iPod: Day 2

Well, yesterday I got my black iPod Nano (4GB) and all associated gadgets to it.

First impressions:
- the iPod is incredible sleek and cool looking.
- it is very light
- it is VERY easy to scratch - I had to immediately go to http://www.theinvisibleshield.com/ and buy the invisible shield wrapper for the nano. The demos looked really good and the reviews at several different sites were overwhelmingly good. I bought one for me and one for my brother as a birthday present since he has a new 2GB nano for Christmas from his fiancee.

From there I set out to plug it in and connect it up. I found it very easy to just dump songs from iTunes into the iPod manually. Once I went home I set it up to automatically update based on playlists I have with one playlist just being a filler for general ipod music.

I threw a bunch of music in and then found out that I had 2 GB still free. Well lets do something about that. I didn't necessarily want more music so I took a swing over to the iTunes Music Store and went to the podcasting section. From there I was able to download segments from NPR, including some of my favorite segments like "On the Media" and "On Point With Tom Ashbrook". At home I set it up to also automatically update all the podcasts I had selected whenever I synchronized. I also set iTunes to update podcasts every hour. What's cool is that I have it set up to grab the 7am NPR News Briefs so that I can listen to it on the way to work.

I played with the pictures portion of the syncing and I'm going to put the pictures of my condo on there just for fun. Its mostly for amusement value as the screen is very very tiny.

Upon getting home I realized I had left the iPod software CD at the office, but thankfully I was able to download a copy off of Apple's site. With that problem done I realized another problem. My computer only has USB 1.1 ports, and the iPod works best with USB 2.0 (which is about 40 times faster for data transfer). Well from there a quick trip to Pricewatch.com to get an $11 four port USB 2.0 PCI card for my system. Thanfully the company is a NY company and shipping was free. I should be getting that any day now, and USB 1.1 actually works fairly well, it just takes longer.

I've also found that I can easily rate songs that I have on my iPod. Another neat feature is that if I listen to part of a podcast on iTunes and then transfer it to my iPod it remembers where I was when I stopped. Apparently you can set this feature on any iTunes file but its most useful for books and podcasts.

Overall the thing that surprised me the most is how much I enjoy podcasts. Its almost like TiVo for news and discussion. I can download these segments and play them in the car or while I'm working and its a nice relaxing way to take in information. Previously I had kinda dismissed the whole podcast thing as a fad but it is really really useful and interesting.

Well, that's all for now. I'll post more of my experience with the new iPod later.