New iPods this Wednesday?

iPod capacity

There’s a ton of rumours floating around that a press event Apple is holding Wednesday will see the introduction of a new line of iPods. I say it’s about time. Though I haven’t even had my 30 GB black one for a year now, the design of this one dates back about two years and is starting to look a little stale next to the iPhone. Then there’s the issue of storage; I don’t have a problem with hard drive-based media players from a capacity standpoint (though mine is almost completely full, as shown above), but the performance on the full-sized iPod compared to the Nano (which uses flash storage) is just awful.

The iPod uses some pretty aggressive power saving mechanism that spins down the hard drive fairly often. While this is great for battery life, this also means that when I hit the next button, there’s a delay of sometimes one up to sometimes four seconds before the track changes, and even then, the album artwork takes a couple extra seconds to refresh. This is a lousy user experience. The Nano changes songs without skipping a beat, so I’d like to see them move to flash storage across all platforms.

September 3, 2007 | Filed Under Uncategorized