 Diversify
or die a lesson that the Dinosaurs failed to heed and one that
politicians are the masters of and so it seems are Apple with the
new Photo Ipod 60gb, just when you think you have the Ipod firmly
where you can see it, it shifts sideways into a new niche.
For a while now various photo capable devices have appeared, from
the Nikon cool walker which is essentially a big disk to store your
pictures on with a screen strapped on the front to the Archos Gmini
which is an MP3 player with the ability to download you cameras CF
card.
But Apple must have sensed a gap in the market or perhaps the
upcoming threat from portable media players when they decided to
unleash the Photo Ipod 60gb, the move to the bigger 60gb disk has
been widely predicted as has a colour screen but to combine photo
viewing and output capability with an MP3 player is quite a shift.
Based around the new Toshiba 60gb hard drive the Photo Ipod gets a
220x176 pixel 65k colour screen to add to the now familiar cool
white exterior and the new 4G click wheel controls, but this extra
disk capacity and features comes with some penalty the Photo Ipod
weighs just over 180 grams and that's quite portly!
So you can probably guess that the Photo Ipod is still a great MP3
player and indeed it is so there's not much to add to our review of
the 4g Ipod on that front, but the addition of photo storage is
worth of some further explanation. Apple have launched a new version
of iTunes to enable your PC or Mac to connect to the Photo Ipod and
to download and manage photos and images, as before this connection
is made via USB or Firewire.
 The
screen can display your images that are synced with "my photos" or
another nominated folder on your PC, there is a very intuitive 25
image preview screen which allows for rapid navigation of the many
thousands of images you may have stored on the 60gb drive. Scrolling
though is made simple using the now widely acclaimed click wheel,
simply hurtle through your photo collection and once you see an
image you want to display full screen just push the centre button!
Formats supported for display by the photo Ipod are JPEG, BMP, GIF,
TIFF and PNG's .
Of course being able to carry your photo collection round on a
chubby Ipod is no big deal, but sharing them via an AV cable means
you can hook up to a TV or projector to give a modern day version of
the slideshow, yes just think of how exciting your photos of that
day on the steam railway will be when they come from your cool Ipod?
But seriously you can combine images in a preset slideshow with MP3
playback to make a full on AV experience which should really impress
anyone no matter how dull the images are.
The battery has been improved now giving 15 hours of MP3 playback
(instead of 10) and up to 5 hours of combined MP3 and slideshow,
charging is via the USB / Firewire connection or with the unit sat
in the photo dock supplied with both the 40gb and the 60gb models.
Priced at £354 and £424 for the 40gb and 60gb models respectively it
is a fair whack to pay for just the increased disk size, so you
really do need to consider if the photo capability is worth the
extra, the units are well built and a dream to use so you wont have
issues there. Its just one of those situations where the heart says
"go ahead" and the head questions spending this much on a supped up
Ipod.
More Portable Media Players -
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