Apple 30 Or 60 Gigs Video ipod .... Uk Enquiry

No one with this name here.

Typical sales person paid on commission. They will lie and tell you anything, do some research FIRST. Why buy a product you say you know nothing about.

Why subscribe to WHICH magazine when you can use search engines to get product information and reviews.

It's a pleasure.

I've been doing a lot of testing of portable media devices in my job, I can say that the Creative products have been mediocre at best, and the software they ship with is garbage. The Philips devices look kinda cool but they're even worse, complete junk, they lock up constantly, the controls are not intuitive and the screen is of poor quality.

I'm a PC/Windows guy and certainly no Apple fanboy but their iPod hardware is hands down the best designed, slickest, most intuitive device in it's class and the only of ~25 different similar devices I've worked with that I'd recommend without hesitation.

the sales droid may have some element of truth there, ipods are not the best MP3 player out there in terms of features on them, but they are common, well styled and the ease of use has pushed it in the public conciouysnes, if you say you want an ipod everyone knows what you mean, if you say you want a mp3 player people look blankly at you.

Any shop selling mp3 player's and not carrying apple is just asking to lose sales.

Personally I've never found Which to do really indepth tests, there ok as a read but i wouldn't rely on them for a purchasing descision

Which? reviews are impartial? Most of the reviews you find by a search are just ads.

life

deals to

Hi James, That info is usefull to know, so they are not a total pile of rubbish then? What is the battery life on the ipods?

Thanks

Unless they are free of charge, there is no real point crossposting this to freebies NG, is there?

We have 4 iPods in this house ;-). The old 20GB 3rd gen iPod has a crap battery. It's down to about 1 hour of use after a couple of years nearly solid use. However, they were notorious for poor battery performance, and Apple changed the battery type for all subsequent iPods.

The 4GB Nano lasts about 12-15 hours, depending on how loud my wee lad decides to listen.

My wife's 30GB video ipod and my 60GB video ipod both last about 8-10 hours when listening to music, or about 2 hours when watching video. I use mine on average 4 hours per day, or up to 10 hours per day when I'm travelling.

I have to agree with other posters. I've had Philips, Creative and Sony in the past, and got rid of them all in preference to the Apple. Sound quality, build quality, and software are all much better than any of the competition.

And remember, Apple doesn't have 73% of the market for no reason. If they were as bad as the sales person said, then surely they wouldn't be as popular.

Umgall

Hi,

Have a look at IRiver products - they offer many additional features compared to an IPod and are also easy to operate with firmware upgrades released where necessary.

Note that's 20 hrs audio, as specified by the manufacturer. YMMV.

I wasn't aware that Apple were allowing other companies to use their trademark and brand name.

Honestly I'm not really sure, I've never done any battery life testing since that's out of my scope and I've never run my nano down all the way, it seems to do pretty close to the stated 14 hours or so though. They're not perfect but then none are, but they are quite good overall.

Those too are worth a look, as well as a few of the latest Samsung players. To me they don't *quite* match the iPod but they're good products none the less.

Remember it varies according to what your doing.

Watching video needs more processing power and the backlight to stay on.

You'd be lucky to get the manufactureres stated 3 hours from the battery if your using it for video playback

As others have said, I get about 15-20hrs (music) and 2-2.5hrs (video) out of my 60Gb iPod.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the battery recharges very quickly via USB. I think the specs quote 4hrs but mine seems a lot faster than that.