For years, my friends tell me how great the iPod is and as a music lover, I always wonder why I didn’t get an iPod for my musics. So I decided to buy one as my X’mas gift last year. Before the actual purchase I did a very scientific evaluation. I entered the storage size, weight, volume (!) and price of the iPod Nano, Touch and 80G / 160G Classics into a spreadsheet along with same figures of my Archos and Dopod (my trusty digital wallet and smartphone).
Then I calculated the weight per song, volume per song and cost per song (to store in iPod), and I also performed sensitivity analysis to tell what device is the best buy if I have 2,000, 4,000, 10,000, or 20,000 songs to store to it.
The result of this geeky sophisticated analysis was I needed a black iPod Classic 80G. Why the analysis could tell what color I needed ? I don’t have a clue … 
But then the trouble beings … first I have trouble to make the iPod recognize the song details if those are not in English … I have to retype hundreds of songs’ title, album and artist information. In a word, painful.
The second issue is without an iTunes store in my country, I have no easy way to get the cover art to the iTunes and iPod. After lots of searching, evaluation I eventually installed a Yahoo Widget – iTunes Companion that will automatically download the album art from Amazon.
The most recent trouble is after just 3 weeks of usage, my iPod can no longer play songs smoothly – it will play one song, and refuse to play the next even I press the next button. Again, I searched numerous forums to find the ins and outs of it. Finally, I found a way to reset the iPod and solved the problem (for now):
- Toggle the Hold switch on and off
- Press and hold the Menu and Center (Select) buttons simultaneously until the Apple logo appears (about 6 to 10 seconds).
- You will see the Apple Logo appear and your iPod will come to life with a lit screen. If this does not happen please within 2 mintues please repeat steps 1 and 2.
A looooong story, but if you are considering to buy an iPod … re-read this post.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
with my consultation, my wife bought a Creative Zen 4GB last week. Except the common appearance, Zen gives out 2.5″ TFT with 16.5M color, “zero-learning” UI, fast response time (than Samsung)…pretty cool.
why we won’t choose iPod, well, FM radio is definitely in my wife’s functional requirement list.
what’s next?
a wonderful earphone < $300, that’s my budget.
highly recommended, just follow your feeling when you desire to buy another gadget(s) next time…forget those clumsy algorithm…enjoy.
It’s bloody obvious that my gut feel was to buy iPod, but just need some ways to justify the decision
Creative Zen is a good gadget, just I have to pave the way to buy music online … and iTunes is one possible future. And 4G is too small for my music collection
For headphone, I suggest to buy Shure … earphone with superb sound.
Thanks for the recommendation. Btw, I do think your music library…counting in TB, not GB…maybe richer than “3 music store”…