A Tale of Two Gadgets
February 12th, 2006It’s my birthday this month and that means two things: a) I really am not getting any younger and b) gadgets. This was a banner year for birthday gadgets – I received both a ROKR E1 phone and a 60GB iPod. Following is my two cents on both.
ROKR E1
I had read awful things about this phone for months, and I’d just like to say those people are a bunch of whiners. I replaced a SonyEricsson T68i, and the ROKR is 10x the phone that was. It has good sound quality, it feels good in my hand, and the Moto user interface is much more usable than I had been lead to believe. The UI is a little sluggish at times, but so was the T68i. But the best thing by far is having iTunes on a phone. While running some errands this week I’ve been able to listen to music in places I normally wouldn’t have my iPod. I love this phone.
It’s not all good news though, there are a few tough spots. For example, copying songs to the phone does take a very long time. Each evening before I go to bed I set iTunes to autofill the phone with 100 songs from my "ROKR Tunes" playlist in iTunes. I also have it downsample the tracks to 128k AAC files, which means the whole transfer probably takes an hour. But its done by the time I get up in the morning, and I throw it in the charging dock while I get ready. By the time I leave, I have new music on a fully charged phone.
Also, I’m pretty sure I’m going to destroy the little rubber flap on top of the phone that conceals the headphone jack. Long story short – this phone isn’t an iPod, and I’m okay with that. The positives far outweigh the negatives in this great phone.
I am curious if they’ve made any UI improvements in the newly released SLVR L7 phone. For example, if you’re listening to music and you get a call, the music just stops. The first time it happens, you look down to see if the phone shut off suddenly and then realize someone is calling you. It would be a better experience if your music’s volume lowered and you could hear a ring through your earbuds.
60GB iPod Video
This really is a beautiful device. The screen is much higher resolution than my previous 3rd gen iPod, and it’s nice to have buttons on the click wheel. It’s fun to see cover art on the iPod also, and I’ve been loading the cover art into iTunes for my favorite albums this weekend. I haven’t watched video on it yet for any substantial period of time, but I used Handbrake to convert a Radiohead DVD to watch over lunch sometime soon. There are a LOT more features in this generation than in my previous iPod, and I’ll be exploring them for the next few weeks.
The only bad things about it are that it does seem more scratch prone than older generations, and I had to upgrade my docks at home and work to accommodate the slightly different dimensions of the unit. I also needed to get a USB 2.0 card for my G4, but that wasn’t a big deal because I was lucky to find an OS X compatible card for $30 at MicroCenter.
But it’s a great gadget – and I’m getting real used to seeing the iPod UI in color now. Plus, it’s nice to be able to carry 40GB of music, 5GB of videos, and use the rest of the space for project work and handy files.