Apple iPod Photo 40 GB

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Apple iPod Photo 40 GB

Aalaap Ghag, Jan 20, 2005 0000 hrs IST

The latest incarnation, the iPod Photo, features a bright color display and lets you view photos along with music

Compact, Great sound quality, Photos, Yeah all that stuff

Only photo-support is quite late in this day and age, Expensive

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On October 22nd, 2001, the engineers and marketing guys at Apple were busy going over the details of a product launch scheduled to take place the next day. A product so revolutionary, it would completely replace the people's perception of portable music, become a worldwide style statement and also earn the company a lot of money. And it did. The little 5 GB hard disk-based MP3 player went on to become a phenomenon that almost rivaled the pertinence of MP3 itself.

Since then, Apple has made a few notable revisions to its blockbuster iPod like higher capacity, better control (the click-wheel is too smooth to let go!) and a smaller iPod mini. The latest incarnation, the iPod Photo, features a bright color display and lets you view photo slideshows along with music at the back. But with the current breakneck pace of technological advancement, it's tough to imagine that all Apple could do in almost five years is manage to make a portable music player that lets you view photos. Video is nothing new. Smaller companies like Archos, DMS and Transcend have done it, so what's keeping Apple, the pioneers of high-capacity portable music players?

So here we're still with a great sounding portable MP3 player, that also lets you view photo slideshows and if you want, play music in the background. It has a TV out feature so you can sit back with your entire family or group of friends and enjoy the photos. The quality, as is with the MP3 counterpart of all the iPods, is fantastic. During a TV slideshow, the entire TV screen is used for the image and the iPod screen shows that image in the center, as well as thumbnails of the previous and the next images, which I found to be quite useful. The slideshow delay can be adjusted. So far, so good.

The click-wheel retains the innovation in the iPod Mini, where the back/next/menu/play buttons are at four points of the wheel and not external like the earlier iPods. If there's anything I wholeheartedly love about the iPod (apart from the sound quality), it is the smooth touch-sensitive click-wheel. Scrolling through several thousands of photo thumbnails is even more gratifying than scrolling through those many MP3s. It's fast, it looks good and it feels great!

There are color versions of Bricks, Solitaire and a new Parachute game, which is a Paratrooper clone. It's fun to use the click-wheel to control the cannon, but you have to use the center button to fire and that isn't the most comfortable configuration. But there isn't any other button that can be assigned to fire, so there's little that the designers could have done.

The audio and video cables both fit into the same stereo jack, stereo and a triple-stereo respectively. The video cable is a standard AV cable, but the dock that came with the iPod also has S-Video out.

The iPod connects to your PC or Mac via USB or FireWire. Like all the previous iPods, it shows up as a removable drive and you can drag-and-drop any type of file onto it, effectively making it a portable storage medium. However, the MP3 files you drop into the player are not playable as they do not show up in the iPod playlists. You need to use iTunes to transfer your music. This is something I've always found to be a little inconvenient. Same is the case with photos, so basically you can't plug a digital camera into it and pull all the images, which would be very useful for photographers on the move. Some people may find the iTunes method a little easy because of the GUI being available for the transfer process, but copy-paste or drag-and-drop just works better for me. And I don't want to install iTunes!

And it's expensive!!! Rs. 34,100 for the 40 GB version and Rs. 41,700 for the 60 GB version! I know what Ameya is going to say. It's not expensive without reason. It's a style statement. It's an iPod. But "crikey!" is all I have to say!

Test Unit Sourced From: Apple India.