Last Look: iPod Photo Packs A Few Surprises.

I ordered the 60 gigabyte model from the online Apple Store as soon as it was announced. It took a few days, but on Saturday Apple sent me email confirmation that the iPod Photo had shipped from Shanghai, China.

The only problem with that is my impetuous streak (I’m working on it). Friday night I’d stopped by the local Apple Store. They had a few iPod Photos in stock so I bought one; thinking I’d have time to cancel the other order.

No such luck. The good news is that I can honestly say this has been a good experience as far as iPods go. I had an original 5 gig model, then a 20 gig. Then an iPod mini. Then a 30 gig. Now the iPod Photo. Am I running all these iPods at the same time?

I don’t have that many ears but I do have that many relatives. Hand-me-downs are a tradition, even with Apple products.

OK, first, the iPod is packed well but similar to others. The box remains a cube and feels a bit heavier than previous iPods. That’s probably because this box contains the AV cable, the case, the belt clip holder, the iPod, USB and Firewire cables, and other goodies.

Apple says the iPod Photo is about 80-percent charged and mine was about that, so it worked fine right out of the box.

Upon start up, the first thing to notice is the Apple logo. It’s ain’t black on gray no more. This is color, baby! The screen is drop dead gorgeous. It’s not as sharp as some of the LCD screens in digital cameras (notably, the Canon 20D), but crisp and clear.

I took everything out of the box first and laid components (cable, case, dock, et al) out on my desktop, next to the Mac display.

The iPod Photo menu is notably different. It’s Aqua-like with blue menu selections. There’s also more selections than with the regular iPod.

The first thing I did was set the time, then browse around the menu items. Nothing under anything yet because music and photos hadn’t been transferred from the Mac.

Fixing that was easy and took a little over an hour. I plugged the iPod Photo into the Mac via the included Firewire cable. That brought up iTunes and a dialog box. I had to name the iPod, click a few settings, and iTunes did the rest by copying over nearly 3,000 tunes.

This is where more surprises came in. I expected the iPod Photo to ask me about synchronizing the digital photos in iPhoto. It did not. In fact, iPhoto is nowhere to be seen. All the copying action takes place in iTunes.

Immediately after downloading the last song, iTunes began “optimizing” the photos in iPhoto. As I understand it, thumbnails get made, and images are compressed and moved to the iPod Photo. iTunes does NOT copy the full-sized iPhoto images in your collectin. Yet.

That process took another 20 minutes or so. Upon completion, I started to browse iTunes Preferences and came upon an unchecked selection to allow for the full images to be copied. Hey, it’s a 60 gigabyte iPod and I have less than 7,000 images, so, why not?

That took still another 20 minutes.

All total, about 90 minutes disappeared but all music and all photos were now on the iPod Photo and there was about 30 gigabytes to spare.

Hmmmm. Time to backup the rest of the Home directory? Later.

Otherwise, it’s just an iPod that holds digital photos, right? Not quite. It was easy enough to backup digital photos on any iPod with sufficient space. This is the iPod that will auto sync with iPhoto AND display the photos on your TV with a slide show (automated or manual) AND do so with background music from iTunes.

On to Page 2 and a couple of surprises. One that looks very promising for users who want to import photos directly into iPod Photo, and another that might save you a few images.

Click Here for Page 2.

Off Topic Note: Have you ever noticed how much Apple’s “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” television commercials remind you of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote? Seriously.