costela.net

Ok, right… so I gave up and bought an iPod.

I’m sure the net is filled to the brim (don’t you sometimes wish it had brims?) with posts about it, being the monopoly and the cult commodity that it is, but I must express my tiny nagging frustrations with it anyway.

It’s obviously a lot nicer on the eyes than my old iRiver. A lot thinner and lighter too, but I guess that’s the kind of improvement you should expect after 6 years (the iRiver was exactly as big and heavy as a 2nd generation iPod).
The battery-life is also like comparing a 20 something guy with a 98 year old with with a heart bypass in a marathon… the thing just goes, and goes, and goes…

Then come the problems, the first of all being the click-wheel. I’m sure a lot of people love it, it’s sleek and innovative (or at least was), but it’s just not for me. I’m a button guy, I like clicking something and knowing that it will do exactly one action, like, say, upping the volume by a set amount or skipping ahead a set amount of time. The click-wheel is just to sensitive for me, I keep having to activate “hold” to avoid messing with the volume when I have my hands in my pocket, and then deactivating it to be able to skip a song, something I used to do just by pressing the easy to feel button on the old iRiver, without even having to put the hands inside the pocket at all.

The other problems are the proprietary interface and cable. I loved how the iRiver was just an external HD, you just had to dump the songs in the “music” directory and be done with it, but now I have to use ipod-specific programs (the linux versions aren’t exactly fancy like iTunes, but they work) and carry the damn ipod cable whenever I think there might be a small chance of needing a sync or wanting to put some other files in it. Of course the upside of the whole monopoly deal is that almost anyone has an ipod cable nowadays, but it’s still not as ubiquitous as mini-USB cables, and I must say that there’s also one big advantage to this: the proprietary interface allows offloading the indexing task to the desktop application, meaning the iPod doesn’t have to rescan the music collection after a sync, so feels way snappier than the poor old iRiver.

Then we have some minor usability quirks. I got used to some features the iRiver had and really grew to like them a lot, incorporating them into my music listening habits, like for instance the ability to seamlessly change shuffle modes with just one button, switching between “all” and “directory” (which in my case meant “artist”).
I used to listen to my whole collection on random, and would switch to “artist random” when I felt like hearing more of something. This could be done with just one click, and wouldn’t stop the currently playing track. On the iPod you have to click the central key 3 times in order to access the shuffle mode, and even then you only have the “song” and “album” options, unable to shuffle artists.
This leads to another small problem: the whole directory idea behind the iRiver made it possible to organize your collection any way you saw fit, with any degree of granularity. Simply put, it was a sort of “power-user” device. The iPod locks you to the artist/album/track paradigm, with its advantages and disadvantages.

But the only thing that really annoys me is the lack of a “play next” or “queue” function. The “on the go” playlist is a nice feature and it has been suggested as a replacement, but it’s just not the same thing. I wanna be able to keep listening to random songs from my whole collection and simply specify what the next song should be, without leaving shuffle mode. Many people seem to have the same problem and I haven’t been able to find a suitable solution.
Right now I have to wait for the current track to stop, then browse for the one I want to hear, wait for it to finish, then browse back to the whole collection.
Why not add this to the menu you get when you hold down the center button while browsing? If only Apple had a suggestion box… perhaps in a future firmware update…

In the end I’m obviously satisfied with it and it’s clearly a very polished product, specially considering the lack of real competition, but I still feel I need some time to get used to it…