For years, my friends tell me how great the iPod is and as a music lover, I always wonder why I didn’t get an iPod for my musics. So I decided to buy one as my X’mas gift last year. Before the actual purchase I did a very scientific evaluation. I entered the storage size, weight, volume (!) and price of the iPod Nano, Touch and 80G / 160G Classics into a spreadsheet along with same figures of my Archos and Dopod (my trusty digital wallet and smartphone).
Then I calculated the weight per song, volume per song and cost per song (to store in iPod), and I also performed sensitivity analysis to tell what device is the best buy if I have 2,000, 4,000, 10,000, or 20,000 songs to store to it.
The result of this geeky sophisticated analysis was I needed a black iPod Classic 80G. Why the analysis could tell what color I needed ? I don’t have a clue … 😎
But then the trouble beings … first I have trouble to make the iPod recognize the song details if those are not in English … I have to retype hundreds of songs’ title, album and artist information. In a word, painful.
The second issue is without an iTunes store in my country, I have no easy way to get the cover art to the iTunes and iPod. After lots of searching, evaluation I eventually installed a Yahoo Widget – iTunes Companion that will automatically download the album art from Amazon.
The most recent trouble is after just 3 weeks of usage, my iPod can no longer play songs smoothly – it will play one song, and refuse to play the next even I press the next button. Again, I searched numerous forums to find the ins and outs of it. Finally, I found a way to reset the iPod and solved the problem (for now):
- Toggle the Hold switch on and off
- Press and hold the Menu and Center (Select) buttons simultaneously until the Apple logo appears (about 6 to 10 seconds).
- You will see the Apple Logo appear and your iPod will come to life with a lit screen. If this does not happen please within 2 mintues please repeat steps 1 and 2.
A looooong story, but if you are considering to buy an iPod … re-read this post. 😎
M.Y. Lessons Learnt 
with my consultation, my wife bought a Creative Zen 4GB last week. Except the common appearance, Zen gives out 2.5″ TFT with 16.5M color, “zero-learning” UI, fast response time (than Samsung)…pretty cool.
why we won’t choose iPod, well, FM radio is definitely in my wife’s functional requirement list.
what’s next?
a wonderful earphone < $300, that’s my budget.
highly recommended, just follow your feeling when you desire to buy another gadget(s) next time…forget those clumsy algorithm…enjoy.
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It’s bloody obvious that my gut feel was to buy iPod, but just need some ways to justify the decision 😎
Creative Zen is a good gadget, just I have to pave the way to buy music online … and iTunes is one possible future. And 4G is too small for my music collection 😎
For headphone, I suggest to buy Shure … earphone with superb sound.
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Thanks for the recommendation. Btw, I do think your music library…counting in TB, not GB…maybe richer than “3 music store”…
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