I’ve always thought that iPods were overpriced and underspecced but I had never actually used one until last week. When I ordered my dad’s PowerMac the guy on the phone told me I could have an iPod for half price - well, even I wasn’t going to turn that down. By the time the thing arrived I had decided that I couldn’t afford to keep it and should put it straight up on eBay (and make a few bob in the process). But as it sat there on the coffee table, gleaming in its black box I said to myself “I’ll just take it out and look at it…” Well, a look turned into a feel which turned into a play which turned into full-on intercourse (between the iPod and my laptop ;-)

This is when things started to go wrong. I had to register with Apple in order to download the iPod updater in order to convert the Mac iPod into a Windows iPod. Well, OK, that’s largely Windows’ fault for not supporting the Mac filesystem but it’s still a bit annoying. So now it shows up in Windows but I can’t actually load any tracks onto it, oh no. I have to download 30MB of iTunes for that. Oh and the iTunes installer forces me to install Quicktime! So I start up iTunes which then pauses for 2 1/2 hours while it catalogues all my MP3s.

GODDAMN IT I JUST WANT TO COPY A TRACK TO MY IPOD!

Actually 2 1/2 hours is an estimate because after 30 minutes I got bored of waiting and downloaded ephPod which has more functionality than iTunes but is 1/10th the size, faster, easier to use and actually works. Finally, I managed to copy some tracks onto the iPod and have a play.

Now, before I start to comment on the iPod itself I would like to hurl some more abuse at iTunes. I removed Quicktime as soon as I could (I hate that thing with a passion) only to find (to my not very great surprise) that it had crapped all over my Quicktime Alternative installation. iTunes fell over very ungracefully when Quicktime was removed though it did manage to mainly run once I had reinstalled Quicktime Alternative. The reason I even attempted to run iTunes again was that, after reading about all the cool things that Anapod Explorer could do, I thought that I must have overlooked the equivalent functionality in iTunes the first time around. I hadn’t, of course.

So what about the iPod itself? Well it looks great. In fact it probably looks better than anything I have ever owned. And I have to give the designers credit for making such a complex gadget operable with only 5 buttons but in the end I feel that this was a mistake. Control is rather unintuitive due to some of the buttons having different functions depending what screen you are on and how long you hold them down for and it takes ages to do anything because you’re constantly navigating backwards and forwards through menus. I must admit that the touch sensitive scroll-wheel is a real joy to use. It makes scrolling through long lists a pleasure - though the acceleration is a little too quick for my liking - and it’s pleasantly positioned for single handed use.

So let’s select a song: Menu > Music > Songs > select song title (it doesn’t show the artist name here). Yay! It’s playing my music! Oh, that’s interesting, it has queued up all the songs on the entire thing for me to play. Now, I’m sure that I missed something here but try as I might I couldn’t get it to play just one song. Nevermind, I’ll just edit the playlist. Oh, wait, I can’t do that unless I’m already playing the special “On-The-Go Playlist”. OK I’ll just crank the volume up and have a boogie. Hah, no chance! It goes up to a level I would call “pleasant” but no further. If I was in a loud environment I wouldn’t be able to hear it at all. And for those that don’t know me - no, I am not deaf, in fact I have particularly good hearing.

Pah, well it’s not much good at playing music; what else does it do? It has 4 games. None of which are anywhere near as much fun as “Snake” that I had on my phone 5 years ago. And, no, you can’t get new games - you’re stuck with those 4. Oh and if you drop back to the main menu to skip the track or change the volume you lose your position in the game and have to start again. It has a contacts manager which I can’t really see any use for. You can’t do anything useful with the contacts unless you have a phone or computer and if you have one of those then why would you need to store your contacts on your iPod? It has a calendar which could possibly be useful if you don’t already have one on your phone and only need to view, not add, items. But I wonder how many people with iPods don’t have have phones with integrated calendars.

Oh wait! This is an iPod photo. Let’s load some photos on. Ah yes, you’ll need iTunes for that too. I told it which folders to upload and it set about “optimising” the images. What does this optimising involve? Well it involves converting ~120MB of JPEGs neatly categorised into folders by date and location into a single ~450MB file on the iPod. Nice work. The image viewer really seems as though it was added as an after-thought. The images are all in one long list in no order that I could make out. Scrolling does not accelerate like it does on other menus and your position in the list is also not saved as it is on other menus. But then again who needs consistency?

I had originally considered buying the iPod Camera Connector to allow me to copy images from my D70 when I’m out and about but one thing they fail to mention is that there’s no way to delete stuff from an iPod without connecting it to a computer. A computer with iTunes. But if I’ve got a computer then why do I need to use the iPod?

Although I never rated the iPod very highly I still naively believed there was more to it than clever marketing. It appears I was wrong.

So, who wants to buy a nearly new 20GB iPod photo? Any takers? Ah well, I’m sure some mug on eBay will buy it.