mpio dmk 64mb - mp3 player

The physical design is beautiful, even the packaging the thing comes in is a work of design elegance, I love the piece of paper on the top as you open it that just says "Enjoy." Apple are definitely design masters and create real lifestyle and life modifying products. The scrollwheel and buttons are great and responsive although there may be some slight delay between pressing and seeing a response on some screens if you have a large music collection on there, I have about 9000 songs but the delay is still small.

The interface is very intuitive once you get use to it although I would have preferred being able to change EQ and shuffle/repeat settings without having to go back to the menu and into Settings. Id also like to be able to do this from the remote and to be able to rate songs via the remote, ideally id also like a remote with an LCD display for song titles (with 9000 songs on shuffle its difficult to remember exactly what youre listening to!). Perhaps Apple will do something like this in the future.

Those are minor points, the main flaw in the iPod, as everyone is aware, is the battery. It really is bad, 5 hours play is good for the iPod and worse is that the battery runs down when its off, so if youre on the last bar or two when you get to work and dont/cant charge it during the day the chances are itll be dead when you come to use it in the evening. There are a couple of things you can do, dare i say need to do in order to get the best out of your iPod...

The first thing is to buy the belkin battery pack and carry it with you always, the lights on it tell you when the batteries need replacing so you should always have power backeup for your iPod.

Secondly, try and charge your iPod where you can monitor it rather than overnight (although overnight as well is good). The reason I say this is because when the iPod says its charged, it isnt. If you unplug it and then plug it straight back in again and switch the iPod off it will start charging again. You can do this 3 or 4 times in succession and get a full charge.

Aside from the battery and the few very minor issues I have with the interface, the iPod is brilliant, your entire music collection in a small and beautifully designed piece of kit with on the go play listing and easy and fast access to any song. It doesnt get much better than that. Its expensive but if you can afford it and have a large collection, get one.

In response to some other comments:

Yes the iPod has an EU volume limiter but is easily got around, use one of the tools available from the iPodlounge (use google to find), also many tips and tricks on there, very useful.

WMA format. Not supported and it should be to be a universal music player. Is an established and, contrary to some opinions, a very good compression format and is petty of Apple not to support it, especially now that they have iTunes for Windows.

Headphones, the iPod ones are pretty good but my personal fave
are the Koss "The Plug" phones as you can put them right in your ear, have virtually 100% sound proofing of external noise and you can have your iPod loud and people around you wont hear it, bass is fuller as well. Use Creative Travelsound speakers for the best on-the-move hifi combination.

USB v Firewire, I think the reviewer who mentioned this got it the wrong way round, Firewire is much faster than USB2 and its well worth getting a Firewire card, theyre quite cheap and the transfer speed is much improved.

iPod tip: Use Brasso (yes brass cleaner) to clean your iPod, the wheel and buttons can get a bit grubby but this works a treat.

About one month after buying my iPod, the problems kicked in. I travel between two houses quite frequently and have two different computers- one PC and one Mac. I manage my iPod through my Mac. As I had 5 gig to spare I thought Id transfer some data from my PC to my Mac. I was unsure about the safety of my music, but thought that Windows XP would ask me before doing any formatting. I plugged in my iPod into my PC and without asking me it reformatted my iPod. Ihad spent about two weeks putting all of my CDs onto my iPod and that was all gone within two seconds.

I suppose that apple do this because they want less piracy but because of this, the iPod features suffer WAAAAAAY too much. You might ask why I didnt back up my music- the answer is I couldnt. Once the music is on you wont get it off.

There are also other cons, such as the battery life. If you want to listen to your iPod on a coach or train, you will need to use it near full volume. above 3/4 full volume the battery will be lucky to last over 3 hours. To be fair, if you manage your playlists well and dont scroll around too much, that figure mught be higher.

Another thing which annoyed me is that if you have the songs year attached to the mp3 in iTunes, there is no way of finding that out on the pod :(

I guess Id better summarise:

PROS:
Looks amazing and its size (physical) is impressive
Holds SOOO much
Very easy to navigate and organize

CONS:
Very (too?) expensive
Short battery
Volume Issues
Is Pc friendly, is Mac friendly, but isnt cross-platform friendly

The biggest plus are the amount of storage and the ease at which you can access it. Either select by artist, album or a playlist you have created from approx. 10,000 songs. Enough for most people! The intuitive way you search makes it very easy, indeed a pleasure to use, even with a large number of records.

Its small, light and elegant. If you havent already just pick one up. Why shouldnt it be beautifully designed and useful?

The sound quality is excellent. You can choose the quality of the tracks; higher quality will equal a smaller number of songs but I have hooked my iPod up to my hi-fi and no one has yet been able to distinguish the difference between the iPod and the original CD without cheating! And that is using an average quality setting.

Downsides are cost and battery life. Its not cheap and whilst I think it is a better portable jukebox that its contempories you may want to consider a smaller model (note that the iPods with less storage are actually smaller and lighter than the 40gb model). Battery life is not great either. 8 hours is the absolute max but if you repeatedly skip tracks, play the games included or use the backlight you will invariably get less.