Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
The iPod is a portable music player from Apple, you could call it an mp3 player to make things easy. If you're like me you think of some really small device that uses a hundred or two megabytes of memory to store music. That's not quite the iPod though. The iPod uses a hard drive to store its music. Depending on the model it can be anywhere from 5 (for the old models) to 30 gigabytes of space for your music in there. To accomodate this, the iPod is quite a bit larger than other mp3 players I've seen, and it's got a great user interface to help access all those songs as well. This doesn't mean it's large though, there aren't many pockets that it won't fit in. If you can bring your mobile (or your handheld) with you, you can bring the iPod.
When the first iPods were announced, they were only supported for use with Macs. Nowadays both Mac and Windows computers are supported, and you can connect using either firewire or USB 2. USB 1 works too, but for transfering all your music it's just too slow to be funny. It works nicely for the odd file though, so you can use your iPod as a removable hard drive on any system with a USB port. Make sure it's Windows formatted first though, a removable hard drive using the Mac's HFS+ filesystem isn't much use to a Windows PC. (Yes, you can get programs that access HFS+ for you, but then you need to install that on every PC you want to connect to first, so the convenience goes down quite a lot).