MP3 Player: 40 GB iPod Photo

Here I am, an urban-dwelling twentysomething, living in one of the most amazing cities in the world, regularly seeing the hottest musical talent on the planet at some of the best nightclubs this country has to offer. Yet, there’s been a certain something missing from my life, there is one elite club that I have yet to gain entry to. Its members can be identified easily enough by the self satisfied grin on their face and the bright white headphone cords trailing from their ears to their pockets, backpacks or purses. These members of the white headphone club know first hand the pure, unadulterated joy of owning the technological icon of the 21st century, and for a brief few weeks, I too got to join the realm of the iPod owners. Rumours of a higher capacity iPod with a colour screen have been circulating for several months now, and in typical apple style, they remained tight lipped right up to the release date. But here it is, just in time for Christmas, the all singing, all dancing iPod Photo, available in 40 GB and 60 GB capacities and sporting a flashy new colour screen and the ability to import and display photos right on the iPod itself. On top of that, it now claims a much improved battery life of 15 hours if you’re just listening to music, but if you’re playing games or viewing your photos a lot, it’s obviously sure to chew through the battery quicker. I hope Santa has you on his ‘nice’ list though, because the 60 GB model weighs in at $950 and the 40 GB at $800, or $150 more than the standard non-photo 40 GB iPod.The first thing that shocked me was how well the iTunes/iPod integration worked. Within minutes I had installed iTunes and was synching my library of MP3s with my iPod, and loading photos was just as easy – simply point iTunes to the folder (or folders) you want to load onto your iPod and off you go. The only catch here is that to view photos on the iPod, iTunes first reduces the photos to a size suitable for the iPod, which takes a while. iTunes can copy the original photos to the iPod, but it won’t let you view these photos – this was really only designed as a feature to transport photos between computers. Viewing the photos on the colour screen is a cinch. Each folder you load from your computer is set up as a separate album and presented 25 photos at a time as a 5×5 grid. Browsing through the photos is quick and easy and the iPod even has a convenient slide show mode to show off your latest snaps to your friends either on the iPod itself or on any television screen via the included AV cable. The five-cm colour screen was quite good, at 160×128 pixels and able to display 65,536 colours, it not only gives you reasonable space to view your photos, but also brightens up the device significantly. Menus are easier to navigate, text easier to read, games more playable, and did I mention album art? That’s right, if you’ve set up iTunes to display album art for your mp3s, then this will be copied over to your ipod and you get a neat little picture of the CD cover displayed when you’re listening to your music. This was my favourite feature of the device – artists usually do some really creative stuff with their CD covers and if you listen to all your music as mp3s, then you miss out on that, but this feature serves to bridge that gap just a little. As someone who’s used a PDA with a high quality screen for a while, I felt that the screen could have been bigger and higher resolution for a device in this price bracket. That said, it was a joy to use and there’s no way I could go back to the monochrome screen after using the colour model. If I was considering a 40 GB iPod, then it’s definitely worth the extra $150 for the colour screen. As always, there are a few things that could be improved in the king of mp3 players. First of all, if like me, you are a music lover of the dance persuasion, then you’ll likely have dozens of compilations, each with dozens of artists represented on them. Unfortunately, the iPod thinks it is a great idea to list every single artist on every single compilation in your music list, making scrolling through artists looking for music tedious and almost unusable. It would be much nicer if you could browse through your music in the neat, organised folders you had them in on your PC, but alas, it wasn’t to be. Also, the infamous ‘gap between tracks’ is still hanging around, which is where the iPod reaches the end of one track and then pauses for the briefest of moments before playing the next track. It’s barely perceptible to some, but if you listen to a lot of DJ mixes or compilations, you may just find it really, really annoying, and is an issue that really should be resolved by now, 4 generations into the iPod. As nice a device as the iPod Photo is, I couldn’t grasp why Apple didn’t include video playback ability, or include a simple radio for that matter. If my mobile phone can feature both a radio and video playback, then why can’t my iPod? And why can’t Apple include a decent pair of headphones with the device? The trademark white headphones might make a strong marketing statement, but they fit badly and sound quite poor compared to a reasonably priced pair of proprietary earbuds. Despite a few niggling problems, iPod Photo is still the coolest kid in mp3 town. With the colour screen, it looks even sexier than its poor monochrome cousins, has killer usability thanks to the cunningly intuitive click wheel, and makes listening to your music and viewing your photos on the move an absolute breeze. I would have preferred Apple add a colour screen to the impossibly thin 20 GB model, but if you are considering a 40 GB iPod, or need the extra storage capacity of the 60 GB model, then my advice is to splash out and get the iPod Photo. You’ll be the envy of white headphone clad, monochrome-screened iPod owners everywhere.Rating:

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