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Apple iPod Video 5G
Testing: Software
And now we come to it. I suppose I should face my demons right off the bat. iTunes. iTunes, specifically the iTunes store pricing scheme, is the primary reason why I have shunned the iPod. The reasons are many and my gripes lengthy. But, I'll swallow my pride and put forth an honest and untainted view of the iTunes software for the purposes of this review. Apple is smart. They know that nearly all of their customers are going to have access to the internet in one form or another; dial-up, broadband, coffee-house, jacking the neighbor's Wi-Fi!whatever. Knowing this, they have foregone the inclusion of an iTunes install CD with the iPod bundle. Users need only head to apple.com and download the newest version of iTunes to get started using their iPod (in my case iTunes 7.1.0.59). The download was easy and the installation painless. A couple of clicks and I was ready to go. The download itself took about 10-15 minutes as it was a 36MB file and my downstream bandwidth tends to suck (ahem, Comcast). At least I wasn't forced to create a bunch of user and hardware names right off the bat, a la Zune. Apple is generally good at making things foolproof and I was loading songs onto my iPod in no time. Adding songs to the iPod is also relatively easy. If you horde your songs (on a Windows machine) in the My Music folder, iTunes will automagically detect and load the songs onto the player. Otherwise it's a simple matter of telling iTunes where to go to find your tunes. The software will even seek out album art for your music files from the interweb to be displayed during your listening sessions. But if you don't have much of an electronic music collection to start with, Apple is more than happy to help you start one. iTunes is pretty much THE online music retailer. For 99ยข/song or $9.99/album you can get started collecting digital music. And as the 5th generation iPod has reached the portable video age, a multitude of TV shows and movies are also available for purchase ranging from $1.99 to $9.99. Personally I still don't like watching movies on a tiny screen but with the arrival of Apple TV iTunes movies and TV make a bit more sense. You can of course add your own videos to the iPod. Using iTunes you'll be able to convert your vid stash into iPod friendly formats. Although I made the mistake of loading the entire Steve Jobs MacWorld intro of the iPhone and the conversion took quite a while. But then again it was a 250MB file. I also had some issues converting existing .mov files into iPod friendly movies. The error I received said that the format is not compatible. I assume this means my files aren't compatible with the QuickTime converter or were created with a now obsolete version of QT. That is a bit frustrating considering that .movs are QuickTime files to begin with. Actually purchasing music or movies is, as you may have deduced, easy. iTunes isn't the best by accident. They make it entirely too easy to spend your money on music and movies. You'll first need to set up an iTunes account attached to a credit card. After that buying music is as simple as clicking "buy". Tunes are synced up to your device and stored in your iTunes library. And unlike the Zune Marketplace, iTunes accepts real money, not pre-purchased imaginary leprechaun points. The breadth of the iTunes library is absolutely mind boggling. Music of every type is available for purchase. Throw in movies, TV shows and audio books and there are literally endless options for entertainment, as long as you're willing to pay for it. If you are a cheapskate like me you can always buy your music or movies elsewhere and sync/convert them over. The hands down best deal for iPod users are the multitude of podcasts available for free! Now you don't have to own an iPod to listen to a podcast. But iTunes does have excellent podcast support. Simply search iTunes for the podcast you want and click subscribe. iTunes will automatically download and sync new shows for you as they become available. This is my favorite feature of iTunes. Normally I manually download and sync my podcasts to my SanDisk Sansa e260. I could live without the auto-subscriptions, but man they are convenient. And even Microsoft looks to finally be including podcast support in upcoming firmware revisions, although it's still quite a ways off. Part of me wonders if MS aren't just a bit jealous that podcasting shares a common moniker with their #1 competitor.
Page 1: Introduction & First Impressions
Page 2: Testing: Software Page 3: Testing: Hardware Page 4: Testing: Daily Usage Page 5: Conclusion 
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Add Comment
7 User Comments 1 - Posted by
socokid
on April 18, 2007 - 6:15 pm There is, however, one big difference between the 30 and the 80 GB iPods. The 80 gets 6 more hours of music playback (20 hours as opposed to 14 on the 30 GB). Just had to point that out...
2 - Posted by
Kurtis
on April 18, 2007 - 6:36 pm Good point on the battery life of the iPod variants, socokid.
3 - Posted by
handrail
on April 19, 2007 - 7:52 am indeed. obviously the 80GB is the sensible way to go if you can afford the extra dough. but since we wanted to compare apples to apples, zunes to ipods, as best we could...we got a 30gigger. good to know that 80GB has better battery life too. thanks for the info! brad. 4 - Posted by
some guy
on April 19, 2007 - 8:06 am The often cited lack of FM support in iPods is not entirely true. A prospective buyer (just) needs to shell out additional $49 for the Apple branded "iPod Radio Remote" which acts as iPod FM antenna and cable remote control. 5 - Posted by
Kurtis
on April 19, 2007 - 9:43 am lol, i don't think anyone would argue you can't buy an accessory for that functionality. heck, you can buy an accessory for the iPod for anything. you can probably get a toothbrush attachment for the thing. the problem people have is that as expensive as the iPod already is it is not as feature-rich as some other players out there which tout those features from the box. 6 - Posted by
handrail
on April 19, 2007 - 3:35 pm i guess then one could also say that the iPod comes with a car as long as you shell out $20k for it, right? :) kurtis has already pointed out...well, my point. doesn't come with it out of the box like the zune and so many other players. not that it appears to matter. i'm probably the last person on earth who gives a crap about the iPod not having native FM functionality. 7 - Posted by
Rich
on April 20, 2007 - 9:55 pm I guess hell really did freeze over! Brad with an iPod. hah!
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