Apple iPod 20GB Review

Overall Rating

It has a large, bright and multi-functional screen. Firewire connectivity is a plus, and an enormous amount of storage space.

Poor sound quality, controls are not tactile enough, and volume adjustment is too sensitive. Short battery life. (relative to other players) REQUIRES iTunes to manage music library.... iTunes is not very intuitive (in my opinion).

I purchased a 20GB Apple iPod Photo and returned it a day later. Some of the downsides I found to the player were specific to me alone, and shouldn't be counted against the iPod in general. I found that 20GB has far too much storage space, and I can't fill it with songs that I will actually listen to. The iPod is also fairly small, considering its storage capacity, but still too large for me. I don't have enormous hands but they're not small either, and with the iPod and my hand in my pocket at the same time, I had no room to use the controls easily, thus I would need a remote. These 2 reasons are specific to me. The rest are not.

The iPod is too smooth. Without looking at it, in my pocket, I couldn't tell if I was actually pushing on a button, and many times upon pulling it out of my pocket I realized I was pressing on the back of the device! The touch wheel is a bit too sensitive and sometimes, while walking, the volume would go up without my touching it. I realize there's a hold button to combat this but that should be used by choice, not necessity. The battery life of the iPod is short too, even the iPod shuffle only lasts 12-15 hours, whereas the Sony NWE407 Walkman (flash memory) or the NetMD last forever on a single charge, or in the MD's case, an AA battery (something like 50 hours). As far as I'm concerned Sony's R & D in battery technology was money well spent!

Lastly, and this is the biggest one, the iPod's sound quality was awful. I'm comparing it to my previous portable, the Sony NetMD. No matter what EQ setting I chose, I could never seem to get a full range of sound, particularly bass. If I chose a setting with increased bass it seemed to bottom-out the headphones, causing some distortion. Even different headphones (the same ones I used with the MD player) didn't help. After returning my iPod, I purchased a Sony NWE407 1GB flash player and I am VERY impressed. The sound it produces is amazing.

One last personal beef is that iTunes is not very intuitive. It seems like Apple likes to dumb things down for their users, and iTunes is evidence of this (in my opinion). I have a fairly large collection of music that I have no problem managing on my own on the hard disk, I don't need iTunes to do it for me. The Sony's drag-and-drop approach to adding music is beautiful, simple, and intuitive to any computer user, using folders to group songs into playlists. That was a long rant. I'm done now.