My Video Ipod Story
March 06, 2006 - by jason
Back in January, staring at a sheaf of plane and train tickets, imagining long stretches of unconnected tedium that lay ahead en route from A to B, I decided to buy a video Ipod. No way in hell I was going to like, sit there and not have constant access to digital entertainment, and certainly no way in hell I’d be so last-millennium and super-un-agile as to haul around a bunch of bulky web page prototypes with which to fill the seconds.
The day before I left I lobbed a bunch of TV shows and movies at this wonderful thing, synced up the ipod with the desktop computer, and tucked it into the carryon. All set.
On the train up to Paris I was three quarters of the way through the first movie, just coming to terms with how silly it feels to hold a device eight inches from your face and still strain to see anything, when the battery ran out. Grnk. Once in Paris, I plugged the Ipod into my laptop for a recharge, handily forgetting that it had its preferences set to ‘automatically updates songs and playlists’, which it went ahead and did, taking the laptop’s empty Itunes library as its cue to wipe itself clean. Double Grnk.
So: screen ridiculously small, battery doesn’t last long enough to watch anything, extraordinary vigilance required to prevent mass file deletion when moving from one computer to another, lucite case will scratch if you so much as breathe on it, clickwheel requires about an ounce too much pressure to work.
I’m just sayin’.