How does it work? Is it pretty cool? Im thinking about buying one, but I dont know anyone that owns one. Give me some reviews if you can, thanks
I have a first generation Ipod, 5gb model. Never had a moments problem with it. My 21 month old son got a hold of it the other day and tossed it across the room and it still works great.
I've used almost all of them For the price I would go with the 20gig one. The mini's are cool , but for 50 more dollars you can get a 15 gig. I love the firewire. quick and easy transfer of songs. Use Itunes if possible. Umm. You can rank songs by how good they are. Pretty much all good. a little pricey, but cant beat the design and funcionality Cnet.com is the best place for reviews
Can you put other files, like word docs, excel sheets, etc on them too? Do they act like a regluar portable hard drive?
Yessir, You can booot up a mac from one. I haven't tried to boot up a PC from it. I have all my HD backed up on my friends 40 gig, and he still has 5 gigs free. Its sooo awesome. Even the games are allright.
I also have a 1st generation iPod, and I love it. Works great and is super easy to use. Highly recommended. movement: You can put ANYTHING on the drive. It does indeed act like a portable drive. Plus, you can store contacts on it, too.
Don't think PC's can boot from a FireWire drive, so no, but it's very handy for transporting large files from one place to another.
If I were you I'd recommend the Creative Jukebox. One comes it at 40GB of space, at 250 roughly the same price as a 10GB iPod. They're a little bigger and bulkier, but provide better sound quality, are actually built specifically for Windows, have a longer battery life, and when the battery does die, it's easier to remove it then with an iPod. Software wise the iPod wins with iTunes. For Windows, it eats up a lot of resources but it makes transferring songs on the iPod the easiest, and is a good music player on the PC to boot. You can do a lot neat things with it. Software wise and for a sleeker physical size it's the iPod. Price per GB of space, and better sound quality you go with the Creative Jukebox. I have a 5GB 1st Generation iPod and I love it but if I were to choose again, I'd go with the cheaper Jukebox with more space. As it stands right now I'm personally debating whether I want to get a PocketPC (have no idea which one to get. just a techie geek ), or getting a Gameboy SP instead, or merely saving my money for something more practical that might be more appealing later on in the future. I personally am hoping to hold out for when Doom 3, Half Life 2, Painkiller, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Farcry, etc come out and build a new PC off the technology out then.
I like the new iriver mp3 players. I've got an Archos Multimedia Jukebox, which I don't like much at all. It's got lots of neat features, but if I can get $300 for it with the acessories on ebay, I'll be elated. The battery only lasts 4 hours at the most, and the feature I bought it for (recording video onto it), didn't have a module created for it until about a year ago, and it was only produced for about a month. The firmware on the archos sucks ass too -- it locks up all the bloody time -- in the middle of a song it'll skip to another song, then back and forth between tracks at will, with no rhyme or reason to it. Archos' customer service has been less than responsive, and they won't allow third parties to write firmware that fixes the problems (it's being worked on under legal threats by archos). It'll be a cold day in hell when I buy another Archos product. The ipods are cool, but I've read about the battery only lasting 18 months. After a big fuss, apple's finally created a battery replacement program ($100). The cool thing about the iriver (and archos) is that it acts just like an external hard drive, so you don't need any software installed or anything to access it. Plus the iriver plays ogg vorbis files, which is completely worthless to 99.9% of people, but every once in a while I get some ogg files (Democracy Now is on ogg from archive.com), and it'd be nice not to have to convert them to MP3 to take them on the road.