Apple iPod 20 GB

...and put the lovely white Apple earphones supplied with your iPod in your lovely ears, you’ll now have CD quality music coursing through your lovely brain. When the first track is finished, your clever little machine will select another track for your delight and edification.

Naturally, given all those menu options, you can choose to listen to a whole album, all the tracks in a genre, all the ‘60s music, all your five-star favourites…whatever!
...cost a mere £299.00 from Apple online (http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore?family=iPod) or you might save a tenner or so buying from Amazon.
So to sum up: It’s lovely, it’s comprehensive (Hell…I haven’t even MENTIONED the GAMES yet, or the fact you can store your contacts on it or…or…) it’s efficient and IT’S MINE…SO HANDS OFF…OK? MY Precious…MINE I tell you!
  ... more

Lately, I’ve been found huddled in a corner on my own, with a loony smile fixed to my face.

Nothing too unusual there, then.

I’ve been clutching a small white and silver box, and I’ve been rocking back and forward, occasionally breaking into what would pass for song...if I could sing…which I can’t.

I can be seen relinquishing the small silver and white box, but usually only for long enough to get into some outerwear prior to grabbing my Precious, plugging in the earphones again, and going out for long walks, during which the tuneless singing goes on…and on.

I’ve discovered the joys of iPod.

My Precious…MY Precious.

Oh enough of this shameless piggybacking on the success of a recent film. I must get down to a proper review of a fine product. (Hey…first time for everything!)

The iPod, for those who live in caves, is Apple’s version of an MP3 player. It is also a design icon. It plays a wide variety of file formats in addition to MP3, including WAV, AIFF (a Mac format), AA (for spoken word) and principally – indeed preferably – AAC, which is a format that allows for serious compression, but without appreciable loss of sound quality, and it’s a design icon.

Did I mention that it’s a design icon and that it’s rather lovely?

It’s small too. Mine is a 20gb version, and it measures a dainty 100mm x 60mm x a skinny 15mm…in other words about the size of an audio cassette (remember audio cassettes? They’re what we used to have before iPods).

Now, to put things into perspective with regards meaningless numbers like 20gb I reckon the longest audio cassette available back in the dark ages was a C120, which allowed for 2 hours of recording. The average CD (he said, moving towards the present day a little) runs to about 60 minutes of music, while recording your own MP3 CDs (nearly up to 2004 now) will give you something like 80 minutes of music. (I’m sure someone will be able to tell me that I’m wrong here and you can get a truckload more onto a CD, but I missed that class at techie school. Sorry.) My iPod, however; small but perfectly formed, will hold about 5,000 tunes. That’s about 2 weeks of non-stop, round-the-clock music. Or, to put it in other terms, one track a day for about the next 14 years!

I’ve not filled mine yet.

I put all my CDs onto it, and I’ve STILL got nearly 14gb of memory to try to fill.

1,229 songs loaded, and I’m not sure I’ll live long enough to fill the rest of the space, far less listen to it all!

So how (I hear you ask) does the music get from the CD to the ears via the iPod?

The whole process is a fairly simple one, but does require a computer with a CD drive and preferably a bit of space on the hard drive as well as the iPod and the software which comes with it; iTunes. (By the way, if you want to preview iTunes, or just get yourself a great media player for FREE, download the latest version from www.apple.com )

Just plonk a CD into your drive with iTunes running, and you’ll be presented with the track listing for the album with all the tracks selected. Then uncheck the box to deselect any track you don’t want to transfer. Click the ‘import’ button and the tracks selected will be whizzed over to your hard drive as fast as your CD drive will allow.

Once you’ve got something on your computer, plug the iPod into a Firewire or USB 2 socket (you can use a USB 1, but it’ll be a whole lot slower) and the tunes are squeezed down the wires at a hell of a rate; about 2 a second, and into the weenie little hard drive that is your iPod.

The whole thing is as gloriously simple and unfussy as the iPod itself.

Simple?…well not quite. I’ll start with a description, after which I suspect things may start to go downhill on the comprehension front.

The iPod itself is silver (at the back) and white (at the front) with one socket on the base and another on the top edge. Also on the top is a slide switch, which is the only moving part on the whole exterior. This is the ‘hold’ switch, use of which precludes the machine turning itself on in a pocket and leaving you with a flat battery.

The face; the white side that is, features an LCD screen measuring 40mm x 33mm. Below this there are four recessed circles of about 1cm each. These are marked with the familiar fast-forward, reverse, go/stop symbols, plus one marked ‘menu’. Below these, and taking up the rest of the face, is another recessed circle with a button in the centre. These are all the controls, and they are all touch sensitive. No actual buttons to stick or break and no little nooks and crannies for dirt to get into.

The screen is, of course, where all the info appears, while the buttons do what they say, with the stop/go button also acting as an ‘off’ switch.

The large ring and button are the selectors; run a finger round the large ring and the screen will show a highlight bar move up and down whatever the display is currently showing. A touch to the central button will select the highlighted choice.

This machine is so damned clever it’s kind of hard to decide what to tell you about first. Naturally, you can have a look at all your music by pressing the ‘menu’ button, but it’s not quite that simple. The first page of the menu lists playlists, browse, artists, albums, songs, genres and composers. It also allows you to access the ‘extras’ menu, the clock, calendar, games and settings menus and the backlight settings. Choose any of these and start on a voyage of discovery, for they all lead into other menus and from there allow you access to all the good things contained therein.

Setting all that aside for a moment, let’s assume you just want to listen to some of your music in no particular order. First go to settings and ensure that ‘shuffle > songs’ is selected (the alternatives are ‘shuffle > albums’ and ‘off’) then press the menu button again to back up to the first menu, run your finger round the big ring thing (this sounds hellish complicated now I come to write it down, but it’s not…honest!) to select ‘browse’, then ‘artists’ then ‘all’, then hit the play button. Assuming you read my mind and put the lovely white Apple earphones supplied with your iPod in your lovely ears, you’ll now have CD quality music coursing through your lovely brain. When the first track is finished, your clever little machine will select another track for your delight and edification.

Naturally, given all those menu options, you can choose to listen to a whole album, all the tracks in a genre, all the ‘60s music, all your five-star favourites…whatever!

The gizmo comes with a white and silver remote control which plugs in between the iPod and the headphones and does all the start/stop, volume sort of thing, as well as having its own ‘hold’ button to lock all the controls. It also comes with a docking station which can optionally be used for downloading your music.

The unit has rechargeable batteries which are sealed. If you have a Mac computer, the iPod charges while plugged into the Firewire socket. If you’re a PC user, then you need to use the charger which comes with the kit. The same cable is used for charging as for downloading, which keeps things a LITTLE simpler.

Also included is an adaptor which converts 6 pin Firewire to 4 pin. I had never seen one of these before, and was delighted to find that I could use the iPod with my Sony Viao laptop, which has what Sony call an ‘I-socket’ or some such, but is in reality just a 4 pin Firewire.

There are a whole range of accessories available, many made by Belkin; a name familiar to anyone who has shopped around for cables or hubs or the like. You can buy a car kit, a microphone, which allows the iPod to be used for dictation or verbal note-taking, a memory card reader, which allows the user to download digital images onto the iPod instead of having to carry a computer or a whole raft of spare cards when on holiday with your camera...all this, and much, much more can be yours!
I bought my Precious in the USA, despite having to use an adaptor plug for charging the battery when at home, because the dollar is SO weak that I saved a bucketload! Here in the UK, an iPod just like mine will cost a mere £299.00 from Apple online (http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/ukstore?family=iPod) or you might save a tenner or so buying from Amazon.
So to sum up: It’s lovely, it’s comprehensive (Hell…I haven’t even MENTIONED the GAMES yet, or the fact you can store your contacts on it or…or…) it’s efficient and IT’S MINE…SO HANDS OFF…OK? MY Precious…MINE I tell you!
 

...less