Mini Reasons to Get an iPod

I was given a brand spanking new Apple iPod mini last week, so I decided to spend the weekend playing with the gadget that is all the rage amongst technophiles. My silver “mini” (it also comes in gold, blue, pink and green) packs a lot of punch for something that measures 2 inches by 3.6 inches and is a half an inch thick. Apple claims the 4GB of storage is enough to hold 1000 songs, but I uploaded almost 300 and my mini is almost half full.

No, I’m not storing operas, just plain old music. 2.5 to 5 minutes bursts of my kind of music. This 3.6 ounce device is also pretty easy to setup and use, even though the documentation was horrible. I wonder how much of a headache my mom or dad might have getting this device to operate.



The sound quality is a good as the files you load onto the device. Sampling songs at lower bit rates will return poorer quality files than those sampled at much higher rates. Considering that you’re listening through ear phones, a 380 bps digital file is really all you need. I suspect that pumping the music from the mini and into a receiver probably isn’t going to degrade the sound too much either, but I’ll get back to you on that one.

I was able to pull about 300 songs off of CDs in about four hours. It takes the iTunes software that is required to run on your PC (or heaven forbid your Mac) about two minutes to pull 8 to 10 songs off a CD. Swapping disks and picking the songs you want to pull off those CDs is where you spend most of your time.

Now comes my biggest complaint about the iPod. Seeing that I’m not 16 anymore and I don’t have countless hours of downtime to do absolutely nothing, I’m having a hard time trying to figure out when I’m going to actually use my new toy. A lot of the engineers at my work have them, and it makes much more sense for them, since they spend the majority of their time in front of a keyboard and monitor pumping out code.

I don’t have that luxury, so I’ll be lucky if I get to use it once or twice a week. I suppose I could use it when I work out, but that would require me to start working out again. Notice I said “again 

Anyway, we’re going skiing during President’s Day week, so maybe I’ll get a chance to enjoy my new pocket sized CD collection then.

If you’re thinking of venturing into iPod land, the mini only runs $250. Apple just released a cheaper, smaller version call the Shuffle, which runs $99. The regular 40GB iPod runs around $400, but you get ten times the storage of the mini.