Two P’s in an iPod

When it comes to technology, I’ve never been an early adapter. The laser disc technology in the late 1980s – slept through it. The VCD period – largely ignored it. The dawn of the laptop – went by unnoticed as I clung to my PC DX486. Even when people were already using Palmcorders and slipping those Super HG’s in handy made-to-watch-at home VHS cases, I was still playing Betamax tapes. I was the last one among my colleagues to buy a DVD player and get rid of my 14-inch TV for a decent, bigger flat screen with woofer. In fact, that used to be the thing that a layout artist at the office would laugh about (the bleeding SOB would point at me and laugh in my face!).

And, for God’s sake, we just got PLDT at home last week (after seven years of using a less efficient phone company), but that wasn’t my fault.

Of course, as computers, cameras and MP3 players got cheaper and more efficient, thoughts persisted about finally getting updated. Believe me, once you get an itch to buy something, it won’t be satisfied until you scratch it. That’s what happened summer of last year when I decided to get an iPod. I had been looking at the Applestore website and thought iPod was the coolest thing since Rio and Philips first came out with MP3 players in the late ‘80s, years before iPod’s first-generation hit the market in October 2001.

So I decided to buy. It so happened that on the plane abroad, I picked up a Time magazine and there it was – the new, slimmer, smaller, snow-white, third-generation iPod – and instantly felt hip about going to an Apple Center on the week the new iPod was released and saying, "I’d like an iPod please."

Before the year ended, I decided to get a matching white laptop (all right, "notebook"!), and again, luck was on my side: Apple had just dropped its prices and released the new iBook G4 with combo drive, 800 MHZ and 256 MB built-in memory – before this, the standard was only about 125 MB and for a G4 you had to buy the very expensive Powerbook.

So all in all, 2003 was a darn good year for late adapters because they actually became early adapters (of product models, that is) without meaning to. It was pretty cool.

Well, until 2004, that is.

I’ve realized that even if you’re the earliest of early adapters to new technology on the market, Steve Jobs and his Apple crew will make you slide down the ladder in just a few months.

Not a year had passed since Apple released the 3G iPod did it announce it was coming out with the iPod Mini and later the 4G iPod.

The iPod Mini, however, is the most exciting thing for MP3 fans since, well, iPod was invented. First of all, it’s so small it makes the iPod look oversized. Second, it comes in hip colors to match your clothes or the silver one to match your Powerbook. Third, and my least favorite reason of all, you can buy an armband – and display it like an idiot, if I may add – that’s meant for people who jog or walk. The truth is, when I see people displaying their iPods, I am reminded of the time when office proles used to display their humongous pagers on their belts so everybody would know they had one.

But that’s me.

The iPod Mini, priced at P15,740, has the same easy user interface as the iPod. We should have known that when it was released in April this year that a re-design was coming up for its bigger sister (and indeed the 4G iPod, released in July this year, also dispenses with the four buttons on top of the scroll wheel).

Design wise, Apple has the most innovative design team in the industry. Remember how Apple first brought colors and handles to the staid laptop and landed Steve Jobs on the cover of Time? Of course, some people thought the colorful Apple iBooks looked like toilet seat covers, but hey, in a world that was then ruled by black laptops, it was a whiff of fresh air. Which is probably why you hear of so many noisy Mac diehards and you rarely hear a peep from PC supporters (ah, the eternal geek battle of Mac vs. PC). Then Apple decided to go white and minimalist, and again the design blew everybody away – unfortunately, the whiteness of the cables soon turns gray, even if you keep them in a box, but that’s me being anal.

Even the iPod packaging is dazzling – a square that breaks in half like a puzzle, and you slowly discover the elements that make for great portable music.

Microwarehouse last month lent me an iPod to use for a week. It was two things to me: Pretty and perfectly sized. Just a little bigger than a Nokia 7250, it’s so light at 3.6 ounces it’s the same weight of a small bottle of alcogel – and can pack 1,000 song in 4 gigabytes. It is indeed the smallest MP3 player in its range.

Encased in a lightweight anodized aluminum body, the Mini is scratch-resistant (unlike the back of the iPod which manages to accumulate scratches even if it’s encased). The Mini is available in five colors – silver, gold, pink, blue and green. Curiously, in Taiwan the most popular color is pink, according to Apple product development manager EY Yeo. You can operate the Mini with one hand (much like the bigger iPod actually) and it works seamlessly with Apple’s iTunes. It comes with a belt clip, earphones (which are actually decent compared with bundled ones in other packages), power adapter, a FireWire Cable and USB cable, and a CD with iTunes 4.6 for Mac and Windows.

Like iPod, the music is CD-quality and you can adjust the equalizer by choosing the genre of music, from hip-hop to electronica to spoken word (the last, of course, is for those stand-up comedy albums).

The coolest thing to me was that between the old and new iPods, Apple decided to dispense with the Windows or Mac option. When the 3G iPod was released last year, I had to buy a FireWire card for my PC and install the MusicMatch software that came with the iPod because iTunes then didn’t have a PC version. MusicMatch was great at playing songs on a PC (and also for burning data – easier for me than the Nero software), but man, synchronizing the iPod with its library took all night! Like all stupid late adapters, I must have accidentally erased my iPod’s library at least thrice! Another thing was that when I decided to transfer my music library from my PC to iBook, I had to do my library all over again on iTunes, which synchronizes so fast you won’t have time to pee between albums.

Using an iPod, you soon realize that they thought of everything when they were designing the controls. First is the hold button on top, which lets you listen to your music without accidentally putting it on ear-shattering volume or skipping to the next song (the scroll wheel is touch-sensitive). Next is the middle button in the center of the wheel, which lets you multi-task between volume control, fast-forward or rewind a song and see your rating. It’s also the magic button in creating your own play list (On the Go function), , which you really, really need if you have 10,000 songs in 90 albums and all you want to listen to is about 20 from different albums.

For the extras, the iPod accessories apply to the Mini, too. The Airport Express, P8,300, is the first mobile base station that features wireless Internet connections and USB printing that can be used at home or on the road – like if you’re in a hotel with broadband connections. It features analog and digital audio outputs that can be connected to a home stereo and with the software AirTunes, you can stream music from iTunes to any room in the house. Even before Apple released it on the market, it had already received 80,000 pre-orders.

During the launch this week of iPod Mini in Makati, EY Yeo showed media people how AirPort Express works. With just a click in iTunes, he changed the output from different speakers. iTunes detects the remote speakers and displays them in a simple pop-up list for the user to select. Once the remote speakers are selected, AirTunes wireless streams the music from the computer to the AirPort Express base station. It’s pretty convenient in a big house, where you can have music in the living room, dining and kitchen from one source. It provides a range of up to 150 feet and multiple base stations can be bridged together to send music to extended areas.

The sound quality is so good – so unlike when I tried connecting my iPod to the car stereo via the tape deck, which sounded, ugh, lame and it wasn’t because of the speakers since the Discman sounded good. To be fair, on the show Rides on Discovery Channel, pro football player Lawyer Malloy was asked what his favorite car accessory was and he answered it was his iPod. He wasn’t using the tape connector but had custom-made a dock that he could plug into his stereo directly. It sounded great. Then again, his ride was a Hummer with a dozen speakers.

There’s no doubt that the present iPods are the best MP3 players in their range (from the Mini’s 5 GB to the 4G’s 40 GB) and the best designed ones.

Well, until next year, that is, when Apple designers get restless again.

* * *

iPod Mini and iPod are distributed by Microwarehouse and available at Apple Centers, leading computer shops and other stores.