I bought my ipod because I thought I'd be the cool kid at the office... actually, I bought it because my Marketing professor raved about it two semesters in a row so I figured he was on to something. I've come to realize now that he wasn't on to something... he was on something.

I will admit that it had some cool features, but it was so easily damaged (I had scratched on mine in less than two days) and un-user friendly that it made the $300+ price tag a very difficult pill to swallow. The retailer where I bought mine also ended up making the purchase less than fun so I will also admit that part of my prejudice against the thing may stem from that -- but I will try to be reasonably objective and eliminate that from my review.

The ipod requires you to use itunes which, according to Apple, is supposed to give you a seamless experience. Now let me stop here a moment and tell you that I grew up on Apples. I was such an Apple snob when I came into the business world of PCs that I almost ran crying and screaming back to my old life. That being said -- I hate Apple software. Quicktime sucks worse than old Dos based machines did. ITunes is just as bad.

If you have a music library on your machine in another format, iTunes will "commandeer" it (I think Apple refers to this as Sync). Then, when you go to upload more music to your ipod, it will copy over it (unless you're super geeky and tech smart -- which I am not). Apple says that this is supposed to update, but unless I was doing something very wrong, it cleared everything I had that wasn’t already in my ipod every time. If you change computers to upload music, it wipes out the music you already had in place and loads what was on the ipod. This happened to me twice before I finally lost my mind and put my ipod in the classifieds.

Now the upside to this is that the ipod I had (the 60 gig) will hold up to 20,000 songs (song capacity based on 4 minutes per song and 128-Kbps AAC encoding), somewhere near 25,000 pictures and something like 100 hours of video. This means you can comfortably add movies or tv shows (think Grey’s Anatomy) to your ipod for the commute into the city every morning. You can store TONS of stuff on this thing. That was kind of cool, but getting it on the device in the first place was not since the wheel takes quite a bit to get used to -- getting to your data after the fact will also take some time and effort. However, I believe from the Apple website (and one super geek in my office) that there is a band new interface on the newer generation 30 gig and 80 gig ipods – including a new feature that supports gapless playback which would have been nice for my techno collection.

If you want support or help from someone, don't try Apple. They were incredibly unhelpful which surprised me a bit since I am still quite the Apple fan. I’ve never had difficulty getting support on an Apple product before. I happen to think part of a product's appeal-ability is the support you can get if you need it. Give up here -- help ain't coming! You can try asking a ten year old -- most of them will be able to operate the thing, but if you have even an iota of ego to be bruised -- this will definitely leave you with a mark.

As for the actual product itself -- it's kind of pretty – mine was the white one but I seriously considered getting a pink one to be super-girly. But pretty and useful do not go hand in hand here. The wheel definitely takes some practice to get good at using, and the plastic screen as well as the metal on the back scratch very, very, very easily. I searched quite a bit to see if there was a way to repair the scratches, but alas, there is none. I recommend getting a case for your ipod – spend the extra money now because it will be worth it in the future.

The fact that it does not come with a wall charger kind of disappoints me because I did not want to have to lay out extra cash to get a wall charger and I could not keep my laptop with me every time I traveled. But if you have an endless supply of cash to spend – there are accessories for virtually every use possible!

The sound was okay, but the ear buds that come with the ipod tend to distort the lows over about half volume which for me was a definite turn off as well. Plus I have relatively small ears so they didn’t fit very well. But if you don’t mind spending an extra $39 you can buy an upgraded version that responds to lows very well as well as comes with 3 sizes of caps to ensure proper fit supposedly.

If you're under the age of 24 and have a lot of time to devote to the maintenance of this object -- it'll be fine. For people who are the least bit technology challenged, you have some technical issues to deal with so buyer beware. If you're like me and want quick and easy, go with the Samsung!


Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 327.00
Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection