Mp3 Players and Ipod Reviews

With 80GB or 160GB of storage(1), iPod classic gives your music and video room to move. It also has plenty of energy (up to 40 hours of audio playback 2), good looks (a sleek, all-metal design), and a great personality (a brand-new interface with Cover Flow). In other words, iPod classic makes an ideal companion. Why not get to know it better?

The Classic’s most impressive design improvement is its dramatically overhauled menu system. One of the most striking changes is a split-screen main menu that displays the selections on the right half of the screen and a picture related to the selection on the left. For example, highlight the Music selection on the main menu, and the right half of the screen displays a random, drifting close-up of cover artwork from your music library. This same effect accompanies menu items such as movies, podcasts, and photos. Some might write off this split-screen effect as pure novelty, but the end result is quite beautiful. The Cover Flow system, for browsing your music collection with an emphasis on album artwork, finally makes its Classic debut, although Cover Flow does lose some appeal when not on a touch-screen device such as the iPhone. We also found a noticeable amount of lag using Cover Flow. Users with large music collections to sort through will prefer browsing using the list mode or search function. That said, Cover Flow makes for a scenic and engaging, if slow, way to browse your music.

Technical Details
* 160GB hard drive
* Holds up to 40,000 songs in 128-Kbps AAC format
* Holds up to 25,000 iPod-viewable photos
* Holds up to 200 hours of video
* 2.5-inch (diagonal) color LCD with LED backlight
* 320-by-240-pixel resolution at 163 pixels per inch
* Support for display of multiple languages and characters simultaneously

Apple iPod Classic (160GB, black) Reviews From ciao

Advantages:     Lots of space, great features
Disadvantages:     Controls a bit sluggish, not compatible with many accessories yet .

Apple iPod Classic (160GB, black) Reviews From ilounge

Pros: A superior update to Apple’s 2005 and 2006 hard-disk based iPods, featuring cleaner audio, crisper video, better storage capacity and greater than promised battery performance at last year’s prices. Available in silver or black versions, each featuring an enhanced user interface that’s visually more interesting than its predecessor, and with better built-in games. Offers industry-leading 80GB and 160GB hard disk technologies in enclosures that are slimmer than ever before.

Cons: No longer Apple’s “best iPod ever;” outdated 2.5” screen and interface are now steps behind Apple’s best devices in ease-of-use and quality of overall media playback experience, while new interface struggles to match iPhone/iPod touch features without approaching their elegance. For photo and video output, no longer compatible with majority of video-out accessories, including portable video displays, released for the color 4G and 5G iPods, requiring new and more expensive replacement accessories; past accessories with on-iPod display features will exhibit reduced functionality, as well. Past iPod games won’t play on iPod classic.

Apple iPod Classic (160GB, black) Reviews From cnet

The good: The iPod Classic is just like the fifth-generation iPod with video, only slimmer, tougher, and injected with a more visually rich graphical user interface.

The bad: Video output now requires a proprietary cable; audio quality has not improved; some older iPod video accessories may not be compatible; users are required to use the latest version of iTunes, which may not work on some older computer systems.

The bottom line: The iPod Classic is a refinement of the formula that put the iPod on the map. Few can match its combination of storage capacity, battery life, and advanced user interface.