Who owns an iPod?

I did a few comparisons and iTunes uses slightly less space than Java, and everything seems to go when it's switched off, apart from the helper thingie which seems to be a startup exe so it could probably be disabled without too much fuss.

Never had a problem with Java either (lovely country) so maybe I'm the wrong person to judge.

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I'm not a big fan of bloatware either. I'm only a short generation ahead of you, Yods, and I'm sorry, but people don't need to have *every* piece of technology at their fingertips 24/7. It is possible to live without access to a camera/phone/television/internet/camcorder for a whole day. Honest.

I've started counting on my commute to/from work, and I'm seeing about 20% of the drivers with cell phones against their ears. What, you can't stay off the phone for an entire commute?

Please. Get a headset.

Better yet, turn the damned thing off. The world won't end.

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Java slows down my computers a little too -- nothing dire (same with iTunes), just annoying.

And yes, I've already disabled all the iTunes stuff from starting on bootup. I'm fairly minimalistic in my computer usage. Learned that from my old DOS days before multitasking.

It's no big deal. By itself it's a minor inconvenience. But, coupled with the proprietary snobbiness of the iPods' behavior and the attitude of the Apple forum people (which even staunt Apple users have noticed), it leaves a bad taste.

Enough to make me think twice about buying another one if a PC-based one is similar.

I haven't had to use Apple's support yet (fingers crossed) though admit to being a bit of a Luddite where things like that are concerned...

Tragic fashion victims like meself need pitying sometimes.

Edit - I use mine a lot in the car too, which is probably why I don't feel the need for a player brimming with 'extras'.

You never struck me as a fashion victim, but hey, if you so say so.

Rep points to you for using the word "Luddite."

The only problem with the iPod in my opinion, is the battery. after a while it starts to work for less and less amounts of time b/ charges. so u have ot charge it more. Apple just had a class action suit against it for this and if you send them a claim saying that this has happened they will do 1 of 3 things: nothing, take your iPod and replace the battery, or if neccessary send you a new iPod. This all being said because i have an iPod, and I got a letter saying all of this. The other thing about the iPod is the way it is organized. I used on of those Dell things that they say is the match for the iPod, not so. I could figure it out but it was just to weird after getting used to an iPod. and the scroll wheel was much different and the volume control on the iPod is much better. Apple was very smart in the design. you can use the scroll wheel for almost anything, thats the way it was designed and it makes access to many dif/ things on the iPod a lot easier.
The other reason I like my iPod is because it has Solitaire.

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Wait, is this it?...

"Nervous twitch with a smiling heart loves two yellow Vanna smileys standing next to Steve Jobs' second chance at success?"

Ok, i'm not saying this is fact, just personal experience, iPods have rather low battery life, and eventually run out all together and die, leading to an expensive replacement which should be un necessary. And they all break, every iPod owner i've met has encountered some difficulty with their iPod. Due to this, most people i know have now changed their mind and bought the superior iRiver



I agree that not everyone wants or needs to play videos, but for the same price, it's an added novelty, even for just 20 seconds clips or whole films, even Tv series, something to pass time while travelling when music's got boring. Then there's the radio, the quality is fine, and it's great to be able to record from it. Also you can record externally, which i'll admit i havn't tried but i'm sure would be handy during gigs. The battery life is 16 hours, which is double the iPod? Design is simple and navigation is simple, you can find your songs easy as pie, on the downside i have yet to sort out set playlists. But i'm pretty sure it sounds better not sure how you can judge, but it's certainly as good as iPod. So why aren't more people buying iRivers, instead buying iPods? Many media reviews rank them higher than iPod as well.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...321048-6727868

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Why? One word: MOMENTUM.

is that a new version of the Ipod. I like mine better with the buttons built into the scroll wheel

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Again, this is true of any player which uses a lithium ion battery. Either the iRiver is using AAA batteries, in which case you have to take into account the inconvenience of buying new ones/changing them, or else it's using a lithium ion battery, in which case the exact same complaints apply. All this talk about battery replacement isn't a complaint about the iPod at all; there is a direct tradeoff for all such devices. User-replacable batteries are nice, but always make the device larger and heavier, and some people find the act of recharging and/or replacing batteries far more inconvenient than simply replacing one battery for a fee every year and a half.


"They all break"? Huh? How many are we talking about here, and what, specifically, were the problems? And what constitutes "some difficulty"? Because I've had "some" difficulty with pretty much every major product I've purchased.


It's not that it's just a nice little bonus; the presence of unwanted things can easily become a negative. I'd like my iPod less if I had more menus to comb through, or more features to scroll by that I didn't want. And I think it's unlikely that any significant added features have not come at the expense of something like sound quality, durability, etc.


The battery life for some older iPods is 8 hours, though you can't compare a new iRiver to an old iPod. The new iPods get 12 hours of battery life. The iPod Photo gets 15. And the iPod Minis get a whopping 18 hours on a single charge.

As for sound; I wouldn't know, personally, but what I've heard is that the iPod is popular largely because its sound is generally superior. From what I see it's the clear choice of audiophiles. Not that everyone needs such a high level of sound quality.


Those are user reviews from people who have bought the iRiver. If you visit the iPod's page on the same site (Amazon UK), you'll see the opposite.

You've got a fourth generation (4G) iPod. The one in the picture with the mechanical buttons is a 2G. The one that has the four buttons horizontally above the scroll wheel (rather than on the wheel, as with the 4G) is the 3G.

PT, what you're saying is essentially - 'my dad's bigger than your dad' even though you've never met my dad, merely heard about him from other guys who've seen him in the shower room...

The words iRiver and Superior do not go together. Superior to stuff that comes out of my ass, maybe, but nothing else.

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is there a first generation Ipod?

Yoda, i wasn't using Amazon has reference to media reviews, simply a link to the player.

Iriver does use a lithium battery, i guess i'll have to wait a while to see if it fails.

In regards to extra features being a nuisance, to listen to radio, you simply hold a button, and to play videos, you simply select the file and play it like any music.

How is the iPod for transferring music?
Does one need a Mac or Apple computer, i'm not too hot on technical stuff like that.

For more information from someone who knows more about waht they're talking about> http://www4.tomshardware.com/mobile/20041005/

At least 5 out of the 15 or so people i know with iPods have switched, and the rest appreciate the iriver at least.

You don't need a Mac to use an iPod. Most of the iPod owners I know are PC people. However, apparently the formatting needed to play music on on iPod isn't compatible with iTunes' biggest competitor, RealRhapsody. (In other words, if I buy a song from iTunes, I can't play it through my RealRhapsody software, and vice versa. To people like me, who use both, this can be a problem.)

To me it wasn't intuitive how to get music to play from my Shuffle on a second computer other than my main one. This is where the Apple forum people were so rude, implying that I was stealing music from somewhere else rather than just wanting to play my own legitimately purchased music on my second computer.

But, yes, iPods can be used in the PC world. They're banking on it.

So they work easily with PCs?

Yes, easily. With probably the same quirks they have in the Mac world. It's that USB thing. The only thing is that, when I plug my Shuffle into a USB port, the computer wants to know if I want to replace everything on the Shuffle with what's in my playlists.

If I've plugged the Shuffle into a computer that is NOT the main computer I use it with, it'll then ignore the Shuffle and not do anything. (This is part of that "we don't want you to steal your own music" stuff that Apple is so good at now.)

But again, that's not a PC thing. I think the Mac users were complaining about this stranglehold as well.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that every iPod owner I know uses a PC.