An ode to my iPod video
How do I love my iPod video? Let me count the ways. Seriously, I adore this small piece of technology. It's nearly 3 years old now -- I ordered it the first day it was available -- and this 5th generation 30GB iPod video unit is still chugging along and making our lives better.
First and foremost, it is an absolutely fab music player. Apple did it right. My iPod offers all the audio control I could ask for including my much-beloved parental controls that keep my kids from blasting out their ear drums. On behalf of parents everywhere, thank you Apple for giving my kids' ears a chance to grow up.
I'm not a serious audiophile, fussing about detailed audio reproduction. I have listened to music of every genre, podcasts, audio books and so forth on this thing and it still sounds great.
The iPod video is the perfect size. It fits in my hand and my pocket, my purse and my backpack. It's quite a bit smaller and lighter than my iPhone despite its onboard hard drive.
More of my overflowing praise for the iPod video below...
The click wheel on the iPod lets me control playback from my pocket. I can change the volume and click back and forth between tracks without ever looking. And it does this without ever making me wear earbuds, a headset style that I loathe.
I love my iPod's video out features. I have a rigged-up hacked-together video system in my car, all based on the fact that my 5G iPod can output video through the ear jack using a standard cable. Hundreds of hours of kids video have passed through my iPod. My son thinks of it as a SpongeBob dispensing device.
My iPod can play games. Sure, most of the games are pretty limited but we're fond of the quizzes and miniature golf and mahjongg. And my daughter plays Phase to a Hannah Montana soundtrack.
My iPod is a portable hard drive too. I've used it to ferry around work folders and medical records over the years. And it's been modded at one time to provide guided tours for a school project -- because it could.
My iPod can record audio. I bought one of those memo microphones for a TUAW story about the iPod touch a while back. But because the touch requires pre-amplification, that mic found a home on my iPod video instead. Without installing any special software, I can record memos on my iPod and they sync right into iTunes. Is that handy or what?
My iPod is a whiz at slide shows. I can hook up the same (free) cable to the iPod that I use in my car and project our latest iPhotos on our TV. I checked a box in iTunes a few years ago and now I don't even think about it. The photos are there.
And have I gone on enough about the 30GB of hard drive storage? That's umpteen hours of podcasts, photos, Top Chef episodes, music, audio books and so forth. We will not run low on Avatar and Hannah Montana any time soon.
My iPod is insanely durable. This baby has been dropped, kicked, chewed, undercharged, overcharged, punted, and worse. My then-two-year-old put it through the paces and it's still producing high-quality SpongeBob three years later as he gets ready to head off to Kindergarten.
Before the iPod video, I didn't have much use for iPods. They were sweet, they did music but they just didn't fit my lifestyle. The second I saw the video model though, it clicked. This was the one. The promised iPod. The right fit.
And it was.
(Yay Apple.)
Feel free to join in the gushing iPod love in the comments.
