The Best is Never Cheap
Written: Nov 18 '02
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Pros: The best MP3 Player in the world
Cons: None
The Bottom Line: Get off the fence and buy one. I had all sorts of worries before I bought one and it took me only fifteen minutes to fall completely in love.
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| oldtelcoguy's Full Review: Apple iPod (20 GB, PC - M8741LL/A) MP3 Player |
The Research
If you're reading this review, you're looking for a good MP3 player. You're staring at the $500 price tag of the 20 gig iPod and saying "Man, that's just too expensive." You may even have surfed around looking for a better deal, and have found that the price is pretty much the same everywhere. You're looking at other MP3 players and find the process of comparing all of them confusing and frustrating. You're wondering, "Is the iPod the best? It's certainly the most expensive." Read on, and you'll soon see that the iPod is the best player you can buy - not because of the price tag, but because it is a work of art with exceptional sound quality and features. It is not just a little bit better than other players. It is an order of magnitude better than other players. In my opinion, it's worth more than five hundred bucks.
Who Should Buy the iPod
If you are looking for an MP3 player primarily for a heavy outside exercise routine - where you will get the player wet occasionally in a light rain, and roll it around in the dirt once or twice when you slip on wet leaves, for God's sake, do NOT buy the iPod. This thing is like fine jewelry or a high-end Mercedes. It's built tough and is very solid - more solid than most players, but it's also a piece of high-end stereo equipment and would hate getting wet and dirty. If you want an MP3 player for the road, for the office, for airplanes, for walking the dog, for the bedroom, for walking around town, for hooking up to your stereo system or for hooking up to your car audio system, the iPod will perform flawlessly.
The Presentation
Every single thing in the iPod box is designed with one thing in mind - perfection. Apple's pride in their product is evident in every aspect of packaging design and organization. Every bag, twist of cable, booklet and accessory is precisely aligned in packaging that is nothing less than art. You *will* be impressed. Very very impressed.
Lying there in one half of the hinged box that the iPod comes in is a small glass and chrome sculpture that will take your breath away - the iPod itself. Small glassy silvery bags hold earbuds, remote and firewire cable. Cables are not twist-tied together - instead, Apple crafted a special cable holder that holds cables in perfect spirals so that the presentation of the cable is a work of art. Perfection touches even the smallest aspect of this product. The iPod is one of Apple's finest achievements and they are very proud of it and want to share that pride with you by presenting it no differently than you would present a crown to a king.
Human Factors
The iPod is a BRILLIANTLY designed tool. Its purpose is to allow you to listen to what you want to listen to with a minimum of interaction. On your PC, you subdivide your MP3s by putting them in different directories. iPod is NOT about directories - it is far more powerful than that. Instead, iPod uses ID3 tags (more about these later) to present your music to you by playlist, artist, album, song, genre or composer. Want to listen to everything in your collection by the Corrs? No problem! A couple of clicks and your whole Corrs collection is cued up, and no need to define a playlist for this. Want to listen to just classical music? The genre selector accomplishes this. Or you can set up custom playlists. One for the road, for work, romantic music for your date tonight. The sky is the limit. Navigation of the iPod is intuitive. My 65 year old mother was able to use it immediately with no help, no documentation and about 1 minute worth of experimentation. Crucial to the ease of iPod's navigation is a sort of touch-sensitive dial. It doesn't actually move, as less moving parts means a more robust unit. Instead, it is pressure sensitive and acts like you're dialing it as you trace your finger around it. iPod has an accelerometer on the dial that determines how fast you're accelerating the rotation of your finger, and it will make huge leaps through song lists concurrent with your acceleration. That means that ENORMOUS lists can be navigated rapidly, meaning little effort is required to scroll through 500 albums or 5000 songs.
Sound Quality
Most MP3 player reviews skip discussion of sound quality. Why is this? It's terribly important, as the sole purpose of the device is to please you with great sounding music. The iPod delivers sound quality in spades. From low volume to full volume, sound is crisp and alive with shimmering highs, bass that resounds deep in your chest and a crystal clear and vibrant midrange. This is NOT like listening to Winamp on your home computer with a set of cheap headphones. This is like listening to a high-end stereo system with a pair of fine headphones. The included earbud microphones sound spectacular - as good as my high-end around-the-ear headphones. Power is ample to destroy your hearing at high volume with both the earbuds and the full headset, so be careful - I mention this because some MP3 players are weak on volume. The iPod has NO problems with volume. In fact, the French government blocked sale of the iPod until it had it's top volume level adjusted down. That's on the French model, not the US model, so all of you Americans can go blow your ears out without government intervention.
Size
Size does matter, Virginia, and the 20 gigabytes of room on the iPod is a nice clean canvas for you to paint your music against. Do you have any bloody idea how much room 20 gigabytes is, mate? It's enough bloody room to put every single song you grew up with, every single song you listen to now, everything your mates like, everything your significant other likes, a bunch of audio books, and still not have it even half full. 20 gigabytes solves the problem of "what musical mood will I be in later today" because you can put your whole collection in your gleaming chrome iPod. Its a paradigm shift in how you look at music.
The Remote
iPod comes with a handy remote that lets you play, pause, go to the next song, go to start of the current song, go to the previous song, fast forward, fast reverse, increase volume and decrease volume. All with 4 buttons (intelligently engineered). The remote comes with a clip so you can clip it to your clothing. Some people have said that they think the clip comes off too easily. That has not been my experience, but then again I'm not jogging with the unit. I actually find the clip pretty grabby. Some folks have criticized the remote because the buttons are placed symmetrically and it is hard to figure out which button to hit without actually looking at it. This is true until you get used to the unit and know based on how you've clipped it on which button to press. It'll take you a week or less to get to the point where you'll be using it in the dark without looking. Did I mention that the remote is also a work of art? It too is a chrome sculpture like the iPod.
iPod-PC Communications
iPod comes with a PC installation CD. This installs two programs on your PC. One is an icon that sits in your system tray and shows you whether your iPod is connected to your PC or not. The other is MusicMatch Jukebox, a program that helps you find, catalog, create playlists with and organize your MP3 collection, and sync that collection with your iPod. This is a fine program, though I have one criticism of it - it is not the work of art that the iPod is. It has a fair amount of complexity and bloat to it, but it is attractive, has many features and gets the job done, so this is not much of a complaint. However, there are other programs you can use instead of MusicMatch Jukebox. There's XPlay, which you have to buy. I've never tried it but I understand it is okay. The one I use is called EphPod, which is a free download and is really really nice to use - it is a work of art just as iPod is - it even looks like iPod. It can also get news, sports and weather, calendar items, contacts and any regular files you'd like to sync, and upload them to the iPod along with your MP3s. I'll save you a lot of time and recommend EphPod. It is much more suited to the perfection of the iPod.
Preparing Music
One of the important things you'll have to do if you're going to have lots of music on your iPod (and with the 20 gig version, we're talking 500 albums or so, so that's a lot of music) is organize your MP3 collection by filling in all the ID3 tags for all the songs. An ID3 tag is a part of each MP3 file - it contains the name of the song, the name of the album it came from, the artist, year recorded, etc. iPod cross-references your whole music collection by these, so making sure you've got all the tags filled out consistently is important. I will now save you about two weeks of hunting and experimentation by recommending the "Tag&Rename" editor. It can even connect to a CD database and an even better music database and will download all album information and will set up your ID3 tags for you. You can then use the ID3 tags to automatically rename your MP3s so that they are consistently named across your entire collection.
Don't get me wrong - you don't HAVE to do all this ID3 tag work. While you can drop 20 gigs of unsorted MP3s on the iPod and it will gobble them up and serve them back to you, you'll have a neater collection by doing this ID3 tag work, and you'll enjoy the project. Any way you slice it, it is going to take you a month of evenings to bring a 20 gig music collection into the iPod in a properly organized fashion. Far from being a chore, this is a very fun and pleasurable experience. And it's fun to freak out your friends with the breadth of your collection ("So which group do you want to listen to?" "The Who!" "Cool, which album?" "Nah - how about Aerosmith?" "Cool - which album?" "You serious?")
Unusual iPod Facts
The iPod advertises 20 minutes of "skip" protection, as if the iPod were a turntable for playing vinyl records. Perhaps they were alluding to the read head errors that cause CD players to "skip" when they get jostled around. Folks, the iPod has a hard drive inside it, and the closest thing to a "skip" on a hard drive is a "head crash" which is a really bad thing. No doubt you could bust the hard drive to smithereens by dropping iPod on the concrete, but one thing you will NEVER hear is a skip from this player. So if you're worrying about skipping, stop worrying if you buy an iPod.
iPod has a huge placard on the front of the unit when you open the box that says "Do Not Steal Music" in about 5 languages.
Conclusion
Unlike so many other products in the world today that are conceived by engineers - products that are tedious, complex and cryptic, iPod stands alone as an example of the acme to which true artists and craftsmen can aspire. If Bang & Olufsen ever set out to make a portable MP3 player, they would design the iPod. The iPod will make your spirit soar.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 499
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oldtelcoguy
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