It's Not Pink, But It's Still Beautiful

What? It's Not Pink?

Yes, unfortunately, you did hear me right. It shocked me too. Apple, the company who's computer products are made specifically for graphic artists. Mac OS X includes OS-level color management (something Windows only dreams of) and even a five sample, highly sophisticated, display calibration utility (which makes a joke even of Adobe Gamma). MacOS is the system that's had gamma correction forever, and they can't even get "pink" right. Shocker.

The worst part about this was that I bought without having seen, way back when. The picture on the website, on a calibrated monitor (yes, Mac default gamma 1.8) definitely looks cotton-candy pink. A really pretty cotton candy pink. I fell in love at first sight, who says guys can't like pink? So I ordered it...

The Long Journey From Order to Door

The initial delivery time estimate was 4 weeks. I ended up being at 7 when I got it due to a shortage of the hard drives used (this has surely been resolved by now) in the iPod mini. At least I got a free Marware case for calling to complain (which ironically shipped immediately, well before my mini...). When this little beauty finally did ship it was sent direct from Shanghai, China by FedEx International Priority Direct Distribution (which I've since learned is common practice for Apple).

As I awaited the FedEx guy, who arrived just after 9am (and was actually a woman to kill that sexist idea of the "FedEx Guy") I was really excited. It almost ended when I opened the box. I just wanted to cry. Pure disappointment. My cotton candy pink iPod mini was really a lilac color. Was it a mistake? A few Internet searches later and I find they're pretty much all lilac. Oh well, it was still cute so I charged her up using the beautifully designed charger (I wouldn't normally comment on a charger, but the Apple chargers are quite beautiful), which seemed to take forever. I couldn't quite tell you how long, but it was awhile. I never time my electronics charging.

The First Computer Connection

My memory is a little foggy at this point, but all went smoothly. I plugged it in to my FireWire port with iTunes running and iTunes immediately detected it (this was on Windows, I was still a Windows person). Since I ad four GB of music I had to decide what to do. Since I had seven weeks, I was well prepared for this. I had a 3.7GB (hard drive size with the software loaded) playlist which I set iTunes up to sync with. This went amazingly quick thanks to the FireWire connection, and then I ejected it and went to try it out.

Tryouts

To be fair to Apple (and because they're so cute) I used the included earbuds. They're very low-end, but they sounded better than anything I'd heard included with a music player before, as does this music player sound. The iPod mini produces clean, lifelike sound, if not as good as that of a CD player, it's close. We're talking a portable player here afterall. It's not noisy or distorted to nearly the degree of other players I've heard. The earbuds aren't for an audiophile, but they definately do the trick for the likes of me.

This was the first iPod to use the Click Wheel design. As the name implies, it's a wheel which one can push to click on. It sounds complex, but it's very intuitive and user friendly (like most Apple stuff with the exception of the insane one buttoned mice). "Turn" the virtual wheel to scroll up and down or change the volume, the button in the middle is a select button, and the wheel can be clicked up (menu), down (play/pause), left (back), or right (next). It's much simpler when you actually see it. There's a hold switch on the top as well if you're going to put it in your pocket or something. The well-designed user interface interacts beautifully with the click wheel.

Durability

Being anodized aluminum and plastic, the iPod mini has a fairly durable finish but it can still get scratched. The Click Wheel gets dirty fairly easy. The screen is very slightly recessed to reduce the risk of scratching if set upside down, but it won't make any difference in a pocket, etc (still, it's something cell companies should take note of). What you really must remember is that this is a hard drive player and hard drives, while running especially, are motion sensitive. I wouldn't suggest dropping it. A flash player may be more appropriate for the gym (rumor is there may be a flash based iPod soon enough) since it has no moving parts

Features

Your $249 ($229 for me since I'm a student) buys you:

4GB Hitachi Microdrive Yup, you digital camera folks immediately see the value in this. This little harddrive which stores your music costs more alone than the iPod mini as a unit... 'Tis a wonderfl thing. Unfortunately, 4GB (3.7 with the iPod software and everything loaded) just isn't enough for a typical music collection. I'd say it holds 700-800 songs at 160-192kbps. If you use 128kbps encoding bitrate it can hold a thousand but that's still not enough, and that's not an adequate bitrate in my opinion. My 1590 song iTunes collection is 6.89GB and I think it's on the small side (mainly because mine is made up of legal music whereas many of the huge collections people I know have contain music of questionable origin). Buy a big iPod if you need your whole collection with you.

1.67" Grayscale LCD A truly bad joke, can't they give us color in this day in age. Not that it's needed, but it would add greatly to the pretty factor and since just about every cell phone has a color screen...

8 Hours Battery Life Very adequate for such a small cute device, it does the trick. Still, if you think you're going to use it nonstop with no chance to recharge, a big iPod may again be more your style.

Four Games Brick, Music Quiz, Solitaire, and Parachute. Music Quiz is fun, it quizzed you on the titles of the songs on your iPod. The others are not nearly the level of cell phone games, which are much more fun.

Very good earbud headphones Great for freebies, I've heard they're made by Sennheiser (don't know but they sure sound like they could be).

USB 2.0 and FireWire Connectivity It's worth noting that the cables for connection to either a USB 2.0 or a FireWire port are included. I chose FireWire because my computer at the time didn't have USB 2.0. Now I choose it merely out of tradition, both are fast. Apple doesn't suggest trying USB 1.1 and I second that - we're talking 4GB of data transfer here.

So You Say It Changed Your Life

In a way, my mini changed my life - just over a week later I ordered myself an iBook G4 (also reviewed) and turned me into a Mac person. The beauty of the mini really sold me on Apple, even if it isn't actually pink. I'm now definitely a Mac person, and in a way life's a tiny bit better than when I used Windows as my main OS (of course, I'm an artistic person, I should have been on a Mac since day one but they're so expensive). It's the price you pay for such a great product.