I have just received the new iPod Classic 160 GB. I have had little time to run experiments on battery life and I am currently converting video to run the video tests. As I stated before I will be comparing a little differently. I will be comparing a 60 GB iPod Photo to the new 160 GB iPod Classic to help those who have not gotten a new iPod in a while whether it is worth the upgrade. Today I am going to go over the quality of the packaging and the interface. 

One area that Apple really succeeds in that no one ever realizes is the packaging. They have continuously made the packaging smaller and use less material. Many people are not like me and they throw away the box the second they get their iPod, so it is good to know that there will be less packaging going into landfills. You could fit about three iPod Classic boxes into one of the iPod Photo boxes. This means that when iPods are shipped from the factory they take up less space and they can ship more iPods with fewer emissions. Really even the shipping box that the iPod Classic shipped in barely compares to the iPod Photos retail box. 

The iPod has always strived to be the most easily controlled media player on the market. With the iPod Photo it intuitively began to skip between the letters of the alphabet while scrolling fast, but it was hard to see where you had ended up and when you stopped and started, it would go song by song again. A new feature I found with the iPod Classic is that when it starts to skip through the letters of the alphabet it shows which letter it is on. As long as you are still touching the wheel and you have gotten to the letter switching speed it will stay in that mode. For example you start in the letter A but you need to go to the letter S for “Smashing Pumpkins” you would scroll fast until it begins showing the letter that you are on, on the screen. Then you can slow down and go letter by letter until you get to the letter S and if you accidentally go to the letter T then you can easily just back up. 

Another thing that the new iPod does is show you animated images of what menu option you currently have selected, so if you are over music it will start to show album art that is in your music collection on the right pane of the interface. Also when in the album view it shows a picture of the album and tells you how many songs are in the album, which can be helpful. I have also noticed that the new iPod Classic is much thinner than the iPod Photo. One last obvious thing, the new iPod Classic has a much bigger screen made for playing video. Many people already know some of these things from the last iPod refresh. 

Here are some pictures comparing the boxes to each other along with the shipping box compared to the old iPod Photo retail box. 

-Pictures-

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Conservation, Mobile Electronics, Recycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.