Sansa Fuze. iPods are overhyped, overpriced, buggy pieces of crap.
I’m guessing you’ve never actually used one.
You’re right. I’ve used two.
Oh yes, being able to read books on my iTouch is just terrific. I can’t recommend the device enough for it’s flexibility.
I’ve owned two iPods personally and my fiancee is on her fourth. I’ve had no end of trouble from them. I’ve also owned two Sansa players, an e260 and a Clip, and the only trouble I’ve had with either one is that I dropped the e260 and broke the headphone jack.
I’ve owned three and my wife has had two (including her iPhone) and apart from my red and black U2 special edition being stolen, I’ve never had any problems with any of them.
I dislike the iPod and iTunes, but realise that I am not the ordinary person. I use Media Monkey for a superset of iTunes functionality, and my phone is my main MP3 player - Nokia right now with 16GB microSD, and I’ll be getting an Android in a year or so.
When people say they’ve had “problems” with their iPod they generally mean one of 2 things:
- They were unlucky and got bad hardware. It happens.
- They hate iTunes and their iTunes rage spills onto the device by association.
And there are definitely no other problems to be had!
“Generally”.
Seriously, what happened with them?
My 5th gen iPod (aka “video iPod”) would lock up now and then, but my Archos player did that more often, so I took that in stride. My Palm TX locked up more often than either one of them. I’ve yet to experience any lockups with my 3rd generation Touch. The only reason I’ve had to reboot it has been software specific: the current version of Stanza gets into this state where it refuses to import new books until you’ve power-cycled the device. That’s clearly a problem with that particular bit of software, not the Touch in general.
The only problems I ever really have with my Touch tend to occur after I jailbreak it. I have the occasional glitch when it hasn’t been jailbroken but I’d be hard-pressed to find any real fault with it.
My iPod Touch was very reliable for 2 years of heavy usage. It’s still fine now. The lack of moving parts make it more reliable than the old iPods, I reckon.
iPod Mini: arbitrarily would not sync with some computers.
iPod Nano (2nd gen): arbitrarily would not play some files; crashed every time a file with the extension .MP3 was played (this was how the In Rainbows files were named); click wheel became very unresponsive inside of a year; crashed ~50% of the time when first playing a song after disconnecting from the computer
iPod Nano (5th gen): backlight intermittently did not work and eventually quit entirely
iPod Nano (6th gen): runs its battery down constantly even when it’s off (we’ve been abroad since getting it, but it’s getting sent back as soon as we return)
The only one I didn’t have problems with was my big 4th gen iPod, which lasted about as long as one could expect. Well, except for the time that Apple pushed an update to iTunes that killed compatibility with that generation of iPods for a couple of weeks until they fixed it, but that’s to be expected.
You forgot to mention all the hard lockups.
Like iTunes not working, those are to be expected.
Make SURE you get the iPod Touch with the hi-res (Retina, TM) display.
The hi-res small display instantly obsoleted everything else I had seen up to that point. I was planning on keeping my iPhone 3GS as a misc device, but I couldn’t even bear to look at it after going hi-res.
That is pretty bad. If I’d had that kind of experience, I probably would never have purchased another iPod.
I was pretty hostile to the original iPod, mainly because I saw it as grossly overpriced. As I said, I had an 20GB Archos MP3 player at first, which did the same thing as the first-generation iPods for much, much less. I bought 2 in fact, one for me and one for my wife, and recommended them over iPods to anyone who asked.
Eventually I ended up buying a 5th generation iPod (“video iPod”) for a variety of reasons. I was interested in using it as an movie viewer for plane trips, and I wanted an alarm clock dock, and “MP3 alarm clock” meant either a severely limited all-in-one solution, or an iPod dock. After using the 5th gen iPod, I came to terms with it being a pretty good device, if pricey for what it did. Of course, I never had any problems like you did with your Nanos.
The Touch is a different beast entirely. If you’re buying it for MP3 capability alone, you’re paying way too much. It’s really a handheld compute, and it’s almost unimportant to me that it plays music. It was a Palm TX replacement for me, not an MP3 player replacement, and it’s far superior to the TX. Just the capacitance-based touch screen instead of pressure based is a huge improvement.
iTunes doesn’t bother me, but I don’t use iTunes all that much. It might be different if I were actively acquiring music all the time, but I’m in my 40’s - I bought most of my CDs 20 years ago. Every once in a while I’ll buy something new and sync it to my iPod, but for the most part it’s the iPod I’m using, not iTunes.
I did just go through converting The Sarah Connor Chronicles to iPod viewable format, and yeah, my experience with using iTunes while doing that was kind of craptastic. For example, it has fields for “season” and “episode number,” but doesn’t use episode number to sort. Instead, because I ended up changing the type from “Movie” (default) to “TV show” out of order, it sorted them in the order I marked them as TV. I had to convert them back to Movie en mass and convert them to “TV show” as a block. That’s awfully stupid.
Yeah, the biggest issue I’ve had with my 3G Touch is Stanza crashing out to the OS. It’s definitely Stanza, though, because it doesn’t happen with any other app and Stanza has been getting worse and worse ever since Amazon acquired it. I wish I’d never updated from the pre-Amazon version.
I also have a 2G Nano I use for working out and I’ve never had any issues with it in the three or so years I’ve been abusing it in both freezing and sweltering weather.
I find this surprising.
I compared the two side-by-side tonight: my Touch 3rd generation vs. a Touch 4th generation. On paper, the difference is huge: 480 x 320 vs. 960 x 640. 4x the pixels, double the pixels per inch. Yet in practice, I had to really look hard at fine details to see the difference. A still from the same scene of the Sarah Connor Chronicles (original resolution 1920 x 1080) showed more detail on the new display, but it wasn’t something I could take in at a glance.
I figured since I’m hyper-sensitive to this kind of thing on large displays I’d notice. But it really didn’t seem that important. Yes, I can see more details in the book thumbnails in the Kindle reader, but again, it’s subtle.
My take is that when your display is only 3" x 2", 160+ pixels per inch is still pretty good. The 19" monitors I use every day are only 86 ppi. So buying a used earlier version of the Touch may be just as good for most people.