Product Reviews

The first difference you'll notice between the Photo and Apple's earlier iPod music player is the large colour screen - this is because, in addition to being a digital music player, the iPod Photo can store and display photos and other images. Its 60GB hard disk has enough space for all your MP3s and digital photos.

As a music player, the iPod photo is much like earlier iPods, which is to say excellent. The only obvious differences are an extra 5mm of thickness and the colour screen. In music-playing mode, the screen shows tiny thumbnails of the album cover for the current track, provided you bought the track from iTunes Music Store, or you've downloaded the image and put it into iTunes yourself.

So what about the photo functions? Basic browsing works

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well. Although the screen isn't very big, it's fine for looking at snapshots.

You can output a slideshow of photos to a projector or TV (even including a soundtrack). You either use the supplied composite cable (which, with typical Apple design elegance, plugs into the headphone connector) or the S-video and line-out connections on the dock, which we found gave better sound output. You could even export your PowerPoint slides to JPEGs and give a business presentation. The battery can handle five hours of slideshows or 15 hours of music listening - three hours more than normal iPods.

Disappointingly, there's no way to transfer photos directly from a camera. You have to transfer your photos onto the iPod via your PC. Mac users can use the free iPhoto program to manage photos, but on Windows, album information is based on the folders you save your photos in. Updating music and photos is done through iTunes.

Should you get an iPod photo? If you need the extra storage (20GB more than you can currently get in standard iPods), or you regularly need to give slideshows, it's worth considering. But if you're a serious digital photographer, bear in mind that for the price of this iPod photo, you could buy both a dedicated photo viewer like the Epson P-1000 (which has a much better screen and can read memory cards) and the basic 20GB iPod.