Almost a full two years since its last full-size iPod, Apple has unleashed the iPod classic. Coming in 80GB and 160GB capacities -- costing £159 and £229 respectively -- the classic can hold a massive archive of music and video. There's no need to pick and choose which music goes with you, even if you rip CDs at the very highest lossless quality. We wasted no time in stress-testing the classic to within millimetres of its life. The classic is available now from Apple stores or the company's Web site.
Design
The glossy and easily scratched faceplate of previous models has been replaced with an attractive matte texture, either in black or silver -- white is no more. The Click Wheel too has been steered from shiny gloss to matte, the result being a less scratch-prone finish. The reflective silver casing is unchanged though, and still easily scuffable -- seven days into the classic being used as our 'full-time' MP3 player, several scratches had appeared.
An unchanged 64mm (2.5-inch) 320x240-pixel full-colour screen still consumes the top half of the player's front. The new iPod nano's screen has the same pixel count in a smaller display, leaving us feeling a little left out -- why not up the classic's resolution a notch?
Features
The most exciting new feature is Cover Flow. You've seen it in action with iTunes -- it's that arty way of browsing your CD collection by the cover art. We've long hoped it would come to the iPod, and now it has. It works just like in iTunes, only it's now on a white background instead of black. You'll need to ensure most of your music files have album art embedded or you'll see a lot of generic grey album covers floating around. Browsing Cover Flow is easy with the Click Wheel and, hell, it's darn pretty too!
A new UI splits the main menu screens into two halves: the left half contains the traditional blue-on-white menu, while the right contains floating album art. Artwork slowly moves around the right-hand side of the screen as you navigate through menus. This is all well and good unless you've got, shall we say, 'Grandma-unfriendly' album covers floating around while demonstrating the interface to friends.
In fact, album art is used widely in the classic. In addition to Cover Flow and floating menu art, small covers sit beside albums as you browse through artists. Floating menu art doesn't appear in these menus, so there's plenty of room. Art is much more attractively displayed on the 'now playing' screen, in as much as it's slightly larger than on previous models and a reflection is displayed below it.
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Chris_Ryles 11 September 2011
Good: HUGE storage, Menus
Bad: Nothing
Comment: This is my favourite bit of tech that I own. Over my phone, computer- everything. It take pretty much every song you've ever heard and fit it in your pocket. Sounds great, looks great preforms great. I have 7500 songs and over 24 hours of video on mine and I've just passed 50% capacity. Awesome
rlankine 22 November 2007
Good: Memory size, physical robustness
Bad: Slow and unreliable firmware (v1.0.2)
Comment: I bought my iPod classic in mid-October and started converting my collection of ~40000 MP3's to AAC@128 . While doing it for a couple of weeks the iPod worked just fine - if perhaps a bit slow when load playing lists and other UI features. Alas, when nearly all of my collection was converted, my iPod froze during sync so badly that even Apple service could not revive it and replaced it with a new one. So I synced that one, it froze, too, and was exchanged. And so on... I'm now at my fourth unit, and after reducing the number of my iTunes play lists (from ca. 75 to ca. 60) it sort-of works. It still reboots spontaneously in random places related to playlists, searching, shuffling, and loading lengthy lists of e.g. artists, but it can be used when it works and exchanged when it locks up next time.
Anyway, I'll continue experimenting (and also awaiting a better firmware update) as long as Apple is willing to replace frozen units at no cost to me. I really wish they'de get the FW right, since it is the only player on the market having the size (160B) large enough to contain all of my music collection.
FWIW, I run Windows Vista in a genuine Intel laptop no older than three months.
Greeny 20 October 2007
Good: The menus are great but the Storage is incredible
Bad: Slightly slow loading on the coverflow
Comment: Apple have very nearly perfected the Ipod now. I recently got an 80Gb Classic and have been blown away by new menus and its interface with my computer. It took me about 10 minutes to load 2000 songs onto it and about 5 minutes to load 14 hours of video. The menus have been designed around the old 5th generation Ipods but have been revamped and modernized and have your cover art floating around in the background which is a nice aesthetic touch. The one thing everyone seems to be raving about with this new Ipod is the coverflow feature. This does look good but means you have to go through your whole library getting the correct art. This gets even more complicated if you have lots of compilations or older albums that don't have the cover art necessary. On the Ipod this feature takes a while to load and if you have lots of albums, when you flick through there is a lot of generic grey before it loads. Despite this the Ipod classic is a quality piece of kit and I would recommend it to anyone who has more than 1000 tracks in there library. If you have less than that then I would recommend the new nano or an equivalent as you will never get near filling this beast.
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