by Farlsborough » Oct 9th, '06, 23:24
Yeah, it's now more fashionable to slate iPods than it is to own one! Still, my 60GB photo does me well. It's my 2nd in a way, I had to send the first one back, but hey - they didn't quibble, so I'm happy.
The click wheel interface is just so intuitive! The battery life is fine so far, you just have to follow some common lithium battery sense: when you first get it, charge it right up, then let it run right down, then charge it right up again and afterwards charge it back to full when it reaches about 40% empty if poss. Periodically let it run right down and charge it right up again, and it should last as long as anything else using a modern rechargeable battery.
I think people mis-use the iPod and expect to get top battery life. It's hard drive based (well, the larger ones are) so it's got to mechanically move bits every time you select a new song. But when you queue up songs, say put an album on or let it run through an album/artist/genre/whole collection shuffle, it reads the songs once and puts them on a temporary flash memory. If you do this most of the time, and set the back light to minimal settings (ie. goes off not long after you stop touching the wheel), you are likely to have no problems with battery life. If however you belong to the MTV (or rather, ADHD...) generation and choose a song, listen to 80% of it then put on the back light to choose another song etc etc, it has to access the HD every few minutes plus use the backlight more = "poor battery life". This will be the same for all HD (ie. large capacity) mp3 players - until they find a way to make compact, large capacity flash memory. The nanos are flash based memory so should be better for this.
My only beef with iPods is iTunes, or rather, the limitations Apple imposes. This is a bit frustrating, but there are a wealth of help forums out there, and with a fine selection of 3rd party software out there (iPod plugins for die-hard Winamp users, Ephpod, Sharepod and iGadget to name a few) it's really not that challenging to do anything you want with them.
Go 'Pods!