Video iPod is impressive - but seems to drain battery fast
October 20, 2005 by Mike Wendland
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I’ve spent much of the day running a new 30GB Video iPod through the paces. I’ll have a full review next week but here’s some quick impressions:
It comes in a typically slick and sleek Apple box, with the CD, instruction book, soft case, earbuds, USB2 cable, earbud covers and the video iPod snugly and ingeiously packed inside.
The unit is noticeably slimmer than other iPods I’ve used (not counting, of course, the Nano and the Shuffle). Gone is FireWire. All new iPods now work only with USB2… which is faster anyways.
After installing the updated iTunes 6 and QuickTime 7 software, it took me about five minutes to download 900 songs, about 100 pictures and my calendar and address book into the unit itself.
I then went to the Apple iTunes store and downloaded an episode from ABC-TV’s Lost and Night Stalker.
On a 4 Mbps broadband connection, it took me about four minutes to download a TV show. Not bad at all.
As far as titles to choose from, there’s really not much of a selection. Some music videos, Desperate Housewives episodes (I’m not that desperate to download one of them) and some shorts from Steve Jobs’ Pixar movie studio.
I watched one of the TV shows (they blessedly download with no commercials and run about 40 minutes) and I found the 2 1/2 inch screen very bright. I watched the show in my car as I waited for my wife to do some shopping and had no trouble seeing, even in the brght daylight. I was surprised, however, at how much battery life was gobbled up by watching that 40 minute show - about a third. I need to test that out good this weekend and see how long I can watch video. Early experience causes me not to expect more than a couple of hours.
I’ll also try and upload some of my own iMovie video to the iPod over the weekend to see how that feature goes.
Initial impressions: Pretty cool. I think this is going to really take off, but probably not until there’s a lot more content. And it would be nice if Jobs works out a deal so we can get full length movies… though I have doubts about whether the battery life would be long enough to watch an entire film.
“Gone is FireWire. All new iPods now work only with USB2… which is faster anyways.”
On what do you base this? Those USB 2.0’s ‘rated speed’ of 480Mbs is faster than Firewire 400’s rated speed of 400Mbs, every comparison test I’ve ever read shows that Firewire is faster in most every type of test, primarily the sustained transfer rate used in transfering files to an iPod.
Googling found a few articles such as: http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm –
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,948181,00.asp –
Now, all of this says nothing about Firewire 800, which has been out for years now. If Apple had been more aggressive about including it in peripherals and computers and licensed it cheaper to manufacturers, we might all be doing even faster transfers nowadays.
I guess I relied on the rated speed… the tests you site seem to indicate otherwise. One thing… with USB2… the form factor is smaller. Apple says FireWire connections are bulkier that USB2 and that they were able to significantly slim down the iPod. The Video iPod is indeed much slimmer.
Thanks Toeknee for the citations.
The main reason they ditched FireWire is due to the size (and cost) of the chipset.
Everyone has some flavor of USB. The only people left in the dark are those with USB 1.1. Then again, if your machine is so old that it doesn’t have USB2, it’s probably time to upgrade anyways.
Keep in mind that you can still charge over FireWire though…
You can charge over USB2 as well.
The main reasons for going there was form factors but even more so was market share. USB dominates the PC industry where as Firewire got the shaft (mostly from Intel wanting their standard USB). Dell pretty much did their best to kill it for it’s Apple’s roots.
Basically, the iPod is Apple’s trojan horse and they sacrificed firewire to get it into the hands of more PC users. In doing so, they opened up the eyes of many who never considered a Mac before.