Well, I did it. I went and grabbed myself an iPod mini. The first thing you notice when unpacking the thing, is how much attention to detail there is, even in little things like the packaging. The fold out box, the neat little alcoves in the cardboard, everything. It's very nice.
Once I got it out of the box, I attached it to a laptop that already had iTunes on it to install the software which is required to initalise the iPod - it also takes your name and email address and sends it back to apple. The iPod can't be used until it's initialised, if you attach it to a windows box it is detected but reports that the hard drive is not formatted. After running installing the software it rebooted the laptop, and the iPod was attached via USB2 at this point - and it managed to lock up. Nothing would restart it apart from switching hold on and off while holding down menu + select. It seems a few PC users have had this, so I'm guessing it's a problem with USB2 - luckily I'm using Firewire on my main setup, so it won't be an issue. Once it was restarted, I fired up iTunes on the laptop, and iTunes automatically started syncing every piece of music across - seems to be a slightly stupid default option, and it started with no warning or request or anything. Perhaps they should put some sort of a check in there for the minis, and change the behaviour accordingly.
After all this, it was over to my main PC and I hooked it up via Firewire. The iPod automatically started recharging (Yay for the Intel motherboards having 6pin Firewire and not the crappy 4port version that some PCs come with!), and the PC detected the iPod and assigned it a drive letter. I fired up Winamp, and configured ml_ipod, and I was away copying music across. All very painless - the Winamp plugin works incredibly well, without needing any of the Apple software installed on the machine at all.
The design of the mini is great. You really cant beat 103 grams and that form factor. The default belt clip it comes with is functional, and does the job, it sits on my gym shorts securely and comfortably which is all you can ask for really. With the jog dial it's easy to adjust the volume through a t-shirt or something, which is kind of cool. Software wise, I think that creating some playlists are a must. Previously I've never really used predefined playlists much, I'd just enqueue anything into Winamp via Explorer (as my directory structure is very well defined), but on the iPod they become quite neccesary. You have a 'play all' option (which supports randomising and shuffle) or you can select a single artist/album, but there's no easy way to skip large amounts of tracks (my old NetMD player would let you skip tracks normally, or skip artists by pressing the jog dial up, which was quite handy for skipping from one album to the next) apart from pressing the skip button loads of times. Making playlists via the Winamp plugin is pretty simple though, so it's no big deal really.
If you don't want to use the Winamp plugin, or iTunes, then you could consider this piece of software (which is commercial, about $19 USD or $39 USD depending on which version you go for) to sync between a PC and your iPod. The software also supports many other MP3 player makes and models, so it's great for things like the new Rio or Creative players which have nice hardware, but come with utterly lousy transfer software.
Anyhow, so far I'm loving the iPod. It really is a joy to use. I need to find a carry case or something to use when I have it in my laptop or gym bags, as it doesn't come with anything there, and I also need to get an iPod mini dock when they become available, and also something for the car, and then I'll be sorted!
Tags: iPod