>Seems like Apple would > prefer to view my iPod as their personal ATM. I've gotten an older > [2.5 generation] iPod touch and honestly I've grown to detest the > thing. Wifi is incredibly slow, the touch typing is annoying and slow, > and not uniform across apps, no streaming internet radio by default. > It does nothing *well*, and what it does do--play music I already > own---so did my Walkman from 1986 [except that Walkman had also had > simple access to free radio].
I hate to be /that guy/, but I recently bought myself a used Zune HD and it works very well with all of my computers (PC and Mac alike). I replaced my older iPod Touch because of what you described: Apple not really supporting anything, either. In addition, the audio quality on my FLACs was subpar; I often blast the tunes off of it on huge speaker systems, and I got tired of FLACs sounding like 128kbps MP3s. The Zune works reasonably well; to sync on Mac, just load up the tiny, low-resource sync utility, point it to a folder of MP3s, and wait a few minutes. Wifi is quite usable, and the web browser is as nice as an older iPhone's when over wifi. I'm not big on games (I have a PSP for that), but there *are* a few nice ones, esp. with some hacking. Streaming Internet radio support is available with a little hacking, and it picks up both FM and HD radio really, really well out of the box. Furthermore, the UI is really nice and easy, and the OLED screen is gorgeous when watching movies on it. The downside is the fact that my used 64GB cost $280 (about the same as a new iPod Touch, right?), and that's the low end for the pricing on these guys (mine had some geometric design etched in the back; plain-backed ones can't be had for under $350). Battery lasts three days of on-again, off-again usage (probably about 15 hours of music, with one movie's worth play) The bad thing is the price, the manufacturer, and the fact that they don't sync natively with macs running pre-10.4 OSes. Still a great way to spend a week's wages, though. Other than that, I really like the Samsung Galaxy players and some of the newer Sandisks for music, esp. if you load Rockbox. The thing is that I have ~250GB of FLACs (with an MP3 copy of each for various purposes) and I need, at the very least, 60GB of storage (to have my favorites in FLAC and a bunch of other stuff in 320 MP3s). I might get a 160GB Classic, but the battery life worries me. Back on topic: I think that iTunes' radio support is mediocre at best, but updating the links manually seems like the only way to go here. I'd really like to think that this is just another Apple-Hates-PPC move, but some of my stations on an Intel mac were lost too, so I dunno. -- -- Illirik Smirnov -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
