Tim Coughlin's Blog: Review of the New 5G iPod ‘video’.

I have owned the new iPod ‘video’ for the last few weeks and I thought I would share my experiences of the product. I won’t pretend I can compete with the excellent review at ilounge.com, but nonetheless I am going to push on with my feelings about the newest addition to the iPod family.

First and foremost the iPod remains a product dedicated to the listening and enjoyment of music. In this respect it differentiates itself little over its predecessors, gaining a few relatively small advantages. The first of these is that with the increase in screen size, the album art can be viewed better than before. Secondly there are reports that this latest update to the iPod ushers in a new gold standard for iPod audio quality only matched by the shuffle. Having owned a 3G, 4G, nano, shuffle and 5G I can say that subjectively there is very little difference to be heard between all these iPods. This is especially true if using the supplied (and as usual disappointing) ear buds. Worth mentioning is that this iPod does seem to get rid of the problem of hard drive ‘static’ noise when skipping between tracks. I never really found this to be an issue but I know it was to some, so its a good thing it has finally been banished.

Another area in which this iPod picks up the baton of its predecessor is in that of photo functionality. In this area the iPod has picked up a couple of improvements. The most obvious of these is that a series of transitions have been added that were not previously available, including the popular ‘page flip’ and ‘cube’. Admittedly this is just eye candy, but it is pretty cool especially when outputted to a TV. The second improvement again relates to the increased screen size and quality. The pictures on the built in screen look excellent as do the transitions, making the experience of sharing pictures on the iPod much more viable than in the previous model.

Obviously there is one significant feature which I have not mentioned as yet. This new iPod is capable of playing video, both on its built in screen and on a connected TV. This is big news, and I think a lot more of this will be made in both future versions of the iPod and iTunes. As it stands this feature is an adjunct to the iPod as a music player, and is not intended to make the iPod a true multimedia platform .... not yet anyway.
The first experience I had with video was with downloading the music video ‘Nelly - Ride Wit Me’ from the iTMS for the princely sum of £1.89. Before I go on I will register my irritation that the UK is paying more than any other country for the services on the iTMS. Indeed the gap has widened with video content, and I dread to think what we will be charged when TV shows make it onto out store. That aside, the download was painless enough and the video transferred to my iPod with no problems.
The first thing I noticed when I played the video was that it was in a widescreen format, not the native 320x240 resolution of the iPod screen. Because of this, the display size was effectively halved making the video look quite tiny. Here we have the first problem that the iPod is going to face in the future. All TVs and almost all Macs now ship with a widescreen display. If Apple is going to make a serious play for multimedia distribution it is going to have to supply all of its video in widescreen, but in doing so it is going to create a problem for iPod users. It attempts to rectify the issue by making a widescreen on/off option available in the ‘video settings’ screen. This is not ideal however, because you of course loose a block of video from either side of the original. I don’t see an easy resolution to this presenting itself, but its not my problem to solve! Ignoring this the quality of this first video purchase was not bad at all. It was smooth and the colors were good. There was evidence in the picture that it was heavily compressed however, and so in truth I was a little disappointed.
The story does not end there however. The iPod does not only support content from the iTMS, but can play any file provided it is converted to the correct format using Quicktime (painfully slow) or any other appropriate software. The iPod is commonly quoted as supporting video up to a resolution of 320x240 for h.264 and 480x480 for Mpeg4, but this is not actually true, at least not regarding Mpeg4. Using Handbrake I ripped a copy of Love Actually I had on DVD to a resolution of 704x304 . This played smoothly on the iPod, and more importantly when outputted to a TV screen it looked excellent. From a relatively near sofa I could not tell the difference between it and the dvd (using a 30” widescreen).
When taking this into account the iPod becomes a more attractive product from a video perspective. It will indeed be a pain converting content to put on the device, but it is important that it can be done to a quality which by all accounts is rather good. I would also speculate that this could be the beginning of a new format to sweep the Bittorrent and Kazza networks, iPod ready, high quality files. If this comes to pass, Apple’s addition of TV shows to the iTMS could be significantly undermined, something I am not bothered about personally given the excessive pricing (I rather suspect the blame for this lies with the content providers rather than Apple).

The new iPod carries a few more surprises and features which deserve a mention. This the the first large iPod the come in plain black (the U2 iPod had a red clickwheel), and I think this is a welcome addition to the line up. I myself opted for the black because in my opinion video looks better on the screen with a dark surround.
Sadly the iPod no longer supports firewire. I believe this decision was taken because the removal of firewire allows hardware to be taken out of the iPod making it both smaller and cheaper. However, it is a pain the backside for users who do not have USB 2.0 on their computers, as i don’t on my first generation 12” powerbook. I would say that using USB 1.0 is not as dire as some people make out and unless you extensively use the iPod as an external drive there should not be a problem. I have found it an irritation, nothing more.
A few extras have been made to the software, which are nice though none of them are groundbreaking. They are the addition of multiple time-zone clocks, a stopwatch and a screen lock. I can’t say that I have made use of any of them but it is possible that they will be useful to other people, and their inclusion is certainly no cause for complaint.
A couple of other irritations have crept in to this update to the iPod. The first, one which could be quite significant to some people, is the omission of the peripheral port on the top of the device. I am not sure why Apple would drop this, but it kills support for quite a number of devices including the iTrip. Second is that on many of units the battery indicator is very inaccurate. I have found that despite a full charge the iPod can show my remaining battery to be in the red. On using the device however, the battery DOES perform to specifications and I typically get over 14 hours of playback from the 30Gb model. This software glitch will hopefully be remedied in a future firmware update but no further information on the issue has been forthcoming.
I will end by commenting on the recent ‘screen scratching’ stories. In my experience this iPod is equally susceptible to scratching as previous models and I would recommend using the included pouch to protect the device.

Overall I am very happy with the new iPod and I think it offers a worthwhile upgrade to users of the 4G iPod including the photo version. The main benefits are the great quality screen, the larger capacity for the same price and the inclusion of embryonic video support. The cons are the removal of firewire support and peripheral connector, and the dodgy battery indicator.

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Saturday, November 26, 2005

Review of the New 5G iPod ‘video’.

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