iPod photo thoughts

iPod photo screen

I kept quiet when Apple announced the iPod photo a week ago, not wanting to join the crowd and hype another Apple product like the rest of the cult of the Mac. On Sunday I visited the Apple store in San Francisco and played with the iPod photo for a little bit and realized what an iPod is really about.

I want to be able to backup my data easily, and have that data available at all times, possibly enabling synchronization on multiple machines. I live on the edge when it comes to my software environment and sometimes I push the edge too far. The iPod photo is about giving me access to as much of that data as possible away from the tether of a computer.

Music and pictures are the two biggest consumers of hard drive space on my PowerBook’s 80 GB hard drive. Having access to the two biggest categories of drive consumption makes sense to me. I have gigabytes of movies too, most are not legal, but I would be happy connecting the iPod to a television when the time comes to share a movie.

With the iPod in my hand and a beta copy of Tiger waiting for an install at home I saw the iPod as a backup device with limited ability to play with my data on the go.

I expect to see a lot more album art tools for iTunes in the coming months. Windows Media Player and MusicMatch do a much better job at cataloging music than iTunes.