Part of the best family of personal audio products available
Written: Jan 16 '04
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Durability: |
|
|
| Portability: |
|
|
| Battery Life: |
|
|
|
Pros: Best design; best audio quality; best user interface and useability.
Cons: There really aren't any.
The Bottom Line: You simply cannot find a better MP3 player which has all of the size, features, and capabilities of the iPod. Still the best product on the market, regardless of copycats.
|
|
|
| dmiller62's Full Review: Apple iPod (20 GB, PC - M8741LL/A) MP3 Player |
I bought the 20G iPod several weeks after it was first released, in August 2002. (At the time, previous iPods had increased in size from the original 5G to 10G, and the bump up to 20G was enough to get me to jump in).
Since then, I've filled it with music, carried it everywhere, and played a very extensive library of widely varying types of music. Rather than go into a detailed description of the iPod and its features, which you can read in many of the other reviews here, I'll concentrate on a few key areas where I can offer some additional insight and cast light on some of the issues noted by other reviewers.
First, battery life. My 20G iPod preceded the current, "dock" version, which has a smaller battery (part of the price for smaller size) that Apple rates for 8 hours instead of the 12 hour rating that my older model has. Beyond that, much has been written about battery, or in some cases, lack of it.
Apple has notes about this on their web site, but in a nutshell: Don't drain the battery all the way down. It's better to use part of the charge and to recharge it as frequently as possible, keeping the battery filled unless you really need to push it. My year-and-a-half-old battery is still working fine.
The battery drains faster if you do things that eat power, such as: click from track to track; use the equalizer; use the backlight. The only way you'll get a "full" 12 hours on the older models or 8 on the current, dock-ed models is to let the iPod play without any user intervention at all. It accesses the internal hard drive as little as possible that way and uses very little power. Apple suggests that one way to test the battery is to set the iPod to play it's entire contents with shuffling turned on and see how long it goes before the battery runs out.
The battery is fine, just use it intelligently. Get a cigarette lighter adapter for your car so that you can charge it as you go places. Keep it topped off as much as possible and it should have a longer, fuller life. If you need a replacement, Apple will now swap the battery (along with the entire unit! Read their policy carefully!) for $99 if it runs out after the warranty expires, and there are 3rd party battery companies on the web where you can order and do this yourself (if you're daring).
The earbuds: I've read a wide variety of praise and complaints about the white Apple earbuds, and I've come to the conclusion (based on my own use and testing) that they -are- really very good, for what they are: earbuds that do NOT deeply enter and seal the ear canal. Exactly HOW they "sound" to someone is going to depend on a number of different factors: the size and shape of the person's ear, how the buds are mounted, positioned, and fit over the ear; and what their hearing is like. If you play with the buds, you'll find that pressing them in tighter dramatically increases both sound volume and bass response, so it's obvious that how -close- they are to your eardrums and how snugly they fit greatly affect how they sound; and this positioning and "fit" is itself going to vary widely from person to person, depending on how the outer and inner parts of their ear are shaped. Even the "rotation" of the buds changes things; I find that turning them "forward", so that the wires point more straight-ahead than "down", improves sound quality.
Conclusion: the wide range of praise/complaints about the iPod buds that I've read is because "how" they sound is very dependent on a person's ear size, shape, the position of the buds and distance from the eardrums, and other things that are peculiar to that person's hearing. As a result, overall comments about this will be all over the place.
In comparison, I tried several other buds in the $30-$60 price range and wasn't satisfied with any of them. One pair of more-expensive "outer-ear:" buds were just unlistenable; very harsh upper range, vs. the overall "warmth" of the iPod buds. In-ear-canal buds from Sony which provided a tight "seal" produced better sound and much better bass than the iPod buds, but I found that I disliked using them because they seal off nearly all sound from the outside. Like having a bad head cold.
What I -like- about the iPod buds is the nice, open-air feeling you get from using them. You can hear other sounds and talk to people if you keep the iPod volume turned down. It's like walking around with the music playing in your environment, but you're still "in" the environment rather than having your ears sealed off with the music. You can walk around the field at a sports game, listen to the music, and still enjoy the sights -and- sounds of the game. That's the idea. So even if you don't experience as much bass this way, it's worth the tradeoff.
Having tried several more expensive pairs of other buds, I still use the iPod buds, all of the time.
Apple's customer service: when I needed them, they did a great job for me. Several months after I'd bought it (still under warranty), I managed to "blow" one of the buds (crackly sound, uh oh). I called them, they took the serial number (which I'd registered when I first bought it), and immediately mailed me another set of buds, no questions asked, and I didn't have to return the originals (which I still have as a souvenir). I would expect the same to happen if there was a problem with the battery or if something else goes wrong; they'll either fix it immediately or (more likely) swap the entire iPod out for another one.
Other quick comments:
Sound quality is great.
Overall useability is great. Yes, if you have a lot of songs (like I do), it isn't always easy to find what you want. Use iTunes to create playlists to localize music so you can get to it more quickly. Create a playlist for each family member so that, if you share the iPod (for instance, if you're driving in the car on a trip), whoever is using it can find "their" songs and scroll through to play the ones that they like.
iTunes is a very "deep" program. Experiment with playlists, "smart" playlists, etc. and read all of the help file content so that you'll better understand how to use it.
A cassette adapter works much better than the FM-transmitter adapters I've tried. I have an "iRock", which doesn't work very well in the New York city suburbs; and I've also tried the iTrip, which was very difficult to use in terms of setting frequencies. A casette adapter is not only easier to use (just plug it in!) but offers better frequency response.
Don't bother with the Apple belt clip, get a better one. I would recommend something with a clip that ROTATES (without naming particular products) and a case that attaches and detaches from it quickly. Rotation is important so that you can reach down, swivel the iPod to see its screen, select a new song, and let it start playing again.
Use AAC encoding when ripping your own CDs in iTunes. Quality is better than MP3 at the same bit rate/file size. I would use at least 160K for the bit rate, and bump up to 192K for music that has a lot of high frequency sound (violin; classical; female vocals; etc).
Overall conclusion:
Don't even think of buying a non-iPod MP3 player. The iPod -is- the best, no matter which one you get, up to and including the new iPod Mini. You get what you pay for; and in the case of the Mini, what you are paying for is -size-. Need more space? Get the 15G iPod "standard". Want something even tinier and lighter? Spend $50 less for the Mini.
At the time I bought this iPod, it was $499 for 20G, and I consider this the best $499 that I've ever spent.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 499
Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
dmiller62
|
|
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.