Review:Apple 30 GB iPod

From AJS.COM

Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Review by Aaron Sherman - AJS Reviews
Overall: A wonderful music/video player with a few gotchas: 8 out of 10

The Apple 30GB iPod is not the largest size Apple makes. That would be the 80GB version. So why did I buy the 30GB model? Frankly, I don't need something larger. I haven't quite used half of the storage yet, and I have all of the episodes of Tiki Bar TV, nearly 3000 songs from my extensive CD collection, dozens of podcasts (some video, like Tiki Bar) and a small collection of trailers. I just don't need 80GB of storage on one device.

The negative

What I don't like about the iPod is a small list. The UI hides some features (like turning on shuffle-by-song mode) in a top-level settings menu that's a pain to go back to when I want to switch modes. Small loss, since most of the time I can get by with just the universal "shuffle play my entire collection."

Also, the plastic on the front is scratch-resistant, which is nice, but the metal on the back scratches pretty much right away. You'll almost certainly want to get yourself a leather "PodFolio" case or the like for it.

The positive

Well, the hype is pretty much right. It's a great device that makes managing a huge music collection much more reasonable. The most positive thing I can say is that I never would have bothered with podcasts before, even though I could have run iTunes. podcasts opened up a new world to me that I didn't realize had developed. I'm now routinely listening to the BBC and several newspapers in the morning and loving it. I'm also paying attention to some comedy and other stuff that floats around out there from NASA, digg.com, and lots of other sources. Great stuff.

As for music. I bought a couple things on iTunes to check it out, but I still prefer buying a CD and ripping it with iTunes. The sound quality is what you would expect from a modern digital audio player. I did ditch the head-phones and picked up a pair of Philips HS430 Lightweight clip-ons which took some getting used to (I had to learn not to screw them onto my ear too tight), but they're very nice at work and walking around.

Overall, it's just a great little device and I couldn't be much happier.

The extras

The only thing that I felt I really had to buy (unlike the headphones and the case which I just got because I wanted them) was an A/V dock with remote. I really wanted to be able to go from iPod to TV and back trivially, and this lets me do just that. I can start watching a video on the iPod, then switch to the TV to show some friends, and all I have to do is plug it into the dock on top of the TV.