Brent's Two Cents

Arrival

It finally got here. After months of hesitation and weeks of post-decision waiting, my 30G iPod arrived on Tuesday. Everyone knows all the great things about the iPod, so I'm going to report on the problems with it.

• I absolutely love the look, shape and feel of the device. In fact, it looks so good that you just want to hold it. But when you hold it, you get fingerprints all over it's nice shiny back, ruining the esthetics of the device.
• I have the dock hooked up to some speakers, so I can listen to the iPod at my desk. When the iPod sits in its dock, I find it a little tough to navigate with the scroll wheel. It seems like sometimes it just doesn't notice me touching it.
• I find the display quite difficult to read without the backlighting on.
• The little earbud covers were hard to put on.
• I always get the left and right earbuds mixed up. :-)
• I haven't been able to figure out how to consistently seek back and forward in a track using the scroll wheel. I might have to read the manual.
• Sometimes when I put the iPod into the dock, the "don't disconnect" message comes up and stays there until I launch iTunes and hit the eject button. That's really annoying, because I know that it's not doing anything.

Now, these minor negative points account for something like 1% of the total experience of using the iPod. I've worked with a lot of digital audio players in the last couple of years, and I'd never consider making a list like this for them because they're uniformly horrible, ugly and difficult to use -- the lists would be too long. The iPod puts them all to shame. Now, if only it would record.

Posted by Brent Marykuca at May 15, 2003 09:42 AM