The product is a marvel of design. Aside from its impressively compact profile and slick blue aluminum casing, its click wheel is what sets it apart from competitors from a hardware perspective. It produces a very different, and vastly superior, user experience. It operates much like a laptop touch pad and is certainly the fastest way to scroll through hundreds of tracks on a small screen while also providing enough precision to slow down and select the exact song you're looking for. It took me a little longer to become accustomed to using it to control the volume, but the simplicity of the interface was worth it.
Being able to hold 1000 tracks (vs. the 60 tracks that my 256MB flash player holds) dramatically changes when and how I use the iPod. It's not enough space to download my entire music collection, but it's enough for me to carry an extremely wide variety of music, and certainly enough for any trip. The sound quality and output power is also outstanding, and it was able to drive my Sony MDR-V6 headphones at high volumes without any problems. That was important, since the sound quality of the included earbuds – while probably fine for listening to music outdoors – didn't really satisfy my standards for home listening. Of course, using the larger Sonys consumed far more power, and revealed the only significant shortcoming I found – that the battery life can be dissapointingly short for a dedicated device.
Like the iPod overall, the iTunes for Windows software was excellent. It converted my WMA files into AAC format rapidly, synchronized my library with the iPod even faster, and provided a great interface for managing and annotating my collection. As an iPod user, I'm compelled to use iTunes to manage my music, but even if I wasn't, I would certainly consider it. Its capabilities greatly outstrip both Windows Media Player and WinAmp, and its interface is far simpler to use than programs like MusicMatch Jukebox. And it looks great too.
The biggest disappointment was iTunes. I have previously analyzed iTunes and other music download services from a number of angles and concluded that they cannot be successful solutions for mass audiences. I thought that my perspective might be different if I was an iPod user myself, and so I decided to give the service the benefit of the doubt. My opinion hasn't changed, and I'll be writing a report of my iTunes experience next.
But overall I was impressed and very happy with my new toy. And did I mention it looks great? I suspect this reason alone fuels the majority of iPod Mini sales. I'm amazed that Apple's competitors can produce devices which are comparable or superior on nearly every engineering metric, but fall down flat when it comes to making something aesthetically pleasing and easy to use. Has Apple hired all of the world's best interface designers, leaving other high tech companies with the design sensibilities of 1970's auto manufacturers? Competing products from Sony and Creative resemble a cassette player and a Fisher Price toy respectively. And Dell's Digital Jukebox looks less like a competing product and more like an iPod storage container. Whatever their malfunction is, they need to rectify it soon, because Apple is rapidly becoming the only name in electronics that people associate with beautiful products.
