iPod is not flawless

Author's Rating:

Pros: light, compact, elegant, click wheel is a good idea.

Cons: easily scratched, itunes doesn't work well in Windows, installation was difficulat on XP.

The Bottom Line: 
If you can get pass installation and some sluggish performance on iTunes, go for it.

Author's Review
This is my fifth MP3 players. Of the five, one is a flash memory based (Creative Nomad II), 2 are CD-based, and the other being Archos 20gb studio 20.

I didn't really wanted to buy iPod, but when buy.com had a real low priced sale ($339), I bit the bullet and bought one. After using this little gadget for 2 weeks, I now understand why iPod is so popular. However, iPod is not perfect, and for Window XP users, beware.

Overall Grade B : the major pluses are the user interface, elegantly designed, compact, light. The major minuses is the casing is easily scratched and difficult installation with Windows XP.

Sound Quality/headphone Grade B : Nothing to write home about. The player itself played MP3 well. based on personal experience, the sound highly depend on the bitrate you encode your mp3 in and the headphone. The headphone itself is "earbud" type. My personal experience shows this type of headphone does not produce the sound as well unless you wish to shell out $100. It does the job and the sound is clear.

Installation Grade D : At home, I am running Windows XP SP2 on a laptop with a 4-pin firewire port and only USB 1.1 ports. This iPod only comes with a 6-pin firewire and usb connectors. I didn't want to use USB 1.1 due to extreme slow speed. Luckily I have an external hard drive with 6-pins port (from my computer to the external drive, I have a 4-6 pin cable), so I figure I daisy chained iPod to the external hard drive. For some unknown reason, formatting could never be done this way. After 6 hours of trying to format (also reconnect using usb ports), searching the internet for solution, I decided to connect to my Windows 2000 computer at work without any daisy chain. Amazingly it worked. "Format" took about 30 seconds on Windows 2000. So for windows XP users, beware. In fact, in the two weeks, my windows 2k never have problem. On the other hand, the XP computer twice encountered blue screen of death with message complaining about iPod driver. One other gripe, since the drive is formatted with FAT File system. You can't have a 4 GB+ file.

Music Medium management (aka iTunes) Grade C+ : You manage the songs on iPod with iTunes that is run on your computer. I often hear many Mac users/Apple enthusiasts brag about how easy it is to use Mac software. Well... iTunes doesn't want to be friend with Windows. First gripe comes with CPU utilization. iTunes often uses about 30% of CPU utilization (my XP computer is 1.7 Ghz P4). Second, launching of the software is slow, I believe it is trying to synch with iPod, but I turned the synchronization off and it's still slow. Third, the "grid" in the song list should have extra capabilities so if I wish to copy content from one cell to another (like Excel), it should be easily done. Instead I must go into song info to modify mp3 tags information (a new window for every mp3 file). Fourth, where are the files stored? Let's say you copy a file to iPod, you would not know where this file is stored. To add file to iPod is easy, just drag the file and drop it in to iTunes, or synch from the library. However, if you turn off the "synchronization", you won't be able to drag the file out. To actually grab the file out, you'll need to search the file directory (after unhide the directory). This lead to my fifth complaint : audiobook - how in the world you distinguish a "music" from "audiobook". After searching abit on the net, I realize I need to rename my audiobook (in mp3 format, extension) to another extension (no need to re-encode). But I've already copied the files to iPod, turn the synch off. So I have to laboriously now retrieve it rename all my audiobook files to a compliant format. By now, you probably think I am one unhappy camper with iPod, and I should return it... I almost did. :) Then iTunes begin to show something that I like. First, ipod may associate album picture with the songs - this is a neat feature. Playlist creation was easy. Searching is FAST - possibly the best feature of the whole software. I've already put roughly 3200+ files on iPod (used about 15Gb), and I've never have trouble with searching. The search is practically instantenous.

Photo display - Grade D : first the screen on iPod photo is not big. So you figure there should be some control to "zoom in"/"zoom out" of a picture... wrong. It's pretty much just a slide show of the pics you have. Very disappointed.

Photo management (on XP) - Grade F+ : for Mac user, the iPhoto seems to be very nice. Unfortunately, I use XP, iTunes only synchs with a folder. Too bad all my photos are scattered around. That's pretty much all iTunes does. You can't preview or do anything with it. Photoshop Album supposedly work with iPod on XP, but I don't own a copy. So I am stuck with iTunes. :(

External casing - Grade B : The reason this grade is B, because it is elegantly designed. Otherwise, the "silver side"/back side of the case is easily scratched. For something that's costing for $300+, Apple should have come up with better casing material than cheap plastic and scratch-easy metal case.

Portability - Grade A+ : Finally, light is shed on why iPod is popular. This player is light, portable. My old Archos was small, but heavy. My old Nomad II was light and a bit smaller, but holds less than 200 meg of information. So no doubt, iPod is the champion of portability.

User Interfact/menu system on the iPod - Grade A : Fantastic! The click wheel, the menu, the "touchpad" certainly make navigating this player easily with only one hand and a thumb. The interface/menu on the iPod is self intuitive, easy to navigate around. Finally, the "user friendly" reputation of Apple product can be applied here. :)

Battery - Grade B : This player lasts for at least 8 hours on one charge.

Conclusion : iPod itself is a very very well designed piece of hardware. The only drawback on the iPod for me was the casing. However, the software needs some major improvement from installation to iTunes on Windows XP.