New range of iPods.......

[admin_exported]

Quite an anouncement in my inbox this morning!!

Apart from the new colours for the Shuffle, the sexy new Nano - wow, third generation already - and the iPod Touch - iPhone without the...................phone - there is great news in the form of the iPod Classic - classic already, really?! - with a 160 Gb hard drive.

This is great news for re-encoding my colloection into Apple Lossless format and being able to take a sizeable chunk of it with me wherever I go!

Back to the Touch though, why? Great concept, but 16Gb maximum capacity!! Great for showing off, but not much use for carrying around vast amounts of high quality music - put the 160 Gb hard drive in it and then you will have a truly awesome product. I know that the Wi-Fi iTunes app for the Touch will be its unique selling point, but, for me, that is not enough to justify the price. Could the launch of the Touch be an admission that the iPhone is not that great without 3G HSDPA on board?

Roll on next year, eh?

 

[Anonymous]

Yes, methinks I'll be hanging on till there is an iPod Touch with more storage. My 60GB iPod video will be my constant companion for a while longer it seems...

 

[Anonymous]

The Touch is expensive because flash based storage is currently more expensive than hard disk. Flash however is better for being shaken around, so is less prone to jumping and damaging the plates in the hard disk when the player is moving around in a bag. Flash is also likely to last for a longer amount of time. Flash storage is reducing at a steady rate though. Maybe Apple will release a HDD based Touch, but I doubt it for now because that'd affect the sales of the iPod Classic.

As an "anti-Apple" kind of person, the Touch even looks good to me. Against the iPhone, it wins hands down, without the excuse for a smart phone features whilst retaining all of the decent items on the spec sheet. 160GB would have looked insane to anyone even a few years ago, but as digital music libraries have grown and the use of lossless tracks means that it's almost a necessity for those wanting to carry their entire library with them. I however, don't want to carry everything with me all of the time. It's fine when away from home a lot of the time, but for commuting I prefer something less capacious to carry the latest and greatest using flash based storage.

 

[Clare Newsome]

Apple-store delivery permitting (yes, we have to buy them like the rest of you!) we'll be testing the new nano and the 160GB iPod classic very shortly, followed by the Touch, which looks like it isn't going to hit the shops until the end of the month....

 

[Anonymous]

"Apple-store delivery permitting (yes, we have to buy them like the
rest of you!) we'll be testing the new nano and the 160GB iPod classic
very shortly, followed by the Touch, which looks like it isn't going to
hit the shops until the end of the month...."

Would you be so kind to buy and test some iriver players too!? I'm thinking about buying a good-looking, great sounding player myself and sure like the looks of the touch (and the former nano- maybe I can get some good discounts on that..) but also the iriver clix.

I'm a little confused though: WHFS&V sees the ipods as the best sounding, but most of the forums I see on the web see ipods as inferior to iriver, creative and iaudio (cnet for example).

"Compared to products such as the Creative Zen V Plus, the Cowon iAudio 7, or the Toshiba Gigabeat U, however, the iPod's sound quality still leaves room for improvement." That said, after listening with our Ultrasone HFI-700 headphones as well as a set of Shure SE310 earphones, we can say with confidence that the Nano's fidelity will certainly satisfy most users.

(http://reviews.cnet.com/portable-video-players-pvps/apple-ipod-nano-third/4505-6499_7-32595954.html?tag=txt)

How can this be: isn't sound quality always priority for WHFS&V !?

 

[Clare Newsome]

Sound quality is indeed priority for us, and we haven't always ranked iPods top.

I'd argue, for example, that the old (second-gen) nano, was being slightly outclassed by several rivals. The new nano may change all that - as we saw this time last year, when the original nano was beaten by several rivals in our testing, but then the second-gen trumped them. But until we've thoroughly tested it, who knows - it's facing it's strongest competition yet, with five-star LG, Samsung, and Creative models in the race, too.

Unlike other testers - as the cnet quote shows above, when only headphones were used - we also judge an MP3 player's performance when it's plugged into both desktop speaker systems (like the Audica MPS1) and connected to a hi-fi. Yes, the portable performance is paramount, but readers need to know what their purchase is capable of in wider use, too.

I'm sure we disagree with cnet's collection of freelance reviewers on many things (certainly that any Cowon we've tested was anything better than average), but our dedicated testing team certainly rates the iPods up there with the best, and often as the best.

 

[haider]

Recently, on my travels to North america, I baught 2 iPods for a friend and my brother. They are both into their music in a big way and both have very decent hi-fi systems at home. In all honesty, appart from the fact that neither are technically perfect and tend to jump like a scratched CD a lot(while docked and playing through a hifi) the sound quality is not what one would call amazing. Oh I must also add that they have been using uncompressed WAV files rather than AAC or MP3.

I have an older iPod, which also isnt amazing but actually seems to sound better than the newer ones. I have put a few other machines to my ear and, in all honesty, the best sound has so far been from the Nokia and Sony Ericson mobile phones! The Creative Zen was also definately more musical than the iPod I have experiennced to date.

Dont get me wrong, I love the styling and the presentation is great. Image is most things with these kind of products.

As for the iPhone well never again will I try to have a touch screen phone as a practical, every day mobile device. Lovely to look at though! The touch screen iPod certainly has more scope and will sell more in the long run. What is teh world coming to when you can get a free MP3 player built into a 2Gig thumb drive???!!! all for about £10 at Currys!! madness. And they have a display!

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Clare, for your explanation. Much appreciate it!
Seems that ipods generally are the best choice...until something new and better shows up. By the way, until now I didn't know what all the fuss was about concerning the easy operation of the ipods, but after testing the cowon myself, I do. It was so dreadful, it seemed to have a mind of it's own...
In a week or so I'll get a chance to test the ipod against some other flash players and make up my mind there and then which one is the best for me.

Anyway, thanks again.

 

[iRog]

Came across this recently. Seems not all iPods are created equal....
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/09/ipod-classics-s.html