Recently I cashed in five years of company incentive points for an IPod 60 Gig Video.
Positives:
The interface is nice.
Good size – not too small, not too large.
Control is nice – simple, intuitive, and comfortable.
Screen resolution and quality is excellent.
ITunes management system is nice – metatagging management is good, automated free podcast subscription is great.
Up to 20 hours of battery life for audio playback is great.
60 gigs is a huge amount of space.
Video playback (h.264 mp4) is smooth, responsive, and high quality.
Nice little features – it automatically pauses when the headphone jack is unplugged, will sync and display Outlook calendar and contact data.
Negatives:
The interface doesn’t give me as many options as I’d like. For instance – search video by genre.
The screen is rather small – forget watching any movies with subtitles.
Apple’s DRM and other locking down of features is annoying. For instance:
– Apple doesn’t want you to be able to copy your content – even legal non-DRM’d files – back off the IPod.
– Apple links your IPod with just one computer. If you want to access it from another computer, ITunes helpfully suggests that you delete all content off it.
– Apple has locked down your metainfo options. For instance, you can’t tag video with the format of “TV Show” which means you can’t use the nice sorting configuration built into the IPod interface.
Overall, I enjoy and use it regularly. The ability to get my NPR top news podcast every morning automatically is something that I could get dependant on. I think what’s really needed is some competition on tools and applettes to bring back the functionality that Apple chose to leave out.