My Mini Jukebox... (Apple iPod mini 4 GB)

Member Name: Lynnie27

Product:	Apple iPod mini 4 GB
Date:	26/08/05 (387 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Sturdy, great looks and sound quality, stores over 1000 songs

Disadvantages: Perhaps a little expensive

Last year I was working evenings as a data inputter which can be a tad boring and is made less sleep enhancing by listening to music. I took along a portable CD player but batteries didn’t last and I kept having to change the disc so I started to wonder about getting an ipod mini. I put it off for ages as they seemed so expensive, but after a particularly good week on ebay I bit the bullet and bought one in gold (not solid gold you understand!).

When it arrived I have to say I was bowled over, I didn’t realise that it would look so good or have so many smart features – you can keep contact details on it and there’s even a calendar and games. I have to admit though that I have never used any of these features preferring to make use of my pc and games console for things like that and leave free space for music.

I charged the ipod through my pc and get this – even bought a new pc with a firewall connection because the ipod worked better that way, a little extreme I admit! It could also be charged with a USB 2 connection but I didn’t think my old pc had one of those either and I am not too technically minded:-)

Next, I loaded onto the pc the software that was included with the ipod – itunes. I was pretty happy with that and to start with I had a lot of fun loading my cd collection onto the pc. It’s easy to do as the track name and numbers all appear and all you have to do if you don’t particularly like a song is to uncheck it (take out the tick) and it doesn’t get included. It was a long process though and this thing is only 4gb, it must take weeks with the bigger ones! Finally I was ready to put the music onto the actual ipod and found that this process was easy and thankfully, also pretty fast. I got over 1200 on there as I think some of my songs are smaller than average, so I was happy with that.

Now I know some people have complained about poor sound quality and the tinny earphones that come with it, but I am very happy indeed with mine and still use the original earphones. I do lock the device when I am playing a song and wandering around though because the jog dial is easy to knock and the volume can easily get turned up – not good! The belt clip is very useful too as it makes the ipod totally portable, so I can listen to my ipod while I iron or cook dinner and it’s great for drowning out the football on tv!

There are lots of options for choosing the music to listen to – you can go by genre, artist or song, and there is also an option to store a list of favourites so that in a way you are making almost an album of your favourite tunes – this is a cool feature if you aren’t in a position to keep changing tracks around, which was the case for me at work. I was in seventh heaven because I could just set the thing up and let it go, I had music for the 4 hours I was at work and when I got home I just charged it through the pc and it was ready for next day.

It’s difficult to say how long the battery lasts, I know some people have said it’s poor, but I charge it anyway when it starts to get low so it has never actually run out on me. My ipod was originally for the US market so it came with a two pin plug. I find it easier to charge through the usb cable from the pc and just leave it to go so again, it’s also difficult for me to say how long a charge takes.

Another useful feature is that while a song is playing you can see how long is left to play and you can also look through the menus for the next song to play without interrupting the one currently playing. It does have shuffle and random play but I haven’t used that as I tend to choose my songs to match my mood.

I did think that the ipod would be another thing that I would buy and abandon within a week but it has stood the test of time and hasn’t found it’s way onto ebay yet  I am going to Portugal in a few weeks and I am very much looking forward to lying on the beach with my ipod and not having to worry about carrying round lots of tapes / mini discs and changing them every 30 minutes or so.

In my opinion the ipod mini is a great little gadget and would recommend to all.

Summary: A wonderful device with space for over 75 albums.

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