I went straight in to shefali’s (the winner of the Ipod contest @ MS) profile and checked if there was any review on Ipod. It wasn’t there. Hmmm people say history repeats, and it has. After ‘Oh podu’ rocked Chennai few years back, its now ‘I pod(u)’, when a famous software firm distributed video Ipod to 12, 000 of its employees (I am not sure if I got the number right, but somewhere around that should be right). Me being one among them, I got a chance to live with this little(?) gadget for about 20 days, good enough for me to bring out a review, I thought I could bring out a review. Myself and shefali are in same category (we got Ipod free of cost) and that why I was prompted to look if she had written a review :) … And here is how mine goes …
First, my proficiency in handling a music player could get a 3/10. I cannot adjust bass, treble and those things; I do not know what they are on the first place. If you are looking for something like sound output … i.e. XXX Watts, etc etc might not be available in the following. But I have tried to put my best efforts to let you know almost everything that I found in the Ipod…
The experience in hearing songs:
My first song in the ipod was ‘Fana .. ‘ from ‘Ayudha eluthu’ (Tamil version of Yuva) at full volume. It was such a pleasing experience, as A.R.Rehman’s beats did a dance on my eardrums. The sound quality is so good and now I understand the reason behind its price. ‘Nice things cost money’. There is no distortion whatsoever at the highest volume. The same volume on my Walkman would have torn my ears into pieces.
Ease of handling …
The interface is very simple. The menus are lesser. And it is just the wheel in the center you use for selecting and playing songs. I felt that the center wheel was just a bit extra sensitive. It would have been better if there were more friction. Not much of a drawback though. You can add songs to your playlist and play them, just like you would do on your system. Also there is that shuffle option, always useful this. But these are very basic things that you would expect from an Ipod. Ipod doesn’t disappoint in all these.
Storing songs on your Ipod - The itunes
I would call this as one of the biggest drawbacks of Ipod. You cannot just copy paste the songs into Ipod’s drive. You have to store it through Itunes. And it is definitely not software for a layman. Do not ever plug in your ipod on to others’ system. And if you do, do not give ‘Automatic update’ (Every time you plug it in others system, it asks and don’t press the conventional ‘Yes’ … Do press only ‘No’ for this). It erases off all that you had it in store and replaces with the songs in the library of the system you plugged in.
The menus in the itunes are not so interactive. You will have to search for your options. As I said earlier, this is not software for layman (A layman in computer parlance). Be sure to take a basic course to learn handling this software (Itunes), for which you will have to go through a manual of around 40 pages (NO kidding here!). As an option, you can contact experts like me for clarifications ;)
Battery and charging
The battery’s capacity after a full charge is specified as 20 hours. But the average ‘actual’ life is about 7-8 hours. This in my perspective is poor. This only when you hear songs. For videos, it is just 2-3 hours. Pathetic. Ipod may consider working on this, in its next release.
I guess it is the lithium ion battery. It requires 4 full hours to charge it fully, another drawback. And you can charge it only on USB port, or will have to buy an A.C charger separately.
The images and video experiece
Crystal clear resolution. It is just a shrunk television. The screen is big enough that you can watch movies without much loss in ‘movie experience’. The Ipod software is pretty fast and it displays images in a jiffy. The videos take time to get started (a fraction slower than the songs and images). But that is understandable, even Media player takes time.
The best experience would be to watch a horror movie on Ipod with full volume. Before you finish movie, your screen will get switched off to bring you more horror! When you think your Ipod has crashed or something is wrong, it would only have been the battery that would have gone down. Do not worry you can recharge it :)
Memory, file formats and related
My ipod has a 30GB space. Absolutely no complaints here. Even my laptop has only 40GB. You can also use the ipod as a portable hard disk.
Ipod does not play all the formats directly. It requires conversion. Itunes does this conversion for you. I have seen the Ipod support wma and mp3 formats. There could be more. You can easily identify the supporting the format by just trying to add it through itunes. The Mp3 format gets converted to ipod playable format quite faster. But the wma takes hell a lot of time to get converted.
The video format can only be two MPEG-4 and one more (which I forgot … sorry). You might need to download free converters from the net. (Go to https://download.com)
The transfer after conversion, to the ipod is actually amazingly fast.
Handling
I have seen shuffle kind and the nano kind. They appear quite handy. The version that I have is quite bulky (in Ipod terms, i.e. not as sleek as the nano versions). It has a metallic shell and the fingerprints make the rear portion look ugly. Having a pouch should help.
Ho, looks to be a big review here … let me quickly summarize:
Great audio and video experience. Too much of dependency on a PC. You might have to buy a system, if you don’t have one! Poor battery back-up. For the experience of music, it is worth owning an Ipod.