Sexy & Stylish Music, Photo & Video Player (Apple iPod (5G) 60 GB)

Member Name: blonde_girl774

Product:	Apple iPod (5G) 60 GB
Date:	07/11/05 (480 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very large memory capacity, holds music, photos and videos too, stylish and small design.

Disadvantages: Very poor usage instructions, quite pricey still.

On a recent shopping trip I was feeling a bit down in the dumps and so decided to splurge out on an ipod. Now my initial reason for joining DooYoo was to earn a few extra pounds to buy an ipod with but as it’s going to take me quite a while I decided to splurge! Ipods are made by the electronic company Apple who have found a huge goldmine with the manufacturing of them. For those of you who’ve never heard of them they’re basically a stylish and up to date mp3 player with a few extras.

I settled on the new 60gb ipod which comes in white or black and features a colour screen too. It’s 10.4cm by 6.1cm and only 1.4cm thick so it can fit easily into your pocket and it extremely stylish looking. They come with either a white or black front and a silver back which is very hard to keep finger print free! The screen is now available in colour which is a new feature offered in comparison to the old ipods and the resolution is 320 x 240 pixels which makes any photos or pictures very clear indeed. It was actually a little heavier than I imagined but that’s due to the huge memory it has! The new 60gb ipod can hold 15,000 songs, 25,000 photos and 150 hours of video which is a huge increase from the older ipods. The battery life lasts for 20 hours when playing music and 3-4 hours when looking at photos or playing videos. The ipod came in a small black box that also contained a small stand for your ipod, a USB port connector for the computer, some earphones, a cream case, an itunes CD and an instructions booklet.

Using the Ipod

The ipod itself is very easy to use, all navigation is done by the apple wheel which consists of an enter button in the centre, a menu button, a play/pause button, a forwards button and a backwards button which are all located on a wheel. To move up or down a menu or to adjust the volume of the ipod merely roll the wheel around to accomplish this. There’s also a hold button on the top which allows you to put the ipod in your pocket or bag without it being turned on/off at all. Upon turning the ipod on you’ll be presented with an ipod that offers you 6 settings which will all be discussed in turn…

The music option offers you the chance to play your music by playlist, artist name, album name, composers, genres or merely song name. All these things can be assigned to the song while on itunes. Music is loaded onto the ipod by the computer programme itunes which is described in more detail below. There’s also the option to shuffle your songs so the ipod will play all the songs on its memory in a random order. You can even assign photos to different songs so that when you play them the photo will flash up onto the screen! When a song plays it comes up with the title, the artist, the album and the photo if there is one to accompany it. Along the bottom of the screen you can also have a bar to show the timing progress of the song so you know if it’s at the start or end. The photos option is next up which allows you to view any photos you have on your ipod which again you load up off your computer. These can be viewed one by one or in a slideshow with music to accompany them if you so choose. The videos option allows you to play videos on your ipod, equipped with sound, which again you need to load onto your ipod. Music videos are the most common to be played on the ipod but really there’s no limit to the length of video you can load on (except for the 150 hour limit memory).

Fourthly is the extras menu which offers you the chance to set the time and date on your ipod so you can use it as an alarm, calendar and clock also. There are also four games with the ipod which are called Brick, Music Quiz, Parachute and Solitaire. Brick is pretty good and involves moving a rectangle to allow a ball to bounce off it and delete rows of bricks above. Music Quiz is the best one; this plays you a song that you have stored on your ipod and gives you 5 possible titles for it which you then have to choose the correct one from! There’s also a notes section and a stopwatch too under this menu. Lastly is the settings menu which contains options such as how long you want the backlight to stay on for, the option to repeat all songs, a sound check option and the option to turn off the wheel clicker as well. This isn’t really a section I’ve used much to be honest but if you like your technical stuff then no doubt it will entertain you for a bit!

The ipod comes with a CD for itunes which will load the programme onto your computer. You merely copy music from other files on your computer or direct from cds into the itunes screen by a simple copy and paste function. All songs will be stored in your itunes library and each time you plug your ipod in via the USB port connector all new information from itunes will be uploaded onto your ipod, very quickly. The only slow point of itunes is that when you're adding a CD to itunes it takes about 9 minutes to process an average sized CD which is quite timely. By right clicking on any song you can choose the option “get info” which will let you fill in details such as the composer or put the album photo on. Itunes also offers you the opportunity to buy music in a similar way that music programmes such as Napster does too. Prices start at 79p for a single or £6.99 for an album.

There’s also multiple accessories available for the ipods, of course as this one is fairly new out they’re still bringing out accessories but if it’s anything like the old ones then you’ll be able to get speakers for it, a car adapter to either play your music through a cassette or a radio tuner to play via a radio station frequency and many cases/covers too.

My Opinion

All in all I’d have to say I’m in love with my ipod, I’ve only had it a week and it’s the best investment I’ve made in a long time. It’s super duper sexy design was the first bit hit with me! I also found it really easy to learn to use and within about an hour I was an expert. My only criticism of the ipod really is that the instructions that accompany it are very poor. They basically consist of 6 pages, the first 2 just detailing what you get in the box so it really is your own job to familiarise yourself with your ipod, don’t rely on the instructions! All the navigation you’ll ever need to do is via the click wheel which makes it much simpler to use than any phone I’ve ever had. As there’s only five options (enter, menu, back, forward and play/pause) you can’t get too confused or lost and if ever in doubt just click on menu and it will take you back to the previous screen. Oh and while we’re on criticisms I’ve just got one more, it’s really hard to turn the ipod off when you’re playing music. Basically you need to press down the play/pause button for about 10 seconds to turn the ipod off but while you’re playing music it can become a little confusing with the music going on and off!

With regard to the battery life I’ve never played the ipod for 20 hours solid in one go so can’t say it does last that long but when switching it on and off between listening to music it lasts for about 10-12 hours without charging. The ipod charges its battery through your computer although if you have a laptop it’s not ideal as it drains your battery so I bought a plug adaptor for £19.99 so I can charge it from the mains. It only takes about forty minutes to fully charge the battery via the mains so it’s quite quick when you think it plays music for 10-20 hours, supposedly.

As for the quality of the ipod I’d say it’s really good and worth every penny. The music is really clear, just like listening to a good quality CD player in my opinion. The sound is clear and crisp, even the base is pretty good too. In the settings section there’s something called EQ which allows you to increase/decrease the base or alter the vocals to ensure you get the perfect sound. As for photos the colour is exceptional, so clear with really bright colours too. As for videos I’ve only loaded music videos on and the quality is outstanding, the screen rarely jumps unless you’re running fast and the colour is brilliant – just like watching a pocket TV really.

It’s much more up to date than the older ipod 20gb or the ipod mini and has a much greater capacity than the new ipod nanos. So far I’ve got 1000 songs on it and a couple of music videos and still have over 52gb of space left. It’s also available in 30gb which obviously holds half of what the 60gb does but if you like your music and are planning keeping it a while I’d recommend the 60gb as it’s only about £60-80 more for double of everything! If you love your music and listen to it daily like I do then the ipod is a worthwhile investment so get it on your Christmas list now.

Oh and a plus for all those girls… the back of the ipod doubles up as a great mirror!

www.amazon.co.uk £299.99
www.play.com £299.99
www.ebay.co.uk approx. £270 – 300

P.S. Please rate me as I’m now saving my DooYoo miles for some speakers!!

Summary: The new colour screen 60gb ipod from Apple.

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