right on bro!

I ended up being late for work today because I was playing around with the new video iPod. Here’s a bunch of observations after the first day.

• I ordered the 30GB version from the Apple Store on the 12th, the day of the release announcement. The store estimate was 5-7 days to ship, and the estimated receipt date was Thursday the 20th, but I got it this morning. According to FedEx the package came from Shanghai. So if you’ve ordered one, maybe you’ll get lucky and it’ll come earlier than expected.
• The video thing is pretty cool. I downloaded the first episode of Lost from iTunes, just to see how it was. The screen ain’t no Jon Regul 50″ HDTV but it’s bright and clear. I’m going to skip watching Lost on Wednesday and get the iTunes version so I can see how it is.
• On the 30GB version, battery life for video is rated at about 2 hours. Battery life for music is rated at about 15. The battery was shot by the time I left work, although I didn’t charge it up all the way at first. So time will tell on this one.
• I had some problems installing it. It wasn’t immediately clear to me that the “Do Not Disconnect” message isn’t an error, and that I was supposed to eject the iPod in iTunes. As a Shuffle user, I’m used to just pulling the Shuffle out from the USB port whenver I want, except for when iTunes says it’s updating, and that’s what I thought was happening. I spent the first 30 minutes waiting for the message to go away, thinking that it was trying to update something, until I finally looked online. Apple would do well to revise this message to something like “Please Eject, Then Disconnect,” with the added bonus of having the error message rhyme.
• Transferring songs is a lot faster than the Shuffle.
• For the CDs that you’ve ripped, the album cover art isn’t displayed per song like it does in the TV commercials. To fix this, I got this program called iArt, which hits the Amazon search API for product images and matches them against the artist/album combinations in your iTunes library. iArt is processing my collection right now, and it’s accuracy is really good. Problem solved.
• I finally understand podcasting now that I can actually browse through the list of music/podcasts/videos. Podcasting does not work with the Shuffle.

One thing that I think would be cool would be the ability to skip to all available songs from a particular artist when you’re shuffling. I hope they build this in at some point (or, if it’s in there already, I figure it out).

As far as the video thing is concerned…I think Apple’s going to need a lot more short-form, FREE video content feeds for the video thing to work, integrated into iTunes like podcasts. By short-form, I mean like, 5-10 minute clips - their TV episodes now take a bit of time to download. A site like StupidVideos or Red vs. Blue would be perfect for a video podcast, because the videos they produce are mostly low-res and very short, and they’d be the right size to view several of them before the battery goes kaput. I have no idea how anybody would make money off of this. But it would be cool, so they should do it for me.

That’s it, because I feel dirty from talking about this thing so much. But I’m done bragging now. Thanks!