IPod Mini Review

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Since I’ve had my IPod Mini for a month now, and seeing how Apple’s just pulled it off of their website in favor of the new ever so sexy IPod Nano, I figure I better get my review out while it’s still got some value.

Now that both of my kids are old enough to be in school, that also means they are old enough for after school activities as well. Since I’m “home all day” I’ve been given the honorary title of “soccer mom“, and all of the privileges associated with the title, like bringing the girls to karate lessons, swimming classes, dance lessons, brownies, religion class, birthday parties and so on. So to make the most out of my waiting time I bought my IPod mostly to listen to podcasts. Yes I put music on it as well, but the majority of the time, it’s podcasts for me.

Since I wasn’t putting a lot of music on it the 4GB IPod mini was fine for me. Since green, pink, or baby blue would have given the other parents yet another reason to make fun of me, I went with the silver. Honestly I haven’t lusted for an Apple product since the Apple IIc in high school, however I’ve always thought Apple products were in a league of their own as far as looks and styling. The IPod mini is no exception, it’s sleek and looks a heck of a lot better than anything from Creative Zen or IRiver. IMHO I think the designers took it one step too far, yes it’s another dreaded IPod battery bitchfest. While I haven’t had to replace my IPod battery yet, and hopefully won’t have to anytime soon, I’m going to throw a complete hissy fit when I have to pay $70, because I can’t do it myself. Listen I know you guys wanted it slick with no lines, but EVERYBODY puts their IPod in a case, sock, or some other type of protective thingy. Nobody would see the line for the battery door, so please let’s stop being so anal about things ok?

The click wheel is an interesting little device. I like that it has a speaker behind it so you get audio feedback to the input from your finger. However moving your finger in a clockwise circle to go down and a counter clockwise circle to go up isn’t intuitive. Yes it’s easy to learn, and work with, but it’s not intuitive. Down equals down, right equals right, and so on. I’d chalk this up to an annoyance, and not a flaw.

Ok I’m probably going to be one of the few people in the world to say they hate the ITunes interface. Yes I hate the ITunes interface. First of all like every other piece of software it tries to be the center for all media files on your machine. Yes you can uncheck the options on install but why are they checked by default in the first place? All of my music sits on my file server, all 9,000 files that take up 60GB of space. There’s a lot of crap on their that I have no need to listen to on an even remotely frequent basis, or would want to put on my IPod even if it was capable of holding that much space. ITunes really seems to have a problem with you telling it where all the music is, but telling it you only want it to send a small tiny subset of the music to the IPod. So onto plan B, create a folder on my laptop and manually copy the files into it and tell IPod to sync only the files in that folder. Now the IPod will play MP3 files but they take up much more room than whatever bizarre format the IPod likes, and it continually pesters you to convert the files. Ok fine I let it convert the files, and low and behold they sound like crap. Great ,so I paid $200 to listen to crappy versions of my music. So I do a little test, and get my most recently purchased CD (the soundtrack to Batman Begins if you have to know) and let the ITunes software re-encode it to it’s native format. Now I listen to a lot of soundtracks and classical music, so I know I need a higher bit rate so I adjust it, and send it on it’s way. This time it’s sounds pretty good. Here’s the real kick in the ass, the files that were ripped directly and not converted were smaller in size. So if I want my music I’ve got to dig out all of the original CD’s and rerip the music using ITunes. After 2 hours of mumbling obscenities under my breath, I schlep out to the garage, rifle through the 3 boxes of CD’s, and dig out most of the one’s I want. Now I suppose if ITunes was the first piece of music software I owned, and I was ok with it being in charge of all my media files, and deciding the format my life would have been decidedly easier. However I don’t live and breathe in 7 colors, and if you want me to use your products don’t force those choices on me, ok. So ITunes software big thumbs down in my book.

Despite my extreme antipathy for the software, I still like my IPod mini. First of all listening to podcasts is incredibly cool. The radio world had better wake up and and become part of the podcast revolution. Internet radio stations are already taking a big chunk of their audiences, and podcasts are going to take even more. Because I have an ITrip (Griffin ITrip Review) I can even listen to podcasts in the car. I’m actually very happy with my IPod purchase and don’t feel any buyers remorse, and while it is a bit pricier than other options, I can still recommend buying one, if you can work around the software.

IPod Review Article Series

IPod Mini Review
IPod Mini Case Review
Griffin ITrip Review

Categories:( ipod | ipod.mini | ipod.nano | itunes | ipod.review)

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