Friday, June 16, 2006

My iPod

I have a love/hate relationship with my 5G iPod, the one with video. I love that it's compact and goes anywhere, can hold several days worth of songs, can show videos when I'm on a plane or in the car, it's relativily easy to use, and the video looks great! But there are some glaring problems (some of which seem easy to fix) with it, too:

1) It's too hard to get movies onto the iPod. Granted, Apple doesn't advertise you can watch movies on it, but since it is a video player, it's sorta implied. Wrong. The Apple Music Store doesn't have movies. Sure, you can buy TV shows from the Apple Music Store, but at $2 a show, an entire season usually costs more than a DVD box set. Which means you must convert the movies yourself, and it's slow and requires you to find third-party software.

2) The Apple Music Store has the option of blending songs together at the breaks, rather than leave a second or two gap between songs. The makes a playlist seem more like a radio broadcast. Yet, the iPod doesn't have this feature. It's probably one of the most requested features on the forums I've seen.

3) When I create a playlist, sometimes I'd like to shuffle it, sometimes not. Unfortunately, the iPod seems to only have a global shuffle setting and it's a pain to navigate to it and turn it on/off.

4) The scroll wheel sensitivity needs to be adjustable. It's aggravating when you highlight something and raise your finger to hit the selector button only to have the selection move as your lift your finger.

I wish Apple and Sirius would team up and build an iPod that could receive Sirius satellite radio transmissions. Now that would be awesome.

Overall, I'd rate myself mostly satified with my iPod, but I don't think it comes close to living up to the hype.

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