Apple iPod classic 120GB - Silver

I bought one of these in November 2008 (it is January 2009 as I write this) as a relatively inexpensive portable place to "dump" all my music. In other words, the 120GB capacity was the attraction. But what a surprise - iPod turns out to be a really great little device! So far, I have about 12000 songs on mine, and a few full-length movies, and I still have 36GB free. That's about 38 days' worth of continuous music, plus movies.

The user interface is very easy to use, and remarkably intuitive. Coverflow can be a little slow to get started, if you have a lot of music, and it's not as useful as it looks. The little colour screen is actually quite good for viewing movies. Of the three games incldued, the music trivia quiz is the best. It uses your own music (and the tag info in them) to form multiple choice questions. If you take the trouble to keep your tags reasonably accurate, and you find out the right cover artwork files (which I have) the quiz is very good indeed. basically, the better your music collection, the better the quiz is.

Anyway, games aside (they are a minor matter) the playback quality is excellent. I didn't bother with the cheapo headphones, and bought some Sennheiser headphones. The sound quality is now excellent.

Movies: It is possible to rip DVDs to play on iPod, by converting them to MP4 format. This takes about 2 hours and you need to hunt down some (free) software on the web to do it. The resulting playback quality is surprisingly good.

If anything lets iPod down, it is the iTunes software that is used to manage it. It is just a bit slow - slow to load, slow to respond to commands, slow to shutdown, slow to detect iPod... And for something so heavily reliant on MP3 tags for its music database, it has really poor tag editing tools.

All in all, this iPod is great value for money. If it died on me, I would immediately buy another one.

I love my new ipod but when you scratch the silver one it is very noticable and finger prints and such show up easily, get it in black. No complaints about the actual product though, very easy to use, cool extras, charges quick, battery lasts a long time and it can hold a lot of music.

We all know what an iPod does. In practice? It's good. Everything works pretty much as you would expect.

The Apple earbuds aren't great...while they sound ok they don't fit into the ear very well (so the bass response isn't as good as you might expect) and they seem to throw as much sound out the back as they send down your ear, something to bear in mind for the considerate on public transport. I replaced the Apple buds with my trusty Sennheisers and all is well though I note Apple just announced a new earbud design with gel buds that look like they will give a much better fit. When they are going to be shipping with those I don't know.

Sound quality is very good, detailed and clear, much clearer than my previous MP3 stick. Volume, it's certainly acceptably loud though I would have liked a little more just to be able to turn up those quieter old 80's tracks...I find myself running it at max or close to most of the time (though it's probably good for my hearing that it doesn't go any louder).

The only real issues I've had seem to be around when it's hooked up to iTunes on the PC. Sometimes iTunes doesn't recognise the iPod and won't syncronise/keeps ejecting it, sometimes it recognises it when it shouldn't, reopening iTunes when I close it. iTunes can also get very sluggish with the user interface locking up for 10-15 secs at a time. Because the iPod is umbilically tied to the iTunes software, you must use it to update or access many of the iPods functions so whatever you think of the iTunes player, you are going to be using it.

I'd also like the ability to edit playlists away from the computer. Sometimes I'm listening to a playlist and something jars, I want to delete it or add something else. No chance. I'm sure it would be very simple to implement. Similarly an 'Add to existing playlist' option would be useful. Yes, you can do all these with iTunes, but I wouldn't mind doing them on the move.

Battery life isn't amazing. It's not bad given I hook it up to the PC every day to recharge but I've never really got the textbook figures from it. Games especially can drain the battery in a matter of 2-3hrs.

Games: surprisingly it actually makes a fairly decent games console, far higher quality than I expected. Games are only £4 from the iTunes store...well worth it if you fancy killing a few minutes with one. We aren't talking PSP/DS quality but certainly better than the old Megadrive/Gameboy generation. An unexpected and welcome bonus.

It's a little tricky to convert films/DVD's to work on it if you want to rip a DVD as opposed to buying from the iTunes store but there are freeware tools available online and I really enjoyed being able to put a few films/TV series on here. On a long flight or train journey that is going to be fantastic.

Overall, it's sleek and gorgeous to look at. I think this generation of iPods is visually the best so far. The hardware works well, the interface is refined and easy to use. In short, it works very very well. I'd give it 5 stars but there are a few niggles and it does crash/lock up with more regularity than I would like. But it is a brilliant little device and I am really starting to love it.