User Experience - Widescreen iPod

Initially, the announcement of the widescreen iPod received a huge round of applause during the keynote at the MacWorld conference. As time passed, the feature was forgotten about in favor of the phone and internet functionality of the device (which received the least applause during the initial announcement).

One of the biggest features was the ability to have coverflow on the phone as a way to brows through your albums. All it takes to get into coverflow mode is to rotate the phone. From there you can use your finger to drag through the albums on the iPhone. While coverflow looks great, I really don't use it that much. I usually know what album or artist I want to listen to, and I can browse to it through the list. And unlike the iPhone commercials, your cover art is bound to be incomplete. Or you'll be stuck with a ton of music files where you need to go clean up the metadata attached to the music.

The video aspect of the iPod is great. People are amazed at the quality of the display and how good the movies look for being on such a small screen. You double tap to switch between letterbox (the movie takes up the full height of the screen and cuts off the sides) and anamorphic (black bars at the top and bottom). A single tap will bring up the controls, containing the chapter control (if there is any), volume and scrubber time index. The one problem I have with the scrubber is that on long videos (anything more than 30 minutes) is that it's hard to precisely seek to a point in the movie. The biggest issue is whether you can stand watching a two hour movie on a 3.5"� display. I watched a movie for about an hour and my eyes were watery.

The audio playback is ok, about as good as the iPod nano. I was slightly disappointed as I would get some static from my right ear bud occasionally. One of the features I do enjoy is the ability to create on-the-fly playlists on the device without the need for a computer. You can browse through your collection and add selections to this playlist. However, you can only have one on-the-fly playlist, and there is no way to author a permanent playlist from the iPhone, though it could be possible through software.

Another point regarding audio is the recessed audio input jack. Most headphones that I've tried will not plug into the iPhone's headphone/microphone jack. This might be on purpose because of the addition of the third ring on the input for the microphone/click input on the wire of the right ear bud.

Finally, the last notable feature from the iPod functionality is the ability to rearrange icons at the bottom of the panel - you can replace the songs section with the podcasts section for example. I found it more convenient to replace the songs icon with the albums icon, so I can view a list of albums I currently have on my iPhone.