Product Requirements:
Device:
Apple computer with built-in FireWire port; Mac OS X v10.1.5 or later
PC with built-in FireWire or USB 2.04, or Windows-certified FireWire or USB 2.0 card; Windows Me, Windows 2000 or Windows XP Home or Professional

I've become a Pod person! No, I'm not talking about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I'm referring to the extremely popular Apple iPod. Since bursting into the MP3 player scene in 2001, the iPod has become the best selling player on the market. It was the first small form factor player to include a high capacity hard drive, and it continues to be the one to which all other players aspire to be like.

I've wanted an iPod since first seeing the original advertised on Apple's website. But, for some reason I just never plopped down my hard earned cash for one. That changed after I reviewed the Neuros 20gb player. That product made me realize just how great it is to be able to carry your entire music collection with you where ever you go.

I now have the 30gb 3rd generation iPod, and with the exception of a few little gripes, I am in total love with it!  As a person who has not had one of the 1st or 2nd gen units, this will not be a comparison review. Also, as a Windows user, I won't be discussing iTunes... So, without further ado, here we go...

Hardware Specs

Display: 2-inch (diagonal) grayscale LCD with LED backlight, 160 x 128 pixel resolution, 0.24-mm dot pitch
Audio support for Mac: AAC (16 to 320 Kbps), MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, Audible(6), AIFF, WAV
Audio support for Windows: MP3 (32 to 320 Kbps), MP3 VBR, WAV
Up to 25 minutes of skip protection
Maximum output power: 60 mW rms (30 mW per channel)
Frequency response: 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz
Size and Weight:  4.1 by 2.4 by 0.73 inches, 6.2 ounces (176 g)
Power: Built-in rechargeable lithium ion battery (630 mAh), Playtime: 8 hours when fully charged, Standby time: 2 weeks when fully charged
 

I have to give props to Apple, as they seem to have a unique gift for knowing exactly how to package their products, to give them that special geek "whee" appeal. I'm talking about the excitement that gadget freaks like myself get when we open a new toy for the first time. You know what I mean, when you tear open the cardboard shipping box like a shell, to get to the pearl inside. iPods are packaged in a black cube box, that opens like a book, to reveal two compartments. Yeah, I know that cool packaging doesn't make a product any better, but in the case of Apple's products, it sure makes the anticipation of opening them even more exciting and fun.

When you first see an iPod in the flesh, you will be in awe. They are more like an object of art, instead of an MP3 player. They are unbelievably small when you consider the fact that they have an actual hard drive enclosed inside.

In hand, the iPod is comfortable and heavy. A good kind of heavy though. It passed my Gadgeteer creak test with flying colors. This thing is solid as a rock! The casing is chrome metal on the back and Lucite-like on the top. It is constructed so perfectly, that you can barely feel the seam where plastic meets metal. It is actually so smooth that it feels slippery. The chrome back is a major fingerprint magnet which drives me bonkers though! I find myself polishing the back constantly. It is also easily scratched, so you'll want to keep the iPod in a soft case. To protect the iPod, a nylon case with belt-clip is included. This isn't a super fantastic case, but it will do the job...

Those of you that like to customize your toys can have the back of your iPod engraved for an extra charge of $19.00. I couldn't resist, and had to have The Gadgeteer put on mine! :o)

The front casing is an almost glowing milky white. From a distance (fyi: that song is on my iPod...), you might not notice the buttons or touch wheel as they are also white. They are slightly recessed from the top and are not mechanical buttons at all. Instead they are touch buttons, similar to the touch pad on a notebook PC. There are four round buttons on top with a large round pad or wheel below them. The round buttons give you your standard PREV TRACK, PLAY, PAUSE and NEXT TRACK functions. There is also a Menu button which helps you navigate through the onscreen menus, and song lists. The touch wheel does not physically spin like the first generation iPods. It is a smooth pad that you trace your finger around to scroll through lists, change volume levels and hop to different points in a currently playing song. In the middle of the touch pad is the select button. All of the buttons require barely a touch to activate them. No pressure is necessary. This is a good and bad thing though as the slightest touch to the four round buttons or select button will power the unit on.

Using the touch wheel to scroll through song lists feels awkward at first, but it doesn't take much time at all to get used to it. It's a very natural way to navigate and change volume levels. It is also very cool that as you spin your finger around the touch wheel, the scrolling list will accelerate. This makes traversing a 3000 song lists extremely quick and easy.

Above the buttons is the mono LCD. It is a very easy display to read in all lighting conditions. There is also a very bright backlight that allows you to read the screen in the dark. Even the buttons light up in red, when the backlight is activated, which is a very cool touch! I love the way the backlight turns off, it sort of fades away... even the buttons. The backlight timer can be set to off, 2, 5, 10, 20 seconds or always on.

Of course I'd love to see the iPod with a large color display, but I guess that will be for the 4th or 5th generation units. Can you imagine having the ability to display album cover art or visualizations while a song is playing? Now that would be cool!

The top of the iPod has the hold switch, earphone jack and remote connector. The hold switch lets you lock the iPod so that button presses won't have any effect. The earphone jack is your standard 3.5mm sized jack, so your favorite phones will work just fine. The remote connector works with the included remote. This small doo-hickey sits between the iPod and your earphones to give you volume control along with play, pause, next track, previous track and hold functions. It even has a built-in clip. I guess this is good for joggers... I personally haven't used the remote much at all yet.

The earbuds that are included with the iPod have surprisingly good sound. Actually, the iPod itself is probably the best sounding MP3 player that I've yet to use. I'm very impressed and happy with the overall sound quality. Volume levels are more than adequate as well.

At the bottom of the iPod is the proprietary FireWire / USB / charging / docking station connector. Apple was kind enough to include a couple of plastic covers for this connector if you fear dirt and dust.

Speaking of the docking station, this is the first iPod to use one. It is a small plastic cradle that is heavy enough that you don't need to use two hands to insert or remove the iPod from it. A rubber bottom keeps the dock from scooting around your desk as you use it. On the back of the dock is the same connector as the one on the bottom of the iPod. Next to it, is a Line Out connector so that you can attach external speakers.

The iPod comes with a FireWire cable that has a 6 pin connector on one end. This is the larger sized FireWire connector. If you happen to have a computer with the smaller 4 pin connector, an adapter is included. The problem with using the adapter is that you won't be able to charge the iPod through the docking station. You'll have to unplug the cable and use it with the included AC adapter. Luckily, I had full-sized FireWire ports on my PC. Windows users that have USB, will need to purchase a separate cable ($19) from Apple in order to sync / charge with their PC. Instead of buying that cable, I would advise you to spring for a FireWire card instead... FireWire is faster than USB for transferring music to the iPod, and you can charge thru the same cable.

Before I get into the software side of the iPod, I just want to say that as far as design, this product is as close to perfect as you can probably get. It's a perfect size, shape and weight. Besides a color display, I don't think there is really anything that I would physically change about the iPod.  Well, I do wish there was a built-in FM radio, but oh well.... Also, so far I've found the battery life to be as rated: about 8hrs. No complaints there...

Now for the software part of the review... Although this latest generation of the iPod is compatible with both Mac and Windows systems, the Mac people have the upper hand in sooooo many ways. First of all, they have the iTunes music manager application which beats the pants off of Music Match for Windows users. Mac users can also encode their music into the AAC MPEG-4 format which makes smaller files while retaining quality sound. Windows users have to stick with MP3 right now.  Mac users can download and listen to Audible.com spoken word books and articles. Windows users can't... Mac people also have the iTunes store which lets you buy music and install it on their iPod with a simple click. We Windows users have...ummm.... nothing like that yet.

When I received my iPod, I wasn't going to install Music Match because I never really liked it.  But I went ahead and did so, so that I could go through a typical setup that a Windows person would go through when buying this MP3 player. Installation was simple enough. It consisted of installing the iPod manager program and Music Match. Once installed, an iPod manager icon appeared in the task tray. Right clicking gives the user the ability to see how much space is left on your iPod, mount and unmount it as a drive, and change the ability for Music Match to automatically pop up whenever you connect your player to the dock.

When you first connect the iPod to your computer, whether it be a Windows PC or a Mac, it initializes the hard drive. My 30GB unit had a total of 27.8GB available to me after the initialization. For some reason Mac users get a few extra megabytes available to them, as their units format out to 27.9GB. Once the drive is formatted, it's time to transfer your music!

Luckily for me, I had already started ripping my collection of CDs when I was working on the review of the Neuros. But my collect isn't small (over 200 discs), so I still had well over 150 or more to rip when I first received the iPod. Also lucky for me is the fact that I put a very fast TDK CDRW drive in my PC, so ripping and encoding a typical 10-12 track CD took less than 3mins. I spent an entire weekend feeding CDs into my 4 PCs. I used Windows Media Player with a plug-in from InterVideo on 2 PCs, and a freebie ripping app called NeoAudio on my two notebook PCs. I ripped all the tracks at 192kbps. When it was all said and done, I had over 3000 songs! Wow, that's a lot of music!

My first attempt at transferring the music to the iPod was successful. I used Music Match and did the transfer when I had two thirds of my collection ripped. Using FireWire, it still took a little while, but hey, it was over 2000 tracks! When I received my 2nd iPod (I got impatient and ordered a 2nd one when there was a delay on my first one... long story...), it took about 64mins to copy my entire 3000 song library over to the new empty iPod using FireWire. That is fast!

The trouble began once I had ripped more CDs and tried to sync again with Music Match. Although the application acted like it was copying the new tracks, they never actually showed up on the iPod. I tried syncing a couple more times and had the same problem, so I decided to try another syncing application called ephPod. ephPod is a free application that does an amazing job of syncing your music collection with the iPod. It even lets you sync some news headline sites like Slashdot to the iPod.

Even though ephPod works great on my PC, I have still had a few problems here and there with the iPod Manager program. Sometimes it seems frozen, and won't respond when I try to right click on it in the task tray. Rebooting always fixes this problem though. I think there is some flakiness going on, but since I don't sync my iPod as much as I do my PDA, it doesn't really bother me all that much.

The interface on the iPod is simple and intuitive. The main menu gives six options:

From the main menu, you can go into your playlists, browse, extras, settings, backlight and go to the now playing screen.

When you chose to browse, you can browse by artist, album, song, genre or even by composer. How ever you decide to browse, doing so will present you with another listing which you can scroll through. In the example below, I am browsing by album. Then by the songs in the album.

You can actually start playing music at any point in the browsing hierarchy. For example, if you press Play on the topmost level... on the Songs heading, it will start playing all the songs in your library one at a time. Or, if you press Play on an artist's name, it will play all the songs from that artist even if they have multiple albums. You have the ability to turn song shuffling on for either songs or albums.

While a song is playing, information about the song is displayed on the screen. The song title is on top, artist below it and album title below that. A graphical progress bar is displayed at the bottom of the screen. You can use the touch wheel to move to any location inside a song, which I think is pretty cool... although I don't typically use that feature.

I think the information shown on the screen is adequate. If I could add anything to the info, it would be to show the next song to be played.

There is also a built-in equalizer that you can turn on. The EQ has a bunch of different profiles that you can chose from depending on the type of music that you want to play. I found that some settings caused the player to sound like it was over driving the speakers. Although I fiddled with the settings off and on during my review, I felt the sound quality with the EQ turned off was perfectly fine to my ears.

Those of you that like to make playlists will be interested in knowing that you can't really create playlists directly on the iPod. You can create a temporary list, but it won't be synced to the PC. It will actually get wiped out when you sync. But, if you want to create one, you can easily do so by holding down the select button on a song title till it flashes. At that point, it will be added to the On-the-go playlist that is on the iPod.

Besides being able to play music, the iPod also has a few other built-in features that almost raise it to the level of a PDA.... sorta. It has a built-in clock with an alarm that can either beep (warning, this is very annoying) or play your favorite song. The problem with having it play a song as an alarm, is the fact that you'll need to attach the iPod to speakers in order to hear it go off... I doubt if most people sleep with their earbuds in :o)

There's also a sleep timer that you can use to turn the iPod off after 15 - 120mins of play. This is a cool feature that is better than counting sheep.

In addition to the clock, there is also a calendar and contacts database on the iPod. You can't input data using the iPod, but you can view the data. Unfortunately for Windows users, you can't yet automatically sync with Outlook or other PIMs. You can export your data as vCard and vCal files and copy them manually to the iPod folders though. Not exactly convenient for us yet.

There are even three games on the iPod. Solitaire, Breakout and Parachute. These games aren't super exciting, and are best played when you have absolutely nothing else to do.

Things I love about the iPod:
It's easy to use and doesn't require you to read a manual to figure out the interface. It's extremely fast. You can hold down the Play/Pause button to turn the unit off while in the middle of playing a song, tap the same button twice and it automatically powers on and starts playing from exactly where it left off. I'm not sure I know of any other MP3 players that remember their place in a song.

Things I don't love about the iPod:
Chrome back. No iTunes, or Audible.com support. Music Match... blech!

The iPod is now my constant companion. I listen to music during the day in my cube (day job), in the car going to and from home, and even right now as I sit in front of my PC writing this review. Take it from me, if you love music, you MUST get one of these players! It will really change the way you listen to your music. When you're in the mood for a certain song in your collection, you just scroll to it and boom, you're groovin. And contrary to what the record companies fear, my iPod has actually made me start buying CDs again to add to my collection. I received 4 new discs for my birthday, and am already making a list of some other must have albums. Now I need to find a case and an FM transmitter, and an add-on radio, and... oh boy! :o)

Price: $499.00 Search for best price here.

Pros:
It's an iPod, nuff said!
30gb storage, can be used as an external hard drive
Works with Windows and Macs
USB or FireWire
Great sound

Cons:
Expensive
Windows driver flakiness
Chrome back is a fingerprint magnet
Music Match software for Windows is crummy
Windows users don't have all the features that Mac users have

Update 11/17/03:
Since writing this review, Apple has come out with a Windows version of iTunes that syncs perfectly with the iPod, and now gives Windows users the same great functionality that Mac users have. Audible is supported as well.