smartone86's Full Review: Apple iPod classic 6th Generation Silver (120 GB) ...
When I was a teenager, I went from apathetic towards to obsessed with music. Going on constant road trips with school, church, or my family I was constantly trying to find a way to tote my portable CD player and about 54 CDs with me, along with some kind of portable gaming system typically, to pass the time. And of course extra batteries. I owned tons of CD carrying cases and bags, but something always got broken or scratched, I never had enough batteries, and the CD I wanted at that moment was always stuck at hoem sitting on one of 3 CD racks in my bedroom.
Fast forward 10 years. I now carry my entire music collection (some 2500 songs), a bunch of photos, half a dozen audiobooks, dozens of podcasts, 9 full length movies (and scatterings of various YouTube videos), and 17 addicting video games with me wherever I go.
Heavy? No. Weighs in at less than 5 ounces, and at 4.1 x 2.4 x .41 inches is substantially smaller than just my portable CD player was back in the day.
I'm in media heaven. Welcome to the iPod.
For those of you who have spent the last 8 years living under a rock, let me catch you up to speed briefly. The iPod is a line of portable music (initially, now general media) players that are small in size, and have memory of either the flash or hard drive variety to store music, videos, podcasts, photos, games, and other various files on. These fils are transferred to the device by plugging the iPod into a computer with iTunes installed and "syncing" the selected files over. They all feature a headphone jack and a rechargable battery with battery life varying by the specific model.
The iPod line is divided into 4 subsets- the Nano, Shuffle, Touch, and Classic (the original). This review will focus on the 120gb iPod Classic.
The iPod Classic comes in just one hard drive size- 120 gb. Apple advertises that this will hold 30,000 songs, 150 hours of video, 25,000 photos, or any combination there of. I haven't been fortunate enough to get to prove this. They also advertise that it will play for 36 hours on one battery charge. I'll buy it.
The iPod Classic is the largest and arguably most feature rich of all of the iPod models. It features a 2.5" color screen, which is used for selecting items off the well-organized menus, viewing photos, album art, or lyrics, or playing games or videos.
A "click wheel" is a touch sensitive circle with underlain buttons used for navigating the menus (by pulling your finger across the circle) and selecting items (by pressing one one of the edges of the circle, or the center button).
I'll confess here that I'm an iPod junky. This is my 4th iPod purchase, and is being used to replace a 30 gb iPod Video that I've run out of space on, unfortunately. I also own an iPod Shuffle and an iPod Touch. So yeah, you can tell right there how I feel about iPods.
Apple has been focusing on being more environmentally friendly as of late (hey, if nothing else, it's a great advertising ploy). Therefore, you can expect your Apple products to come in minimal, yet adequate boxing. I'm a fan of this. My iPod Classic came in a box the same shape of it, padded on the inside. The iPod, with a thin plastic film protecting it, sat in here. Lifting up the iPod revealed the bag containing a USB cable, headphones, very minimal documentation, a dock connector (still haven't figured out what this is for) and the omnipresent Apple logo stickers, which the Job God will grant immediate coolness upon you the moment when afixing these to your car. Hey, reason enough to purchase on iPod right there. What you will not find is a CD with iTunes (downloadable for free off of Apple's website), a full user manual (see Apple.com for more information) or a wall charger (it charges through USB or a separately sold charger).
The iPod comes as essentially a blank slate, with only a few games loaded on it (iQuiz, Vortex, and Klondike Solitaire). The rest you load.
Loading music off CDs is fairly straight forward. Simply insert the CD in the disk drive and iTunes will offer to import it, saving the music files to your computer and making them playable via your computer. iTunes will also detect music files already on your computer. Further, you can buy music (and videos, TV episodes, games, and audiobooks) of iTunes (along with several online music stores, include Amazon and Walmart). Once your iPod is connected again, all of these files will automatically be transferred to your iPod. It takes a little getting used to, but overall is an incredibly intuitive and easy process.
Alternatively, your iPod can be used it manual mode, allowing your to manually select what is transferred. This is necessary if you want to add files from more than one computer.
One nice thing about the iPod is that it can also be used to help organize you. You can transfer your calendar or contacts to the iPod and use PDA like features on it. I have a Mac, and this process is very smooth. I cannot vouch for it's integration with Windows. One nice thing about the contacts feature is that if you use a Mac computer, in address book you can assign a photo to each contact. This will transfer over to your iPod, as well.
The iPod also has some other basic applications included- a world clock, stop watch, alarms (though with no internal speakers, this will only work through headphones or external speakers), and a sleep timer (very useful if you like to fall asleep to music).
The iPod itself is very easy to use. Simply power is on, and select from the menu to listen to music, lisen to an audiobook, watch videos, view photos, listen to podcasts, or change settings. The main menu is customizable, as is the music menu. This is nice, as if you don't listen to podcasts or audiobooks you never need to see these options, but if you use playlists a lot (made in iTunes or through Genius) you can add it to the main menu, saving you the step of going through the music menu to access them).
While what the iPod does itself is simple, the elegant design and smooth operation makes it a piece of art.
The iPod, for starters, looks nice, with a large color screen, shiney metal back, and smooth corners.
The menus are featured on a split screen, with options featured on the left side, and pictures of your album artwork, loaded photographs, or a graphical representation of the feature on the right.
When listening to music, your album artwork displays on the screen, angled with a shadow sharpening the image. Once the screen times out, the time and a play or pause icon displays on it.
The newest model of the iPod features Genius. Selecting any song, iTunes can build a playlist off of it automatically picking out songs that go with it. It's very nice, and I've gotten some great playlists by doing this.
Another new feature if the option to choose shuffle mode by pressing the center button a few times while playing a song (versus going through to the menu on previous versions).
A third new feature is cover flow. Simply use your click wheel to flip through album covers to find the one you want to listen to. Handy? Not particularly. Gorgeous? Definitely.
A final improvement over my iPod Video is that holding the center button while playing a song will give you the option to find other songs on that album or by that artist (again, versus navigating through menus by hand).
One con about this iPod (versus previous models I've used) is that the clickwheel doesn't quite seem to scroll as smoothly, though part of this is getting used to.
While I do frequently exercise with my iPod, due to the fact that it has a hard drive (and therefore moving parts), Apple does not recommend doing intense exercise with it. Choose one of the 3 flash-based iPod models for that (Touch, Shuffle, Nano). iPod generally does not skip, thanks to a small amount of flash based memory built into the hard drive model that music is cached to as it plays.
The iPod is a very feature rich, elegant, easy to use device. I'm stuck to think of cons for it. I love everything about it and highly recommend it.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 224 Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection
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