Being an early adopter I ordered an iPod Photo 60GB last Tuesday. I was surprised that despite being shipped from China that it arrived on Thursday. A couple of quick observations on this excellent new iPod… Read More…
Being an early adopter I ordered an iPod Photo 60GB last Tuesday. I was surprised that despite being shipped from China that it arrived on Thursday. A couple of quick observations on this excellent new iPod:
The menu commands for powering off, rebooting, etc. are now printed on the back of the iPod Photo’s “don’t steal music” wrapper. I guess Apple figures that no one reads the manuals anyway… You can download the iPod Photo User Guide from Apple’s iPod support site.
I am mixed on the silver Apple logo on black startup screen, I thought they would better leverage the color screen with, perhaps, a more colorful startup screen. Anyone figure out how to hack this yet? Picture above courtesy of iPodlounge.com.
The iPod Photo feels slightly thicker than my 3G 30GB iPod although you can barely tell. The photo below shows four different generations of iPods and their packaging:
From left to right: iPod original 20 GB, iPod 3G 30GB, iPod Photo 60GB, iPod mini.
Included in the box with the iPod Photo are USB2 and Firewire cables and the brand new heavy-duty A/V cable that features both composite video and left/right audio connections. This A/V cable can be connected to either the dock or to the 1/8th-inch headphone jack on the top of the unit to project a slideshow (with audio) to an external source like a television or a projector.
Since the introduction of the “click wheel” iPods, they no longer reboot each time they are connected or disconnect to the dock or cable – this was new to me coming from a 3G model without the click wheel.
I uncovered a problem with my iPhoto library that prevented certain photo albums from syncing to the iPod. When attempting to sync certain photo albums I’d get one of the following errors:
“The iPod “name” cannot be updated. An unknown error occurred (-36).”
“The iPod “name” cannot be updated. You do not have enough access privileges for this operation”
“The iPod “name” cannot be updated. The required file cannot be found”
The problem persisted even after an iPod restore (read: nuke and pave) with the latest version of the iPod updater.
A third tier support rep at Apple confirmed that there is a file in my iPhoto library that is pointing to something that doesn’t exist which is causing the problem. My options are to rebuild the iPhoto library (hold command-option while starting iPhoto) or to burn and re-import it.
Syncing music appears to be slower (via FireWire) although I haven’t taken the time to prove this out. Perhaps it is the album artwork? Apple claims that album art will only increase the size of your music library by one percent.
More on this exciting new iPod in future installments.
What have you seen that interests you in the new iPod Photo?
