Apple iPod classic 160 GB

Author's product rating:   

Sound Quality	Excellent
Ease of Use	Simple
Look & Design	Excellent
Range of Features	Excellent
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	An excellent MP3 player with a huge hard drive .
Disadvantages:	So much space available you may not know exactly what to do with it all .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Once I bought the iPhone I was dying for another bite of the Apple. I have a huge and ever expanding collection of music and therefore need a large MP3 player to hold it all on. The iPhone is great, but with a 16GB hard drive it just isn't quite large enough to store my masses of music on. From Abba right through to ZZ Top; the 160GB Apple iPod can hold it all and there is still plenty of space left over for my ever expanding music collection. Having so far taken up 100GB I think I'm doing quite well at filling it so far, but there's still plenty more that can be stored and I doubt I'll be stretching my player to its full capacity for a long while yet. 100GB is the total amount of music I have amassed during the last 5 or so years, and to tell the truth a lot of the music on there I probably shan't be listening to ever again. How on earth Kate Nash found her way onto my iPod for instance I'm not quite sure, but you can rest assured she won't be lasting there for long.

This is the first iPod I have ever owned and I have been extremely impressed with my shiny Apple. Rather than being green, red, or a mixture of the two; this Apple is black and a slim, sleek, and totally stylish piece of machinery. The front is given a matt finish and the back a glorious metallic sheen. All black in appearance; I can have no complaints whatsoever with my aesthetically excellent electronic dream. I had originally been looking to buy myself a white iPod, however with the 160GB sixth generation iPod from Apple this is no longer something that is possible. White has now been replaced with Silver, and when I looked at them in the store the black model was by far the nicer of the two anyway. I struggle to think why I had been after a white iPod before when the black model is such a beautiful piece of technology.

iTunes

In order to put your music onto your iPod, you'll need to familiarise yourself with the program iTunes. Originally an Apple only application very similar to that of 'Windows Media Player', iTunes is essentially a music player for your computer which also incorporates the iTunes store where music can be purchased relatively cheaply (79p per track) which can be played on your computer and of course can also be transferred to your iPod. Anyway, the only way to put music onto your iPod is to first master the art of iTunes.

The first thing you need to do in iTunes is make sure that you get together all of the music that you want to include on your iPod and make sure it is a part of your iTunes library. Whether it be CDs you have in your collection or MP3s that you happen to have on your hard drive; you must make sure all this music is copied to your iTunes library and then, and only then will you have the ability to transfer it to your iPod. Having used Windows Media Player for many years and never before having used iTunes, I found this to be the most difficult part of the process and getting used to the interface of iTunes was something that for me took some time. I'm easily confused when it comes to technology though and getting used to change is not something that tends to come easy to me. I take my time getting used to things, and after some months I am now fully adapted to using iTunes and find it to be an extremely painless process. Once you've mastered iTunes it's something that's a bit like riding a bike; you'll never forget how to use iTunes and it will forever more come naturally to you.

iTunes is the program you use in order to transfer your music from computer to iPod. You can do a standard automatic transfer in which all of the music in your iTunes library will be transferred, or you can choose to do a manual transfer and be selective about what is transferred from your computer to your iPod. With a 160GB hard drive, there is little reason to be choosy and therefore I would recommend that you do the automatic transfer rather than the manual, it is far less fiddly and will take up a lot less of your time. Be warned though; the more music you are transferring from computer to iPod, the longer it will take and therefore if you have a lot of music in your iTunes Library then don't expect the transfer to be instant. It is highly time consuming and can in fact take hours.

Ease of Use

Having never owned an iPod before, I thought that I may have had a few issues with getting used to the way in which it operates. This was not the case at all and I was easily able to pick up and play, not having to worry about reading long-winded instruction manuals in order to make sense of my new machine. Everything is laid out clearly on the screen for you and its hard to go wrong really. Whether you're wishing to listen to music, watch videos, or even just wanting to browse through your photos; everything is there for you and all is there to see on the screen. Navigation is simple through the spinning of the wheel at the iPods centre, and it's easy to progress from screen to screen. You can look through your music in alphabetical order of 'Artist', in terms of the 'Album' that music is from, or even by the 'Genre'. It is great to have such options and can save a lot of time if you're looking for a certain artist, or if you're just in the mood for one particular genre of music then you can easily find the music you are after. Everyone I have known to have an iPod has found it to be extremely user friendly, even the most technophobic of people out there should have few problems in using this iPod.

Hard Drive

At 160GB it is hard to find fault with the hard drive of the iPod. I have only used 100GB at current and my music collection it has to be said is extremely vast. 160GB will be more than enough for most, and why anyone would ever need more than 160GB of space on their iPod is beyond me. Even if you're wishing to store a lot of videos then this amount is plenty, to fill the player but be a huge achievement I feel, and although it can obviously be done; it is not something that I believe you will have to be worrying about. Its 160GB hard drive is actually larger than that of my laptop, and given the small size of this iPod at only 4.1 inches in height and 2.4 inches in width; this is really no small achievement.

Battery Life

The specification states that the 160GB iPod will last for a maximum of 40 hours if used only for audio, and 7 hours for video. Having never tested this, or in fact used my iPod for only audio or video but instead using it for a combination of the two; I can not comment on whether or not the quoted battery life is strictly true. What I will say however is that the battery life of the iPo