Well, I got a VIpod yesterday. I had purchased an Ipod Photo a few weeks ago then this thing came out so I took it back and got the 60GB V.
My observations:
I don’t like the new, Apple manufactured, click wheel. It’s more sensitive than the other ones and it’s harder to quickly pick out single items.
The menu slows down DRAMATICALLY when you go through it while a song is playing. It’s got a half second delay or so after each button click before it actually responds.
When you skip to the next/last track while it’s playing it will start playing the track right away but it takes a sec for it to display track info. That’s annoying when you are clicking through some songs on an album
This thing scratches like a BIG DOG. I’ve got the white version and the scratches show pretty well on it. I can’t imagine the black one. I put a silicone case on it and took it off and THAT scratched it. I ended up putting a PDA screen sticky over the whole face and cut out around the click wheel because I don’t want it all beat up. I’m not using this thing as a fashion statement so I don’t care how it looks, but I don’t want the screen scratched because I have to look through that to see videos and track info.
Video plays really well on it. It doesn’t look that bad when plugged into a TV. I used a cable from my Sony Camcorder to test it out and it worked well, though the Red one was the video for some reason.
Sounds the same as my Mini and Photo did.
I don’t know if I buy the battery life claims. I only used it to watch 10 minutes of video and the battery indicator had already gone down about 10%.
Anyway, I definitely like the Photo better. It’s better built IMHO and the Click Wheel is far superior. Though it’s thicker and doesn’t play video I would rather have kept that one.
Can’t take this one back now because it’s got some scratched on it.
I wouldn’t buy one. Once again, Apple has ignored the fact that most of the world watches video in formats other than mpg and mov or qt. It’s ridiculous, but even on a full Mac you have to get third party software to play avi files, which are just everywhere. They act like they’re in control of the computer world, when in fact, they’re just a small sliver.
Nice, I feel much better now. I dropped $299 on the photo about 2 months before the vIpod came out. I was most annoyed about about the 10 extra gigs, and the slimmer form factor, but now I’m happy with what I have.
I have to ask for more specifics. As of last summer, according to all manner of Mac experts, including the “Genius” at a real Mac store, it didn’t play Divx or Xvid codecs, which is what almost everything on the net uses. So while I may have misstated it slightly, my point remains that it doesn’t play what I would want it to play.
The free DivX codec for Quicktime. I suppose you could argue that that doesn’t constitute “native” support, but a five-minute, one-time download and install is hardly a deal-breaker, esp. for someone savvy enough to collect DivX content anyway. (There’s a free xVid component too somewhere.)