I loaded a couple of audio books into Berta’s iPod for our Johnstown trip this past weekend. I’ve learned a couple of important things regarding audiobook playback - and playback in general - on the iPod.
First, I really dislike that you can’t safely feel the interface on the iPod. It makes it virtually impossible to control the device while you are trying to drive. For those that aren’t aware, the iPod controls are touch-sensitive, not pressure sensitive. It’s hard to describe how it works if you’re not familiar with it, but it works exactly like the touchpad now integrated into notebook computers instead of a mouse, and somewhat like those lamps that you can touch to turn on. Since the mere touch of a button activates it, you can’t search for buttons with your fingers without actually pressing the buttons as you go.
I find it’s reasonably safe to locate the device visually in the car, but not being able to feel the buttons without activating them is a real hindrance. Most times I just wanted to pause the playback or restart it so I could converse with the passengers without missing the story. This was a real pain and something I would consider a design flaw.
The iPod also doesn’t store the last paused location for an audio file. This is of particular interest in audio books. If you leave the book and try to come back to it later, you have no idea where you left off unless you remember the time code. I did remember the time code of the book from when I switched playback, but I ran into another problem that I suppose is mostly user error.
Another thing about the iPod that I didn’t like was the shuffle feature. Berta had the shuffle feature turned on for playing music. I suppose that there are little icons in the corner that indicate this, but I didn’t realize that. So when the iPod completed playing audiobook track one, it skipped directly to track three. We didn’t realize this had happened until I tried to start track two of the three track book, and nothing sounded familiar.
As it turned out, we had played track one, then the iPod shuffled over to track three instead of playing track two. We thought that one chapter of the book seemed a little abrupt and unexplained, but continued with the story figuring that was a storytelling glitch. When we resumed the story later, everything was confused.
This confusion could have been eliminated with a simple, easily accessable bookmark feature.
Now I understand that there are possibly ways to do this, but what we’re talking about here is the most lauded mp3 player on the planet. It should be easy to use. I don’t know how to couch this for all you iPod lovers, but it’s just not easy to use.
Is it really simple to sift through 5 menu levels just to get playing some music? To me, that’s pretty odd. Maybe it’s required for something that can potentially hold so much audio, but it seems to me that a “recently played” list, or a “recently bookmarked” list would make it much easier to find the music/audio you want to play.
Another little UI glitch is the navigation within a track. You first have to touch the center button to flip the control to the in-track navigation, then you wind your finger around the wheel until it puts the little diamond-shaped indicator where you want within the track. If you let it sit for too long, it flips the control back to the volume setting. So if you are searching for a specific segment of audio within a track, you start to get annoyed every time you think, “That’s not it,” since you have to switch back into track-navigation mode and then dial it up again. The iPod should stay in in-track navigation mode until it’s toggled back, or at least wait a bit longer before toggling itself.
All of that seems even more stupid when you have the iPod connected only to the car output, which isn’t affected by the on-screen volume control at all. But I’m sure it would annoy a headphone user even more, since you’d be accidentally setting the volume the whole time you’re trying to navigate within the track.
And don’t get me started about iTunes and syncing files to the iPod. iTunes is some of the crappiest transfer software ever conceived. If you don’t agree, then please illustrate the UI that iTunes presents when it is performing actual transfers. There is no button that says, “Move this audio file to the iPod.” I think in trying to make it easy they’ve lost a lot of sense. Perhaps this makes more sense to Mac users, who don’t have to go through these manual machinations to perform tasks on their computers. To me, it’s just aggravating.
For example, the way Windows Media Player transfers audio files to my phone works the way I would expect it to. I expect that I can select files from the media library, and then click “transfer” to copy those files to the phone. Is that so hard that iTunes users can’t operate it? Why does iTunes have to be so automated?
It’s a capable device, no doubt. Having all of that storage space available is a good thing. Quite impressive. But I think that the UI has a long way to go before it really works for me. The Zen Micro should suffer from at least one of the same problems - no tactile UI on the unit itself - but it’s smaller, holds more, has an FM tuner, has a serviceable battery, doesn’t require iTunes, and is cheaper than the iPod. I’m really not seeing an advantage to the “cool” player.
