iPod Review

Good Points:

• It's tiny. The picture doesn't do it justice, because it's out of proportion with my head, and just makes my hand look really big. Remember my Nokia 8820 phone? It's the same height and depth, and only about a third wider. I'm pretty sure the instructions at Apple would have been "Make it the size of a pack of cigarettes". It easily fits in the pocket of my jeans.
• It Just Works. Plug it into the laptop. As it charges, give it a name (Charles Miller's Funky Box 'o Songs). Watch it synch with iTunes. Go through the menus, and select by artist/album, or from my iTunes playlists. Simple.
• Firewire. 400Mbps transfer speed, baby. Transferred about a gig of mp3s in a minute or two.
• It's a portable 5 gig hard drive.
• It means that now I can laugh at ellie's phone for its feeble mp3 capabilities. Ha ha ha!

Things other people have said are bad points, but don't really bother me much.

• It's "only" 5GB. That's still about 100 hours of music. I can live with that quite easily, thankyouverymuch.
• It's Mac only. This means I have to copy the mp3s to my laptop to transfer them to the iPod, that is, at least until I get a desktop Mac. This doesn't bother me, I'm already using my laptop more than I'm using the desktop machine anyway.
• It was rather expensive.

Bad Points:

• No remote-control on the headphones wire, which is annoying, because getting the thing out of your pocket to skip a track is a chore.
• I tend to skip between straight and random play pretty often, and the toggle's in the options menu.