iPod Photo w/ Pictures

At then end of October, Apple released a new member of the iPod family; iPod Photo. Rumors have been swirling around an iPod with a color screen and photo capabilities ever since the iPod’s inception but the rumors finally came true when Steve Jobs took the stage with U2 and The Edge for another music related event sponsored by Apple. iPod Photo was the most amazing announcement and is the best iPod yet. Aside from the color screen and photo viewing features, it has numerous additional features, settings and all of the bugs found in third and fourth generation iPods have been squashed.

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Packaging always amazes me. Apple has used the same size box for the 1st-4th generation iPods and now the iPod photo w/ larger dock, Firewire, USB 2.0, power brick and the A/V Cable still manages to fit in a small box. There is no need to read the manual. Simply take the iPod out and turn it on. My mouth dropped to the floor when a silver Apple logo similar to the one found in the “About this Computer” menu in OS X 10.3. You have a choice of watching in awe as this beautiful vibrant colored logo with a black background shows on the screen or plugging the dock up to your computer and installing the software; iTunes 4.7 and iPod Photo Update 1.0.

Holding the 500-600 dollar device in your hands you really don’t see a difference between this and the 4th generation iPod. Same headphone jack and dock connector, it is the same size just a bit heavier. Other than that, no obvious differences. Suddenly, you see the screen light up prompting you for a default language and your eyes grow wide. The screen is more vibrant than a cell phone, Pocket PC or even a Game Boy. With the backlight off, you can see around 256 shades of color; when the backlight is on, the screen comes alive. Keep in mind when you are listening to music in daylight you don’t need the backlight so don’t worry, the screen is easily more crisp and vibrant than the other iPods even with the backlight off. To enjoy pictures and album art you will need to have the backlight on.

4th Gen iPod owners, the transition will be easy. The Music menu is at the top and under that is Photos, Extras, Settings and Backlight. Before you start messing with things, plug it into your computer and iTunes 4.7 fires up. You sync all of your music (depending on music size and size of iPod), and then it syncs your iPhoto Library. If you do not run iPhoto or do not have iPhoto 4.0.3 installed, you are asked to load iTunes Preferences and choose what folder you would like to load in the pictures area. It is best to choose iPhoto Library and begins the long grueling process of syncing music and at the same time, iTunes is compressing all of your pictures into thumbnail database files. The database files hold roughly 500 pictures each all in small format pictures. I had 2250 photos so I have 5 database files. A “Get Info” on the “thumbs” folder said the five databases consisted of 6.5 gigabytes of data. This is just the thumbnail, not including the full resolution pictures. The full size library was only half at 3 gigabytes, which made my scratch my head.

ITunes has to be getting very bloated since it is now using QuickTime plugins to compress photos as well. We knew it could display album art but iTunes-handling photos is just scary. I have received emails asking if the iPhoto displays motion gifs. It will give you an error saying, “The file xxxxx.gif is not a supported format and cannot be loaded on the iPod at this time”. The answer is no and that goes for some other more obscure formats as well. I am glad the majors are supported; jpeg, gif, tiff, png, psd, but camera raw is not included in that since the files are huge. Be prepared to wait a while for the first iPod Photo sync to complete. Might as well fire up iSync as well and put calendars and Address Book on there.

Once the iPod is done, eject it and try out the photos. You can create sub folders by creating a folder in “Pictures” called “Slideshow 1” then putting full size photos exported from iPhoto and then sync the iPod Photo and that folder will show up. Keep in mind the iPod will fill up very fast doing this but as of now, it does not support aliases. If you select, iPhoto Library” on the iPod, it loads all of the thumbnails and you can scroll through them a page a second if you are good with the scroll wheel. Find an image you want and select it. Within half a second, the image displays and then you can scroll or use the right and left track arrows to scroll through the full resolution images. Thumbing through these is just as fast as in thumbnail mode. You can make a movie by taking pictures of someone walking and going through them fast on the iPod. It looks like they are moving so for those of you wanting movies on the iPod, you will have to settle for extracting each frame out of a movie and playing it that way.

After you have set up a slideshow, set the music timing and other settings; hit the play button and the movie begins. The transitions are pretty lame but ok for a device with a slow processor. Plug the A/V cable into the headphone jack and into the Television or VCR. You can also export as S-Video by plugging the iPod into the dock and using an S-Video cable from the dock connector to your TV. Apple states a 15-hour batter life for typical music usage and only 5 hours in slideshow mode. The number drops three fold due to the large size of photos. With only 32 megabytes of onboard RAM, the iPod Photo is constantly spinning its Hard Drive to keep load times slow and photo quality high. They could squeeze more battery out of it if the photo resolution was made lower, but I am glad Apple stuck with high quality. Either way, the photo viewing is exactly with Apple’s style and its ease of use is great. Without even using the manual, I was using the slideshow and had it plugged into my TV.

You can select to play the slideshow on the iPod only and the music through the headphones or select to go out to TV. This is great if you are with friends and want to show them the pictures w/ transitions without the use of a TV. In A/V slideshow mode, the Television shows just the photos w/ transitions and has music playing through the speakers. The A/V cable comes through the headphones jacks and in an RCA style (Red White and Yellow) plugs into your Receiver, TV, or VCR. As the TV displays the slideshow, the iPod’s screen shows the current photo half size and the previous and next photos quarter size. This is great; just in case those nude pix from last year’s spring break are coming up, you can pause the show and skip past the pictures. The scroll wheel does not affect your slideshow while in that mode; it will raise and lower the volume of the track playing. The final cool feature is the Play / Pause button. When you hit Pause, the TV will show a transparent pause button and the same Play button when you hit the Play Button. This visual notification is a great addition to the slideshow and helps the user know that it is paused.

Some features iPod Photo is missing are many. The ease of use and basic functions are great for the average PC user, but Power Users like to hit button combinations and see things happen that are more or less hidden. For example, while in Slideshow mode you can’t change the audio track playing in the playlist. I would like to hold down left or right arrows and change tracks. It would also be nice to scroll through in slideshow mode by holding down select and turning the scroll wheel. Another feature is pausing a slide show and continuing it after going back and changing settings. The root of “Photos” should have an option even after days that says, “continue slide show”. If you start slideshow again than that is discarded. It would also be nice to save slideshows with their music track, time per slide and more. Some key features which may never come is the ability to create / delete slideshows on the iPod. Holding down the select button over a thumbnail will add that photo to its own “photos” playlist. You can save / delete those playlists. You should also be able to delete photos entirely from the library and iTunes reflect those changes during sync. Finally, the ability to rate a photo is not even there. This is a feature I was looking forward to using and is available in iPhoto but non-existent on this iPod; a saddening feeling indeed.

One feature that is not too celebrated is display of Album Art in the currently playing track. The lack of coverage on this feature is good because Apple did a poor job on the development of this. I have wanted this feature forever and when you are playing a son w/ album art the title is off centered with the album art displayed beside it. If the song lacks album art, the display looks like a standard song being played, and there is no white space or anything signifying there should be album art displayed. That is good but could Apple have done it any other way? That is just a given. The problem lies when you want to view the album art full screen. I did not want this feature anyway but Apple added it without much thought. IPod owners know clicking the center button while playing a song does two things; Scroll Forward, and Rate the song. Apple added a new feature, which is a full screen display of the Album cover. Great idea, but it is the first thing that comes up when you click the center button. Those of us that like to rate our songs quickly or fast forward when there is 30 seconds left in the song and we are tired of the chorus playing, we are left in the dust. There is a short display to display the art full screen, so I click twice then start scrolling to fast forward and nothing happens. I like down and it is still on album mode. It just causes many problems. My suggestion is displaying full screen album art by holding down the center button while in the “now playing” screen. That button does not do anything anyway in that mode; Album art is nice, but poorly executed. One more addition would be a sub menu in the “Photos” area that says “Album Art” It is a gallery of all of your iPods album art. People ask you what Cds you have on there, just load the gallery and go to slide show. Apple could even make it a game. You could name the Artist just by looking at album art.

The UI is amazing. The battery icon when it is charging looks like a Konfabulator battery widget that I have, and when the iPod says, “do not disconnect”, the sign is red and has definition to it. Images are not flat but have a 2-D look to them. There is a definite separation in depth between the title bar and the main screen. The spinning status circle in the top left while syncing actually has animation to it and menu changes while the backlight on is cool and makes me feel like I am going down a staircase at the way the next menu looks lower or higher.

Overall, the iPod Photo is awesome and has all of the features users have wanted since the original iPod was released. The $499 price tag is perfect for 40gbs and the features that come with it, but I can’t justify purchasing one for $599 at this point. Apple would have to change a lot of things and make it more of an input device. Just viewing photos, and listening to music only goes so far. I can purchase a Palm Tungsten w/ an IBM Microdrive and store my photos, edit them, rate them, delete and even edit / add contacts calendars and more. I need more functionality in the iPod before I can spend 600 dollars for it but of course that would make it a PDA, and Apple has said they do not want to go in that direction. IPod Photo is just an update to an aging OS. The iPod OS has remained unchanged since it first debuted on the 5 Gigabyte wonder in November of 2001. Just the UI update alone with or w/o color should be standard on all iPod shipping now, but it looks like Apple will keep the font smoothing and new graphics to the iPod Photo at this point. Unless you absolutely need sixty gigabytes of space, I suggest getting the 40 GB versions for 499 and enjoying its features. In 8 months a new iPod holding 80 gbs and with tons of new features will be out for the same price. Rest assured the bugs and features will be added soon. This is only version 1.0 of the iPod Photo OS and has a lot of room for expansion; heck the thing is big enough might as well put a G3 CPU in there.

As Promised the Gallery Link: https://mypersonalgetaway.com/hardware/ipodphoto/ipodphoto.html