Customer Reviews

Apple iPod Photo 60 GB White M9830LL/A (4th Generation) OLD MODEL

5 star:		(58)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

The iPod series has gained an incredibly loyal following over the years. With the release of the iPod Photo 60 gig, Apple has created a machine that can hold entire music collections - and more.

For those of us who remember the days of giant 128mb MP3 players, to have a 60 gig small hand-held is just amazing. It is barely the size of a pack of cigarettes. The case is white plastic on the front and SHINY silver metal on the back, which will scratch in about .2 seconds unless you're careful. Be sure to buy a protector immediately.

Exercise enthusiasts will note that there ARE moving parts inside here - you can feel it buzz slightly when you do some file operations. It is more akin to a CD player than to a radio. If you are riding an exercise bike, this will be no problem. If you're jogging, that's another issue entirely. Active people should stick with flash memory style systems with no moving parts. Of course the funny part of this is that the commercials all show iPod users dancing around like maniacs.

You might wonder just how you could fill up 60 gig of space legally. Being a musician and friends of many musicians, I of course HIGHLY encourage you to pay for all of your music. It's only 99 cents a song - and you are helping to keep musicians fed and promoted. In any case, the iPod makes it easy to store what you've got. I can get about 3,000 songs in 10 gig. For a youngster just getting started in the work world, this might be a high achievement in CD ownership. But for most adults that I know, especially adults in a relationship, it is easy to have 300+ CDs in the house. You collect them over the years, as your musical interests change and new bands come out. This iPod finally lets you put all your music in one place and hit SHUFFLE. It is really cool to play music for days and days and have it all be different.

The photo aspect is really neat, too. The screen is 220 x 176 which gives you a nice resolution for most photos. There are hundreds of applications for this. You can carry photos of family and friends. You can carry photos of birds for birdwatching. You can carry trip photos. You can carry poison ivy identification photos when you camp. True, a very detailed image (say a class photo with 500 people in it) is going to be too tiny to see. But a nice well-done photo (say a Titmouse on a branch) will be perfect for your needs.

The interface is really easy to use and needs no manual. You slide up and down to choose an item, and click to accept it. There's a clock, calendar, contact manager, and fun games. I really like the 'music quiz' where it plays a snippet of one of your songs and makes you guess which one it is. Since you obviously loaded all the songs onto your iPod you would think this would be easy - but if you have a large library, it can be amazingly hard!

Best of all, recent price drops have made this all-around favorite surprisingly affordable. If you've got a decently sized collection of CDs, and some photos you'd love to carry with you, I highly recommend this device. It's well worth the price.

"Yeah, its an iPod." Then you get to boast about the 60 GB and that wears thin pretty fast. But you have to admit its a damn good looking player. You've read the millions of reviews so I'll only bore you with my thoughts:

$450 and no case? The dock may have been low on the list of usefulness, but come on Apple... this thing scratches if you look at it hard. So the REAL price of this player is more like $490 after you get the required case.

It takes a day to get used to the controls. My wife was so frustrated she tossed it aside and never looked back. The controls are simplified to the point of complexity. Menu is power on (but not power off, that's Play/Pause) but its also back... You get used to it, but I wouldn't sell it as a feature.

The EQ is worthless. I found that ROCK works best and everything else sounds muffled or distorted. It's also a pain to browse EQ settings for the currently playing song. You have to navigate back a couple of menus then into settings then spin down to EQ. After selecting an EQ setting, you drop back to the settings menu. If you don't like that EQ setting, you have to go back into the EQ menu and start the dance all over. Why cant the EQ settings apply live as I spin down them? The song will end before you have time to try them all...

Everyone loves the touch wheel and so do I until you realize you don't remember the group, you have 7800 songs and the one you are looking for begins with a "Z". After about 15 fast laps around the touch wheel it does accelerate, but I wish there was a faster way...

The battery life for me is pretty much as Apple stated. I am concerned that sometime next year after the warranty expires the battery will go poof and die. Apple hasn't done a good job making people like me feel better about the longevity of an iPod. Still, I did take a chance.

I like the Album art when playing. When I used to play CD's (or god bless - my vinyl), I would always have the cover there with me to look at. Something feels more natural having it displayed.

All in all, if you can convince yourself that a portable music player should cost $450/$490 then this is definitely one of the best ones to get, even with its quirks.

I purchased my iPod Photo for the express reason of taking it to Europe along with my digital camera, my girlfriend has dig cam also.
This was our first trip abroad and 14 days in Italy we knew that we would be taking tons of pics and I didn't want to lug around my laptop, so I looked around and decided to get the 60 gig version.
Before we left I added over 30 hrs of music, not much for some but more than enough for me.
We ended up taking more than 2700 pics over that week and half and the iPod
took them all in with no problems.
I purchased Apples camera connector, $29? and the world travel adapter kit from Apple also, the travel adaptors allow you to simply change the style of plug that is on the power adaptor that comes with your iPod or your laptop for that matter, the cool thing is you don't need a power converter for your Apple products, just pop off the plug replace it with the one for the part of the world you are going to and you're set.
With no problems I was able to plug it in and charge it all over Italy, and download all our pics from both cameras.
So instead of having to keep an eye on a big bag with a laptop and worry about it being stolen I was able to keep my camera and my iPod in a fanny pack and I never had a worry.
For those of you out there with high end digital cameras and you don't want to pack a laptop this is the way to go, Plenty of space for even large files.
As for those folks that find the controls difficult all I can think is that they don't understand simple file formating and higherarchy.
One last thing, you can also use your iPod as an external hard drive to copy and transfer any files you want from one computer to another, and it's drive is big enough for anyone.
I couldn't be happier, and like the engraving on the back of my iPod states "Travel is the Best Revenge"

Apple advertises the 60GB model as able to hold 15,000 songs - this is (as they state) based on a 4 minute average per song. Most people retort, "I'll never have 15,000 songs!" This may be true, but you can still quickly fill up this puppy.

I have fewer than 5,000 audio files on my 60GB and it those files take up over 32GB of space. The reason? I have thousands of songs, but I have hundreds of spoken word files (lectures, etc.), and a few dozen audio books and foreign language instruction audio files.

I also got the Griffin Technologies iTalk (also available here on Amazon) so I can record interviews or "notes to self" on the fly with my iPod. So, not only will it store your audio, it can also record new audio when you're miles away from your computer.

All iPods from the Shuffle on up to this 60GB are hot swappable hard drives. You can attach this to any PC or Mac and drag-n-drop files onto your iPod for portable storage.

These hard drives don't spin as fast as a typical portable hard drive, so you don't want to run applications from it, but as storage devices, the iPod rocks!

For a digital photographer, the usefulness cannot be understated. I bought a Belkin card reader (also available from Amazon) to plug into my iPod Photo. Now, when I'm shooting an event, I can have one of my CF cards downloading onto my iPod in full resolution while I'm using the other card to take photos and can swap these out all day long. I've done this before with my iBook, but an iPod is much easier to carry around and this 60GB iPod trumps the 30GB drive on my 12" iBook!

Travelling for business and need to do a powerpoint presentation? Why schlep a computer and an EnFocus machine when you can just bring your iPod Photo and a matching doc and AV cables?

You can make slides into JPG files and put them into an album on your iPhoto. You can select different wipes and transitions and using the dock, you can connect to any TV using an S-Video and audio splitter cable, using your iPod as the "remote" or you can attach a remote to the iPod and have a wireless remote.

Now that the iPod (and iTunes) supports podcasting and cool features like speeding through an audio file to specific spot and speeding up or slowing down audio books without changing the pitch.

My less than perfect rating is for a number of reasons:

1.) Why there is no power adapter included is beyond me. People travel with their iPods and not everyone wants to travel with their computer, too, just to charge their iPods.
2.) No longer including the dock is a real mistake - especially on the iPod Photo.
3.) No longer includes a free case, either... and it is slim-pickin's to find a case that will fit the 60GB. It's easy to find cases that will fit the 20GB model, but there are few classy cases to select from for the 60GB model. The iPods scratch when you blink too fast in front of them - they need a case for protection!
4.) No video support. This is just ridiculous. If it can support wipes & transitions, it should be able to handle video. If the Mac is indeed the digital hub that Jobs claims it is, let's prove it! I can create movies w/ iMovie, but why can't I carry them with me to show them off?

Apple seriously needs to come out with a video capable model. I was an early adapter... I bought the first 5GB iPod years ago when it too, was $400. From that first day of ownership, I have been telling my friends that Apple needs to turn it into a phone/PDA. Apple created the first PDA, the Newton - it's time to put that technology back into our hands.

I love my iPod, but the line needs some improvements.

I had a 60gb photo for the last month. Loved it. It could store way more music than I owned and had great battery life for what i needed. Its also the last great firewire ipod (the new videos dont support syncing over FW). Until I bought a classical piano bach cd (the 2 & 3 part inventions). I could clearly hear this distortion over the piano notes. It almost sounds like a kazoo played along with the high notes of the piano. it apparently is not noticable on the lower frequencies. I dont consider myself an audiophile but this was unacceptable. yes, i did test a different pair of headphones (i have a very high end pair, you may not notice it on the regular apple buds). I even tried the same song on an earlier non-photo ipod and it was not there. i even tried uncompressing the music to no avial. Either, noone can hear the distortion or no one wants to think that a $400 player has faults. I returned mine unhappy about the sound quality. I think from now on i will just use a high end personal cd player and carry a few cds with me instead. Some people's explanation is that the fact that the photo transfer through the headphone port which allows you to view photos on a tv is grounded with the audio. In my experience, grounding mulitple components to the same ground is common practice in electronics, so it does not make sense that this would cause noise issues. If it were interference from the photo feature, it would be that they DONT have a common ground and would be more suseptable to noise interference. My theory for the real cause of the distortion is the amplifier in the photo, which may somehow be designed different because of the photo feature. They probably didnt have as much room for the comonents so sacrificed it for a less efficent amp. Either way, this distortion is inherent in ALL photos ever made. Dont take my word for it, import some bach or mozart and hear for yourself. Or better yet, dont. Then you will not become disgusted with the SQ from your ipod and return it! I wish that I didnt have such a good ear for these things otherwise i would still be listening to my photo happily.

EDIT: I had a chance to test out a new ipod video. Guess what? NO Distortion! Who would have figured? this further proves my hunch that the distortion on the photo is not caused by the TV connection in the headphone port otherwise the video would have the same problem. It MUST be the crappy amplifier in the photo. The video ipod is an amazing device. Unfortunately, there is no FW support as stated above. I only have USB 1.1 on my powerbook, so no video for me. Plus, I'm so picky I would probably find something wrong with it after a while! But it really is a beautiful device. If you were thinking about getting a photo, get a video instead. The SQ is WAY better along with all the other handy things it can do. Unless you dont hear the distortion. Then the photo is a better purchase than the video. The fact that it can play videos is cool, but its not so great that its worth buying if you have the photo.

Right...I hesitated for about 9 months about whether buying this gadget or not. With a hefty price tag of $400.00, well you just don't get up and buy. Finally, while going about my usual way of checking out my favorite gadget store, the calling came to me so I went home with a $400.00 gadget, plus a replacement plan, an Ipod remote, and a leather case.

If you are set on buying this gadget, I suggest you download itunes first and begin burning all your CDs. I advise you burn your songs to a secondary hard drive. In case your system crashes, at least you'll have a back-up of all your songs. Trust me, it'll take you at least two days to burn 2,000 songs. So plan ahead because you'll be so excited to test out this gadget as soon as you get it. Imagine finding out you haven't burned a single song to transfer to your Ipod to test it?

What to expect when you get home with a new Ipod? Well...for starters you need to charge the battery. It takes about 5 hours to fully charge. Next, read the manual especially the part about how to operate the click wheel. It's a bit confusing at first when you work your way around the click wheel. This is my one and only complaint about this device. It's like all the functions have been squeezed into it's 5 buttons. What happens is that you need to remember the key combos to actually do a specific function. Remember the days of playing Mortal Kombat and remembering the button sequence to do a fatality move? Well..it's almost like this. If you want to do a specific function, you have to remember the button sequence. So yeah..it's a weak functionality to an otherwise excellent product.

Right so the Ipod is fully charged. The next step is to begin moving the music to your drive but first you have to install the Ipod software. Before you hook up the gadget to your USB port, make sure you installed the Ipod software first. Smooth installation on this considering I am loading the software to a Windows PC. This makes me question other people's comments about having issues installing and using Itunes on a Windows PC. I didn't experience any installation issues. Here's my advice from a system techie...install the software then reboot the system. Install the Ipod on the USB connection, wait for detection, and then reboot the system again. Fire up Itunes and then wait for it to detect Ipod. Once it's been detected, Ipod will auto download all your burned songs. So....here's what I've noticed. I've burned about 2,000 songs at 128k and it only used up 6gb which leaves me with 52gbs. As far as storage, this gadget is a behemoth.

Look and feel. Well for a 60gb gadget yes it is a bit heavy...not heavy heavy but you can actually feel that slight weight on your hand. It's a hard drive so I understand. The 60gb model has a 2 inch screen with colour display. As far as the face, it's like any Ipod face...it's white, it has a screen and a click wheel. The 60gb comes with a Dock Connector at the bottom.

Sound quality...yes I am satisfied. It has a nice bassy tune which you can adjust using a preset Equalizer in the Ipod. The headphones does the job BUT and yes here's another complaint..the earbud covers are A PAIN..you know the foam thingies that cover the earbuds. I lost a pair already because they keep falling off. My advice...order a thicker more durable pair of earbud covers. You can get them online. Please please do this as soon as you get your Ipod.

Final Word. It's a good investment and with every investment you need to protect it. Before you step out of the house with your Ipod, I suggest you buy a case for it that you can clip on your side. Those hands of yours sometimes have a tendency to drop things and that's what you don't want to happen when you have an Ipod on your hand. So protect your investment and get a leather or aluminum case. Another item you should get is the remote headphones where you can adjust the play rewind menu and forward and volume controls. If you have it in your pocket or on your side and you have a remote, it eliminates the possibility of dropping it. Save all the worries..have a remote so you can have your Ipod snuggled safely.

I've been staiving off getting an ipod for awhile now, but it has become harder & harder to aviod...let me explain. Right now, I have a DMC XClef 500 60GB MP3 player. (...) I wanted to kinda get a feel for an ipod and I also wanted a much smaller MP3 player for even more portability, so I bought the ipod nano. (black 4GB model) All in all, I must say, it is a pretty good little music player. I'm not going into detail on it's features and what I like about it, you can go to apple's website for that. I'm going to talk about ipod's in general. In my title, I say "Pros & Cons", well I'm listing the Cons first!

CONS:
- IT'S NOT DRAG & DROP!!! That is my main complaint about the ipod and why i've been avoiding getting one. I want something simple and fast, that I can plug into my computer, use windows explorer and any ripper program I want to rip songs/albums directly to the player in a folder, etc. I hate that iTunes crap! (Which is why I got Anapod Explorer from Red Chair software. Another $30 bucks!) The navigation of the ipod is too dependant on the ID tags. If all the tags for all your songs aren't in order & labeled properly, it makes it that much more difficult to find anything! With drag and drop, just make a folder for an artist, name the subfolders for albums, and rip the CD or save the music files to those album subfolders, that's it, your done! Apple should have given the user a choice in the ipod from the beginning on transfer and navigation, use ID tags, use folder & file names, or both.

- It is one of the costliest music players out there! As mentioned above, the XClef I currently have cost only $250 and it's 60GB too. But the ipod photo 60GB is $400! Now granted, the photo has a color screen and other features that the XClef doesn't, but the XClef has some really good features that the ipod doesn't...at least that don't cost extra to add-on. (i.e., built in radio, voice recorder, etc.)

- The battery life. What I mean by this is not necessarily the length of the battery life per charge. (Roughly 14 hours for ipod nano, 15 for ipod photo) That's pretty decent. What I mean is the life of the battery throughout the IPOD'S life. Apple warns that the battery that is used in the ipods will eventually lose it's ability to hold a charge, depending on how many times the ipod is charged up. (Roughly I believe it's 1,000 full charges or an average of 2-4 year life span) Apple does have a program to replace the battery for you, but it costs $70! Luckily there are other places that you can find online that can repair and replace ipods and there batteries for a cheaper price. (Which I will mention in the Pros)

PROS:
- Many choices for navigation. I do not like the fact that it isn't a drag & drop interface for transferring files, but there are advantages to using the ID tags for navigating to the music. You get choices on HOW you want to look up the particular album or song you want to listen to. Do it by Artist, album, song, genre, etc. making alittle easier and faster to get to that particular album, song, etc. (When compared to my XClef, which all you get is a root menu of all the folders in the player [artist/system folders]).

- Smaller size. Good things come in small packages. (I know everybody has used this phrase for their descriptions of the ipod to death, but hey, it fits!) Is argueably the smallest mp3 player out there for it's memory size. (Compared to my Xclef 60GB which is 5 x 3.2 x 0.87 in.; the ipod photo 60GB is only 4.1 x 2.4 x 0.75 in. And of course my nano is much smaller/thinner than that at, 3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27 in., but only holds 4GB (technically 3.8GB) so if your music collection is bigger than that, you won't be able to fit everything on a nano.) But the nano uses flash memory, where the regular ipods use small hard drives. But I shall wrap this up before I start to ramble.

- It has a lot of cool features. Again, I'm not going to name them all off (refer to apple's website for a list), but the ipods do have a number of very unique and useful features that are only found on ipods.

- Accessories Galore! The ipod is the only portable music player that has more accessories made by more companies and smaller businesses out there than there are grains of sand at the beach! (This is mainly the reason I'm heavily deciding on buying one) For a complete listing of these companies and pretty much anything else related to ipods, i.e., mods, repairs that I mentioned (...). If you have an ipod or are going to get one and you don't already know about this site, you'll definately want to bookmark it! Cases, cables, mods, whatever you want to do to your ipod but didn't know you could or don't know how, there is a website out there with the info or the gear you can buy to do it! (And ilounge is a pretty good place to start!) There have been a number of little mods and accessories that I've seen for ipods that I wish I could get for my XClef, but unfortunately my player isn't famous enough for others to make the accessories nor the company that makes the Xclef itself. (Except the most basic ones of course, i.e. power cables etc.)

Overall, I like the Xclef a lot, but I want more! (I'm greedy like that!) So as much as I like my current mp3 player compared to the ipod's pros & cons (I mean cons & pros), I guess I'm going to have to bite the big bullet, go mainstream and join all those other ipod yuppies out there by getting an ipod of my very own. (I can hear the chants right now of all those yuppies too, chanting, "One of us! One of us!" Oh man, I'm such a sell-out/tool!) Hope my review/rant helped you out!

The 40GB click wheel iPod I bought for my husband for Christmas last year died (hard drive fried) 360 days after he opened the box but one year and 3 weeks past when I bought it. Appeals to an Apple Store and the "Apple Cares" (how's that for an oxymoron?) phone line fell on deaf ears. They were unwilling to make any exception or provide discounts on a replacement, "...our warranty clearly states...from the date of purchase...". So, in all caps, if you must buy an iPod, BUYER BEWARE! Think of this as a disposable purchase that will only last as long as the warranty.

This (60 Gb iPod Photo) is my second iPod (the first, a G4 40Gb was pickpocketed from my napsack in the NYC subway - beware) and I've had it over a year. Looking over the spate of recent negative reviews here prompted me to respond. Most of the shrieking pans and drooling raves are divorced from reality. I think it's important to point out that iPod is a tool and only a tool - a portable music player - a compact digital device with much in common with a laptop computer. It is highly configurable and the user has many choices about how to encode music - which affects the final results a great deal.

1) About scratching. The front of the iPod is shiny plastic. You'll need to put it in a protective case. There is an extremely lively aftermarket. I bought a nice silicon case with a compliant plastic panel that covers the display for $12 on Ebay. It does the trick and a year later my iPod looks like new if I take it out of the case. A protective case must be considered manditory for an iPod. That's it - now get over it.

2) All hard drive based devices of any kind - iPods included - have limited G-force tolerance. If you jog, it will go into protection - (the music stops and unit appears paused until you hit "play" again). If you drop it while it's running, you might kill it - or cause disk damage that will require a reformat. If you want a player for jogging or sporting (skiing, skateboarding etc...) buy a Nano or a shuffle or competing solid state player. Memory chips have no moving parts and don't suffer these limitations. They just have the size limitation.

3) All electronic devices are subject to RF interference - especially digital devices. The iPod has a nice metal body shield, but it can crash when taken near power lines, radio transmitters etc...

4) Sonically all MP3 players will vary in quality based on how much encryption you choose to use. For best sound use a high bit rate (192K or above). Apple offers proprietary schemes that offer higher performance. Competing open standards exist for just about every format Apple has cooked up. Is this skeevy of Apple? Perhaps. It's similar to what Microsoft did on computers. Love it or hate it - it's part of the whole Apple experience. I use Apple's lossless compression and it works seamlessly with iTunes and yields wonderful high quality rips. Are they portable with any other deivce than the iPod? No. Do they work with any software other than iTunes? No. Am I complaining? Not yet! I personally think the iTunes software is the best software and the iPod is the best player. Down the road if the proprietary format limits me from doing something I want to do I might start complaining. Life is full of compromises and choices.

5) You must turn off equalization if you care about sound quality. Sadly this is true of every portable digital player currently extant in the world. I was expecting better with Apple - but it's not so. Every single equalization setting introduces audible distortion that ruins the experience for an audiophile like me. With EQ set to off I get wonderful sound.

6) About reliability and dealing with broken players - portable electronics take a lot of abuse. Laptops have shorter warranty periods than desktops because rapidly spinning hard drives don't tolerate motion well. This is exactly the situation in the ipod. It's a tough environment for a hard drive. There is a lively after-market for hard drive replacement services. Ambitious folks can buy cheap replacement hard drives on the open market and fix/upgrade their iPods. Sure you'll scratch the case getting it open - but it's better than a dead iPod. Battery life issues - same situation. If you like to tinker you can do this for little cost. If you are paying for the service it becomes more justifiable to just buy a new unit. Is this cost effective? Nope. But if you become addicted to the wonderfuly lifestyle of having one of these players - you'll do it.

7) Audible distortion of the Photo iPod becasue of the video jack? Maybe on early units. I have one and don't have any audible distortion when the EQ is off. This unit sounds noticeably better than my 40GB G4 iPod did. It has better battery life too.

8) What about music services? It's a totally personal opinion - but I don't recommend buying music on iTunes or any other service. They all pretty much use relatively severe mp3 compression. Buy the CDs and get full resolution. Then rip at your choice of compression. That way you have a full backup and you get all the music you pay for. I also feel that music appreciation sometimes takes time. There are many songs on albums that I didn't initally like, but grew to love over time simply because I had them because they were on the album with some more accessible hit. If we only buy the hits - we never get to know the more difficult songs and we end up shallower.

I'll confess I'm a dyed in the wool audiophile - the kind who hangs sonex on his walls and puts specially made sound reflecting pillows on his ceiling. I'm also, like a lot of audiophiles, opposed to digital equipment in general and prefer the warmer fuller sound of analog sources (like my very tricked out turntable). That being said - the system that shows you the most is the one you use most often - and for me that is the portable. For years I had high-end cassette tape walkmen, then portable CD players of various stripes. The iPod completely blows away all previous portables by a WIDE margin. The iPod sounds way better than most stand-alone CD players - the sonics are comparable to a really good DVD player playing CDs. This is a killer sounding portable when used with lossless compression, and etymotic ER-6 headphones. It has better resolution than my big rig (Rocksan Xerxes turntable, Audio Research pre and amp, and ProAc Repsonse speakers). Granted this is digital - so the highs are more brittle and there's less warmth and depth. This is highly dependent on source material. Recent recordings by good engineers sound great - through the headphones or played on a stereo system with a good cord via a line out from the cradle. I get around 1500 songs - about 135 albums worth on my 60gb. The iPod is high enough sonically that it can function as my test source for critical listening of back-end components or sharing music with audiophile friends at their house (on their big rigs). This "library" aspect is the biggest feature of the iPod - and is really life changing. I can't recommend it highly enough.

My main complaint with the iPod is with the headphones. The included headphones are not adequate for musically satisfying listening. I recommend Grado or Etymotic headphones (even the bottom of the line ones). You don't need a separate headphone amp - unless you source material is unusually low volume. "Earbud" type phones are all garbage - avoid them like the plague. Other than that - I'm a really happy camper with the iPod!

Got my Ipod Photo 60GB 1 week ago from [...] Have been playing with it since.I love it.
Box contains:
- Ipod photo 60, AC Adapter and USB cable for charging/connect.
Bought:
-Ipod Case - Belkin Sports Skin($12.54) @ walmart store..cheapest at the best price...other cases with same silicone were ridiculously $29.99 and up...!
- Apple Audio-video cable from Apple Store...(other cables dont work, tried it. Bestbuy, Target and CircuitCity had not heard of this cable..can u believe it...Bestbuy said 3 yrs. they have not heard it...take our audio cables instead...no video..anyway!).
- Apple camera connector @ Amazon
- Car Cassette adapter @ Amazon (later found walmart has it cheaper!)
- Griffin Ear Jams @ Amazon...(Apple headphones are useless without this!...you need this!)
Hope this helps any one trying to decide on an MP3 player.
And oh yes...No other MP3 player comes close to the simplicity and ease of use of Ipod....researched a lot of mp3 players....the only close runner-up was Toshiba Gigabeat....but realized later that an Ipod is after all an Ipod...
About Podcasting and Ipods - a combination made in heaven.
All in all love it!.