A flawless MP4 and MP3 player (Apple iPod (5G) 30 GB)

Member Name: _jlee

Product:	Apple iPod (5G) 30 GB
Date:	03/08/08 (89 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very good sound quality and audio quality, intuitive, easy to use, stylish

Disadvantages: Expensive, earphones not very good

Instantly, by most people, if you have an iPod of any sort, you're cool, even if it was one of those first bricky black and white screen iPods. But the iPod video (in my case) came as a very sleek smooth black device with a glaringly shiny back. It was also packaged very nicely.

One of the first things you notice is that you can see fingerprints really easily! Another thing to mention is that it scratches quite easily. It looks like mine has gone into a blender by now because the scrathes are so visible on the back (should have got a better case).

Onto the actual use of the iPod: it's very easy to use, like the menus are intuitive and you can quite quickly get used to the graphical user interface. The click wheel may take some time to get used to it, but once you have, you can laugh at the other mp4 players, at how fast you can scroll through, yet still precisely. Sometimes it's a bit annoying going past the track, then going back too much - it happens sometimes, but it's also great if you want to get from A to Z in a massive list.

The version I got was a 30GB 5.5 G version which is the last unencrypted version (meaning you can modify the look and install custom menus (e.g. iPod linux, rockbox) which was a bonus. I was told when buying it that it didn't come with a disc, so I would have to download iTunes myself.

You basically have to use iTunes, to use all of the features for organizing your music and syncing. There are other tools, but most are buggy or don't support all the features, like choosing tags, in my opinion. This was an annoyance for me because I dislike the iTunes media player, of which I was forced to use often. I prefer Winamp because of the customizability and interfaces, for example. Using iTunes was very simple and managed to sync everything without any hassle. iTunes converted some formats of video and audio that weren't supported on the iPod.

The interface on the iPod is easy to navigate and I changed the settings to my liking. I quickly picked up how it worked and after a few hours was rating my music, playing games, changing the backlight and changing lots of settings - it was very intuitive for me.

I found that the output quality of the audio from the iPod was excellent, and videos were clear too and I also liked how you could have addons such as radio and other things that can plug right into the bottom of the iPod without looking too bizarre. You can also play games, keep notes with a calendar, use the stop watch and other useful features.

The earphones which came with it were okay, but I can't see why replacements for the official ones are so expensive since they're not particularly good quality and break/get damaged and dirty quickly. They were rather uncomfortable when using for a longish amount of time.

Overall very nice - These are unfortunately no longer made (replaced by iPod Classic - basically the same thing with slightly different interface and different shell)

Summary: Perfect, but expensive

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