Tech-Me – Blogging my thoughts on gadgets, techology and web based media – chapmanmania

Despite all I’ve said about iPods in the past, I’m now the owner of an iPod Classic. I’m actually quite a fan of this generation of iPods, so what has Apple done to win me over and why did I choose the Classic?
I’ve played with all of the range, and I fell in love with the iPod Touch interface and web browsing but is let down by only 16GB and the price of flash storage currently is too high. Similarly with the nano, there isn’t enough storage to justify the expense. I would have actually preferred flash storage due to it’s durability and longer life span, but if I was going to get an iPod, I wanted to be able to sync all of my music onto one device. Which is another reason why I chose the Classic, with all of my music collection with me, I can search for any song I feel like listening to at any moment, rather than being limited to the 1.5GB I was previously carrying on my W810i. Ultimately though, my main criticism of the iPod ranges before now was the battery life. 10hrs simply wasn’t enough for my needs without charging it on a nightly basis. Since this has improved across the board, with claimed battery life for the 80GB Classic being 30hrs audio/5hrs video, I feel that I could actually take it away for a few days use without worrying about the battery going dead. And literally, since Apple unreasonably don’t include an AC adapter in the box. Finally, having used iTunes for a few months now, the iPod was the logical player to go for as I’d be able to quickly and easily sync whilst listening as I would normally.
I bought it yesterday and sadly hit my first hurdle when I plugged it into my computer. Being a relatively early adopter of Windows Vista, I soon found that the iPod wasn’t recognised by the system. Rather, it knew that the iPod was there but was searching for a non-existant iPod driver. Fortunately, I found help from the Whirlpool, where members had encountered the same problems. By pointing toward the Windows System 32 folder, drivers were established to enable the iPod as the mass storage drive drive it needed to be for iTunes to recognise it. From here, it was only a matter of following a simple set up in iTunes to begin the process of syncing my music collection with my first iPod…