ipod photo 60gb review

Ipod photo 60GB review

My brothers gave me an ipod photo 60G for my birthday, and it's taken

me this long before getting around to a review. The first thing I did

was to take it on a 16 mile hike up half-dome. (Half-dome is not a

wilderness experience, so it's not like you're losing anything by

listening to music) The ipod held up fine on the 10 hour hike, and

seemed to handle abuse just fine.

I did acquire a Speck skin for the ipod (hint: don't use the screen

protector, it scratches the screen!) pretty early on.

There's something special about having your entire music collection in

one place (and having 60GB means you'll never have to choose which CDs

you bring with you), and the ipod does sound good when used with a

decent set of headphones.

The big minuses have to do with the hard drive: my ipod seems to be

particularly sensitive to knocks or sharp motions, which don't cause

my ipod to skip but do cause it to suddenly stop playing until I push

the play button again. It even does that when I'm just moving the ipod

a little quickly. The sudden stop doesn't happen a lot when hiking

with my ipod in my camelbak, but does seem to happen a distressing

number of times when cycling with it in my jersey pockets. (I've since

switched to an ipod shuffle for cycling) I see people running with the

ipod strapped to their arms, so clearly, those armband things would

probably work for cycling as well, but I don't like the idea of having

something wrapped around my arm, and my shuffle works just fine for

situations where I'm likely to get knocked around.

In any case, I have the ipod to thank for the sudden increase in music

listening (much more in the last 3 months than in the previous 3 years

combined), and access to podcasts (I highly recommend Radio Memories

podcasts, a nice collection of old-time radio broadcasts during the

golden age of radio). On the other hand, given how it has caused me to

spend more money buying CDs to feed the darn thing (a direct

consequence of my listening to more music), maybe I shouldn't be so