through to popular modern music involving guitars and also some dance and electronica and I am very impressed with how it handles each of the genre’s. You can change the equalizer setting to one of 22 different settings and although you may not quite be able to hear the difference in a few of them at first, when you change to a different genre, it does become a very useful thing to have as the tones coming from a piece of piano music is slightly different from the guitar music from a band like Franz Ferdinand!


So what’s not so good then Drew?
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Well, for a start the very first hurdle you will have to get across when you open the (rather attractive) packaging is whether or not you are going to have to format the thing. If you are one of the majority, and I am, who use a PC you will HAVE to do this to get it to work. To do this, you have to first charge the iPod with the included charger and then when that’s done (about 8 hours for the first charge) you need to install the software with the disk provided. This will prompt you to connect the iPod at a certain point and it will check to see if it needs to be formatted. If you have a Mac, you will have no need to do this but if not, the prompt will tell you to do it and carry out the procedure for you. All well and good so far…. However, when I did this I did as I was told and waited until it was supposed to tell me to disconnect which should have taken about 20 mins to half an hour at the most. Well mine didn’t. As a precaution, I left it there with the Laptop running while I went to uni for a few hours thinking that it would be all done by the time I got back. Nope, still told me it was formatting about three hours later! A quick check online told me that this is actually a very common thing and to just disconnect, re-boot the computer and start again. This worked this time but I can’t help but think that it would be easier for them to sell them pre-formatted for the system you use. I like to think that I am fairly technically minded and I’m more than familiar with the concept of googling, however I don’t doubt that there are people out there that would just not have a clue what they are doing and may do the wrong thing.

The battery on these machines has come under quite a bit of criticism since being launched and I can’t help but agree with this. The stated battery life is 8 hours but so far I have yet to achieve this. I would think that this would be in the situation where you basically just set the iPod to play, and do not touch ANYTHING for the next 8 hours until it stops itself and dies. However, I do not always want to listen to the same stuff in the same order all the time so I will tend to skip tracks quite a lot and go back on forward in the options resulting in the backlight being on more often and the battery going down a lot faster. I have found that the best way to combat this is to try and set up as many playlists as you can so that this reduces the amount of times you need to manually search and to set it up to play on shuffle mode rather than just going through the list. Invariably I will still always find the need to skip the odd track here and there if I’m not in the mood to listen to it but it has helped to prolong the battery life somewhat. Also, you must make sure that when you turn it off you still put the hold button on. This is because all it takes to turn it back on is one click on the central control and its off again and since its not as easy to turn it off, it will be on constantly each time any button is pressed. This means once that it actually crashed in the on position and the light wouldn’t go out. I had to wait until it curled up and died from lack of battery to get it to work again so make sure you use the hold button all the time!

Being a Windows Media Player boy, I have to say I have not liked the transition to iTunes, and while this is not a review of said product I have to mention that I would prefer to be able to use other programs rather than being forced into that one as I just don’t find it that user friendly. Yeah it looks quite nice and there are a couple of really good features but it just isn’t sitting well with me yet at all.

Personally, I have bought this to play music. I did not buy it to play games, keep addresses in, use it as an alarm clock or note important dates into it. While these features are quite neat, I would personally either not have them at all, or have been given the option to delete them to give me that little bit extra space for some more tunes. While 4gigs is quite a lot, it will by no means carry all of my music collection so any useless space being used up does irritate me a little.

Finally, I would have liked the option to turn the stuff on the screen the other way round. This is because I use the belt clip mostly and rather than having to take it off to read the screen properly I would like to have been able just to look down at it (like a watch a nurse would have pinned to her uniform) without the faff of taking it off the belt clip and having to put it back on when I have just skipped one song. Maybe thiat is something Apple will provide in the future though.


So any hints and tips?
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I’m glad you asked! In fact, there is a VERY good website that can provide you with some ‘hacks’ for your new toy. A hack is basically a set of steps that you can use to manipulate the iPod into doing things that it wasn’t specifically designed to do, or ones that Apple just didn’t tell you about.

One really good one that I read is to make sure that you defragment your iPod the same way you would your computer. If you think about it, it really is just a mini computer that only has the ability to store data so its hard drive will need the same care that your main CPU will. Also, it can be a good idea to run virus checks on it if you use some of the other hacks that allow you to upload from other iPod owners computers and iPods themselves!

Go to http://www.ipodhacks.com/ to get this info as well as a lot of other useful hints and tips of how to get the most from your little machine. I didn't really find the instunction manual all that helpful if I am being honest and so far have basically relied on this place to answer most of my queries.


So there you go. To conclude, I would have to say that I am very happy with my purchase and now carry it around with me almost everywhere I go. It sounds great, looks great, keeps you entertained on boring busses and trains and to top it off, you can get lost for hours finding new things that can be done with it! While it was quite expensive at £179, I do think it is worth it and since apple.com/uk will send it to you free in about a week, I see no reason to look elsewhere as prices (even on ebay) are really not that much lower.

I’m going to award it 4 stars as even though I love it to bits, the battery life could be a lot better and I very much think that Apple shouldn’t be pushing their own software on me and could have had the decency to format it for me first!


Happy listening!


drew ♫

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