as there as title say really what are ipods like ive brought my first ever ipod yesterday and am waiting for delivery off play.com

I've just got my first one today (Ipod Classic) to replace my Zen Vision:M (the large capacity, small price and Creative's inability to read what I actually wrote in support emails swinging it for me).

My First Impressions are
On the good side :-
The screens are pretty (but see downsides point 1)

A lot of thought has been put into the packaging - very smart

It's faster transferring music than the Zen (using Windows Media Player and dopisp not Itunes)

Menus are responsive (although most testing has been done on ~200 songs vs my usual ~6000).

It's very slim and light

The iTrip works well with it - tider than the Belkin Tunecast, when I get a car charger for it i'll see if it's actually usable incar now!.

The dock connector is an obvious bonus, allowing integration in third party stuff (car stereos, alarm clocks, speakers, AV Amplifiers)


Oh, just remembered - the search feature, something i've been wanting for a while - can't remember the full name of a song, just type what you know - e.g. "Time of" finds "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)"


On the bad side :-
The transitions are slightly annoying (why have such a responsive player run artificially slow due to transitions? - I will point out that fancy transitions generally annoy the hell out of me after I've seen them about twice)

There are some mildly annoying inconsistencies (i.e. I have set the time mode to be 24 hours, yet you have to set the clock using the 12 hour clock and it displays the 12 hour clock in standby too )

Speaking of standby - if it's going to show anything then what's playing now is more useful than a 12 hour clock.

No power brick is supplied (wtf?!) - oh goodie, my Wii is going to be left on tonight to charge it then, I'll have to bob down Maplin tomorrow to see if they still have the wall wart USB hub and hopefully that can charge my Classic, Shuffle and Mobile - will make travelling easier!

It picks up fingerprints really badly - it looks awful already .

The sound appears to be slightly rougher (however I've only really had a chance for two ear listening direct for about 20 minutes today so it could have been the XFM White Stripes podcast I was listening to that was rough - the rest of the time I've been listening to it via the iTrip on 87.9FM and my Sony Ericsson mobile and that appears to have been okay)

hi kev i might be wrong here but no ipod's come with power brick i might be wrong on this

Yep, they used to though. I was quite surprised about that the other day when I bought a 80 gig Classic after having my 4 gig Mini for a few years, but I guess USB is ok.

Have you updated the firmware?

It's supposed to fix some of the inconsistencies etc. The update should be available through iTunes.. it's version 1.0.1

The thing with power bricks is that the vast majority of people charge them from a computer. As people were buying new iPods they were also duplicating power bricks that people didn't need. I've had my iPod for 4 years and never used the power brick.

So what do you do if you take it on holiday with you?

I use a mains powered USB charger (it's a 3 pin USB charger)

Which you still have to buy yourself. (Yes ... I know you can use it for other things but if you had no other gadgets you wanted to charge through USB it's still an additional purchase)

Agreed, but in my case I have an iPOD, camera and Sat Nav

so it does save me.

A few days of using the iPod later...

I've ended up installing iTunes (the bloated tub of lard it is) because it handles Video, Podcasts and Audio books better than WMP11 and DOPISP does (i.e. you don't get track 10 from the Czech CD while listening on random ) and have let it resynch my library - so I'm now more of a "proper" ipod user. In some ways the iPod and iTunes are better than the Zen/WMP 11 combo, in other ways they are worse.

Firstly the iPod is easy to use, at the expense of lacking features (or at the least having no obvious ways of accessing features!) - although I will admit tacking some time to work out how to change the damn volume on it!

On the other hand iTunes is annoying + and - don't expand drop downs like they do in every other tree like menu, and it's generally keyboard unfriendly (I usually find it quicker and easier to use the keyboard vs the mouse/trackpad)

Firstly a couple of things I miss from the Zen are...

The context menus while playing songs - i.e. If I was listening to my "Rock Tunage" playlist and a song by Fall Out Boy came on I could decided to "right click" and select "Lookup Artist" and then select the "From Under the Cork Tree" album, and either listen to it or append it to the queue - where as on the iPod I have to navigate though all the menus to find it.

Another thing I miss was the ability to "right click" on a track and find out further info about it - primarily the year of release - I can't settle pub arguments as easy now

iTunes doesn't appear to have a way of monitoring folders, due to my syncing to a NAS for backup and sharing between three PCs tracks are not always added on the machine my MP3 syncs though so this is really annoying.

Now getting onto some more positive things :-

I'll start with the poorest implemented nice feature - Audiobooks - urgh; Nice that it separates them out the core library, but why does it play them one by one? I have a single "Audiobook" at present (Which i've had to convert from MP3 to M4B format, but hey I wanted it out the way!) but can I play it though in one go (like I can with the original CD) - can I **** - In fact it's listed as 10 different books - argh!

Podcasts - Ooooh; Now this is how the Audiobook menu should be structured - again they are kept out the main music collection, but this time they are separated into different programmes/feeds (whatever) then listed in reverse order. The iTunes interface to them is great too. So far I can't fault the Podcast feature at all (well aside from iTunes not realising MP3's with the genré tag of "Podcast" are Podcasts but hey I only had two).

TV Shows - Ooooh; this works nicely (similar to Podcasts) - shame iTunes can't a) Monitor Folders, b) Convert without losing sound (Videora gets round that one but is a swine to use), c) "hide" the original file in the library when converted.....

Music Videos - Back to a more "Audiobooks" style menu, again all get dumped into a single list - why not display "albums" in sub folders? (Also see TV Shows comments)., doesn't appear to start playing the next video when the first finishes.

Movies - ROTFLOL, Who's going to watch a movie on an iPod? No idea how it works as I can't see a use for this feature.

Music Library - Firstly no chance of accidentally hearing a Podcast or Audiobook as they have been separated out which is neat.

Coverflow is cool, if a little bit unresponsive

It's a pain selecting "The Zutons" as you have to scroll through the whole list; actually "The Zutons" is just time consuming, moving to something in the middle like "The Manic Street Preachers" is a pain - occasionally a letter picker thing pops up on screen, and suddenly dumps me on The Zutons - still can't work out how to trigger this or indeed work out how to "wrap-around" either (i.e. go from The Zutons to ABC)

Gapless Playback - urgh, why the need for two seconds of silence between each file? My Zen Touch, Zen Vision M and even my mobile handle that one fine, but iTunes has to faff with your library for hours to work that out (track 903 of around 9,000 at present ) - why not just play the MP3s with no bloody gaps? All the CD's I've ripped have silence at the end of non-gapless album tracks anyway

Audio Quality - Is fine, my earlier concerns were down to the iTrip and Mobile. Speaking of the iTrip - works well in the car and much tidier than the Tunecast, not quite as clean as DAB, but less hissy than everything except Trent FM/BBC Radio Nottingham in the car.

The Dock Connector - I can see this is going to be neat when I come to replacing my audio and video equipment - no trying to fish wires down from the back of the hi-fi any more - I have already brought an iPod Speaker/Dock (on offer at Richer Sounds - £20 with a voucher from the local paper ) - literally drop the iPod to play and charge - no messy wires hanging out the player - I know my brother also likes being able to control it from his in-car head unit while it's charging.

Last FM - The syncing of play counts between iPod and iTunes means my Last FM page is going to finally represent more of what I actually listen to, rather than the randomness I have at home - requires a systray plugin though which is a bit messier than the WMP one.


Going back to my original post - I'd forgotten I had ~9,000 tracks as they didn't fit on the Zen - it's great having the capacity again. The Search really is neat, and the speed hasn't changed at all.

And the most irritating thing of all - forgetting which playlist I was listening to when I connected to my laptop - I just want to select "Now Playing" to get going again.


All in all the Zen V:M and iPod are on par - they both have their own strengths and weaknesses.

Doesn't fix even half of the problems. Doesn't fix the clock problem 24 instead of 12.
Doesn't stop the clock appearing in standby or when a song is playing.
Doesn't fix the artwork problem. that artwork isn't always displayed.

It's still a right pigs ear at the minute. But apple don't seem to give a monkeys about the problems.

Ipod is great

itunes is not so great

Audiobooks are not designed to be lots of individual tracks, like podcasts they should be one track with multiple chapters - which makes sense since they are books. There are various tools which will combine tracks into one long one with chapters built in.


iTunes isn't just for use with iPods, it works with Apple TV and Front Row and if you have a big enough computer screen is great for watching movies.

I had one of the first edition iPods and am currently the owner of the 5th gen iPod (the one before the rename to Classic).

Just my views; not trying to pass any of this as fact...

Good
- plug it in and it works
- iTunes and iPod are IIMO a simple and elegant combination
- easy to use and navigate
- battery life is good (it works well for me and the commuting etc. that I do)
- pretty much now there's an iPod to suit all budgets
- it isn't full of features that people won't necessarily use much (voice recorder, radio etc.)
- you don't have to worry about where to save things, how to sync your music - it's all done for you

Bad
- some people don't like the battery life
- it doesn't have some things e.g. FM tuner, voice recording (though also see good)
- the 4th Gen crapped out bigtime
- they're so popular now that every chav also has one. Not classy

Even most of those aren't big issues.

The latest models (and the more recent previous ones) have pretty good battery life.

You can also get accessories that allow you to do many of the things you can't (such as the radio tuner and the Voice Recording).

The chav thing is also a little subjective!

ipod classic, can you drag and drop like the ZEN Vision:M

Gaahhhhhh,

You BOUGHT an iPod, not BROUGHT an iPod.

The verb to bring in past tense is brought, such as "I brought home a bag of sweets."

The verb to buy in past tense is bought, such as "I bought a new iPod recently"

silly me i forgot that i had been bullied out of most of my education and i do make mistakes now and again

yes - if you want to.

or you can simply connect the ipod to the computer, and put your shoes on while it syncs automically.

Iain

I have had an iPod for over a couple of years now and I am well happy with the sound once I got a decent paiur of headphones (the ones that you get with the iPod are so crappy).