It arrived at my desk Friday, my 40GB iPod, disguised in a rather large box in which was a much smaller box with the actual shrinkwrapped box inside. Once all that was out of the way, I actually got to open the thing. The box has a sheath that comes off, then folds open with flaps on the inside. It’s a beatiful thing that belongs in a museum.
The hardest part was getting it to hooked upwith my Windows 2000 box at work.
Since I don’t have firewire or USB 2.0 on my work machine, I borrowed a USB adapter and plugged it in. Windows did its thing and identified it and installed some stuff, but it iTunes didn’t recognize it. Reboot. So I downloaded the latest version of the software from Apple and tried that. “You need Windows 2000 Service Pack 4.” Great. Download, install, wait, wait, find an opportunity to reboot as I headed into an interview with a candidate.
I then ran the iTunes updater software again and no go, so I uninstalled what windows had autoinstalled, and used the software to install it first. Finally it worked and it went about reformatting the drive on the iPod. I threw a few songs on there for fun even though I planned to just take my entire music collection at home and throw it on there that night. USB transfer was slow, but not as slow as I though it would be. Those flash-based players take forever to get songs on them. This one took about 10 seconds per song.
Once I got it working, I had some time to check it out. Some of my first impressions were:
– The dislay uses the Geneva font, the original Mac menu font. Interesting.
– The devices is smaller than I had imagined, but heavy for its size.
– The ear buds are supposed to be great, but I wasn’t very impressed with them. The sound didn’t seem all that rich and those in-ear types always end up hurting my ears after a few hours.
– The iPod is almost entirely a read-only device. You can put songs into ONE “On-The-Go” playlist, rate songs, and change settings, but that’s about it. It feels strange to have all my contacts and calendar on there but not being able to change any of them. Then again, my Treo serves that purpose just fine.
– The scroll wheel is very fast and makes it easy to rip through long lists of artists and songs.
– Going “forward” in the menus is intuitive enough – just hit the button in the middle of the scroll wheel. Going “back” is not. You have to hit the “MENU” button which is above and to the left. Why not just split the middle button in two and put arrows on them?
– Somehow I already had some scratches on the back. The shiny metal case picks up fingerprints and looks dirty really quickly. It sure looks cool when it’s clean though.
– You can’t view album covers from the MP3’s. They might not look great in grayscale, but Apple went to the trouble of making them really easy to add in iTunes, so why not put them on the iPod too? I’d love to browse music visually by album cover.
– The battery status is a little weird. I let it charge all night and when I pick it up in the morning it still displays the charge left from before I charged it. Then sometime later it figures it out and shows the full charge
When I got it home, I just plugged it until my (until now) never-used Firewire port on the back of my G4 and it just started throwing songs on it. Wow, it probably downloaded 2 songs a second and within 45 minutes, all 6093 songs of my collection were on there with 10GB to spare. iSync did its thing too, grabbing my calendar and contacts (previously synced from my Treo) onto the iPod.
After that, I plugged into into my receiver in the living room and let it play. It sounded pretty good and it’s nice to have a convenient way to listen to all our music in the living room again.
I’ve been bringing it to work, running the line out of the dock into the computer and playing them through my computer speakers. That’s a nice way to listen to music and I always have a little display showing me what’s playing and an easy way to pause it. It’s definitely a cool little device. I’m especially looking forward to using it on plane trips and in the car. I just need an iTrip. Maybe I could buy one for myself for my 29.5th birthday coming up in a few weeks. 🙂