Photos. Music. Games. My God.

Author's Rating:

Pros: color screen, sound, battery life, PHOTOS MAN!!!

Cons: sometimes the pad starts to just blank out.

The Bottom Line: 
A new photo ability, 40 gigs, color screen and the works. What's not to love?

Author's Review
The Apple iPod Photo 40 GB MP3 Player is the most pleasent system I have had for music yet. It has a beautiful color screen, a nice charging/battery life span system. The iPod Photo has a back light, which helps a lot, and has the option of how long you want it to stay on for, as long as having it be on full time. The iPod Photo also automatically shuts itself off in about two minutes or so. This is really great to save battery, or you can just go to the Settings menu and select "Sleep".

You get 40 GB shared for both music and photos, downloaded from iTunes version 4.7 and iPhoto version 4.0.3. You can hold WAY over 1,000 songs, as well as a few photos. It might be good to get a software such as Graphic Converter to be able to make the photos the same resolution as the iPod Photo. iTunes 4.7 gives you the ability to download (buy) music from the iTunes Music Store. You can get basically every song just by searching for its artist, title, keyword, album, genre or everything all at once.

The SPECIAL FEATURES on the iPod are not that neccassary, but it is fun. You can play games, such as Brick, which is a bar hitting a ball at other balls, a Music Quiz, playing clips from your iPod music, and giving you a multiple choice on what that song is, Parachute where you destroy parachuters and helicopters while their coming down. And Solitare, good ol' solitare. You have a clock, calendar, mental notes and an "on-the go" playlist.

The basic OUTLINE of the iPod, is simple. A round disc below a clear nice screen, and the round disc controls volume by scrolling your finger along the side of it, and the same for menu, and pushing in the middle button to select something. On the top is MENU, so you can go to the previous menu that you were just in, left is rewind, right is forward, and bottom is play/pause. On the bottom is a port for the USB port or firewire cord, used for charging your iPod, and on the top on the right, is a hold button, and a port for your headphones that they include in the iPod Photo package. On the left top there is also a USB/Firewire port to connect to your computer to import music and photos. While you have your iPod connected to the computer, it automatically charges your iPod. Downloading music and photos is SO fast. I downloaded 241 songs in less than 4 minutes.

The SKINS you can buy for them is nice indeed. I have a blue skin, and a glass screen that I can put over the screen so it doesn't get scratched. There are plenty of skins to choose from, and they are very inexpensive. On most of them, you can get a handle on the back of it so you can clip it to your waist.

On your iPod Photo screen, you have a Now Playing section, where you can rate and warp to a certain part of a song. You can pause or play, or go to the next song any time. You can't change the volume, because you use the same pad to scroll volume as scrolling on the menu. Your battery is displayed in the upper right hand corner. It's green normally, but when you're really low, it's red. If you give it a rest, it may just re-juice a little bit too. That's very helpful.

The iPod Photo also works on the PC, but I'm not sure about what the system requirements for it is. Sorry 'bout that. I have a Macintosh, so I'm all set. E-mail me at jargenjoy@yahoo.com, or just post up a comment. L8r.