My ipod

My iPod arrived while we were away in Barcelona, so I had to wait until we got back before I could get my hands on it. It's a 30gb black iPod with video. I also ordered some Sennheiser earphones as I've heard that the standard Apple 'phones aren't too good, plus they're white. I didn't want a black iPod with white earphones. I really don't understand why Apple doesn't make black accessories to go with the black iPod. I put off buying a dock purely cos it's white. Hopefully, in the not too distant future, Apple will offer black accessories. I guess it all depends on the ratio of black iPods sold to white iPods.

Anyway, the iPod itself is fantastic. I installed the latest version of iTunes and iPod software from the cd that came with it and then set about transferring my iTunes music over to it. At that time I had just over 900 songs in iTunes, mostly all of them with artwork. The entire library took around 12mins to transfer via USB. Not bad I reckon. I've always liked the visual aspect of the album artwork, and the colour screen displaying the artwork and track information looks great. The sound quality is excellent and it doesn't take long to get used to the operating method. It's pretty easy to find the songs you want, but you can make it easier by defining playlists for different genres or artists or moods. Almost anything really. I say almost anything. I have around 100 different artists on there and I wanted to make playlists to split them up into sections. For example, Artists A-E etc. But, sadly it can't be done cos iTunes lists by songname and not artist. Maybe there is a way to do it, but I haven't found it yet.

Since then, I've downloaded a couple of video's from the iTunes music store and was quite impressed with the video playback quality. Also, photo's look good. On top of that, I can sync it with my contacts and calendars. I found out that I can download calendars for all kinds of things into iCal. I've downloaded Southampton FC fixtures and the World Cup fixtures for this year.

One disappointment I have of the iPod so far is it's ability to use as a portable disk. Apparently, cos I've formatted it for mac use, I can't use it on a windows machine. That means I can't connect it to the pc at work to use as a disk device. Again, there may well be a hack for that but I've not found one yet. It's a shame cos as I said, I hoped to use it to update this blog a bit more. I've got around this problem for the time being by simply emailing text files to myself, which I can then pick up at home on the mac and copy into my weblog.