This is the best article I've seen on the new iPod.
October 28, 2004
STATE OF THE ART
The iPod's New Trick: Photo Show
By DAVID POGUE
The New York Times
SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 27 - All right, Apple. The iPod has 92 percent of the market for high-capacity music players. You sold two million of them in the last quarter alone. Your music store, whose songs play only on the iPod, has 70 percent of the online song sales market, and you've just rolled it out in 10 new countries.
What on earth do you do for an encore?
Apple revealed its answer Tuesday to an invited audience of journalists at a half demonstration, half U2 rock concert here: a new, top-of-the-line model that takes the iPod concept in a new direction that's simultaneously risky and overwhelmingly natural. Instead of just playing your music, this model also shows off your photos.
The iPod Photo, as it's called, looks and feels exactly like the existing iPod (it's one millimeter thicker). There's the famous white click wheel, there's the shiny chrome back panel, there are your fingerprints on it. But its two-inch screen is now in bright, crisp color.
The color screen is infinitely superior to the old black-and-white one, thanks in part to its new, sharper typeface. It makes a world of difference to built-in iPod programs like the calendar and the arcade games. It also shows the album's cover artwork when a song is playing.
But the real purpose of this screen is, of course, to display your digital pictures, which the iPod Photo automatically copies from your Mac or PC.
That stunt is brought to you by Version 4.7 of Apple's free iTunes jukebox software; you use it to specify a source for your photo collections. On the Macintosh, it's taken for granted that you use Apple's iPhoto software to organize your pictures; you can specify which albums (that is, subsets) you want synched to the iPod.
On a PC (Windows XP or 2000), you can sync the iPod with photo collections you've set up in Adobe Photoshop Elements or Photoshop Album, or with any pictures folder on your hard drive (like My Pictures).
Of course, a two-inch display isn't what you'd call a billboard; it's no bigger than the screen on the back of a digital camera. Fortunately, you can also connect the iPod Photo to a TV set by plugging the included iPod-white, three-headed audio-video cable into, of all things, the iPod's headphone jack. (There's also an S-video jack on its charging cradle.) This way, you can entertain the whole family with your little "Day in the Life of Me" presentation, as your handpicked music plays in the background.
As it turns out, the existing iPod's design, originally conceived for music, lends itself beautifully to photo shows.
For example, the functions of the click wheel's four buttons - Menu, Previous, Next and Play/Pause - apply just as naturally to slide shows. Ditto for the iPod's navigational system: the click wheel can breeze through the list of photo albums just as it does through music playlists. And running your finger around the wheel during a slide show adjusts the soundtrack volume just as it does during straight-ahead music playback.
In short, graduating from a traditional iPod to a color iPod involves virtually no relearning.
A kind of slide-sorter view displays 25 tiny pictures per screen; it's one way to pluck a certain photo from among the hundreds. Another is to spin the click wheel, which can page through full-screen photos astonishingly quickly and smoothly. They flicker past almost as though they're frames of film.
Here's another nice touch: When the iPod Photo is hooked up to a TV, your adoring fans see only the full-size photo on the TV screen. But you, captain of the iPod, see a tidy little command center on its screen: the current photo, flanked by thumbnails of the previous and next
ones. They provide a convenient crutch for narrating the show. ("O.K., see how cocky Chris looks here, going up the ski lift? Now I'll show you Chris five seconds later.")
And because you can see which photo is coming next, you'll never be caught in what veteran presenters call a "Now how'd that get in there?" moment.
Before shuttling your photos off to the iPod, the iTunes software does quite a bit of preprocessing, including scaling down your huge multimegapixel digital pictures to fit the iPod's two-inch screen. Because the resulting files are so tiny, Apple says that up to 25,000 of them can fit on the iPod Photo. (You can choose to include the full-resolution photos on the iPod's hard drive, too, which is handy when you want to transport them from one computer to another. In that case, of course, the iPod holds far fewer than 25,000.)
Unfortunately, all that processing adds a considerable amount of time to the synching process. On the Macintosh, the added delay is tolerable; you wait about 10 seconds for a dozen fresh pictures. But on Windows, synching is measured in minutes, not seconds. For best results, keep a stack of Popular Photography magazines next to your iPod cradle.
Photo fans should also note that the iPod's 220-by-176-pixel screen doesn't neatly accommodate pictures that have 4:3 proportions, or even 3:2 proportions (the standard aspect ratios of digital photos). Unless you care to crop each of your 25,000 photos before synching them to your iPod, be prepared to accept a subtle letterbox effect, a thin strip of black above and below each photo. (What the heck; the Bravo channel does it all the time.)
The iPod Photo comes in two models, both pricey. One, with a 40-gigabyte hard drive, costs $500, which is $100 more than its black-and-white counterpart. The other, with a new 60-gigabyte drive, goes for $600.
Both models, despite the color screen, somehow manage to provide about 25 percent longer battery life than their predecessors: 15 hours of music playback, or five hours of slide shows with music. ("Which is probably more than your friends will watch," added Steve Jobs, Apple's chief.)
So, yes, the iPod Photo is beautifully done. But within hours of its unveiling, iPod cynics were asking some hard-nosed questions online. Why can't you download your pictures onto this thing straight from a digital camera? Why do you have to use iTunes, a music program, to manage the photo loading? And, inevitably: Why can't it play video?
After all, for the same $500, you can buy a Windows Mobile Portable Media Center that plays not only music and photos, but videos too. (Of course, its hard drive holds only half as much as the iPod Photo's, you can't use it to record your own TV shows, and it's three times the size of an iPod. But still.)
These are rational questions. And if you're among those baffled by the iPod's appeal, well, consider yourself lucky. You won't find anything as beautiful, as polished or as simple to master, but you may well find a rival with more features or a lower price.
(And if you are in that category, you'll definitely want to avoid the striking new iPod U2 Edition, also unveiled this week. It's a traditional, 20-gigabyte, music-only iPod with a shiny black face, a red click wheel and the four U2 band members' signatures laser-etched onto the back panel. And it costs $350, which is $50 more than a regular white iPod.)
But as about six million people now know, buying an iPod isn't a rational decision. It appeals to people's emotions, their creativity, and even their vanity. It's not a machine, it's a personal accessory. In fact, it's practically jewelry.
That's why the iPod Photo makes so much sense. The iPod has always played your songs, in your chosen sequence, at a volume only you can hear; now it also shows snapshots of your life, friends and memories. In other words, Apple has found a way to make the iPod even more expressive, individualized and personal. Rational, schmational - get me on the waiting list.
E-mail:
Pogue@nytimes.com
