Apple iPod 40 GB

...Microsoft Entourage, Palm Desktop, and Apple iCal thanks to the iPod Photo's built in support for standard vCalendar and iCalender formats.

iPod Note Reader allows - you to take your important quick-notes with you on the road.

Alarm Clock - obviously wakes you up! You can choose which song you want to wake you up or a standard alarm.

The iPod feels sturdy and well made and it looks great but it does ...
...charging 'brick', belt-clip case, and Apple headphones. Another nice feature is you can choose to have your Ipod engraved, although I was too impatient to do this I have seen others that have been and it adds a really nice personal touch.

The battery - The batters seems to last for 8 hours when fully charged but as with any rechargeable batteries each time you charge they absorb less power and will eventually need replaced. It is ... more

I've never really been one for technical gadgets and initially when iPods came out I thought they were just a phase (remember Mini Discs) and wouldn't take off but recently I saw my friends Ipod Mini and it was so cool I was hooked!

I have always been a great lover of music and get sick of changing cd's so having all of my music on one product is truly amazing and really saves my back when I go away because I used to take loads of cds! Anyway after looking around online I decided I wanted the 60gb photo Ipod and placed an order on Ebay. I was ripped off so instead of bidding on another one and loosing more money I decided to shop around and buy one from a shop. Curry's had a really good offer online where it was £309 so I went to the store to be told it was being discontinued and they had none in stock. I tried a few music stores and could not find one so gave up and did my other shopping. This led me to Boots where I happened to notice they had a photo Ipod 40gb. I asked to look at it and was told it was £275 and had the latest software so I decided to buy it. I also managed to get nearly £25 back in advantage points!

I went back to the office and couldn't wait to play with my new toy! I did have difficulty however, the plug isn't put together you have to do that yourself but I am blonde and rather stupid so it took me 20 minutes to figure out how! The manual has instructions which show each of the parts but didn't show how to slot these two together and it had a part sticking out but I eventually discovered that when you push the other part into it that disappears!

Once I had figured that out I didn't need to use the manual again because everything is very straight forward. The controls take a little getting used to but after a day or so I was fine in using them and it is so much simpler than my portable cd player. I love the fact that my Ipod is so small it can fit into my pocket. Before I bought this I had a portable cd player but it just seems so bulky in comparison! It took little time to learn how to use and the most time consuming thing is importing your music to iTunes, it's not difficult it just takes time to transfer them over. The Ipod is connected to your computer with cables provided which allows the songs to be transferred and you then install iTunes by using the CD provided and following the simple instructions on screen.

On iTunes there is a store where you can buy a song for 79p or an album for £6.99 there are also celebrity play lists that you can choose from. There are a wide range of styles and artists available and its possible to spend a fortune in there! Ipod Photo has the ability to display the album art for each album on your Ipod. On every track that is accompanied by album art in iTunes, the Ipod Photo will show that image next to the title while the song is playing.

In the Library section of ITunes all of the songs you have on your Ipod are listed (you can choose to shuffle these in your main menu for variety) but you can also set up a play list to include songs from a particular artist or album and you can place these songs in any order you like. This is a great function and makes it easy to find any particular song you may be looking for. You can also choose to shuffle the songs with the play list in the settings tab.

The Ipod also has four games, these are:

Solitaire - The classic card game. I found it hard to get the hand of the controls for it and because the screen is so small it's hard to see!

Bricks - you move the brick to stop a ball from hitting the floor

Parachute - Parachute where you shoot at planes and parachutes

Music Quiz - In my opinion music quiz is the best, the Ipod automatically selects a section of a song and you get on your screen 5 song titles and you have to choose which one it is, ever now and then a title disappears and you get more points for the quicker you get the right answer.

The games could be improved in my opinion such as keeping a tally of the highest scores and statistics and the music quiz could be divided into rounds. Its rather disappointing when you think you have done well and it just goes back to the beginning again!

I can't fault the sound quality although this does generally depend on the quality of the song you have downloaded. Not only can you transfer songs from CD and the iTunes store your Ipod accepts songs from any downloading service such as Win Mix although bear in mind this is illegal.

There are a few extra facilities with the Ipod and these are:

Contacts - your basic address book

iPod's Calendar - Allows you to import files from Microsoft Entourage, Palm Desktop, and Apple iCal thanks to the iPod Photo's built in support for standard vCalendar and iCalender formats.

iPod Note Reader allows - you to take your important quick-notes with you on the road.

Alarm Clock - obviously wakes you up! You can choose which song you want to wake you up or a standard alarm.

The iPod feels sturdy and well made and it looks great but it does pick up scratch marks really easily (I somehow got one on the front of my screen within an hour!) but this doesn't drastically effect the look. The photo Ipod has a colour screen, which I believe, is a big plus.

Another thing I love about my Ipod is that it's fantastic when you're on the move. I use my Ipod when coming into work every morning, I put it on when I am leaving the house and listen to it on the walk to the train station, on the train and on the walk into work and it NEVER skips! I always hated getting a bus with my cd player because on every little bump my cd player either stopped working or skipped and you don't have to worry about that with an Ipod.

Another thing that is great about it is you don't necessarily have to use Ipod accessories to go with it. The Ipod headphones are in my opinion really crap, they don't give you enough sound and I prefer headphones that have a sound adjuster on the wire so its easy to alter the sound when your on the move, not to mention the Ipod ones are a funny shape! Any headphones built for a CD player or Walkman will fit the Ipod and the same goes with speakers. It's between £50 - £100 to buy the proper speakers to go with your Ipod but you can use cd player ones for £20!

The photo part - the iTunes program checks for new photos to add to your iPod. The first time you connect your iPod photo it copies all your existing iPhoto images to the iPod. You can select whether to automatically check for new photos every time you connect your iPod, or only the first time. If you turn off automatic scanning you'll need to manually request iTunes to check your photo library between computer and iPod. Supported image formats are: JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, & PNG. Its really cool that you can connect your Ipod to your TV to see the photos on screen and you can even choose what music plays to accompany the photos although You can't select individual songs, only play lists pre-created in iTunes.

What you get - When you open your iPod Photo box you will find everything you need to get started. Your iPod unit, Firewire and (thankfully) USB 2.0 cables, docking station, A/V cables for TV viewing, manual and CD package, 120V A/C charging 'brick', belt-clip case, and Apple headphones. Another nice feature is you can choose to have your Ipod engraved, although I was too impatient to do this I have seen others that have been and it adds a really nice personal touch.

The battery - The batters seems to last for 8 hours when fully charged but as with any rechargeable batteries each time you charge they absorb less power and will eventually need replaced. It is around £80 to get a new battery for your Ipod so be careful with that power!

The instructions: They dont go into as much detail as I would like/expect but there is a help section in iTunes which covers near enough everything.

Would I recommend it? Although its expensive this is an amazing product and I'm really not sure how I ever managed without mine! The amount of space you need depends on how much music/photos you want to contain on it, most people can probably get away with a lot less space.

Price - I bought mine for £275 but prices can range between £250 and £350 for the 40gb and upwards for the 60gb.  

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