iPod Review

Packaging

The iPod comes in a cube shaped box which has a sleeve which slides off to reveal the inner box. This box opens in half with materials in either half. One side had the AC adaptor, carrying case with protective sleeve, earphones, and the installation media with instructions. The other side had the iPod, Firewire cable, Firewire adaptor and wired remote. Each item is in it's own static free bag.

Preparation

Because I did not have any Firewire ports on my motherboard, I had to purchase a PCI card. The card was $30 and has 3 ports on it. I was mildly surprised that the ports were the 6 pin ports instead of 4, but it was a pleasant surprise. Installation of the card was easy and Windows 2000 picked it up right away.

I also went through my mp3 collection and updated all of the ID3 tags so they would display correctly. A nice program to rename multiple files at once on the PC is called Taggin' MP3. It is a freeware download and works very nicely.

Installation

The first thing that I needed to do was to charge the iPod for at least an hour according to Apple. Not wanting to hook it up to the computer before installing any software, I used the power adaptor which came with the iPod. The iPod connects to the power adaptor using the same Firewire cord to connect to the computer. While that was charging, I used the hour to make dinner and then install all of the software.

Installation of the software was rather painless. The CD autoran when I put it in the computer and proceeded to give me a splash screen to install the Apple software. I went through this process and registered with Apple. This was a little difficult as I had to read the serial number from the back of the iPod where it is written in very small text. After this process, I was brought into the MusicMatch Pro installation. Apple does provide a full copy of MusicMatch with the serial number on the CD sleeve. During the installation of MusicMatch, the iPod plug-in was also installed. After this was completed, I was prompted to restart. After this, I was ready to go...almost.

First Connection

I started up MusicMatch, and was prompted to search for mp3s. I keep all of my mp3s in one folder, then sorted into subfolders by album. After telling MusicMatch where to look, all of the files were imported into the Library in MusicMatch. I picked up on about 85% of the ID3 tags and of those, I was only not able to fix one album through MusicMatch, so I was rather impressed by that.

After all that, my iPod had charged for an hour, so I hooked it up to the computer. In order, these things happened:

All of these things happened within a couple of seconds of connecting. Then the waiting began as MusicMatch had to open it's window for external devices. After 3 seconds there, it took 34 seconds to display the iPod and prompt me to sync it. I started to download all of my mp3s to the iPod. I had about 2 GB of mp3s to transfer, and the transfer took about 5 minutes, or about 400MB/min. Needless to say, I was very impressed. After the transfer, I closed MusicMatch, clicked the iPod logo in the system tray to unmount the iPod and in a couple seconds, was able to unhook it.

First Listen

After unhooking the iPod, I plugged in the earbuds which came with the iPod. I had to put the padding on the earbuds, they come with two sets, I am assuming for if one gets damaged. I turned the iPod on by pressing the Menu button and was prompted to enter my language. I entered English and continued. I was then shown the main iPod screen and chose Artists. I went through some different artists and albums to see how they sounded, and the quality was very nice. Then I tried an album which had never caused any problems on the computer, but simply would not play on the iPod. It displayed all of the information about the songs, but just skipped each song until it got to the end of the album and then hung the iPod. Needless to say, I was a bit dismayed.

Fixing and Following Connections

After being a little frustrated with the iPod hanging, I decided to hook it back up to the computer and see what happens. I was given the Apple logo again and it went back to it's charging/standby mode. I decided that I would try to sync again and see if that fixes the problem with that album. After the 30 seconds to connect, I synced and unmounted again. Unfortunately, the album would not play still, but it no longer hung the iPod. I decided the album wasn't worth the problems, so I deleted it from the computer and when I reconnected the iPod and resynced, the album was gone. This was the only problem I have had playing mp3s.

One other issue I have is that the iPod always syncs with the computer, so if you remove an album from your hard drive, then when you sync, it will no longer be on your iPod. This means you need to have every mp3 you want on your iPod on your computer, which can be quite a bit of space if you want 20 GB of music.

Hard Drive Use

One of the other features of the iPod is that it can be used as a hard drive. I tested this by hooking the iPod up and waiting until the system tray icon changed. Immediately I opened My Computer and a new drive, Removeable Drive (F:) was displayed. I opened this and there were two folders listed, Contacts and Calendar. I will get into the detail of those later. But to test the hard drive, I decided to copy 180 MB of data over and see how long it took. Amazingly, it took less that 30 seconds.

I then copied over a Word document which was instantanious. I was able to open the file from the hard drive with no delay and edit with no problem. I was not able to play a 40 MB movie file streamed from the hard drive however. Overall, I was very surprised by the performance though.

Contacts and Calendars

One of the questions I did have with the Windows iPod is how it would handle Contacts and the Calendar. On a Mac, the iPod can easily sync with Mail, Address Book and iCal to update this information. Since these programs are obviously not on the Windows side, I wondered how it would work.

I read the instructions and it said that the iPod uses the vCard and iCalendar standards in the iPod. I checked with Mozilla and I could not find a way to export vCards with it's address book, so I went to the backup, Outlook Express. Outlook Express handled the exporting of vCards fine and with the search options in the LDAP server, I was able to search, save and export to a file in a few seconds. I just then had to copy the vCards to the iPod, unmount and they were displayed perfectly.

For the calendar data, the University uses Corporate Time. I had not heard of the iCalendar format before, so I installed Corporate Time and it had an option to export the data as iCalendar. I first tried to export my entire calendar. This was taking a great deal of time, so I decided just to do the next week. This exported much faster and was a smaller file, not that it was a great concern. I copied this file into the Calendar folder on the iPod hard drive, unmounted and all of the meetings and events showed up perfect. The only problem with this is that it will not sync with Corporate Time automatically, so if you make a change to your schedule, you have to export the calendar again and copy it over.

Ripping CDs and Syncing the iPod

Because I have a few CDs laying around, I wanted to copy some of those over to my iPod for my listening pleasure. MusicMatch has a feature which allows you to rip CDs to mp3. It took some searching and configuring to get MusicMatch to record and the quality I wanted and save the files how I like, but after this, ripping CDs was rather easy. My only qualm is that the CDDB does not have as many genres as the ID3 tags, so I find myself having to redo the genres for most albums after ripping the CDs.

After ripping the CDs I wanted, I had to sync with the iPod. After waiting the 30 seconds to load up the iPod, I hit the sync button and let it do its thing. It added all of the new songs, removed the ones I had taken from the list and also updated all of the changes I had made to songs already on there. Once again, I was rather impressed.

Accessories

The 20 GB comes with the earbuds, wired remote and carrying case. The earbuds have excellent quality for earbuds. I have not purchased other earphones for the iPod yet and still have not decided if I will. I like the earbuds and they do not bother me too much, so I don't see a reason to switch until they do bother me.

I don't really have a use for the wired remote, but it does have some nice features. The remote has volume control, play/pause, last track and next track. It also has a slider on the side as a hold function, however, this only works as hold for remote functions, you can still switch things with the iPod itself. It also has the ability to clip onto clothing so you can find it easily.

The carrying case is made of leather and clips onto a belt or pants. Personally I think this is kinda dorky, but I really don't like wearing anything clipped to my side, i.e. Palm, cell phone, etc. If you like that sort of thing, the carrying case is nice, but it is not my style.

Connecting to a Mac

I used my Firewire cable to hook up the iPod to a new iMac running OS 10.2 with iTunes 3. After I hooked it up, the iPod acted the same way it does on the PC. It first showed up as a hard disk on the desktop, then after about 30 seconds, iTunes opened and wanted me to sync with it. I chose not to and the iPod showed up in iTunes as normal and would allow me to play tracks off the iPod.

The hard drive worked flawlessly, allowing me to transfer files with no problems. The transfer speed was what I expected, fast, and did not cause any problems with the iPod when I unmounted it. Overall I was really impressed with how it worked on the iMac.

Final Thoughts

After using the iPod for the last three days, I have to say I am extremely impressed with it. I have had a few little bugs, but these seem either to be very minor, or problems with Windows. I have now added over 600 songs and have only used about 1/6 of the space. I also like the fact that I can use this as a portable hard drive. This seems like it will be much easier and reliable than uploading to a server or floppy disks. The sound quality from the earbuds are surprisingly good, although I do not know how much I will use the remote and carrying case.

At nearly $500, this is not a cheap toy. This is the largest model, and with the 5 and 10 GB models available, they are more affordable and may fit your needs better. However, knowing that this will be not only an mp3 player, but a portable hard drive with 20 GB connected through Firewire, I am happy with the purchase.

Overall Grades

Overall: A