Who Can Really Say?

Last year I posted some iPod Advice. Since that post is currently No. 2 in Google for the phrase "ipod advice", I thought I'd update it for those showing up almost daily for some help. Not that I'm Mr. Expert or anything.

But before I get to some thoughts, first some background. This household of three adults has eight (count 'em!) iPods. I have two 20 gig 4th generation iPods, one purchased in August of '04 and the 2nd in August of '05. The first one has a black and white screen, the second is an iPod Photo, with a color screen and the ability to deliver a slide show. Why two? I'll get to that.

One of my housemates (we'll call her "C") has 4 iPods, a 60 gig Video iPod, a 15 gig 3rd generation, a 4 gig iPod Nano, and a 1 gig Shuffle. The other housemate (we'll call her "K") also has a 3rd generation 15gig model, plus a 4 gig iPod mini . Eight iPods, and 139 gigabytes of storage!

Why so many? I can only speak for myself -- I had no plans to buy the 2nd iPod in August '05, but I was preparing to leave for vacation and my first iPod died, one year and 3 days after I purchased it, so I had no warranty protection. I was not happy -- but solved the immediate problem (going away for 10 days without portable music) by dumping another $300 down to buy my second iPod. In the year between the first and second purchase Apple had upgraded what one got for $300, so for the same price I got a color screen that can show photos.

In my earlier post I suggested that buying the extended warranty is a good idea and I still think it is. But do as I say, not as I do -- I still haven't purchased an extended warranty on iPod No. 2. You might consider, though, whether you should buy the extended warranty from Apple or from the vendor (such as Best Buy) that you might be using. I can't compare all of the differences between warranty offerings, but had I bought the Apple warranty I'd have had to return iPod No. 1 to Apple and I still wouldn't have had portable music for my vacation. Had I bought the extended warranty from Best Buy (where I bought No. 2), I could walk in the store, turn it in, and get a replacement on the spot, pretty much.

And by the way, iPod No. 1, as it turns out, wasn't dead at all. Upon returning from vacation, C (who is very Apple knowledgable) found a way to revive it by doing some online research.

One thing to keep in mind is that Apple keeps delivering improved iPods for the same price as the old model. Were I to spend $300 today on yet another iPod, I'd get a 30 gig Video iPod for the same money I spent to get a 20 gig black and white model in 2004 or a 20 gig color/photo model 4 months ago.

So which one is the best to buy? That all depends (mostly on you), but I'll give you my impressions. First, the Video iPod is pretty much all that it's cracked up to be.
C downloaded an episode of Lost from iTunes for $2. Last night we hooked up her Video iPod to my 32" CRT TV set (standard definition) and Lost looked and sounded great. The picture was very sharp -- had I not known the video source was an iPod I wouldn't have suspected anything.

Now, she'd also downloaded a copy of a Star Wars movie to compare the quality with Lost, and the movie was pretty poor -- bad enough to not waste my time trying to collect hot downloaded videos, even if I was so inclinded.

What I take away from this is that when you buy video from iTunes you're not simply getting something you can only watch on the small iPod Video screen -- you're buying something you can watch on a full TV too, which isn't a bad deal, considering that you can't generally buy TV shows by the episode that I'm aware of.

As for watching video on the iPod itself, I don't know that I'd really want to do that much because you have to hold the darn thing in your hand while you watch. I can imagine that getting pretty tiresome. But the screen is very bright, clear, and sharp -- the video looks great.

But even if you aren't interested in watching videos on what amounts to a miniature TV set you still get more space for music than you can shake a stick at, either 30 gigs for the $300 version or 60 gigs(!) for the $400 version. I've considered selling my two iPods on Ebay and then turning around to buy a video iPod myself if for no other reason than that a) it's got a larger screen which makes scrolling your music much easier and b) it has a 50% larger drive than my other models and c) oh hell -- it shows videos!

The Nano replaced the Mini earlier this year and in some ways this thing is even more impressive than the iPod Video. You can get up to 4 gigs of flash memory in a Nano, which makes it nearly indescructable. So the differences between the Nano and the full sized Video iPod is this -- $50 in price (between a 4 gig Nano and a 30 gig Video), 26 gigs of storage, and the fact that the Nano is very hard to kill. If you can fit your song collection into 4 gigs, or don't mind arranging playlists into 4 gig chunks that you can swap on and off the Nano using iTunes, then the Nano is for you. Oh -- and it stores and shows pictures on it's sharp color screen although let's face it, the screen is pretty small.

The Shuffle is the cheapest and smallest iPod, and it doesn't have a screen -- it's called a Shuffle because you dump songs on it and play them back in random order. Do you jog? Work out? Well then the Shuffle's for you -- it's probably more indestructable than the Nano. Buying for a child or young teen? You can't beat a Nano. Need more space or want the video capacity? Get the Video model.

I think I might have held a non-Apple mp3 player in my hand once, for about a minute. I think it was put out by Creative but I'm not sure. So I can't compare products outside Apple's line, except to say that in the look and feel department the iPod beat the other one hands down. Also keep in mind that one of the larger selling points for the iPod is Apple's iTunes store. I can't offer much about that either because 95% of the music on my iPod (2400+ songs and counting) is ripped from our personal CD collections. Apple's music is sold with a copy protection scheme the terms of which I'm not entirely familiar with. You can play the song on a limited number of platforms but I don't know the rules. Still, I'm told it isn't hard to strip the protection from the downloaded files if that's important to you for some reason.

So -- Mr. iPod Expert? No -- but I hope this helped.

[Linked to the Beltway Traffic Jam.]

UPDATE: Corrected an error -- we have eight, not nine iPods and 139, not 140 gigs of space. I credited K with a Shuffle that doesn't exist.