Wife loves it - great to travel with.
Pros:
Tiny - its roughly the size of a deck of cards.
Cons:
None. No matter what MP3 player you get, ripping your CD's takes some time.
The Bottom Line:
Forgotten about your Music collection? Here's a good way to revitalize it: smaller than a PDA, a Mini puts your 17 Beatles albums (plus 80 more CD's) into your pocket.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
My wife & I are now in our 40's, and we no longer regularly listen to our CD collection much. But when we go on vacation, we'll pack a CD player with speakers and 10-20 disks. Unfortunately, its gotten to be a hassle due to TSA rules of no electronics in checked bags, reduced airline baggage weights, etc, etc.
We didn't realize it, but we were ripe for looking for a smaller music machine to carry along.
We came about to the iPod mini because of Apple's iTunes software, which had encouraged us to once again listen to some of our music at home again. And then my wife asked for an iPod mini (in pink) for her Christmas present.
We had a vacation planned for over Thanksgiving, so I decided to surprise her with an early present. The basic product comes with an AC charger and all of the cables you might need, so its a simple "just gimme one" purchase.
Upon its receipt, I figured out how to hook it up to get it charged and also to download our 900+ songs into the Mini. With Firewire, this big transfer goes amazingly fast...less than an hour.
I did have a couple of stumbles, but since neither one of us have yet to fully read the manual (still!), I can't complain. Once its in hand with songs loaded, the menu's and wheel are amazingly intuitive. An elegant device.
Our only mystery was the "Hold" switch. Our only foray into the manual was to read up on it: its function is to lock the controls so that it can't be accidentally turned on/off/etc when stuffed into a pocket or whatever. Good to know about - we used it to make sure it stayed turned off when we packed it into a carry-on bag.
The mini's pleasant surprise was its standard headphone jack and a pair of old (unpowered!) external PC speakers we had: we just plugged these into the iPod mini and were downright amazed that something so tiny could put out pretty darn respectible sound to fill a room. Granted, its not like we're trying to blast the listener out of his chair...its perfect for background music while reading a book, etc.
On vacation, my wife played it for ~5 hours each day, and would then recharge it every night with Apple's included AC charger. Don't know if it really gets 8 hours or whatever because we never had the need to run it for more hours away from an outlet (there's only so many hours that she can sit on a beach reading a book!)
Overall, the mini is definitely our new sound system that we'll use whenever when we travel...we'll take it, the AC charger and cord, and our 'el cheapo' PC speakers, plus the earphones, in case one of us wants to use it on the flight.
And currently, the mini and its speakers are on a shelf in the Living Room (where our stereo isn't!) and is playing a "Holiday Songs" playlist.
Finally, a word about cost.
Some people will say that at $250, the mini is a bit on the expensive side, but I look at the question somewhat differently: it made accessing our music collection a lot easier, which revitalized our interest and enjoyment of it. Since we have over $1500 invested in our CD's alone, spending another $250 or so isn't so unreasonable.
-hh
