(Written on a plane a few weeks ago.)

Now that I’ve had my 40GB iPod for a while and had the chance to take it on some trips, I thought I’d post my thoughts on it.

First, I love my iPod. It’s a great device and I love having all the music I’ve been collecting for the last 15 years available wherever I am – on demand by song.

However, the iPod has a number of obvoius areas for improvement which I didn’t expect to find. Maybe I was brainwashed by the cult of white earbuds.

My 40GB unit came with a wired remote. That’s convenient especially right now as my ipod is tucked into the seat back pocket it front of me and the remote is clipped to my seat belt. The annoying part of using the remote is that it makes the cord really long, so long that I don’t know what to do with all the excess and it ends up just getting all tangled. The remote itself is very chic looking, but it’s also vertically and horizonally symmetric with no tactile markers. That means you can’t differentiate the volume vs. pause or skip forward vs. back buttons without looking at the remote.

The headphones are supposed to be really good, but so far I haven’t found them to be anything special. They hurt my ears for one. Actually it’s only my right ear and I have this problem with most ear buds, so it’s not Apple’s fault. I think it may have something to do with the tubes I had in my ears as a kid. In any case it really hurts after I’ve had them in there for a while. They also don’t seem to be loud enough to block out all the noise on a plane.

This has got me thinking about investing in some good headphones to replace the series of crappy ones I’ve had over the years. I don’t tend to like ear-covering headphones either as they tend to make my ears hot and itchy after a while. I guess I have fussy ears.

As I discussed before, it’s heavier and bigger than I expected, even for one of the smallest players of its capacity on the market. The size isn’t that big of a deal, but the weight is just enough to make it feel ‘heavy’. It’s only a couple ounces heavier than my Treo which doesn’t seem heavy but those few ounces make a big difference. It seems to have too much momentum and inertia on it’s own, so I don’t think I’d ever take it running or some activity like that where it might fall.

The iPod mini doesn’t have this problem, but it’s at a cost of one tenth the capacity. Rumors are that eventually the iPod will take the mini’s form factor. I wonder they’ll call this one when the iPods are all mini-sized? The iPod maxi?

Battery life isn’t great. I feel like I always have to recharge it. I think I’m getting only about 4 hours out of it now.

The iTrip works OK for listening to it in the car. I still wish it was integrated into the unit. The iTrip does seem to significantly decrease battery life as well. Reception is mostly ok too. 88.9 seems to work most of the time around home, but not in parts of San Francisco. The biggest problem of using the ipod in the car is setting it up. Granted, it’s not much work to dig up the device, start it up and set the radio to the right station, but it’s exactly zero work to just let the radio play on the station it’s already on when the car starts up.

I see the same affect with the integration of LAUNCHcast into the new Yahoo! Messenger 6.0. With LAUNCHcast integrated into a critical communication tool at work and because it starts playing as soon as I log in to messenger, I find myself listening to it a lot more than before. Yes, all I had to do is click one button to start up the player before, but I just didn’t remember.

I’ve requested that it also automatically pause when you lock your computer. Right now it’s too hard to find the pause button (and wait if you’re not 30 seconds into the song) so I just end up turning the volume on my speakers all the way down and wasting bandwidth when I’m away.

The biggest flaw I see with the iPod is that it’s too fragile for an expensive device. Because of that I don’t use it in particular situations as mentioned previously and I’m careful to not leave it anywhere for fear that someone will steal it.

In particular, it’s too easily scratched. It seems that the stainless steel back already had some fine scratches when I took it out of the box and Apple’s own case has scratched the face. I got fed up with that and invested in an iSkin eVo, supposedly the best case of its style out there right now. (I got the arctic white version; I’m not trying to make any fashion statements and how can you tell it’s an iPod when it’s hot pink?) It would let me protect the outside while still having access to the contols and connections for the iTrip.

The eVo does what it claims to in protecting the iPod. The plastic screen had a scratch on the inside when I got it, but I figured it would only get more scratched, so I kept it. Indeed it has and I feel better knowing that the actual iPod has no more damage than before I fit the skin over it. The eVo makes the iPod only a bit bulkier but this makes for one critical difference – the iPod no longer fits in the dock. This suprised me because I thought their website said it would work with the dock. On second glance it says that it works with the dock CONNECTOR, not the actual dock. Grrr. I liked using the dock at work because I could use the iPod at a reasonable angle on my desk while dropping it in charged it and connected the line out to my speakers. Since taking the skin on and off is no trivial task, the dock is pretty useless.

The eVo has a removable belt clip on the back. The clip feels kind of flimsy, but it hasn’t shown signs of breaking. Then again I actually haven’t tried using the clip. I removed it to reduce some bulk. They molded some nice feet on the four corners on the back, but unfortunely the prongs that the clip attches to slick out too much and don’t allow the iPod to lie flat.

Something I’ve noticed since I started listening to music on the iPod is that some of the music I’ve collected is total crap. I listen to the same music at home with iTunes, but listening to the Ppod is a differnent experience that makes me care about the music more. For one, I hear it better because I’m listening to headphones and I’m not doing as many things so I actually notice the music. I guess it’s time to to start rating stuff and deleting it later. Sigh, it’s still easier to just hit the skip button. Someday I might just be in the mood for that music so I should keep it, right?

I probably won’t actually start doing that until I run out of disk space and I’ve still got 10GB left. Some of that space is consumed by the album covers I’ve added using the excellent Fetch Art for iTunes. The only problem is that iTunes doesn’t use them at all. Hey Apple, how about at least trying to display them in the iPod?

My #1 problem with the iPod is that’s yet another device. When I go somewhere now, I have to round up my Treo, iPod, digital camera, and GPS. I can’t forget to make sure all these devices are charged either or I’ve make sure I’ve got extra batteries.

What I really want is all these devices to become just one that I’ll always keep with me. Based on the combined cost of all these devices, I’d pay quite a lot for one small, light and well-designed and integrated device that replaces them all. My Treo is a good start. At least I don’t have a PDA, phone and pager to carry around all the time. My inevitable upgrade to a Treo 600 (or Ace) will make my little camera unncessary and an expansion slot may evevtually make iPod like storage possible. Hey if Dan Gillmor can do it, maybe I can too.

Well, that’s enough ranting for now. My Treo and iPod are about to run out of juice and my plane will land soon. My thumbs have gone numb from pecking on this tiny keyboard. Oh yeah, and my ear is killing me. Damn earbuds.