iPod Mini: An In-Depth Review

By Jonathan Berohn

OK—after drooling enviously from the sideline and reporting longingly from afar for far too long (unless you ask my wife, of course), I finally took the plunge and bought my own iPod.

For the two of you who just returned from the desert island, the IPod is Apple’s portable digital music player.  Like the Walkman before it, the iPod revolutionized personal music listening.  And it’s still delivering the best combination of performance plus appearance of any digital music player out there.

The Cool Factor

OK—I’ll admit that I never even looked seriously at any other digital music players for the simple reason that iPod is cool.  The click wheel is a cool interface, the white earbuds are a cool status symbol, and the sleek design is just...well...cool.  Have I mentioned that the iPod is cool?  Seriously, though Apple has hit a home run with design and marketing on iPods.  Lots of other companies make digital music players.  How many can you name?  Exactly.  Of course, the iPod mini isn’t as cool as the iPod Nano.  Now that—oops—um, my wife says that the iPod Mini is quite cool and that if I know what’s good for me I’ll forget all about any other models.  Yes, quite cool.

Features

The most important feature of any iPod is memory.  That determines how many songs your iPod can hold at one time.  The iPod mini that I bought comes with 4 Gigabytes of memory.  To you and me that translates into about 1,000 songs.  Yes, you read that right—1,000 songs (slightly less if you are a fan of bands like the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers and their extended live jams).

When it comes to listening to your songs, the iPod mini delivers just as well on sound quality as it does on storage capacity.  The digital sound the iPod delivers is virtually indistinguishable from CD’s, and the Apple earbuds deliver a vibrant sound that is perfect for all but the pickiest audiophiles.

You control your iPod through Apple’s click wheel interface that lets you navigate through a menu-driven system by simply moving your finger over the center of the iPod similar to how you’d use a touchpad on a laptop.  The menus let you play songs by title, album, genre, artist or song lists that you create yourself.  You can also set the iPod to randomly play any of the songs in your library.  I’ve got over 750 on mine right now, so I can listen for about 2 and a half days straight without having to hear any repeats.

If the music isn’t enough to keep you amused, you can also play a few simple games on the iPod mini. And if the music is too much to keep you focused, you can use your iPod as an alarm clock and appointment calendar, too.  It can even function as a portable hard drive if you need to carry data around with you.

The one slightly frustrating aspect about the iPod is that you can’t simply take it out of the box and start listening to music.

Getting Started

You have to load music onto it first.  If you want to put music you already own on the iPod, this means ripping MP4 files from your CDs onto your computer.  For the uninitiated all this means is that you copy your CDs onto the hard drive of your computer using iTunes—a program Apple offers free for both Mac and PC users.  Fortunately, ripping an MP4 is much faster than listening to a CD.  You can rip all the songs from a typical CD in about five minutes.  If you have a large CD library, this can take a while, but it’s not overwhelmingly tedious.

If, on the other hand, you want to put new music on your iPod, iTunes links directly to Apple’s online music store, where you can buy pretty much any music available for 99 cents per song and $9.99 per album.  Yes, I know, there are plenty of free sources of music out there, too.  But I’m always of a mind that you get what you pay for—and nothing quite beats the joy of a free virus or an unannounced visit from the copyright police.  In the long run that 99 cents is a pretty good deal.

Anyway, once you have your music, you simply hook up your iPod to your computer’s USB2 port and iTunes does the rest for you.  The default setting is to sync your iPod with your computer, so iTunes will copy everything you put on your computer directly to your iPod.  If you want to rotate songs or something later, you can switch to manual updates, but the automatic copying is great for the first use—and it’s even faster than ripping the files, so you don’t have to wait too much longer to start enjoying your portable digital music.