Ed.Williamson's Full Review: Apple iPod photo 4th Generation (60 GB) MP3 Player
One thing is certain about Steve Jobs- he knows far better than most people in the computer industry…and on the planet…what the consumer wants in their gut in a product and how to deliver it. This is strikingly evident in the latest (circa 2005) techno tool: The Photo iPod.
You can see Jobs’ way of thinking if you look back 20 years or so. Take Apple Computers, for example. The “standard” PC, built around the IBM/Microsoft model, has clearly won the market share in the world at large over the years. It is the no-nonsense left-brain no-slackers workhorse of the computer world today, and practically everyone uses a PC from the back street pachinko parlors of Tokyo to the mahogany-paneled offices of Wall Street and everything in-between . Software for anything else is hard to find.
Even so, Steve Jobs and his Apple Computer world have always made a product that is much more fun to own and operate- the Apple Computer- than the ubiquitous PC. The IBM/Microsoft PC has always seemed like a Buick Roadmaster to me, while the Apple Computer (especially the Mac) has always seemed like the Corvette Stingray---it just is a much sexier little dear. One is clearly made for work while the other is clearly made to be beautiful and to have fun- while getting the job done. And Steve Jobs and Apple have always seemed to be clearly aware of this distinction.
I suppose then, that it was fortuitous that Jobs helped bring into being the most fun digital music player in the world: the iPod. It outsells all other portable music players in the world, and for some very good reasons.
First, it is the most fun player to use there is. If you compare it to any other player today, you just get that “click” in your mind that says that this is the best. If you could bottle up “intuitive” when it comes to using a digital music player, the iPod is still gallons ahead. And it will mesh with either an Apple computer or a PC Computer. You just need to have either a firewire port or a USB 2.0 port, but either can be added cheap to most computers by persons of minimal computer experience.
Second, you get the feeling that it was designed with YOU in mind, and that whoever designed it was more interested in how people use their gadgets than in what the end-of-the-year sales results were going to look like in some stockholder’s meeting. You can believe that Jobs must use his every day, whereas you’d wonder--- if it came from Redmond---or Round Rock…or a lot of other places…if the engineers there would use theirs more than every month or so..
Third, nobody in the industry has such a seamless triumvirate as the phenomenal iTunes-software-on-the-computer/ iTunes-Store-on-the-internet/ iPod-itself music triangle. It is just flat symbiotic. I’m sure Microsoft and others must salivate when they see how much fun comes out of that for the consumers and how much cash goes back into it for Apple.
Fourth, you as the enduser feel like you have an expensive product yet which is reliable and is worth every penny. Again, you feel like its designers are straight-shooters who want to give you something that will last.
And fifth, with all those other iPod-ers out there, you feel like you must have made your choice “the People’s choice”…you’re part of an army of music lovers who have found a shared gift. You may like all those other MP3 players out there and be a person who normally goes with “the underdog”, but in the matter of the iPod you realize you need to make an exception. This is the Real Deal.
So what about the Photo iPod- and more specifically, what about the 60 GB Photo iPod?
This little wonder is one of the most miraculous devices I have ever seen in my life. A hundred years ago the royalty of the earth would have probably given a million dollars for one of these things. When they came out at first, the ones with the biggest capacity (60 GB) were about $600.00 (US) but that price has now been slashed to $450.00. That’s a lot of money but what you get back may make it worth it.
First of all, it packs all the wonderfulness that we associate with the aforementioned iPod phenomenon. The iPod is the world-beater deluxe and this one is the best of the ‘pods.
Second- it’s so TINY. It is barely bigger than a beck of cards and weighs only 6.5 ounces. Of the ‘pods it’s the biggest but even so it’s still diminutive compared to, say, an early Walkman.
Third, (and this is to me the mind-blower), it will hold both your ENTIRE color photo collection and your ENTIRE music collection- you can take them with you.
Let me digress for a moment to elucidate that point just a bit to really see what that means---and only about the photography part. Let’s say that you have ten or twenty family photo albums, thirty boxes of slides, and dozens of digital photos of your spouse, your kids, your parents, your friends, your grandkids, any other signif others, your holiday celebrations, trips to various places, and the like. And then let’s say that a disaster- fire, theft, act of nature-whatever- conspires to destroy your original collection(s) after you have stored them into your iPod and taken your iPod somewhere safe. Voila! If you have them all on your Photo iPod, you have saved them ALL, baby! And while it might not be bad to lose some photos, there are definitely some- or at least one- you’d never want to lose. Salvation!
I know what you’re thinking. “Now wait a minute- how could you put ALL that stuff onto that little iPod?” Two reasons. First, the iPod’s storage capacity is HUGE at 60 GB. I don’t know what the human brain’s storage capacity is, measured in Gigabytes, but I just have to wonder of this iPod might top it! The second reason is that the iPod compresses both the songs and the music so that more…and more…and more will fit. It’s literally unbelievable how many thousands of songs and images will go into it until you begin to use it. I’m not saying that you can fit all the books in the Library of Congress or all the pictures in the Louvre into it (hey- maybe you could with the Louvre!). But the Library of You---well, probably.
There are some compromises. The color screen is only 2 inches diagonally, but even so that’s a lot bigger than a keyhole and you can see a lot- it has a 220 X 176 pixel color screen capability shown in 65,000 colors. Personally, I am waiting for Apple or some afternmarket firm to make a REALLY GOOD and REASONABLY PRICED set of “image glasses” (wireless, of course) which you can put on like sunglasses and see the equivalent of an HDTV Jumbotron image of your graphics beamed up from your iPod (Inventors: take note: you saw the idea here first so I get a commission ha-ha.).
The PI displays these images 25 at a time in the thumbnails and then one at a time full-size (2 inches…hmm) either manually or in a slide-show format- and you can have a slide show set to (your) music if you want. You can scroll through the images like you do songs on a playlist. Plus you can display them (with the included cables) on a TV or through a video projector.
The music, like all iPod music, is GREAT and you can download and playlist to your heart’s content. There are so many great ways to get so many sounds today. You can download songs off the net, such as from the iTunes store (or from a P2P source). You can rip CDs into your playlists. You can convert cassettes and vinyl into song files. You can get tracks from internet radio. And now you can even get a Tivo-like effect through a product called a Radioshark. As if that weren’t enough, you can get many, many audio-books and talk-shows-off-the-radio (like Car Talk, etc.) onto your iPod the same way. The problem then becomes one of managing all those songs, books, and shows, and it will test your organizational skills. If you get too many, you can off-load them onto something like an external hard drive for later insertion.
How much sound and light will this thing hold? Well, let’s see. Right now I’ve got 2,590 pictures on my iPod’s hard disk. I’ve got 4,687 songs on it, which the counter says means that I have 14 days, 3 hours, and 27 minutes worth of music loaded in. So, am I running out of space? The 60 GB unit, after application software considerations, actually has 55.7 GB of storage capacity, and so far I’m using, with what’s currently stored, 21.6 GB, or only a little over one-third of its capacity. If you do the math you will see that you should have plenty of storage space for your sound and vision stuff.
Of course, to hear the sound, the stock earbuds are el cheaperino and you will need a good pair like Sony’s in-the-ear buds or any of many dozen other options to get the best effect, but the sound experience is great- whether directly in your ears, through your home stereo, or through your car’s sound system ---many options to make it so.
Another fun thing you can do with the Photo iPod, and one that I love more than just about anything, has to do with “Album Art.” Simply put, every time you display a sound file in the iPod the window shows you a little square for (normally) a picture of the album that the song came from. If you buy songs and download them from the iTunes store you will automatically get the “standard” album cover off the CD like in a music store. But if it isn’t there, it’s a simple matter to either go get an image from, say, the music store at amazon.com or simply Google the image for the album from Google’s wonderful “image” feature. And your creativity can extend beyond that. The gazillions of image files in Google and other places can also be easily inserted into “Album Art” so that you can put a Salvadore Dali painting in as the “album art” with a Stravinsky number. You can spend literally hours in a new addiction searching for the right picture to fit the song you like. You can find the love song you and your lover enjoy and put her or his picture in the “Album Art” square to make a point to yourself that this Is Who this Is. This is tons ‘o fun. And you can take it with you. It’s fun on a long car ride at night to glance down (keep your eyes on the road!) and see those little pictures of friendly faces and sights shining up at you as you listen to the music. Very cool indeed. Makes the miles fly by.
The battery life of the Photo iPod, off line power, runs 15 hours non-stop for songs alone and 5 hours non-stop for slide-show pictures. You can keep it on power in your home and in your car as it plays. There are many things you can do to conserve or squander power- it’s up to you.
Peripherals? The iPod had so many peripherals it must drive its competition nuts. You can get just about anything you want. See Google or its cousins. Like many people, I use mine at the gym for workouts (yes, it can take a lickin' and keep on iPodin') and I've got a peripheral- an aftermarket case- I can wear to keep it snug against me and dry even when I'm sweating up a storm.
All in all, this is a pretty fantastic little device. And that’s an understatement.
But…it can’t be perfect, right? Is it buggy in any way? Yeah. I’ve had a little trouble in a couple or three areas. The little hard disk inside sometimes needs you to wait on it and it and not get impatient with its loads- especially its image loads. Or it will freeze on you. And sometimes, for some strange reason, songs endings appear to get cut off. The most distressing bug was when I recently updated my version of the resident software and most of my album art disappeared. Fortunately, it was saved (along with everything else) on the computer’s hard disk- something normally taken care of by iTunes. I went out on the net to the iPod’s many bloggers and found a procedure to fix it though. Just go to the advisers- official and unofficial- in those blogs and chat sites and you’ll probably find your way out of bug-dom. But the bug factor is only about 5% so it’s not bad. Better than for the early DVD burners anyway.
So overall it’s great. You have to wonder: where is all this going? One of these days there will probably be enough storage on an iPod for storing and playing movies, although you probably will need those wireless screen-specs by then, as a 2-inch screen might be a bit too-small after a half-hour or so. And then what? Holovision? An iPod morphed into a phone/ PDA/ satellite-based internet-radio-TV connector? Maybe that all lies ahead.
But for now, it’s sound and pictures a-plenty. Lots of them. On the Photo iPod.
Thanks again Steve- and Apple- for a Job(s) well done.
Five Stars/*****
ew/050310
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 600.00 Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection
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