Product Reviews

The iPod is at a crossroads. With more than 90% of the market for hard-disk-based digital music players, and nearly 70% of the market for all digital music devices, increasing its share of the - admittedly growing - market is becoming more difficult.

And with all the evidence pointing towards competition to its dominance over the next 12 months coming from mobile phones and Sony's soon-to-be-launched handheld PlayStation, the iPod needed something to make it appeal to a wider audience. Enter the iPod photo.

Having ruled out a video iPod, bringing in a device that can play iPhoto slideshows seems like the perfect solution. It also provides an excellent excuse for having a colour screen. And at £359, it only costs £60 more than the regular 40GB iPod.

First impressions are good. The 65,000-colour, 2in display is crisp and bright and the iPod's menus look great in colour. The Myriad-based typeface is elegant and easy to read. According to Apple, the 60GB version will store up to 25,000 4 megapixel photographs. The exact number will depend on the file size of each shot and the amount of compression used. Using Apple's usual 4MB per song calculation, the 60GB iPod photo will store up to 15,000 tracks.

The supplied, and very elegant, composite video and audio cable can be used to connect the iPod photo to a TV or projector so that slideshows can be displayed on a large screen.

And if all that's not enough, there's a full colour version of Solitaire that looks much beter than the monochrome version on other iPods.

Sadly, in use, the iPod photo is a less than satisfying experience. In order to get photographs and slideshows onto it, you either have to import them to iPhoto and create albums there, or drag the photos you want to copy to a folder on your hard disk and create a separate folder inside that folder for each slideshow. With the iPod photo connected to your Mac, you then choose whether you want to synchronise with iPhoto or a specific folder. This is a reasonable method for

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copying photos from a Mac. But in order to transfer pictures from a digital camera or memory card, you have to first import them to the Mac and then go through the process of synching with the iPod photo.

There is no direct means of transferring pictures directly from a camera or memory card reader and viewing them on the iPod photo. Belkin's media reader allows you to copy the contents of a memory card to your iPod's hard disk, but you can't then view them on the iPod photo.

This is a glaring omission. There are a number of photo jukeboxes on the market that provide photographers with a way of backing up their images and viewing them on screen. The iPod photo would appear to be an ideal solution for this market, but the final link in the computer-iPod-camera chain is missing. This is particularly strange since the iPod already has USB 2 compatibility and every digital camera on the market has a USB connector. How difficult could it be?

Thankfully, viewing photographs is a more pleasing experience. Navigating slideshows is as easy as working your way through music playlists - although there's no photo equivalent of the On-the-Go playlist feature that would allow you to create slideshows on the hoof. You can select a playlist to provide the music for your slideshow - although there's no way to specify a particular track, other than to create a playlist with only the tracks you want as a soundtrack, in the order you want them played.

You can choose to play a slideshow or view individual photographs and the quality of the display is excellent. In order to listen to a slideshow soundtrack, you obviously have to have earphones on, which makes sharing slideshows with others difficult.

Apple's solution for sharing is to allow you to plug the iPod photo into a TV or projector. Oddly for a mobile device, it's as a content provider for a TV that the iPod photo really comes into its own. You no longer have to copy your photos to CD or DVD, or lug your PowerBook around, to bore your friends with those Christmas pics. Just take your iPod and cable with you and plug it into their TV when they're not looking.

The strongest impression left after using the iPod photo is one of a missed opportunity. Sure, there will be some people for whom the colour screen or abililty to carry photos around in their pocket will be worth the extra £60, but there is so much more that the iPod photo should have been able to do. It strikes us as something of a gimmick and one that hasn't been thought through particularly well. If you want a new iPod, we'd go for the regular 20GB or 40GB instead.