prfstars's Full Review: Apple iPod mini 1st Generation Silver (4 GB) MP3 P...
I’ve had my 10GB iPod for over a year now, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. When it came time to buy MP3 players for the kids, though, we seriously considered iPods for 3 or 4 seconds. It’s not that we don’t love the kiddos—we just don’t love them enough to spend $800 on two new 20GB iPods. We did some research, watched for sales, and spent about a quarter of that amount on two 128 MB Rio Sport models. The kids were happy enough, but I felt sort of guilty. I’ve got almost a thousand songs on my iPod, with room to spare. The kids have about 30 songs on theirs, and every time they want to add a new song, they have to delete an old one.
Their iTunes libraries continue to grow and bulge with the likes of Eminem (boy) and The Dixie Chicks (girl,) so we decided to ditch the old MP3 players on eBay, and buy the kids iPod Minis. Blue for the Dixie Chicks fan, and Silver for the “colors are for girls” Eminem guy.
Getting Started
Like its bigger brother, the iPod Mini charges and loads your songs through a firewire connection to your Mac, or a USB connection to your PC. You simply plug the iPod Mini into the computer, and it automatically synchronizes with your songs and playlists in iTunes. You can also plug the charger into the wall if you’re away from home. It takes at least a c ouple of hours for a full charge, but Apple claims that it will charge to 80% within an hour.
Use and Storage
Like the iPod, the Mini uses a navigation wheel to scroll through menus and make selections. The operation is very intuitive, so most users won’t have to bother to read the instructions. You can browse through songs by your playlists, or you can access your entire collection by song title or artist. Within the “artist” menus, you can browse by album, or choose to see all the songs by that artist.
The Mini and the original iPod both have skip protection, a wonderful feature if you use your iPod in the car or while exercising. I’ve never heard either iPod skip under any conditions.
The display isn’t huge, nor is it color. It’s crisp and bright, though, with enough room to display a song’s title, artist, and play time, along with the battery indicator. The backlight is very useful, but you can turn it off to conserve battery life.
The Mini comes with the same ear bud headphones that the iPod comes with. They’ve got high quality neodymium drivers, whatever the hell that means. I don’t know from neodymium drivers, but the sound is excellent. I hate ear buds, though. I prefer the big, dorky, foam-covered headphones that fit over your head and sit on your ears. The kids don’t like the ear buds either, so we’re all using $10 Sony headphones from Target.
While the iPod comes with a choice of 15, 20, and 40GB models, the iPod Mini has only one configuration, with 4GB of storage. At about 3-4 MB per MP3 file, you can expect to store over 1000 songs on your iPod Mini.
The iPod has some additional features that I’ve never found particularly useful. There are a few games built in, including Solitaire. You can keep contacts and a calendar in an iPod, although it’s not a substitute for a PDA. You can also use your iPod as an alarm if you happen to be one of those wild and crazy kids who likes to sleep in headphones.
Battery Life
The official numbers claim 8 hours of playtime, and 1 month of Standby. Believe it. We haven’t had the Minis long enough to vouch for their standby time, but my original iPod lasts at least that long. I leave it in my gym bag, and listen for half an hour per week day while I’m on the bike. I can go two or three weeks without recharging. If you plug your Mini in regularly to update your songs, you’ll never have to worry about running out of juice.
A major complaint about the original iPods was that the batteries tend to die not long after the one year warranty ends. If this happens, expect to pay $50 for a new battery if you feel comfortable swapping it out yourself, or $100 if you want Apple to do it for you. The Minis are too new to know if there will be similar issues. For the record, My original iPod is 15 months old, and I’ve seen absolutely no measurable decrease in its battery’s performance.
The Add-ons
Apple sells lots of accessories for iPods. You can get an adapter to play your iPod through your car stereo. You can upgrade your headphones. You can get a dock, which simplifies charging, syncing, and connecting the iPod to eternal speakers. You can get an armband, which is a nice alternative to the belt clip that comes with the Mini. Perhaps the most useless add-on is the wired remote; this came with my original iPod, but it’s a $30 option with the Mini.
Comparisons with iPod, er, Maxi?
Beyond the smaller storage capacity, there are two primary differences between the original iPod and the Mini: size and color choices. The Minis are light, thin, and small, and instead of the iBook-like white case that the iPod sports, the Minis have anodized aluminum cases in silver, gold, pink, blue, or green.
At $249 for 4 GB of storage, the iPod Mini costs only $50 less than the 15 GB iPod. If you specifically want a smaller case, the Mini is a great MP3 player. If you don’t mind a slightly bigger case, the 15 GB iPod is a much better value.
Unless, of course, you really, really want pink.
For full specs on the iPod Mini, visit http://www.apple.com/ipodmini
Update 5/17/04
One of our biggest frustrations with the iPod has been the inability to use it to transfer music between our computers. I understand this is designed to protect copyrights, but all it does is slow down the process-- not stop it. I bought a new laptop last week, and I wanted to transfer my iTunes library from the old one. The iPod seemed like the fastest way to transer all of that data, but it wouldn't do it. After suffering through hours of trying to transfer it across our wireless network, I ran out and bought a crossover ethernet cable. What a pain! For those of you who want to use your iPod to transfer your library, though, there are hacks out there. There are also numerous shareware applications that will get the task accomplished without loss of your iTunes library statistics. I can't post them here, but a quick Google search will locate them.
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