By now, everybody has heard of the iPod. It’s the industry-standard, perpetually-hip hard disk-based mp3 jukebox from Apple. They’ve been around for over five years now, but just recently, with the inception of the “cute” iPod mini and the Crayola-and-silhouette themed media blitz, iPods have displaced cell phones as the gizmo-du-jour. Recently, Apple introduced a new line, the iPod photo, but their inflated price tags seemed to render them duds. Suddenly, towards the end of February, Apple dropped their prices on iPods across the board, and introduced a smaller more economical iPod photo, which now seems poised to replace the standard iPod as the company’s flagship model. These new lower prices coupled with Apple’s generous student discount program (see www.apple.com/education for details), I was able to afford this new 30GB iPod photo, and am now sufficiently well-versed to write a review of it.

CONCEPT:

The concept behind the iPod photo is simple. Take a regular iPod, which offers well-organized and aesthetically pleasing digital music playback, add a color screen, and the capacity to display photos, and there you have it. This new functionality opens some interesting doors, such as on-the-fly creation of slideshows with soundtracks provided by your favorite iTunes playlist, archiving of digital camera photos on the iPod rather than the PC, and the ability to view the cover art of your favorite album while you listen. As the millions of Apple-faithful may have expected, the iPod photo delivers on these concepts with aplomb.

EXECUTION:

The Music:
Relatively unchanged from the standard iPod, the music functionality of the iPod photo is satisfying as ever. To the newbie, I’d recommend first familiarizing yourself with iTunes, Apple’s free music jukebox for your computer, designed with iPod synchronization specifically in mind. iTunes lets you set all of the “info” fields for your digital music tracks (artist, album, genre, etc.), which the iPod understands and bases its organization on. Above and beyond these organization categories, iTunes allows you to create your own playlists which can then be transferred to the iPod, allowing for “digital mix tapes,” if you will. Once you have the music you want on your iPod organized in your iTunes library, it’s a simple matter of hooking up the iPod and either dragging-and-dropping at will, or letting iTunes automate the whole process for you.

The iPod comes packaged with a CD containing iTunes and the installation program necessary for your computer to identify the iPod. Once this is installed, you need only to hook up your iPod via USB 2.0 or FireWire (USB 1.0 isn’t officially supported, but it works fine for me), and it will show up in your “Source” column on the left side of iTunes. You can edit your iTunes preferences to either automatically synch your iPod whenever it gets plugged in, or to let you manually drag the desired music, playlists, etc. on to the iPod.

What’s unique about the iPod photo is the album art option. If you’ve downloaded album art for your iTunes music (either by dragging pictures to the lower left corner of iTunes or by purchasing them from the iTunes music store, which bundles album art automatically), then these pictures are automatically transferred on to your iPod photo along with your music, so that when playing back a song, its album’s cover art is displayed on your nice color screen! An additional click of the center button blows this album art up in to full-screen size, which is nice for seeing all the little details.

Aside from that, music playback consists mainly of either selecting a playlist or an album, or creating an “On-The-Go” playlist by simply holding down the center button on the title of any song which you’d like to hear. This is a fun way to build a “digital mix tape” on the fly without having to do any computer-work beforehand on iTunes. The patented “click-wheel” makes browsing your music a snap. Simply start off by exploring genres, artists, albums, or songs, and then narrow your search by clicking on a selection. For example, you may decide you want to hear a specific genre, so you’d click on “Classic Rock.” Then you see the name of the bands in that genre. Say you click on The Rolling Stones. Then you see a list of their albums. Say you click on Beggar’s Banquet. Then you see a list of the songs on that album which you can select at will. Or, at any point in that process, you can click play to hear everything in the currently selected category. It’s all very intuitive, and very fun to mess around with.

The Photos:
When an iPod is connected to your computer, an additional button shows up in the lower right hand corner of iTunes, consisting of “iPod options.” Clicking on this button reveals a tab which allows you to alter your Photos settings. iTunes can update the photos on your iPod from a directory you specify (sub-directories then serve as “photo albums”), or you can import albums from various photo presentation software packages such as Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0. These photo albums show up on your iPod very much as music albums do, and selecting one loads a screen of 25 full color thumbnails which can then be selected for individual viewing or scrolled through with no additional loading times via the click wheel. Pressing play on an album title presents the contents as a slideshow, whose options such as soundtrack, transitions, and delay-per-picture can be altered in your slideshow settings. Again, that classic Apple intuitiveness is a huge help here. All-in-all, the photo functionality doesn’t add much pizzazz for me, because I’m not an avid digital photographer. I can definitely see how it would be great for somebody with a lot of digital photos, particularly because a device is currently in the works which allows downloading of digital photos directly to the iPod from the digital camera with no computer middle-man, but I mostly enjoy the color screen and photo capabilities for the album artwork.

In actuality, the photo synchronizing interface is not as clean as it is for music. It’s all done behind-the-scenes in iTunes, and if you remove photos from your synchronization directory, they are deleted from your iPod without warning next time it is plugged in. This is something for novice users to be cautious of.

The slideshows are very nice, and the optional video out cord allows your iPod to function like a mini slideshow server, almost like a PowerPoint replacement without any computer necessary! I feel that it’s a good thing that the iPod photo isn’t much more expensive than the standard iPod anymore, because the photo capability isn’t fully realized yet. I’d love to see a firmware upgrade which allows for more functionality such as video playback and more photo management options.

Overall/Details:
As with all Apple products, aesthetics is where the iPod scores most of its points. It’s a joy to hold and navigate the device, and the click wheel provides a very tactile pleasure with its elegant simplicity and form-follows-function design. I could give this to my tech-ignorant Dad and he’d be listening to his favorite songs in no time (so long as I synchronized them on to the device for him). However (if you’ve done any research on iPods before you’ve heard this a million times, and if not, I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you), iPods are ridiculously easy to scratch and scuff. I’ve handled mine with kid gloves since I got it 4 days ago, and it already has a noticeable scuff that is really bumming me out. This is the only design complain that I can lodge, and it can easily be cured by the myriad of cases available for iPods.

The iPod photo does offer a few more tidbits aside from music playback and photo display. It has a calendar which can be synchronized with any iCalendar format program (which is the standard calendar format), the ability to display notes and to-do lists uploaded from your computer, and it can function as an external hard drive, storing any type of file for transfer on to other computers. It’s a pretty convenient way to carry around 30GB of additional storage! It also has some games, but few prove to have any staying power. The music quiz is a form of “Name That Tune” which draws music samples from your library, and “Solitaire” is pretty fun until you win and then have to click each individual card and move it up to its appropriate Ace stack before the program recognizes that you’ve won!

All-in-all, iPod has few legitimate competitors (no matter what anybody who bought something else and is desperately trying to defend it may say), and is absolutely unmatched in terms of design. The only other digital jukeboxes that approach the iPod’s quality of design have copied it in one way or another. With this new round of price drops, the iPod photo is reasonably affordable and is well worth the money for anybody with a collection of digital music. iPods are not a fad or a trend…they are one of the few products whose level of popularity is fully legitimately earned. They’re so popular because they’re so good. Do yourself a favor and find this out for yourself. I’ll be playing with my iPod if you need me!

-Derek Bronish


Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 319
Recommended for: Beginners - Easy Enough for Tech Newbies