Bye Bye, Lil'Pretty Pink Thing

Last month, after owning my 6GB 4th generation Ipod Mini I sold it on Ebay for about $10 less than I paid for it. For me the Ipod turned out not to be the music listening tool I had expected it to be. Specifically I had the following issues with the Ipod.

• The click wheel, while a totally cool design, isn’t very practical for on the go sporting use (for example, biking, running, surfing). While wearing the Ipod on different parts of you body and in different directions, it is hard to remember which way is clockwise and counter clockwise on the wheel. While this seems like a trivial matter, there isn’t a simple solution to it. And it was enough to annoy every time I turned the volume up instead of down. Obviously this could be filed under user error but I feel good UI overcomes a user’s ability to make repeated mistakes. A series of buttons would have been simple to memorize. For example the third button from the top is volume up and the second is volume down.
  
  
• The inability to delete songs directly off the Ipod. The way I listen to new music is I play it, and if I don’t like it, I promptly delete it. I do this even with older music that I realize I am no longer a fan of. The fact that it can’t just be done with a track once and forever when I realize I don’t like it, is in itself very irritating, especially since the implementation of such a feature would have been so trivial.
  
  
• The requirement of having a computer around in order to charge the Ipod. Apparently in past models a standard wall charger was included, but with the 4th generation Ipods this is no longer the case. A USB connection is used both to transfer music and to charge the Ipod. I like to travel and not everywhere is it feasible to bring my computer nor will I always have access to one when I arrive. While one can purchase a standard charger, it is just another thing I’m paying for that I feel should come with an electronic device.
  
  
• Itunes method of sorting music. I have spent countless hours renaming all my ID3 tags so that Itunes could read them in a respectable manner. Having to then create a play list for every band (because I listen to music by bands not by albums) was just ridiculous. Especially since everything was already organized into folders and each file was titled on my computer. While this isn’t much of an issue for anyone who is new to digital music, for someone with 2000 tracks already, it is a mind boggling amount of needless effort. I often wondered what my former girlfriend was doing all those hours she claimed to be organizing music on Itunes late into the night, and now I know. She was really organizing music. Plenty of other MP3 players have software that can recognize folders and parse file names manageably without requiring a user to spend hours using third party software to rename already named files in a more anal retentive way.
  
  
• The overall dependence on Itunes and, by implication, a computer. You can’t delete files without Itunes. You can’t change file names without Itunes, you can’t charge you Ipod without a computer, etc, etc. etc. The over all dependence of a music player using an industry wide standard open file format is just ridiculous. It’s not that you need a computer to use the IPOD, which is reasonable, but rather that you can’t do any sort of significant alteration to anything on your Ipod without Itunes. The Ipod is effectively ONLY an mp3 player with all addition functionality stripped out and placed in Itunes
  
  
• Lack of an input Mic to record audio and lack of an FM tuner. Now this is just a nitpick since I knew the Ipod would not becoming with these features. But both of these tiny requirements would hardly have affected over all size or functionality, and which would have cost nearly nothing to include (Ipods only cost $40-60 to manufacture as it is). So the lack of these seems very odd to me.

I’d like to make two points in closing which are related. The first is that I was surprised at the response I would get to my complaints and questions on internet forums. For the most part people were very helpful with suggestions but almost all required me to use third party software, alter the way I was using the Ipod, or suggestions that I shouldn’t want the feature in the first place (barring the mic and FM tuner of course). When I buy a product I expect it to satisfy my needs, not require me to alter them. Can you imagine if someone told you couldn’t delete numbers on your phone without first connecting it to a computer?

And lastly, I know a lot of you out there love you Ipod, as a matter of fact I am the only former Ipod owner I know. What I’m trying to say with all this is the Ipod was not the music playing tool that I was looking for, for the reasons cited above. I mean this as no attack on you and your mindless acquiescence of the marketing you are presented with, it’s simply a reflection of how far superior I am to you all. In any case, perhaps I will be better be served with an iRiver H320 or H340.