Apple iPod Video 60GB Black

Price: $ - $

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What's left to say?01/16/06

Pros:

Excellent display quality, long battery life, great storage capacity

Cons:

Expensive, no dock, no software update for Windows

I've been an Apple fan for years. Not only do I love their computers and their software but I love the company as a whole. However, as much as I've always loved the company I never could bring myself to shell out the $300-$400 for an iPod and I knew that I wouldn't be happy with the smaller storage capacity offered by the Mini, Nano or Shuffle. So, when I recently had some extra Christmas cash I decided to take the plunge.

I knew these were great gadgets that, like most Apple products, had great design and usability ratings and I knew that they were high quality products. So, what did I think once I actually had my own and had a chance to use it? Read on.

From the moment I saw the new, smaller size of the iPod packaging compared to previous generations I knew that something was going to be different. I was right. Where as previous generations came with a dock (which required the larger square box) this 5th generation model does not and thus is in a much smaller box. Oh well, it was going to take more than that to dampen my excitement. I started opening the box and was impressed by the quality of the packaging. Everything was very securely tucked tightly away inside of the matte black box and there was no space wasted inside.

Once I turned the iPod on i was instantly impressed by the quality of the display. I have to admit that I was somewhat skeptical of this beforehand. I was greatly relived to fine a very bright, high contrast display. Next I was ready to hook it up to my computer and start transferring my music.

First, a little about my situation. I have a computer at home and a computer at work in my office. On both computers I have LOTS of music but each computer has different selections so my music library is split and neither computer has enough spare space to house all of my music. That's one problem that I was really looking forward to solving with my iPod. One device that holds all of my music and then I can take it back and forth to work with me.

In short, the iPod DID solve this problem for me, but not in the way I had originally expected. Rather than automatically syncing with BOTH computers and doing the hard work to manage blocking duplicate songs, etc I was forced to choose one of the computers as the primary computer that i wanted to sync my iPod with. In the end I decided not to do any syncing and instead have all of the music on the iPod only, clearing lots of HD space on both of my computers. This ended up being an even better solution than I one I had envisioned.

As far as video, I've already ripped several of my DVDs onto my iPod and have even downloaded a couple from the iTunes Music Store. Video playback is great though I can envision some improvements to the video interface to take advantage of more of the Meta data.

One of my only complaints is that since I used my iPod first on my Windows machine at home at formatted the iPod for windows so I'm not able to update the software on the iPod (it must be formatted for Mac, which is what my work computer is). So, if I want to update my iPod's software I'm going to have to dump all of my music back onto my computer, restore/reformat my iPod for Mac and then put all of my music back on. I guess it might be worth it, but still a pain.

Overall, this is the #1 best music player on the market and even if it dies in a few years because of the dreaded dead battery issues that have been mentioned so many times online I will be more than happy to spend my money on another. They're that good.