Apple iPod classic 80 GB

Author's product rating:   

Sound Quality	Good
Ease of Use	Very Easy
Look & Design	Excellent
Range of Features	Diverse
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Slim, Great Battery, Good Sound Quality . , good build quality .
Disadvantages:	Scratches quite easily, new firmware mainly brings cosmetic changes .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

So here we are again, another Ipod to add to the increasing line of apple mp3 players. What are the differences? What does it sound like? Is is durable? How much does it cost? These are just some of the questions I will hopefully answer in this review. Right then, on with the show.

----------What Is An Ipod Classic?----------
An ipod classic is the flagship model and latest addition to Apple's mp3 player market. It was released in the fourth quarter of 2007 and is technically the 6th generation of the Ipod or '6G'. The classic replaces the ipod video (5/5.5G). The term 'classic' in my understanding refers to the traditional ipod looks and layout - presumably added to limit confusion - due to the existence of other ipod offspring such as the
ipod touch and nano.

----------Why Did I Buy An Ipod Classic?---------
An ever expanding music collection basically. After filling my ageing 20gb Ipod Photo quite some time ago, I was coping by just putting a selection of albums on the ipod, but eventually the hassle got to me and I could stand it no longer. I'm the sort of person who likes to carry my complete music collection with me - in my view there's no point having an ipod or any other "jukebox" mp3 player if you can't fit everything you own on it.

As with any purchase decision I did my research, looking at many other competitors and weighed up the pros and cons. Finally, I decided that the ipod came up trumps for me (again) and bought an ipod classic.

----------What's In The Box----------
Well, what I am about to tell you may come as shock if you have never bought an ipod before or if you have a really old. This... comes with virtually nothing. Its a small, high quality box you open it, inside there's the ipod on a little plastic tray with some foam around it, a quick start guide, and a plastic bag containing the headphones, usb cable and some form of plastic dock connector which I've recently found is actually a universal dock adapter for those of you with a universal ipod dock. Now I must say that you'd at least expect a mains charger but I presume they work on the theory that everyone buying an ipod will have a computer. I guess they also work on the theory that you have internet access as it doesn't come with iTunes or any drivers. Wow.

----------Price - How Much Does It Cost?----------
As you may or may not know, the ipod classic comes in two versions, a capacity of 80gb and 160gb. At time of writing, the 80gb will set you back around £159 and the 160gb will cost you around £229. Despite the seemingly large price tags, the ipod is actually cheaper per gigabyte than the old ipod video. The ipod classic 80gb version costs around £1.90 per gigabyte (gb) of storage, compared to the last years ipod video 80gb version costing around £2.80 per gigabyte (gb). It may not seem much like that, but that's a saving of £70!

In Brief: £159 for 80gb, £229 for 160gb

----------Capacity - How Much Can I Put On It----------
To give you an idea of how much you can store, I currently have around 650 albums, and those use a mere 34GB of space. This means of course, that if you are only going to use this ipod for music, you'll be able (depending on quality) to fit in excess of 1000 albums right in your pocket, which is an impressive amount for the price you are paying.

Official apple statistics say you'll be able to fit up to 20,000 tracks and up to 100 hours of video. But as always, this does depend on the quality of your music. Apples calculations are based around tracks encoded at 128kpbs AAC @ 4 minutes in length. Unfortunately, not all tracks are going to be 4 minutes in length, and if you decide you would like to keep your MP3's in their MP3 format, naturally you're not going to fit 20,000 tracks on the ipod. Slightly misleading I know, but never the less the amount you can store should be adequate for all but the largest of collections.

----------Design - Physical Appearance---------
The ipod comes in two colours as it always has, but what is surprising is the absence of the traditional ipod white colour. Pretty ironic, given the "classic" name. This has now been replaced by slightly more subdued metallic silver, but the alternative metallic black is still available for those who don't want to attract attention to themselves. I personally chose the black because it looked that much more stylish in my opinion. I've never thought silver looked right in an mp3 player, and on the ipod i thought it looked particularly bad. The silver colour I found also made the screen appear much less dominant and significantly dimmer than its black counterpart (although this can't be true as of course they are exactly the same screen!). Black seems to be the colour to have electronics wise, with the majority of LCD TV's following this colour scheme, leaving the silver fad of a few years ago behind. Funny how things change.

The ipod still features its 'revolutionary' clickwheel albeit in slightly smaller proportions (more on this later). As always the shiny back surface of the ipod remains and unfortunately still suffers from scratches much like the old ipods - they haven't changed in that respect.

----------Design - Feel & Quality, Size & Weight ----------
This new generation of ipod has done away with the plastics that it was originally made from, and has replaced them with a flush lightweight metal. This fortunately has a high quality feel to it, but does aid visibility of any scratches it may get - more so in my opinion than the plastics on the old ipods. It is also particularly easy to chip the paint on the metal that surrounds the screen (god knows how i did it) and that believe me is very annoying if you are looking at the screen of the ipod for any length of time. I also find that the black metal colour shows greasy/sweaty fingerprints very easily, which for the occasions when you do have sweaty or greasy fingers it can be quite a nuisance.

The ipod classic is also significantly slimmer than its predecessor, measuring a mere 10.5mm thick. This ensures that it fits into even the tightest of pockets without a visible bulge. It weighs in at 140grams, and while this is not particularly heavy, you know its in your pocket. I say this in pretty much every review where weight is an important factor, but I would still prefer to be able to feel the ipod in my possession, that to be wonder whether I have left it somewhere every five minutes.

In other dimensions, H:103.5mm W:61.8mm, I think the ipod classic is more or less the same size as the ipod video, but don't quote me on this. I'd say its perfect size, it feels nice to hold and certainly feels as though it has a degree of protection should it be dropped. It also feels that you can put a good amount of pressure on it before you will do any damage. The new ipod nano for example is incredibly small and thin and feels as if you could snap it with relative ease.

----------Screen-----------
The ipod classic, is of course equipped to play videos, and if you are intending to play videos the way the screen presents itself is even more important than usual. You'll be pleased to know, that in my opinion the screen here is great. It measures 2.5" inches diagonally and runs at a resolution of 320x240. While this is not what one would call ideal for watching movies on (and you can do it with 5hrs video of battery life), it is fine for the amount of times you will actually be using it for that purpose.

With a screen of this size and resolution, the ipod can display 9 lines of menu text not including the title bars. This is pretty good as I recall the ipod photo being just enough for 6 lines of text but again, don't quote me on this. This makes navigating the menus that much quicker and easier as the majority of options are on the screen in front of you without needing to scroll down to reveal more.

The screen itself is impressively clear and phenomenally bright with fully adjustable brightness from 0 - 100%. The ipod comes with the brightness set at 50% which was perfectly visible in strong light. I personally have the brightness set to 0% as the ipod spends most of its life in my pocket. At brightness 0% the screen is perfectly viewable indoors, but under direct sunlight outside, you can see very little. At the completely opposite end of the spectrum, 100% is in some cases too bright, especially when used in a dark room - it will literally light the whole place, blinding you in the process.

Of course the Ipod classic can still display photos, and even includes a new "Cover Flow" function but i will come to this later. As always, if you have the album art turned on the album art will display when you play that particular album - now with a cool new 3d reflection effect. Just a little touch to brighten the interface. Again, more on this later. Getting to be quite a long review!

----------Clickwheel----------
As already mentioned, the Ipod still has the familiar clickwheel interface. This time around though, this has been reduced in size slightly. While I don't think this affects the use of the interface, I will say that the clickwheel does sometimes feel a little unresponsive - and will occasionally do nothing at all until you take your thumb off and put it back on again. Unfortunately I have no confirmation that this is problem so it could just be sweaty thumbs aggravating the touchpad!

----------Battery----------
One significant change is the use of a new higher rated battery. This one apple says will give you around 30 hours of music listening, or 5 hours of video watching per charge. I would have to agree with this. I often find I don't have to charge the ipod for days and even once left the ipod playing music accidentally over night and still woke up to half a battery - meaning I could still take it to college that day without having to charge it. Now as I said, the ipod comes with no mains charger, but the USB cable will fully charge it in around 4hrs from a USB2 port. I haven't tried it with a mains adapter so I cant report on its performance.

----------Sound----------
The most important part of the ipod is obviously the sound. I am no audiophile, but to me the ipod sounds good. Don't get me wrong it is noticeably quieter than my previous ipod but despite this I think the audio is clear and the bass response is good (though it can sometimes overcompensate). As always the supplied new shape earphones don't really do the ipod justice, so for true listening pleasure it may be worth investing in a decent pair of in-ear earphones or a decent pair of headphones. I personally use Sennheiser PMX200's which are sort of a middle of the range pair of headphones, and the ipod sounds good through that.

----------Features & Ease Of Use----------
Now while the ipod is an update to the ipod video in both firmware and looks. I wouldn't say it brings any particularly useful features with the new improved firmware. To me and to many other people it would seem that the new firmware's changes are merely cosmetic, and rather than aiding your use of the ipod, they simply make it look a bit more exciting and interesting. Take the menus for example, the main menu is now split down the middle, so on the left you will see the menu selection and on the right either pictures of random album art from your collection, or a icon corresponding to your highlighted choice. For example highlighting podcasts will bring a stylish 'I' icon to the left hand side of the screen - which is of no real use whatsoever. Other touches include the new improved search function - which again isn't really necessary, and doesn't work very well at all if you happen to have badly tagged files. One thing i did mention is the addition of Cover Flow, which is basically the same as the one featured on the ipod nano, and in the iTunes application on your pc. Here you will basically see all the albums in a line displaying their album art, and you can scroll through this with a nice animation effect. Clicking the select button the clickwheel will perform a virtual flip of the cover, and show you the track listing of the album - that itself is a nice touch, but just how useful cover flow itself is, I don't know. It's no faster... as a matter of fact i'd say it was considerably slower to look for the album you want to listen to in that than it is to use the standard menus. Still, a good way to kill five minutes if you're waiting for a bus or something like that.

The ipod also comes equipped with some decent games, including a revamped music quiz and the addition of a movie/TV quiz. These now follow a more game show style, as there is theme music and even a presenter. Weird i know. There is also a 3D 'brick' type game of old, which is called vortex which features some relatively impressive graphics for an ipod, and is quite addicting. Of course there is a card game as well, and you can download more for it. Apparently however, any games you bought for your fifth generation ipod (ipod video) won't work with the classic.

As always the ipod comes equipped with all the address book/contacts/world clock/stopwatch/screen lock and similar applications that it did come with before, so nothing new there. Naturally, this ipod is also fully equipped with audiobook functions and podcasting including video podcasting, which means as well as having the audio version of a news bulletin you can also have the video version of it. Again, a nice way to kill a few minutes and keep in touch with the world while you've got your ears plugged with your headphones/earphones.

----------Overall---------
It is sort of the ipod duty to perform well and offer ease of use, and again I don't think this one will disappoint. There are plenty of new games and functions to keep you amused and entertained while killing time, though how practical or useful they are in reality will be down to you. Yes, the new firmware adds a new lease of life to the ipod interface but there was nothing really wrong with the old one. Is it worth upgrading your old ipod 80gb for this one? Probably not, unless you really want it. Is it worth getting buying this ipod as an introduction to the ipod line? Definitely

At the end the day, the ipod can chuck as many things as it likes at you in an attempt to become a multimedia device, and it will cope with those well. Its fine for playing video, and its fine for playing a few basic time wasting games, but at the end the day the ipod is what it is - a great way to transport and play your music.