5G iPod followup.

First off. I love my 5G, but have come to discover some, more than slight, annoyances.

Most complaints that I've been heard stem from scratches on the sleek little things. The scratching on my screen is not as bad as I thought it would be. In fact it's much better than expected, same as the shiny backside, and I've only been using the slip case that was included in the box; (Mainly because the few cases available for the 30GB 5G are impossible to get ahold of). Now this may be that I really baby my electronics, but that notwithstanding it is far better than that of the nano, which now resides with my Mom. I do have a Belkin Tunedock II in my car, and one on my desk at work which helps keep everything all safe from most things. I just wish that I had of known that they were coming out with them in black.

My first real complaint is with the click wheel. Sometimes it can require the heavyhandedness of a linesman, while at othertimes you practically need to be an expert safecracker to select the particular podcast that you want to listen to. Normally fiddling around with such an issue is something that I've just learned to live with, and with any other device, and control mechanism I probably wouldn't care. But, with this Ipod it is quite annoying; especially since it is the ONLY means of navigation. Plus I've used the click wheels on previous versions, and even the nano's clickwheel seemed to be consistantly responsive in comparison.

The second, is the downright sluggish performance when scrolling beyond one screen's length of listings. I find it extremely frustrating to find that there is a severe harddrive/buffer lag when scrolling through my artists/podcasts/pictures that I have on my iPod. At first I thought that I just had filled it to within about a few dozen megs of being full, then I unchecked half of my library and found the same problem. This problem also translates to a slow load of the videos. I know Steve-O said that this is a music player that just happens to be able to play videos as well... but, with such a stellar history with these things why comprimise at all? I just hope the next version that comes out has better performance on the video side, and that it will be a little more like the sonos players remote in form factor, i.e. 16x9 with a landscape mode but with less bulk.

Third. A pain-in-the-ass conversion method for videos. Why couldn't they just do the same thing as when importing music into iTunes. Sure it would take a while... but have you ever tried to do it in Quicktime. If you have than you know what I'm talking about. And all of the 3rd party programs that I've tried are not worth the price just to get some QVGA videos to be viewable on a 2.5" screen; or have the problem of not having any audio after conversion. I had the same problem with Quicktime's conversion of my vid's

Other than those few points, and the lack of new accessories (not Apple's fault), it's still a pretty great player.

Oh yeah, you can't view the menu on the TV when using the video out feature.

Ta,

Tim