« Taste the Fame | Main | Grocery Shopping »
December 12, 2005
5G iPod Goodness
My history with iPods has been a little spotty. I had a 10GB first generation unit which I really liked, but I found iTunes too slow and clumsy to be of much use. It prematurely gave up the ghost and I moved up to a 40GB third generation model which I've been using the past couple of years. Still no big fan of iTunes, so I'd moved to other programs -- Media Jukebox, Yahoo Music Engine -- to manage my music, trading the iTunes integration for a different choice of client. Not sure why, but having ituneshelper.exe and ipodservice.exe running 24-7 on my machine has always struck me as bad software design.
I got my hands over the weekend on a 60GB fifth generation iPod, and I guess all I can say at this point is uncle. It's an amazing piece of hardware and iTunes seems to finally be at a point where it doesn't feel like I'm running it through Virtual PC in reverse.
Out of the box experience: The box is much more slender now than previous generations of iPod, but that's mainly because they give you so much less. No dock, no remote (they took the pins off of the iPod itself), no Firewire. Just the iPod, a USB cable, the white earbuds (quickly tossed in a drawer), a dock shim and a software CD. All very nicely designed, all wrapped in plastic that feels eerily like human skin.
The device: The new iPod itself is a great-looking unit with an extremely sharp color screen. Like lots of color screens, it's hard to read with no backlight on, but the backlight comes on every time you touch the controls. I'm not wild about the ersatz Mac OS X widgets in the iPod interface, but that's a minor sin. Videos I encoded look tremendously sharp and bright on the screen, although there are now so many menu options that you can get lost digging around in the multilevel interface.
How's iTunes? iTunes has made huge strides, which some great podcast support. The video integration is strange (why does it default to playing videos in that little window?), but workable. The library and the music store are as slick as ever, even if the product runs those damned services in the background all the time. I had a minor installation snafu, but it was my fault since I didn't close my browser like the Quicktime installer told me to. I had to uninstall and reinstall Quicktime and all was well.
How's the video support?: It's probably no surprise to anyone that the device and software combination is absolutely awesome. I ended a couple of episodes of "Home Movies" with the Videora iPod Converter and dumped them on, bought a song from the iTMS (Ben Folds' hilarious "Bitches Ain't S***"), synced up 4,200 songs and I'm off to the races. It's kind of a pain to navigate that many songs, but that's kinda my problem.
Argh: The only thing I miss, and miss bad, is support for the Yahoo Unlimited music service. Subscription music is unequaled for sampling new stuff -- $.99 per song adds up quick compared to $5 per month -- but no Apple players support it, or, for that matter, WMA. If Apple would suck it up and allow protected WMA music, they'd be unstoppable in this space.
If you want an MP3 player, it's hard to do better than this device. You don't get anything in the box but what you need, but that helps keep the price down and, for what you get, it's a bargain. Nice job, Apple.
Posted by Lee Clontz at December 12, 2005 11:20 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.clontzville.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/4