iPod

Posted by Shaun on December 30th, 2005 filed in Technology

I played around with Sue’s iPod and iTunes last night and I have to admit I’m impressed by both. There is still room for improvement, but overall they work well together. I spent some time Wednesday loading what songs I have onto her iPod so she had something to listen to at work. Last night I copied a bunch of her music into iTunes and onto her iPod.

I also copied some pictures and tried to move movies into the iPod. The interface for the pictures could use some work. You can only select a folder to transfer. What do you do if you want to pick and choose which pictures to transfer? You can’t as far as I can tell. I wouldn’t mind seeing an interface like the music library, but for pictures. Or somehow get Picasa to transfer pictures to the iPod.

The video could be more flexible too. I have plenty of small videos, but only one was okay to put on the iPod. I could only get a few into iTunes and then only one of thost would go onto the iPod. Apple claims that it can handle multiple formats, but I’m not seeing it. And I’m not too eager to shell out money for Quicktime so I can convert the movies to an acceptable format. It just isn’t worth it to me. I’d expect the iPod to handle AVI files at the very least.

Overall it is a nice piece. The color screen is very nice to look at. Much better than the old black and white screens. If you get an iPod though make sure your computer has a USB 2.0 port. Trying to use this thing with a USB 1.0 port takes years off your life. I did this on two computers and each time the machine locked up and took an extremely long time to transfer files to the iPod. With a USB 2.0 connection the transfer was very fast.