| Value | 8 | |
| Performance | 9 | |
| Sound Quality | 9 | |
| Features | 9 | |
| Design | 10 | |
| Overall | 9/10 | |
The new iPod is the first MP3 player to pack a mind-blowing 2,000 songs and a 10-hour battery into a stunning 6.5-ounce package you can take anywhere. It now comes with the choice of a 5GB or 10GB iPod, you can take your entire music collection with you wherever you go. (Just imagine what you can do with all that extra capacity: in addition to your MP3 music files, you can store your presentations, pictures, documents and digital movies on your 10GB iPod — and then take them with you in your pocket.) New Contacts feature You can adjust the equalization to match your favorite music with more than 20 equalizer presets that come standard with the new iPod. Equalizer presets enable you to adjust the dynamic range of your iPod to match the style of the music you’re listening to. And the iPod also supports equalizer presets that have been assigned in iTunes, so you can fine-tune your listening experience on a song-to-song basis. When you first plug iPod into your Mac, all of your iTunes songs and playlists are automatically downloaded into iPod at blazing FireWire speed. Then, when you add new music or rearrange playlists in iTunes, simply plug iPod back in and it’s automatically updated in seconds. It simply doesn’t get any easier or faster than this. You can download an entire CD in less than 10 seconds. Or 1,000 songs in under 10 minutes. Plus, iPod automatically charges whenever you’re connected and your Mac is on. The iPod has a large, high-quality liquid crystal display (LCD) for viewing up to six lines of text. And the LCD features a white light-emitting diode (LED) backlight for clear visibility in low-light situations — indoors or outdoors.
A high-output (60-mW) amplifier provides CD-quality sound with a wide dynamic range. The result? Deep, pulse-pounding bass and sharp, crystal-clear highs. Even the headphones that come with the iPod are phenomenal. They’ve been engineered with Neodymium transducer magnets for enhanced (20-20,000 Hz) frequency response and stunning, high-fidelity sound.
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The Lowdown: Apple has followed up the successful launch of its original iPod with a new model that offers 10GB of storage (as opposed to 5GB) and updated firmware, so you now get some additional features, the most notable of which are an equalizer and a contact-list manager. However, since owners of the original iPod can update the firmware on their devices, the real upgrade here is only the extra storage space, for which you'll pay an additional $100. In other words, Apple has made a good thing even better.
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