Back in January, staring at a sheaf of plane and train tickets, imagining long stretches of unconnected tedium that lay ahead en route from A to B, I decided to buy a video Ipod. No way in hell I was going to like, sit there and not have constant access to digital entertainment, and certainly no way in hell I’d be so last-millennium and super-un-agile as to haul around a bunch of bulky web page prototypes with which to fill the seconds.
The day before I left I lobbed a bunch of TV shows and movies at this wonderful thing, synced up the ipod with the desktop computer, and tucked it into the carryon. All set.
On the train up to Paris I was three quarters of the way through the first movie, just coming to terms with how silly it feels to hold a device eight inches from your face and still strain to see anything, when the battery ran out. Grnk. Once in Paris, I plugged the Ipod into my laptop for a recharge, handily forgetting that it had its preferences set to ‘automatically updates songs and playlists’, which it went ahead and did, taking the laptop’s empty Itunes library as its cue to wipe itself clean. Double Grnk.
So: screen ridiculously small, battery doesn’t last long enough to watch anything, extraordinary vigilance required to prevent mass file deletion when moving from one computer to another, lucite case will scratch if you so much as breathe on it, clickwheel requires about an ounce too much pressure to work.
I’m just sayin’.
7 Comments
Yeah, I agree with your reaction to the screen; Steve Jobs said there was no headphone equivalent for video and thats why Apple wasn’t doing a video iPod. That was a few years ago. Nothing changed, technology-wise, but Apple’s position did, and I think the old Jobs was right.
Because you don’t feel ridiculous enough already (holding the screen eight inches from your face), here’s yet another device you can lug around to help you out with that ‘battery issue’: the Solio – on the plus side, you’ll look like you’re packing a mini-radar, or possibly some sort of Ghostbuster gadget…
Poor baby.
Finally someone is not praising the iPod Video. I was already starting to think it was a God present to us stupid humans or it came w/it’s own RDF built-in.And reading this remember me when the rumors were up for such device and SJ would come up and say that “nobody would want to watch videos in a small screen”. Just like how integrated graphics were demonized just until few days ago…
PSP! The Logitech case makes a great stand. We watched The Warriors and Big Trouble in Little China on a cross-country flight. No battery issues, and the screen is big enough for two reclining in coach.
Holy crap, you made my day! I actually RETURNED my video ipod to Apple about 5 days after I bought it. Sucker scratched faster than a NYC DJ, and had the battery life of a solar powered dumptruck at night. Ugh. You’d think, after the 5th generation, they could at least make it not suck, especially for the retarded amounts of money it costs (4 bills… I’m just sayin’).
Meh. Feelin ya on the ‘auto update’.
Wiped a friends ipod clean by accident once because of that… :-/