I may never use my CD player again.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Superb sound quality. Well designed -- easy and fun to use.

Cons: Surface picks up small scratches.

The Bottom Line: 
If you enjoy music you'll enjoy it even more with an iPod. If you want to save money, try one of the cheaper iPods without the Photo feature.

Author's Review
I've always thought the iPod would be a cool thing to have, but I resisted. After all, I didn't really need one -- my pocket sized Firewire hard drive works great for computer backups, and … well, I don't really listen to music that much anymore. I'll wait until the things get cheaper … or they integrate a mobile phone … or I get given one as a present …

And get given one I did -- ah my wife knows me too well. Perhaps she knew better than I just how much I would enjoy this device…!

It took very little time to learn how to use. The biggest time cost was importing all my music into iTunes. Not that this is difficult -- it's not -- just that it takes time: opening CD cases, loading them in, importing, waiting, doing it over. But now that I've done it, I may never have to open any of those CD cases again! I've found that it's just too easy to fire up the iPod and select an album from my whole collection, or select a particular artist, or a genre (e.g. Jazz, Rock, etc), or a playlist that I setup in iTunes. You can use the supplied audio cables to connect iPod to your stereo system when you're at home, but I tend to not even bother with cables as I was also given an FM transmitter that plugs into the top of the iPod. This allows you to play through the stereo via the FM tuner. (Although a technically minded friend informed me that the sound quality of FM is not as good as CD -- so you'd get better sound through the cables.) The point is, since having the iPod, I've found myself listening to music on very little else … and I've found myself listening to and enjoying my music more often -- I guess because it's so convenient.

A friend of mine points out that the iPod doesn't play video. True. My questions is: do you really want a device that does video? For me, the most important features of a music player are: convenience / ease of use, and sound quality.

The iPod is just great to use. The scroll wheel (I think that's what they call it) is a brilliant design. You can pretty much do everything with one thumb! I haven't a lot of experience with other competing devices, but from the pictures I've seen in some catalogues, the alternatives don't look so good. I guess the only way to be convinced of this is to go into a store and try it for yourself.

Sound quality: again I don't have the experience of using other music players to compare to, but I can't fault the sound quality. The supplied ear phones provide (at least to my ears) crisp, clear sound with no background noise at all, and with more than enough volume at the loudest setting. The only times I've had less than great sound was with a poor quality recording that I had cranked up the volume of in iTunes, and a particular song with a particular EQ (equalizer) setting -- I think there ended up being too much bass or something and some distortion could be heard. (After playing around with the EQ settings, I tend to just leave it off.)

Regarding the 'Photo' feature of iPod Photo, I would love the convenience of being able to dump photos from my digital camera's flash card when we're away from home and view them on the iPod. Unfortunately though, it seems with the currently available media readers, photos uploaded directly to the iPod are not viewable on its screen -- instead you have to download images from your computer before you can view them. I'm not sure where the blame for this limitation rests -- with Apple or with the media reader companies. Either way, my Photo feature is going to waste until a fix comes from either party.

The menu based interface is logical and again, easy to use. You can even customize the items you want to appear on the main menu.

I also have my address book (on my Mac) automatically synced up with the iPod, and I have found this replaces another previous annoyance for me -- entering contact info into my mobile. The one small drawback is that with a large list of contacts, it's a little hard to locate a particular contact quickly -- the scroll wheel let's you scroll through the list really quickly, but then it becomes a bit difficult to know when to stop at the right place! Perhaps adding categories of contacts (like in the Address Book software) would help reduce the list sizes.

I also use the iPod to backup large amounts of work from my computer. So far I have found the 40GB to be a good size. Importing music using the default AAC encoder makes the music files very compact and a collection of 100 CDs barely scratches the surface.

Speaking of scratching the surface, the iPod feels solid and well made, and it looks great, but the shiny plastic coating on the front does pick up tiny little scratch marks quite easily.

Overall, this is a great product. Well designed and a lot of fun to use. The biggest problem with buying one is that soon everyone in your family will want one. Even my six-year-old daughter is thinking of saving up!